Citadel: First Colony (15 page)

She slumped into the pilot’s seat again and settled in to wait for Mitch to call her for the pick-up. It might come any minute now, and it wouldn’t be a minute too soon. She was sick of waiting here. It was boring. She was ready for something,
anything
, to happen.

She realized she was still holding the wrench in her hand, gripping it so tightly in fact that her hand was starting to hurt. Why was she gripping it so hard? She looked at it and realized it was blackened and scarred and melted in places, as if it had come in contact with an electrical discharge. Had she touched the power conduits with it? Had she shorted them out?

She thought back and realized that she couldn’t remember much after finding the port. There was a vague memory of a spark and a flash, followed by the smell of ozone. Maybe she’d brushed a conduit with the wrench somehow, and the spark zapped her but good. If that was the case, she was lucky to be alive. Lucky that a bit of memory loss was all she’d suffered. It could have been a lot worse.

Damn Mitch for being right
, she thought.
I should have worn that EVA suit after all
.

––––––––

T
homas couldn’t imagine how this could be any worse.

The girl—Penny—was more than just a pain. She was starting to become an obstacle. Everything had to be a battle with her. And Thomas found himself devolving to the type of guy who resorted to threats just to get things moving. He didn’t like being that guy. He had dealt with too many bullies in the past to enjoy playing the part of one.

“I can’t go up any further,” Penny was panting after making it only a few feet since the last time she had claimed she couldn’t go up any further. She was more than halfway to the ridgeline now, and Mitch stood on the ridge high above her, holding the rope they had tied around her waist. She couldn’t fall, at least not to the ground, but that seemed to be of little comfort to her.

Alan was directly below her, and Thomas was below him. The climb, so far, had been laborious. Getting her into the tree in the first place had taken an effort of sheer will. Now it seemed every branch was a battle.

Alan climbed up next to her, sitting in the crook of one of the branches as she clung tightly to the trunk, eyes squeezed shut.

“You can make this climb,” Alan said plainly. It wasn’t in that nurturing, encouraging way you’d expect to hear in a situation like this, and it wasn’t harsh. It was matter-of-fact. He wasn’t encouraging Penny, he was
reminding
her.

It seemed strange to Thomas that Alan was so taken with this girl. He was a pretty levelheaded guy, by all accounts. Now, though, if Thomas didn’t know any better he’d swear that Alan’s hormones were getting the better of him.

Penny was very attractive, Thomas had to admit. Lean and shapely, blond hair, tanned—she was everything one would expect from the daughter of a very rich man. Including spoiled and obnoxious. Alan, who didn’t seem to be the kind of person to be taken with something so shallow as sex appeal, nevertheless seemed to be going out of his way to take care of the girl, to encourage her and protect her.

It occurred to Thomas that he might be this way with any “civilian” they encountered. Or maybe he really was letting his hormones guide him. Only time would tell.

“I can’t!” Penny was saying now, in a pout. Her eyes were welded shut, and she had a death grip on the tree’s trunk. She was digging in, prepared to stay in that spot until the tree itself fell down from old age.

Thomas, feeling the pressure of some unknown deadline pressing against them, was starting to become annoyed. But for the life of him, he couldn’t think of what to say to this girl to get her to finish the climb.

“You’ve made plenty of climbs that were much tougher than this,” Alan said.

Silence.

To Thomas, it seemed as if the air around them was now crisp and still, even the sound of the local birds seemed to have dimmed. From above them, Mitch called down, “What does that mean?”

“She’s a climber,” Alan said, without taking his eyes off of her.

Penny, who until now was hugging the tree for dear life, now hung back casually and looked at Alan with a strange, slightly annoyed expression. “You knew?” she asked.

He shrugged, “I’ve read articles about you. I recognized you when we opened the pod.”

Thomas, jaw dropping was furious, though he wasn’t sure what, exactly he should be most angry about. “You ... you mean you’ve been
faking
this whole fear of climbing thing? Why the hell would you do that?”

Penny looked at Alan, then down to Thomas. Her expression was smug, and it made Thomas want to shimmy up the tree and smack her. To his credit, he stayed where he was, waiting. “A girl has to have her secrets,” she said.

Thomas was infuriated. And apparently so was Mitch, who made a noise of pure disgust before stepping away from the edge of the ridge. Alan, however, clung passively to the branches closest to Penny. He seemed to be unaffected by the girl’s deception, possibly because he’d known about it all along.

“Why didn’t you say something?” Thomas said to him.

He shrugged. “She was keeping it to herself. I thought she might be trying to protect herself.”

“Protect herself?” Mitch called from above.

Alan looked up. “It was her advantage. She still wasn’t sure about us, but if she could make us think she was helpless when she really wasn’t ... ” he let the rest trail off, unsaid.

Thomas understood at once, and more than simply what Alan was saying. He understood that Alan had allowed Penny to keep her deception intact so she could feel safe, but was now telling her that he wasn’t fooled, to assure her that it was alright to trust them. It was an expert move, Thomas thought, and it showed that Alan had a much deeper understanding of people than anyone might have supposed.

It also showed that Alan would willingly allow those around him to be deceived, while he knew exactly what was going on. Thomas wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, or how he felt about it.

“So why did you tell on me?” Penny said, affecting a sort of childish pout that told Thomas she was still practicing deception, still trying to fool them into thinking she was helpless.

“You’re slowing us down,” Alan said. “And there are a lot of people who still need to be rescued. Including your parents.”

Penny stared at the young man for a long moment.
She’s realizing
, Thomas thought,
that she’s met her match. Heck, I’m realizing it, too.
No one had guessed that Alan was such a keen observer of humanity, and no one had known he was capable of letting a deception go on, just so the deceiver could feel at ease. It was kind of sneaky actually, and it had the effect of disarming Penny so that now she would have to suck it up and trust them.

“He’s right,” Mitch said from above. “We’ve wasted too much time already. You’ve slowed us down. Now get your ass in gear and get up here so we can go save someone else.”

Penny bristled but climbed faster. She paused long enough to untie the rope from her waist, letting it dangle until Mitch quickly wound it to the top. In a short time, they’d all made it safely to the top of the ridge, and the three men pulled up the heavy stasis pod from the bottom of the ravine, while Penny brooded by herself at the edge.

When the pod was safe, all three men took a handle, not even bothering to ask Penny for help, and began the trek to the landing zone. Mitch keyed the comm on his shoulder, “Shuttle, this is Search, we have the first pod and a ...
guest
. Rendezvous at LZ in twenty minutes.”

“Roger that,” Reilly replied.

They made their way to the landing zone in silence.

––––––––

T
he
shuttle didn’t land, but it came as close to it as possible.
As the cargo door lowered to the ground, the three men charged upward with the pod between them.
A bit like a funeral in reverse,
Mitch thought, with the pallbearers carrying the casket back into the chapel after retrieving it from the ground. They’d even gone to the extra trouble of raising the dead, and there she was walking among them as if nothing had ever happened. The rich girl. The princess. The liar.

Mitch didn’t care for liars. No matter what their motivation might be, he was pretty sure it all came down to the same thing—self-preservation. And it was one thing to do whatever it took to stay alive and safe, it was another to put others in jeopardy to do it. By slowing them down with her little act, this girl may have killed other colonists. There’d be no way to know for sure, of course, but that didn’t make her actions any less reckless.

To be fair, he wasn’t angry at her alone. He was also angry with Alan.

He’d known Alan for a few years now, since he’d come onto Alonzo’s crew as a young man. He had told them his parents had died in a colony ship explosion, and that had gained him a great deal of sympathy. Such things weren’t common, but they happened often enough that nearly every Blue Collar had been affected by such a loss.

Mitch, like everyone else in the Blue Collar crew, had taken Alan in as his own kin, looking out for him and protecting him as he grew and learned and became useful. He had potential, Mitch felt. He had a shot at becoming a White Collar engineer if he wanted. He could make the transition in status that half the Blue Collars yearned for and envied and the other half resented and scorned.

But why had he let Penny’s lies go on for so long?

So he was angry with Alan, angry at Penny, and even a little angry at himself for being fooled. He was so angry that once they were on board he started looking for something—
anything
—that he could do to keep his hands busy. He would hide his anger in work, just like he always had, and so by pissing him off, this girl, Penny, would have only accomplished something good in the end. By being such a liar and a moron, she would get the environmental systems functioning again. And Alan, by letting liars delay them and possibly cause the deaths of some of the colonists, would help them all by causing the shuttle’s stabilizers to be repaired.

They were in the air now, setting course for the hop to the colony module’s wreckage some miles away. Mitch had picked up a wrench that was out of place, and somewhat worse for wear, burned and scarred and melted in places. What the heck had happened to this thing? Did someone shove it into a power cell?

“Mitch,” Thomas said from behind him.

Mitch didn’t turn around. “Yeah,” he said.

“You seem ... well, you seem pissed off. Want to talk about it?”

Mitch whirled on him. Thomas had also been fooled by the girl, and had been caught up in the elaborate game she’d been playing. But for some reason, Thomas didn’t seem angry about it. He seemed to have dealt with it somehow. “Yeah, I’m pissed,” Mitch said, but his voice stayed low and calm so that only the two them were part of the conversation. Everyone else was busy, except for the lying little snob who had strapped herself into one of the charred seats while wearing an expression of disgust. She might have said something, but if she did, Alan was the only one who would hear.

“It’s the girl, right?”

“Yes,” Mitch said.

“And Alan?”

Mitch paused, then suddenly, strangely, felt the anger unknot itself. It didn’t fade away, it just became
lighter
. Less pressing. For the first time, Mitch started to wonder if it was these two kids he was really mad at, or if it was something else entirely.

“Yeah,” he said, “I was pretty angry about the climbing thing. But I think I’m getting over it.”

“It didn’t exactly thrill me, either,” Thomas said, with a tight sile. “But I think Alan handled it pretty well.”

“You do?” Mitch was confused and a little annoyed. “He practically helped her lie to us.”

“But that’s not what he was doing. That may be how it felt to us, but I think he was doing what he had to do, to make her stop lying and start taking this seriously.”

“By playing along?” Mitch asked.

“By letting her get to a point where she couldn’t keep up the lie. I think that when he recognized her he also saw that she was scared. People do desperate things when they’re scared,” Thomas said. Mitch thought there was more feeling behind it than there should have been. Something Thomas wasn’t saying. “I think Alan knew she was feeling powerless, and so he let her do something that gave her power.”

“By lying?”

“By keeping a secret. Secrets give people power, believe me. When you know something and your enemy doesn’t, they can never be sure where your weak points are.”

Mitch thought about this and thought about how he felt about it. He had never been one to stay angry for no good reason. He was rational, logical. He wasn’t like most of the Blue Collar crew he knew—quick to anger and slow to forgive. He might still hold something of a grudge against this girl, but he knew Alan too well to let some passing offense color his judgment.

Slowly but steadily he calmed himself, and in moments the anger was gone. Now he was looking at Thomas, who was looking back at him, and he realized for the first time that this man was not who he said he was.

It occurred to him like an inspiration. There were hints, constant little things he did and said. Questions he asked. Concepts he should have been familiar with but of which he seemed to have only a cursory knowledge. Like Penny, Thomas was holding something back, pretending. He was deceiving them all somehow. But since the crash, Mitch had spent a lot of time with this man, had had many conversations with him, had laughed with him, and had struggled with him. Was it possible that he could have deceived them all so thoroughly? Was he evil in a decent-looking package?

Mitch wasn’t sure. Thomas seemed genuine in most things. He seemed to genuinely care about rescuing the colonists, for example. He seemed concerned with his team, too. Hadn’t he come to check on Mitch, to soothe his anger? Could an enemy do that? Mitch didn’t know. But he was starting to get a deeper picture of this White Collar engineer. He liked him, that much he couldn’t deny. But he wasn’t sure how much he
trusted
him.
This man has secrets
, Mitch thought.
And I don’t think he was placating me when he said secrets give you power. I think he was confessing.