Song of Scarabaeus (18 page)

“Damn labor-gang activists, that's who it was.” Zeke dropped a dead tom at Edie's feet, his usually soft brown eyes fired with anger. “Probably a dockworker. They smuggled one bloody tom on board with our supplies, and ended up killing a serf instead of freeing any.”

Edie didn't point out that it was Haller who had killed the man. His death, and the fate of the other two escapees, weighed heavily on her mind.

“Did the serfs know about it beforehand?”

“I don't think so. Looks like the idea was just to cause mayhem and give them a chance to mutiny. Idiotic plan. Those activists are as shortsighted as the eco-rads. Ranting on about forced labor, completely disowning any responsibility for setting free hardened crims.”

She'd never seen him in such a foul mood. The tension on the ship had been rising all day, with the Crib Interstellar Patrol vessel following them through the last jump and still tailing them at a distance. Haller was short-tempered, Zeke yelled at Kristos for the slightest mistake, and even Cat had stopped smiling.

“Did you want me to take a look at the tom?” she said, in the hope of appeasing Zeke.

“Waste of time. We know it was this one. The kid spent all afternoon tracking it down.”

She didn't envy the young teck that job. Kristos now sat in the corner of the hold wiping and rebooting every tom on the ship. The toms clustered around him like eager children waiting their turn. A simple master program would achieve the same result, but making Kristos do it manually was his punishment for hiding out in his quarters while the serfs were loose. This, along with Zeke's scolding, had left him subdued.

Finn, meanwhile, had barely spoken a word to her since the death of the man in the engine room, and she worried that the events of the previous night had given him second thoughts about their plan to finish the mission. For now, though, he was being cooperative, helping a couple of serfs move all the illegal equipment into the skiff so it could be temporarily jettisoned if CIP boarded.

Edie followed Zeke through the hold to the cellblock, where he'd gathered the tools needed to fix the broken bolt.

“What happened to the other men who tried to escape?” She wasn't sure she wanted to know, but she hadn't seen them all day.

Zeke waved his hand dismissively. “Aw, don't worry about that. We dealt with them.”

“What does that mean?” She glanced at the closed hatch leading to the lockdown cell—the railings Finn had been chained to a couple of days earlier had looked suspiciously like a flogging post.

“I'm the handler. I handled it. They'll be back on duty tomorrow.” Zeke's tight voice, so different from his usual joviality, warned her to drop the subject.

She did so, and consoled herself with the fact that, if nothing else, at least the serf revolt had given her the chance to meddle with the
Hoi
's comm systems. Not that she could think of a single soul on the outside to contact at this point.

“What about this CIP vessel? Are they after me?”

“Who knows? They finally made contact this afternoon,
demanding our manifest. Claiming we underpaid the tariff at the last jump gate.”

“Can't you just pay up and get them off your back?”

“No, because they know that we know it's a bullshit excuse. If we cave in, they'll know we're covering for something else.”

At the far end of the corridor, a flustered Haller jumped down the ladder and marched toward them.

“Are you reading my memos? Did you program those nanofinds?”

“Uh…nanofinds, sir?” She had no idea what memo he was talking about.

He glared at her, his color rising, and seemed to be waging an internal battle as to whether he should smack her. She was grateful that Zeke was right there and Finn was nearby.

“Read my fucking memos, Edie! If we can't avoid being boarded, you and that serf need to get to the skiff. We'll give you a shove into the jump node and you can hide out until it's over. We need nanofinds to wipe the
Hoi
clean. Get it done. Then report to the bridge. We might have a problem with the BRATs.”

He stormed away.

Edie turned a questioning look on Zeke. “What's he talking about? He wants to dump us inside a jump node? In that tiny skiff?”

“If it comes to that.” Zeke shrugged, as if it wasn't a big deal.

It was a very big deal to Edie. If the skiff needed a push from the
Hoi
to enter the node, it must mean there was no gate. And with no gate, the skiff would be stuck wherever it exited until the
Hoi
came back for it.

That sounded like a terrible idea.

 

“Isn't this illegal?” Finn's dry tone emphasized the irony of his question. Was anything these rovers did legal?

“Completely illegal. The primary use for nanofinds is to scrub a crime scene.”

“But you've done it before?”

Edie shrugged. “It's biocyph. I figured out how to make them when I was a kid.” They were in the infirmary, where she drew blood samples from them both and dropped them into the DNA sequencer. “Never made them before to wipe out all traces of my own existence.”

Their med records had already been wiped. It was a strange feeling to scroll through the ship's logs and find herself erased. Even Haller's memo vanished as soon as she closed it. She scanned the system to find that he'd put a rather clumsy precoded worm into action an hour ago, presumably when the danger of being boarded had become too great to ignore.

Finn watched her working but fell silent again. He was hardly the most talkative person she knew, but today he'd seemed preoccupied with his thoughts.

“Are you thinking about that serf?” she said.

“I'm thinking about CIP.”

“The ship out there?”

“Ever thought about turning yourself in?”

Her hand froze over the sequencer. “You can't be serious. Go back to the Crib? I've told you why I can't do that. Natesa, Project Ardra—”

“What about me?”

He was right. She had to consider what was best for him, too. But that was never going to be the Crib.

“After what Haller did—murdering that serf,” he went on, “I believe you now. I believe he'll find a reason to kill me.”

“Cat thinks otherwise. Listen, what Haller wants is to get through the mission with maximum profit. We're doing this for the creds. Our goal and his are the same. The Crib isn't the answer.”

“It might be the only answer to deactivating the leash. Crib tecks are the best.”

She couldn't argue that point, and they'd agreed from the start that the leash was their first priority. But the situation had changed. After witnessing the Fringers' misery first
hand, she'd lost any remaining faith in the Crib's integrity. They'd discard Finn even quicker than Haller would.

“What about afterward?” she said. “Even if they do cut the leash, you'll still be their slave and I'll still be Natesa's pawn. The Crib has nothing to offer us.”

He inclined his head in a gesture of withdrawal from the discussion, but not exactly agreement with her argument. Edie didn't pursue it, didn't want to hear him come up with more reasons. He was simply wrong if he believed either of them had a chance of freedom in the hands of the Crib. His peculiar mood singed the air.

Using a standard wet-teck generator, she imprinted their DNA codes onto a matrix. A few minutes later she held between her fingers a vial of genetically engineered nanofinds to be distributed through the aircon. They would multiply rapidly, spread through the ship, and selectively target only the DNA for which they were primed—hers and Finn's. They would break down all traces of hair and dead skin cells they came across and then quietly self-destruct into unremarkable dust, to be mopped up by cleaner toms.

 

Edie was prohibited from the bridge, which made Haller's summons all the more unnerving. Her crew key failed to snap the hatch and she was about to hit Haller's callsign when he opened the hatch from the inside.

“That report you wrote,” he said without preamble, leading her to a console at the rear of the bridge. Finn hung back and the bridge crew ignored him. “Because the BRATs were dead, you said, the Crib scout ship knocked out the satellite that the original mission left behind.” He flicked on a holoviz, which displayed various projection lines on an image of Scarabaeus. Behind her, she was aware of Captain Rackham in conversation with Cat at the con, and one of the engies.

“That would be standard procedure. If the BRATs didn't germinate, they would've disabled the satellite to prevent its transmissions drawing the attention of rovers.”

“But you don't know for sure?”

“No,” she admitted. Her report contained a large amount of speculation that she'd presented as fact, based on her accumulated knowledge of standard CCU seeding procedures.

Haller's holoviz was starting to make sense now. An animated sim showed the satellite's projected tracking path and ground coverage arcs.

“Our advance probe is picking up transmissions that exactly overlay this pattern. That means the satellite is still functional.”

“I guess so.” What did he expect her to do about it? It wasn't her fault CCU had left a beacon behind. “Surely you have to deal with this problem all the time—isn't that what you rovers do? Hit and run. Disguise your ident transmissions within the system, do your dirty work and then disappear before CCU can respond to the satellites that detected your presence?”

“It's not detection I'm worried about. Yes, we can disguise our approach.” He gave her a look that said he wasn't about to tell her how. “The satellite is receiving information from the BRATs.”

“Okay, that's normal. There would be latent broadcasts from the surface regardless of whether the BRATs germinated.”

“I'm not talking about weather reports and positional scans and security beacons.” Haller's voice was tight, controlled, masking something very much like panic. “The satellite is picking up activity
within
the BRATs. Our probe sent back a preliminary reflection and it looks like nothing I've ever seen.”

He flashed up the data packets. The content was Crib-encoded so he'd been unable to access it, but the packets contained far more information than could be accounted for by the housekeeping blips of dead BRATs.

Stunned, Edie could only murmur, “What's going on out there?”

“CIP is on the line,” Cat said sharply from her console,
and Edie turned to catch the wary glance the navpilot threw in her direction.

“Off the bridge,” Rackham snapped at Edie over his shoulder, sparing Finn a brief glare as well.

By the time they reached the hatch, everyone's attention was on the main holoviz. In a spur-of-the-moment decision, Edie ducked behind a console, pulling Finn with her. She needed to know whether CIP was after her, and she wasn't going to rely on Haller's secondhand report to find out.

“Put them on,” Rackham said.

A young, square-jawed CIP official appeared on the holoviz.

“
Hoi Polloi
, this is CIP Inspection and Quarantine on the
Laoch
. One hour ago you were ordered to power down and prepare to be boarded.”

“One hour ago,” Rackham replied coolly, “you sent an illegal order to inspect our manifest. You've since provided no acceptable reason to delay us and no justification to inspect our holds, despite numerous requests from my crew. Your spurious excuses are unconvincing. This continued harassment is unwarranted, and I intend to take it up with your superiors once we return to the Central zone in a few weeks.”

The young man didn't falter, reciting his orders like an automaton. “You are required to comply with all CIP requests for inspection.”

“Cut the bull, young man. Those regulations apply within Crib Central space, which we left two days ago.”

“You registered an incorrect mass at jump dock thirty-three AVID, within the Central zone. Therefore—”

“Therefore, you should have stopped us then. You missed your chance. Not that it matters, because we both know that there was nothing wrong with our mass or with the tariff we paid to traverse that node.”

The CIP official set his jaw in frustration, and Rackham turned to Cat with a cutoff signal.

“Captain!”

They all spun back to the screen at the sound of a new
voice, and Edie suppressed a gasp. A familiar face now filled the screen.

“Captain Rackham,” the woman said in the snide voice Edie knew so well.

“Who the hell are you?” Rackham barked.

“Liv Natesa. Crib Colonial Unit, Special Branch.”

Edie crouched lower behind the console. There was no more pretending that this was a routine CIP inspection, although rovers must run into such trouble all the time. Natesa was on board the
Laoch
. It could only mean she suspected Edie was on the
Hoi
.

“Captain, I have the authority of Crib Central Intelligence behind me. You need to listen to me.”

That got Rackham's attention. The bridge went quiet.

“Say your piece, Ms Natesa.”

Edie had to give him credit for sounding entirely calm, something she'd never felt in Natesa's presence. She knew the woman too well. Natesa had a way of crushing all arguments, all obstacles that impeded her mission. She always won. Rackham just didn't know it yet.

“I have information that you may be harboring a criminal,” Natesa said, “by the name of Edie Sha'nim.”

A
criminal
? What was she talking about? Was she planning to accuse Edie of desertion? Or worse…of Ademo's murder? Edie saw her future with the Crib more clearly than ever. If Natesa threatened her with criminal charges, her choices would be Project Ardra or life in a prison camp.

And Finn's choices? None at all. He'd participated in her kidnapping, or desertion, or whatever Natesa planned to call it. As a serf, his status was below Natesa's threshold of humanity and his future was a swift execution. Even if Edie could plead his case, he was at the mercy of the leash. Natesa would never allow him to stay at her side. He would be discarded. There was no hope for him.