Offspring (52 page)

A quick check told Gretchen the other five units were occupied. She thought about waking the other people—victims just as she herself was—but decided against it until she knew more about what was going on. She padded noiselessly over to the windowless door and pressed her thumb against the plate. To her surprise, it slid smoothly open. Her kidnappers must not have expected anyone to wake up and try the door.

The gray corridor beyond was lined with doors but otherwise empty. More cargo holds? Gretchen eased down the hallway, heart pounding at the back of her throat. She needed to find a weapon, or maybe a communicator. Her earpiece was gone, of course, even if it had enough range to reach anyone. Gretchen’s stomach tightened. This place felt like a ship, or maybe a space station. If that was the case, she could be light-years away from help.

Story of my life
, she thought.
Okay, girl—keep moving. You can’t be the only person on board.

The corridor ended at a larger doorway which opened at Gretchen’s command. The space beyond boasted a set of elevator doors and a ladder that lead upward through a hole in the ceiling. Letters marched across the elevator: LEVEL 3 S”T 7395-”5-11. A tiny bit of relief touched Gretchen. She was on board a satellite, probably in orbit around Bellerophon. Worse than being on the ground, better than being on a slipship. If she could find a shuttle, or a way to call for help—

The elevator doors slid open. Gretchen leaped for the ladder and scuttled upward. The rungs bit into her bare soles like hard fingers. Human conversation floated up to her from below.

A...re-check the units and then transfer everything to the ship within the hour.” Gretchen recognized the voice of the dark-haired woman. “Then we hit slip.”

“Shit. How are we supposed to keep to that schedule?” It was a male voice, not one Gretchen could identify. “We’ve been pulling double shifts for three days now and I’m sick of hanging out on the stupid satellite with nothing to do but work.”

“Welcome to life at Silent Acquisitions,” the woman said. “We love our job.”

“I just better be loving my bonus on this one. I haven’t seen my wife in—”

The voices cut off as the door slid shut. A chill slid down Gretchen’s spine. Silent Acquisitions. Padric Sufur. God
damn
it! She should have killed him, no matter what Kendi said.

Grimly she climbed the ladder. If she was on level three and the emergency ladder only went up, the satellite was a small one with only two more levels above her. Experience told her the command center of the satellite was probably on the first level. She hurried as best she could, but her muscles were still twitchy from the aborted cryo-sleep. In her mind, she saw her captors checking the cargo bay and noticing her cryo-chamber was empty. Any moment they’d raise the alarm. Her lungs worked hard in her chest as she passed the second level and finally reached the first, emerging into the elevator bay. The double doors leading out of the area had actual windows in them. Trying to keep her breathing under control, Gretchen sidled over to the exit doors and stood with her back flat against the wall next to them. The only sound was the soft hum of the ventilation system. A line of exertion sweat prickled her hairline. First she had been too cold, now she was too hot. Holding her breath, Gretchen eased an eye around the edge of the window until she could peek into the room beyond.

It was a large, round chamber ringed with workstations. A man sat at one of them. His back was turned, but even from behind Gretchen recognized the blond man who had delivered the balloons. Gretchen’s thoughts raced. The other two would probably discover her absence in a few seconds. She had to act now.

Gretchen thumbed the plate and the doors slid open. The blond man didn’t look up from his board. Gretchen rushed across the room at him.

“That was fast,” the man said, tapping at the panel before him. “Or did you forget something?” He spun his chair and saw Gretchen charging him. “Oh, sh—”

Her fist drove straight into his midriff, cutting off the expletive. She followed with a hard left to his jaw. The pain in her hand was mitigated by the satisfying
crack
the blow made as it connected. He keeled over and spilled groaning out of the chair just as an alarm blasted through the room. Gretchen ran back to the doors and slammed her hand against the plate.

“Lock!” she shouted, and the plate turned red, indicating obedience. The idiots hadn’t bothered to program the satellite’s systems to respond only to authorized personnel, probably because they hadn’t figured anyone would escape the cryo-chambers. Their mistake, her advantage. Gretchen sped around the outer ring of workstations, scanning each one. Where the hell was the communications board? The alarm continued to blare. She got almost all the way around the outer wall before she found it not far from where the blond man wretched on the floor. Gretchen kicked him.

Someone pounded at the doors. Gretchen wasted five precious seconds orienting herself to the unfamiliar comm board. She slapped a control and was gratified to see the panels spring to life with blue and green lights.

Glass shattered. “Get away from there!” shouted the dark-haired woman through the broken window.

Gretchen found the regulator, spun it to the emergency frequency, and tapped the control to open the channel. “Emergency!” she barked. “I need help. I’m on board satellite number—” What the hell was the number? It was on the elevator door. She fumbled before her Silent memory training took over and the number popped into her head. “Number seven three niner—”

The panel exploded in a shower of sparks. Gretchen leaped backward and spun around. The dark-haired woman was aiming a portable gravity beam at the board, presumably the same one she had used to shatter the window. She aimed it straight at Gretchen. Before Gretchen could react, a green beam slammed into her. Gretchen flew backward, crashed into the wall, and slid to the floor. Her entire body went numb, but she retained consciousness. The blond man staggered to his feet and stumbled over to her. Blood streamed from a split lip. Gretchen tried to move, but her body refused to respond. She felt consciousness slipping away.

“Bitch.” The man spat blood. “I’ll feed you through the meat grinder.”

He drew back his fist, but Gretchen was already out.

“Nothing destroys a relationship faster than suspicion.”

—Daniel Vik

Ara fussed and cried in Kendi’s arms. Kendi rocked her in the chair, trying to calm her down. She refused a bottle. She didn’t need changing. She spat out a pacifier. Kendi rocked and rocked and hummed a desperate little tune. The sound of Ara crying unnerved Kendi. Was something worse wrong with her? Was she getting sick? Maybe he should wake Harenn.

In his own crib across the room, Evan slumbered peacefully, completely oblivious to his sister’s cries and his Da’s distress. Kendi wondered if Ara fussed because she could sense Kendi’s restlessness. The wrongness of Sufur’s plan tugged at him. Originally Sufur had wanted to remove all Silent from the Dream and destroy it. Now, it seemed, he had scaled back a little and contented himself with trying to remove just the human Silent from the Dream. He was going to do it by getting all the human Silent in one place and damaging their Silence so they couldn’t enter the Dream.

That was the problem. Bellerophon and S” Station had a lot of human Silent, but nowhere near
all
of them. Even if Sufur waved a magic wand and all the Silent on Bellerophon and S” Station dropped dead, there were enough human Silent scattered around the galaxy to replenish the population. And then there were people like Vidya and Prasad Vajhur, people who weren’t Silent themselves but who produced Silent children. They didn’t seem to be on Sufur’s little list.

Then there was the problem of execution. Every kidnapping, every trip up to the cargo satellite, every transfer to the hidden slipship was a chance to get caught. Sure, the hostage situation kept Kendi’s mouth shut, but all it would take is one innocent witness to a kidnapping or a single suspicious neighbor to call the police and the authorities would slam Sufur to the ground before they even knew the hostages existed. A few people—including Gretchen—would die, but Sufur’s main plan would sink like leaky ship. Sufur had to know that. So what was Kendi missing? Maybe Ben and Lucia would turn up a clue at Sufur’s home.

Ara continued to fuss. Kendi rocked and worried. A thousand things could go wrong with Ben and Lucia. The police might catch and arrest them. Sufur might wake up and catch them. The information they sought might not be stored on Sufur’s computer. Ben might not be able to hack in. Lucia might—

A noise in the hallway halted his line of thinking. He got to his feet just as Ben and Lucia entered the nursery with the rope ladder. Relief washed over him.

“What’s wrong with her?” Ben asked, holding out his arms. Kendi handed Ara over, and her cries instantly stopped.

“Sounds like she just wanted her daddy,” Kendi said. “How did it go?”

“I’m not sure,” Lucia said. “Ben won’t say.”

Kendi tensed. “What’s going on? What happened?”

Ben took Ara to the rocking chair, sat, and stared down at Ara’s face. “I didn’t get it. The codes, the program—none of it. And he’s...Sufur is...”

“What?” Kendi said, resisting the urge to grab Ben by the shoulders and shake him. “Sufur is what?”

“Dead,” Ben said flatly.

Icy chills slid over Kendi’s skin. “What do you mean he’s dead?”

“I mean,” Ben said, “that he’s
dead
.”

“That isn’t very—”

“Ben,” Lucia interrupted gently, “please start from the beginning. Tell us what happened.”

Ben started to rock. Ara sighed once and fell asleep. “It was weird. I went into Sufur’s house to find his computer. I remember seeing it when we visited him, so I knew right where to go. I was trying to be real quiet, you know? I turned on my data pad to give me a little light and I looked around. His computer was right there in the living room. I listened for a minute and didn’t hear anything, but the house smelled funny. Sausage from the kitchen, but a sort-of sewer smell, too. I though Sufur had maybe used the bathroom a little while ago or something, and that made me nervous—what if he hadn’t fallen back to sleep yet? So I tried to work fast.

“His computer had a standard set-up, and I was able to find my way around his system pretty quick. Parts of it were secured with expensive and powerful programs—I expected that—so I connected my data pad to the machine and uploaded a few programs of my own. Sufur probably thought his security was pretty good, but I’ve hacked government computers inside the Empire of Human Unity. Sufur’s stuff was almost...cute by comparison.”

“Only you,” Kendi said, “would describe security protocols as
cute
.”

“Shush,” Lucia said. “Go on, Ben.”

“I started nosing around the secure part of computer’s drive,” Ben said. “I found logarithm generator pretty quick, along with the files containing the coordinates of the ship and the satellite. I also saw a manifest list of thirty people—fifteen Silent and fifteen Silenced—as being stored in cryo-sleep aboard the ship. Six more people are on satellite and they’re going to be transferred soon. One of them...one of them is Gretchen.”

Kendi set his jaw. “We’ll get her back, then.”

“Maybe,” Ben said. “At any rate, I figured it would be best to download the codes the program had created, erase them from Sufur’s computer, and then disable the logarithm program entirely. Sufur wouldn’t be able to communicate with S” Station or with the ship. Or rather, he would, but they would assume it was some kind of trick because he couldn’t give them the clearance code.”

“Right,” Kendi said. “That’s all according to plan.”

“Except for one problem. I called up the logarithmic generator, but the computer was slow. The sewer smell was really strong now, and I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from, and it seemed really strange that it wasn’t going away. So while the computer was working, I looked around the room a little more. You remember that chair Sufur sat in when we visited before? It was still half-facing the window so I couldn’t really see into it, and now that I was paying attention to it, I could tell the sewer smell was coming from that direction. I went over to the chair, trying to stay really quiet, and that was when I saw him.”

“Sufur,” Lucia said.

“Yeah. He was just sitting there in the chair. His mouth was hanging open like he was surprised. There was a circle burned in the middle of his chest. The sewer smell must have been because his bladder had let go.” Ben continued to stare down at Ara. “I didn’t understand what I was looking at. I kept thinking it was some kind of joke—a dummy or a hologram set out to fool burglars or something. I reached out and touched him. That was when the alarm went off.” Ben sighed. “I don’t know what I was thinking. He’d shocked me when I just got near him that last time. I guess I figured with him being already dead, the defense system wouldn’t kick in. But he must have had a proximity alarm set to go off in case anyone touched him. Anyway, the police were coming. I grabbed my data pad and ran for it. Lucia and I barely managed to get away. And here we are—screwed. The whole house is a major crime scene now. We’ll never get in there.”

“Shit,” Kendi said.