Song of Scarabaeus (14 page)

“I mean just now. Something happened, woke me up. I felt you—”

“No, I'm fine,” she said quickly. Damn the leash. Her mind still whirred with anger and fear and shock.

“I guess our escape didn't turn out so well.”

“No.” She tried to find a silver lining. “But if the local authorities had taken us in, they'd probably have handed us over to the Crib.”

“I'd be no worse off than I was a week ago.”

“How can you say that? They'd kill you for helping to kidnap me.”

He frowned, unconvinced. “And what d'you think those rads were trying to do?”

Edie sighed, shook her head. “Maybe it's for the best. Seeing those people…I wanted to help them. People like them. And the rovers are doing that. They have resources. The
Drakkar
could never have protected us. They're too small and too poor. Hell, Finn, they needed our help more than we needed theirs.” She thought of the ragged little girl, brought to a grown-ups' meeting. They couldn't even afford a babysitter.

Now Finn shook his head, a slow roll of his neck on the pillow. “Since when did helping Fringers become part of our plan? Don't make me start thinking you're going to stick with these rovers after this mission.”

“No. I'm thinking beyond that. I have a skill the Fringers need. If there was a way…” She trailed off, not sure of what she was trying to say. She hadn't thought of what she would do if they cut the leash. She hadn't truly realized there were people out there so much worse off than she was. She hadn't thought she could make a difference.

“Every time you reveal what you are,” Finn said, “you're painting a target on your—”

He cut himself off as he glanced at her face, his eyes narrowing when he saw her swollen cheekbone, as if noticing it for the first time. He reached up to touch the bruise, and the brush of his fingertips brought fresh tears to her eyes. She shivered, not from his touch but from the sense memory of Haller's assault. Despite everything Haller had said, she had no doubt that Finn's concern was genuine. He was no brutish lag who could only be controlled by violence.

She held her breath at the stroke of his fingers along her jawline. For a few seconds, she forgot everything else but his simple touch. That yearning for human connection shocked her, and she made a small involuntary movement, shying away from him. Then regretted it, because his attention was the first good thing she'd felt in a long time.

Whether or not he noticed her reaction, Finn dropped his
hand away without asking about her new bruise. Let him think it was from the fight at Neuchasley.

He was right about her being a target, and her heart sank at the realization. If she worked as a cypherteck, there would always be someone, somewhere, who would use her or kill her for that skill. Even the Fringers might hold her captive and force her cooperation. While the rads' desperation was driven by ideological fervor, theirs was driven by pure survival.

“This is where we're safest,” she said firmly. “I don't want to admit it any more than you do. Let's get back to our original plan. If you…if we behave, Haller will leave us alone. He needs me and we need the creds.”

“These pirates are using you.”

“You and me both. Right now, we can't change that.”

He shrugged, too tired to argue with her, and winced in pain at the small movement. “I could feel you…holding on to me. You could have left me there.”

“No.”

“You're not what I expected.”

“I just want you to live.”

Finn turned his head away and stared at the featureless bulkhead. “We were almost free.”

“We will be free.” She wanted to touch him, reassure him, but she wasn't sure she believed what she was saying. “We need to plan things better. We need the creds from this mission. We need to wait until we're out of Crib space, where no one cares about a couple of runaways.”

Finn closed his eyes again. She didn't know if he was listening.

And despite her exhaustion, she had work to do.

Edie ignored the pain in her knees and the ache in her shoulders, and kept scrubbing. An hour ago she'd stopped looking back every few minutes to see how far she'd come along the corridor. It was disheartening to see how slowly that distance increased.

A sensor swept the corridor from one end to the other every ninety seconds. The invisible laser scanned for debris and dirt on the gravplating and relayed information to the cleaner toms—except that the toms weren't working. Edie had started out with a bucket and mop, but this wasn't good enough for the sensor. Haller must have turned on its audio alarm, because every ninety seconds it had beeped to inform her she wasn't doing a good enough job. She'd had to resort to getting onto her knees with a scrubbing brush to remove particularly stubborn areas of dirt. Knowing Haller, he'd probably increased the sensitivity of the sensor, too. This much crap couldn't have built up in only twenty-four hours.

But this wasn't about clean decks. The cleaner toms would get fixed, one way or another, or Zeke could put the serfs to work until the gravplating gleamed. Haller didn't care about clean decks. He wanted to control her.

And that infuriated her. Her options had never been so limited as they'd become in the past few hours, and yet her determination to control her own fate had never been stronger.

She sat up on her heels to stretch her back.

“Penance
over
,” she muttered. She'd get back to her regular work, prove herself with her strong suit, make Haller feel like he was getting his money's worth. He could hardly expect her to slave away with a scrubbing brush for days when there was work to be done.

She swished the dirty water down the drain in the nearest maintenance cubby and washed her hands. The hard work had left her plenty of time to think. With her fingers wrinkled from the cleaning fluids and her knees rubbed raw, she was resigned to being back on board under the control of her captors. Haller might repulse her, but he wanted her alive. Cat and Zeke were tolerable crewmates. This was simply the safest place to be.

Despite her overwhelming fatigue, she climbed up to top deck. The common area was the only easily accessible place on the ship she'd found with a viewport to space. She wasn't expecting to find someone else there. Cat beckoned her over and they sat on a low plush bench, side by side, looking out at the turning stars. The navpilot did a double take at the ripe bruise coming up on her cheekbone, but if she guessed it was Haller's work she didn't say anything about it.

After a few minutes, Cat spoke. “You ever looked out at nodespace?”

Edie shook her head.

“Not for the faint-hearted. If Haller's got the watch, he shuts the screen. I think it's beautiful.” She indicated the inky black landscape. “This, too. All of it.”

Edie was grateful Cat hadn't opened the conversation with admonishments about her escape attempt. “Is this why you like flying?”

Cat nodded. “It's so empty and peaceful. I like that. But you can't beat the action of flying the smaller ships—the
skiff, the chasers in the war. You really feel like you're part of it.”

“Part of what?”

“Everything. The lights out there, the nothing in between. The universe. Sometimes I feel like it's pulling me in, welcoming me home like a long-lost child. And I'm always running away, another ship, another mission. Out there, that's the only place that will always want me back. Don't you ever feel that way?”

Edie frowned, not sure how to answer. “I haven't really contemplated the universe before. My life has been rather confined. But most of the time I'd rather be somewhere else.”

Cat gave her a sidelong glance. “Somewhere like Port Neuchasley?”

“Somewhere Neuchasley could have taken me—us.”

“That was a pretty dumb thing you did today.” Cat shook her head more in sympathy than reproach. “If you want to survive away from the Crib, you need us.”

Edie stared at her hands, running her fingertips over the scraped knuckles, knowing that Cat was right.

“You have to understand, I thought Haller was going to kill Finn. I couldn't let that happen.”

“I heard about what happened earlier today—Haller was bluffing. There's no way he'd leave him at the port. Finn's already connected to your escape from Talas. If they found his body and linked him to the
Hoi
, they'd be on to us. Believe me, if Haller wanted to get rid of Finn, he'd find a more discreet way of doing it.” Cat put her hand on Edie's knee to take the sting from her words. “It won't happen. Haller won't lose sight of the prize. He needs your cooperation. Just try and stay under his radar, okay?”

“Yeah, I'll try.”

“I've been here for years and I don't like Haller and he doesn't like me, but it's just easier for everyone if we get along. He's furious with you right now but it'll pass. Hell, even I'm furious with you. The captain puts on one crew
supper per mission—tomorrow night—and he got into a snit over this and postponed it. I was really looking forward to some good food.” She smiled to show she was teasing. “I can do without his stupid war stories, but you can't get one without the other.”

“Why do you call them stupid?”

“Because I don't think they're real. I was Fleet, too. A lot of what he says doesn't add up. Sometimes I think he lives in a fantasy world. Maybe that's just how he gets through this. We're all just trying to get through.”

The hint of sourness in Cat's voice made Edie wonder just how committed Cat was to the
Hoi
's agenda—why she stayed and whether she had a choice.

She dared to ask the question. “Are you here because you have to be?”

Cat tensed, her breath hitching. When she spoke, her cheerfulness sounded forced. “I'm flying, Edie. I can't complain. They tell me where to go, but I'm the one plotting the route, riding the nodes. I can carve out my own path through the universe. I'm not saying I don't have plans—” She looked down abruptly and when she continued, Edie sensed she'd changed her mind about what she was going to say. “I just do the job.”

The job.
Scarabaeus.
Edie hadn't given the mission a serious thought since her initial doubts after the briefing. It seemed like weeks ago. The sense of dread that had started when she found out their destination returned in a sickening rush.

Cat touched Edie's shoulder briefly as she stood up. “You've still got a few things to learn. We're not the enemy. At least, I'm not, Zeke's not.” With that, she said good night and left.

Alone with the stars, Edie wondered if she, too, might carve out her own path. Her past had been dictated by the Crib, which chose the course of her future, shaped her mind, her talent, her options. It had whittled away her choices until
one path remained. She'd never thought to look for another way until she'd stepped onto Scarabaeus's soil for the first time and realized her path was to destroy.

One of the lights out there was Scarabaeus's sun. She should have asked Cat which one.

No, she didn't want to know.

 

The e-shield dulls her senses. Some people insist they feel no difference, but she's never worn a shield before and is hyperaware of the way it makes everything feel fuzzy under her fingertips, how it waters down the sounds and smells of this alien world, dulls the taste of the air and reflects a disconcerting silver glare onto her retinas. The last thing she wants is for her experiences to be filtered. Tainted.

So she flicks off the shield. Bethany will kill her if she finds out. Alien worlds are never compatible with human physiology, and some are outright toxic. But she feels safe here, though she doesn't know why.

Later, she finds out. Danger is loud and ugly. Danger is the sound of warning sirens screaming, heavy boots thudding over gravplating, the crack of a spur wielded by a faceless rad. The look on a dying woman's face, the acrid smell of scorched flesh and of too much blood.

This is the lesson she will soon learn by experience. But there's no danger here, in this place of beauty—at least not to herself.

She watches the beetle struggling through the moss as she lies under the alien sun. Her vision blurs with tears, her mind reels with the weight of the knowledge that being here is a mistake. Yet no one cares. Not the commander, not the seeding team. Not even Bethany, who seems concerned only that she watches and learns and behaves herself, that the timetable is adhered to, that the rigs function smoothly, that the planet is worked over, torn down, and remodeled to make it fit for humans. They want this world, and no three-billion-year-old ecology will stand in their way.

Bethany, furious, finds her there, lying on the moss. She
aches with the shame of her disobedience because she loves Bethany—how else to explain the choking grief when she dies? But Bethany is part of all this, part of what she now sees as the Crib's betrayal.

And so, rather than save one beetle from its treacherous entanglement only for it to be destroyed by the BRATs, she resolves to save everything. She doesn't know how. She only knows that when the chance comes, she'll take it.

She's capable of more than any of them can guess.

 

The stars glowed and contracted into tight points of light as Edie's eyes refocused. She'd returned to Scarabaeus in her dreams, time and again. Sometimes the dreams were achingly beautiful, and she felt safe and welcome on that alien world. Other times, the emotions dredged up by the mission overwhelmed her. The shame of inciting Bethany's anger, the sense of betrayal over the Crib's intent to destroy such a world, the terror and grief over Bethany's death.

And underneath it all, her own betrayal. The secret she held on to like the shell embedded in her skin that everyone else deemed worthless.

She saw Finn's reflection in the window and swiveled around. He sat on the edge of a couch a few meters behind her, head forward, relaxing with his hands dangling between his knees.

“How long have you been there?” No answer. “You should be resting.”

“Med tom says I'm fine.”

“Then we should move back to our quarters so Haller can forget this ever happened.”

“Did you get hurt down there?”

She shook her head, frowning. Her injuries were insignificant compared to what he'd been through.

Tapping his temple, he clarified his question. “Why're you so churned up? I thought you were glad to be back on board.”

“You know that's not really true.”

He looked down at his hands, accepting her rebuke. When he glanced at her again, waiting, Edie knew she should say something. She wanted badly to explain everything, to open her past and her thoughts to him, but where to start? He wanted a release from her emotions, not an explanation of them. And thirteen years spent under the close scrutiny of CCU trainers and case workers and doctors had instilled in her a powerful reluctance to open up to anyone.

She thought about what Haller had said—his implication that Finn must have done something terrible to end up a lifer. Edie didn't want to believe that. Nor did she think Finn would reveal anything if she asked him directly.

“If we…after we find someone to cut the leash, what will you do?”

He opened his hands, stated the obvious. “Evade recapture.”

“But where will you go?”

“It's probably in my best interest not to tell anyone.”

She tried not to be offended that he wouldn't confide in her. “I know you fought in the Reach Conflicts. Which planet were you fighting for?”

His jaw tightened and he stared beyond her, at the starscape, hesitating long enough for her to realize he was weighing his words carefully. “None in particular. From our side it was called the Liberty War, by the way.”

“I know.” He'd avoided the question, and she let it drop. “The part I don't understand is this: they send POWs home after the war. You're still here. They said you were a lifer.”

He gave her a dark look that made her regret bringing it up. “Whatever you think I've done, you don't fear me. You never have.”

“Haller wants me to fear you.”

“He wants you to control me.”

With the voice snag gone, the drub sitting in her quarters, and her promise not to use the jolt, Edie wasn't doing a very good job of that. She was uncomfortable talking—or even thinking—about the reason she wasn't afraid of him.

“Do you have family?”

“Truthfully, I don't think about it.”

“I just wondered if you were a decent, upstanding citizen, once upon a time.” That was what she really wanted to know—who he was, what he had once been.

Finn gave a low growl and said with real annoyance, “Too many damn questions. And no, I was never that.”

His restless aggravation was covering for something more profound, and she was itching to get to the bottom of it. But she kept her tone light.

“You don't like the way I handle you, Finn?”

“You're not
handling
me.”

“Well then, I'm doing something wrong.”

She was teasing him, and he had enough good humor remaining to let it slide. In turn, he moved the topic away from himself.

“If it's not Haller spinning stories that's getting you riled up, what is it? Is there some danger I should know about?”

He deserved an explanation. Edie sorted through her thoughts before speaking.

“There's no danger that I know of. But I haven't told them everything.” Her hand moved unconsciously to her throat, where the neckband of her tee hid the beetle shell. She made a fist to stop the nervous gesture. “They know all they need to know. The rest is…my business.”

When she stalled again, he raised an eyebrow expectantly.