Ghost of Mind Episode One (20 page)

She’d have to get off here, eventually, but
maybe Helper was right, and for now they really needed to regroup
and plan.

‘
Follow me,’ Helper chirped by her side
again, and he zoomed forward, though just a little, then he turned
on the spot and appeared to wait for her, somewhat like an excited
pet or child.

Swallowing all the stress and fear, Alice
followed.

Chapter 30

John Doe

‘
So let me get this straight,’ Evelyn said
as she gave the cutest smile on record, ‘you’ve never tried ice
cream? Aren’t you human?’

John, trying not to look too embarrassed,
stretched his shoulders a bit, and made what he hoped was a manly
show of shaking his head. ‘I never really got the chance back on
Earth,’ he mumbled.

Evelyn’s beautiful blue eyes widened.
‘That is no excuse. For a human to never have tried ice cream, is,
is, well criminal,’ she concluded.

A part of John wanted to put a hand up and
tell her straight away that the reason he had never tried ice cream
was that as a child he had been lucky if he’d been able to eat at
all. But she seemed to be having such a good time poking fun at
him, that he stopped himself.

‘
Well,’ she nodded down at the ice cream in
John’s hand, ‘what do you think?’

John shrugged his shoulders. Sugary, kind
of creamy, and it certainly had more flavor than most of the
recalibrated foods he got on the Pegasus. But he put a little bit
more effort into smiling, and maybe that effort came from the
sparkle in her eyes. ‘It’s pretty nice,’ he offered as he finally
finished it.

‘
Pretty nice?’ She shook her head, her
silky golden locks spilling over her shoulders, pushing against the
high collar of her blue tunic. ‘When I was found by the Project,’
she said as she began to play with her fingers distractedly, ‘ice
cream was practically my best friend.’

A little bit of the luster and sparkle
fell from her shine. And John found himself trying harder to keep
his smile in place. Because he could read between the lines on that
one. ‘What was . . . the Program like?’

She stiffened a little, pressed her lips
into her teeth, and obviously tried hard to hold onto her natural
exuberance. ‘Okay, I guess. I can’t say I have known much else. It
has really been my life for . . . as long as I can
remember,’ she managed eventually.

It was quite a change in topics, and quite a
change in mood. It left John with a heavy feeling in his stomach.
When he had agreed to take Evelyn on a tour around the docking
ring, he’d thought he’d just been doing his duty. After all, if he
was expected to spend the next several months to year with this
woman, he had to put on a show of being friendly, reliable, and
approachable, right? Especially if the Admiral was going to be
looking over his shoulder every 20 seconds to see how John was
treating his precious asset.

But what had meant to be a simple walk had
kind of turned out to be . . . a lot more
pleasurable than John had expected. Evelyn was nice, painfully
nice, and what was more, she had a personality too. She wasn’t the
mind-washed robot that John had been expecting.

Clearing his throat, he thought it was a
good idea to change the topic. ‘Your quarters will be ready
shortly. Parka is just doing the finishing touches to the security
system the Admiral has demanded.’

Evelyn clenched her teeth together and let
out a sharp hiss of air through them. ‘I am so sorry, John,’ she
said as she shook her head, ‘I know he can be over the top. He
takes the Program and every participant in it very, very
seriously.’

‘
I can bet,’ John agreed in a low
voice.

‘
But he is a good man, and the
Program . . . is really important.’

John nodded back to her, mustering a smile as
he did. While he wasn’t ready to be so easily swayed on what he
considered to be an enormous waste of time and money, he couldn’t
blame Evelyn for it, could he? She seemed to be just a woman stuck
in the middle, a particularly nice one at that.

Bringing a hand up and patting it over the
back of his head, John let out a little sigh. Then he nodded
towards the railing before them. ‘It’s an incredible view, isn’t
it?’

That particular smile returned to Evelyn’s
face. It was a very distracting move. It seemed to make her eyes
sparkle all the more, and her cheeks fattened as her lips spread
wide. ‘It’s beautiful.’

‘
Yes it is,’ John practically said under
his breath.

The two of them walked over to the ostensibly
thin metal railing that ran around the edge of the promenade. There
would be no risk of anyone tripping and falling over it though;
there were incredible force fields that surrounded the entire
docking ring.

Essentially it was a giant floating metal
doughnut, sliced up into multiple layers, with ships docked all
around the top section. But in the center was nothing but air. And
the various promenades that run around the central rings, had a
fantastic view of the empty middle. You could lean your hands right
over the railing, push yourself as far against the weather field as
it would let you, and peer right down to the swirling clouds and
the tiny speck of blue ocean so far below.

As John looked around, he could see many
other people, many other couples too, doing exactly what they were
doing. Smiling, chatting, leaning against the railing, and staring
down at the beauty underneath.

It was planets like Orion Major, with its
incredible floating cities, that could lull you into thinking that
everything in the universe was perfect, modern, technological,
advanced, and incredible. But no matter how fantastic the view was,
it could not expunge from John’s memory Orion Minor. And as he
stared down past the swirling clouds that were being pushed to and
fro by the frantic winds of the atmosphere, the memory of her
popped into his mind.

The hood, the lips, that terrible moment
where the soldier robot had snapped her up and tried to strangle
her.

His shoulders tensing, his jaw locking into
place, John ran a hand down his cheek and tried to relax his
muscles.

Maybe Evelyn saw that moment of tension,
because her smile changed. ‘I suppose you are under a lot of
pressure with this mission,’ she mumbled quietly.

Yes he was. But he could bet that she was
too.

‘
I’ll try not to let you down,’ she said
after another careful moment.

It was such an incongruous statement that
John gave a little, huff of a laugh. ‘Sorry, let me down? How could
you let me down?’

‘
My mission is very important,’ she replied
back quickly, her eyes blinking fast, her expression
shocked.

John’s skin paled as he realized how rude
he’d just been. Bringing up his hands, even shuffling back a step,
he shook his head. ‘I didn’t mean to imply that you
were . . . ’ He stopped herself from saying
useless and he gave a heavy swallow instead. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I
accept and understand why you are coming along,’ his cheeks were
starting to feel hot, and he wanted more than anything to run away
from this conversation before it got any worse.

But thankfully Evelyn didn’t turn on her
foot, trundle off to the Admiral, and tell him how much of a brute
John Doe was, instead she offered a wry smile. ‘Sorry,’ she
managed.

Letting a pressured breath through his
teeth, John nodded his head. ‘I’m sorry too.’

The two of them dwindled into silence, but it
was a particularly heavy, meaningful one. It was the kind of
silence that two people share when they are standing right next to
each other, trying to stare at anything save for the other person,
and yet more aware of their presence than anything else in the
universe.

In other words, intensely awkward, but
something more too. The kind of pause that makes you want to know
just exactly what the other person is thinking of you and just
exactly what might happen next.

But John would not get a chance to find out.
Because at that moment he received a call. Frowning at Evelyn as he
pointed to his ear in the universal sign that someone was receiving
communication, he half turned from her.

‘
What is it?’

‘
It's big, is what it is,’ Parka answered
with a heavy, resounding sigh. John was lucky that the audio feed
technically bypassed his ears and was fed straight to his brain,
otherwise his eardrums would have rattled at Parka’s resounding
breath.

‘
What's the matter? What have you found
with the scans?’ John suddenly straightened.

‘
Oh, you need to sit down, Commander,
because I have a lot to tell you. First I’ll start off with our
little friend from Orion Minor,’ Parka's voice grew low and
tight.

But it was nothing compared to hell low and
tight John suddenly drew himself. His stomach gave a kick, his
shoulders snapped in, and his eyes opened wide.

He’d been trying very hard not to think of
her.

‘
I just got a call from Orion Minor, they
finished the scans, they finally think they know exactly what
happened to that transport beam,’ Parka didn't sound
pleased.

John found his jaw tightening as he
latched a hand onto the railing by his side, his knuckles growing
white as he clutched the thin metal rod as tight as he could.
‘Where did she end up?’

‘
You can take that doomsday note right out
of your voice. She is not dead. She landed right on the top of
Block Alpha. And so did her little friend, the soldier robot. But
while he was unlucky enough to re-materialize smack bang inside a
giant chunk of ore, she was fine. Scans confirm that she lived
through the ordeal.’

John's face could have fallen off; his
cheeks and mouth descended with such a snap that his neck actually
gave a shake. ‘Sorry?
She is alive?
Do they have her in custody?’

‘
I told you this was big, John, so of
course they don't have her in custody. I've not finished my story
yet.’

But regardless of the fact that Parka had not
finished her story, John's brain was jumping ahead of him. If the
woman had lived, and the transport beam had somehow managed to
re-materialize her somewhere with enough oxygen and stability that
she didn't suddenly get sucked inside out from the vacuum of space,
then knowing her, she would have found somewhere safe. Because John
could remember the tenacity and determination. She had lived
through a three-kilometer fall, surely she had managed to pull
herself up after she had landed from the transport, and then run
off somewhere safe.

There hadn’t been a great deal up on the top
of Block Alpha that had been safe at that point. With the weather
fields down, the place had been a cold, windy, hellish nightmare.
In fact, the only ships that had been docked there that were
allowing traffic in and off had been the Pegasus and some giant
mining vessel right on the other side of the ring.

Taking a swallow, back straightening as
his muscles tightened, John shook his head slightly. ‘Have you
finished the scans on the ship?’ he blurted out in an
instant.

‘
You're getting ahead of yourself, and of
course I thought of that too. But no, we didn't find anything with
the scans,’ Parka finished.

Before she could add anything more, John let
out a beleaguered sigh. A part of him had really been hoping, as
crazy as it sounded, that they would find the woman tucked up
neatly inside the Pegasus after all of these days.

But apparently he wasn't going to be that
lucky.

‘
Stop interrupting me, John, because I'm
not finished. The reason we didn't find anything with the scans, is
that the scans were interrupted. In fact, our whole ICN was
hacked.’

John let those words settle over him. He
now leaned into the railing, clutching both hands onto it. ‘What
the hell?’

‘
Oh yes, and it gets worse. When we finally
got control again, I did the first thing I could think of. Instead
of scanning for bio scans, which can take a very long time, I
scanned for sodium bloody chloride.’

John’s eyebrows descended in a click.
‘Salt, but why would you . . . ' He trailed
off. Because he was being very stupid, wasn't he?

‘
I don't know what that woman is, I don't
know what she is capable of, but I do know that after her little
trip around the salty, smelly wastelands of Orion Minor, she was
bloody covered in the stuff.’

John pressed his teeth together, clenching
his jaw, letting the pressure build up and translate down his neck
and shoulders and torso until it made him grip his hands even
stronger.

‘
It's all through the service ducts, all
through the elevator shaft, and John, you might not like to hear
this, but it's in your room too.’

His eyebrows now descended so low that his
eyes practically closed. ‘What?’

‘
And that's not all. In the elevator
shaft . . . . Look, I've never seen anything
like it. But as soon as the scans found salt, I went in and checked
them myself. And John, chunks of metal have been ripped into. It
looks like someone, maybe a robot, maybe one of the hard races, has
dug some kind of tool right into the metal sheeting and used it to
climb vertically up the shaft.’

It felt like John didn't have any blood
left in his face; his cheeks and brow and lips were so cold it
could have given him frostbite. ‘Are you sure?’