Tag - A Technothriller (15 page)

“They never spoke of Sir Thomas in front of me, but once I heard half of a conversation between our father and Bo Vinh. What made me stop and listen was the serious expression on our father’s face as he said he would be careful and that he understood that his affair with Mariah had caused him to become an enemy of Sir Thomas. They didn’t discuss this in front of me, but I found out later, much later, that Mariah was Sir Thomas’s wife when she met our father. Mariah left us for a short while, it was a week, as I found out later when I studied that time, and when she returned we left the hotel in Sydney and moved to a place called Byron Bay. Here we rented a house next to the beach.

“My mother was Sir Thomas’s wife?”

“Yes, and I think that played a part in your being stolen. Your mother became my wonderful step-mother. She wrapped me in her love and told me every day how much I meant to her and that her love for me was equal to her love for our father. The only time that I saw our father sad in that year was with the death of Bo Vinh. He went to the funeral, and the image of him at the funeral is the only one that exists in the public domain – all others have been deleted and purged by Sir Thomas. Wearing black, and I remember our mother packing the suit in his carry on, he is crying at the funeral of the man he helped to bring to prominence.

“Returning from the funeral, his mood stayed somber but our mother drew him out and within a month, the news that she was going to have his child, you, lifted his spirits and we lived in a state of pure joy for that year. We took long walks on the beach and drives into the countryside, often eating on a rug spread out on a dune or a hill. We talked of everything. I was never denied an answer by either of them, they took the time to explain things to me.

“You were born at 2am on the morning of 23rd September 2075 and you weighed three point two kilogs and were fifty-three cents long. We stayed at the hospital for three more days after your birth and then we moved back to the wooden house on the beach. What I didn’t know at the time was that our father had been investigating the circumstances around the death of Bo Vinh and had begun documenting his findings in a report that clearly implicated Sir Thomas. That report disappeared after the events that followed. The evidence, much like the evidence we have today against Sir Thomas, was also largely circumstantial, and our father had kept it to himself.

“One evening in early October, the 6th, we had just come home after a walk on the beach. As we approached the house we could see three men standing on the back of the deck that surrounded the house. Our father told Mariah, who was holding you, and I to wait, and we did as he walked up to the men and asked what they wanted. They went inside the house and that was the last time I saw him. When nothing had happened for over half an hour, Mariah with you in her arms and I approached the house. We heard nothing and we went inside. Our father’s study was a mess of papers strewn about and the drawers had been tossed carelessly on the floor beside the desk. His Dev was gone and so was everyone. We were alone in the house.

“Mariah called UNPOL and told them what happened. They came and talked with us and a woman stayed with us while the search for our father continued. After a week, Mariah called Sir Thomas to ask for his help and he arrived half a day later. After their meeting, she told me that she was terrified of what Sir Thomas had told her and what he had done. She was crying, and told me that we had to disappear, that we must run immediately and hide from Sir Thomas. We packed some clothes into a carry on and fled on foot up the beach. The two of us walked for hours, stopping only to feed you and ourselves with the food we had brought from the house. It was a warm night, and as we walked up the beach where we had so many happy times. I cried, thinking about what we were doing. In a week everything that we had known was suddenly gone.

“We traveled north for four days, taking EVTours as far as Darwin, and it was there at a motel on Cavenagh Street that we stopped. The motel room had large air conditioning ducts and it was a good thing because the room was hideously hot. Too hot to be really cooled down – we were all uncomfortable and exhausted. You however slept and ate and smiled at us, and you gave us strength. You were less than a month old but you gave us strength.

“It was in the motel, on the second day that we arrived there, where Mariah told me what it was that Sir Thomas had told her. He had told her that it was he that had ordered the death of Bo Vinh, and it was he who ordered the three men to come to the house that day to take Philip away. He told her of how he tortured our father until he cried for mercy and told him everything that he had found out. He told our mother that she was going back with him and that you were to be his child. If she did this he said he would spare Philip his life. In his twisted way Sir Thomas gave her time to think over what she would do, perhaps sure in the knowledge that she would come back to him. He gave her a day to think about it and in this Sir Thomas had miscalculated. We can never be sure what would have happened because Mariah believed that Sir Thomas had already killed Philip and so she explained why we had to run.

“I think she knew that they would find her, because she unscrewed the cover off the air-conditioning duct and taught me how to crawl inside backwards. She would then hand me you and I would pull the cover into place after us. She made me practice it a few times to be sure I could do it quickly and quietly, and on the fourth night we were there, a knock came at the door.”

I am not a particularly tearful person, but I had to wipe the tears off my face. The understanding of what would come next was too sad to bear. I blinked to clear the tears from my eyes as Gabriel continued.

“I quickly climbed into the duct holding, the cover in one hand, getting ready to take you in with me as we’d practised. But you were crying, and Mariah shook her head at me. I pulled the cover tight hiding myself from sight. Mariah went to the door but before she could open it the door handle flew inwards with a great force, hitting her in the stomach. She fell to her knees and it was all I could do to restrain myself with her last order in my ear. Don’t move, no matter what, she had said. The door opened and a man I know now as Sir Thomas came into the room. They argued and he tried to pull her arm towards the door. She struck at him and suddenly he pulled a long blade from within his outers. I saw it flash on the light from the outside of the door and then he struck upwards with it driving it into her stomach. He held it in her and twisted it; watching from my hide I stared in horror as she died there on the floor of that motel. Sir Thomas leaned down and wiped the blade on her before he rose and walked slowly out of the room. A short while later, three men entered the room; putting her in a body bag and taking you with them, they left.

“I stayed in the hide for another hour and then I left. There was nothing in the room or on me to indicate who I was or what life I had led up to that point. I was alone. I left at night without being seen. By lunch the next day I had reached the outskirts of Darwin and just kept walking. I walked through the day and the night, into the country. The next morning a group of aborigines found me sleeping beside a tree. They talked to me but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t talk to anyone for another five years.”

Gabriel looked at the Devstick, and standing said, “We will have to continue this discussion another time. We really should begin your training to defend yourself against a mind probe now.”

I nodded and stood too, looking at him. He was slightly taller than me and his hair was graying at the temples. I walked over to him and we embraced. I hugged him harder and tighter than anyone I had ever hugged. I felt the loneliness of those years that he had been on the run, as I too had been lonely – shunted from one childcare institute to the next throughout my childhood.

It made sense to me now, that part of my life. I had wondered why there had been that coldness. It had always seemed as if Sir Thomas could not bear to be around me and now I understood why. He wasn’t my uncle. He was the murderer of both my mother and father.

Gabriel pulled a chair from the table and sat down. I sat down in the Siteazy again and waited for him to begin hypnotizing me. I took a long look at him and he smiled. Once hypnotized he was going to remove all my memories related to our conservations in the White Room and this chat on the Moon. After this he would become the runner again and I wanted to savor my last memory of him as my brother.

Chapter 15

In Hot Water

Nineveh Hot Spring Resort, Shackleton Moonbase, The Moon

Friday, 13 December 2109 7:35am

I woke up with a foul taste in my mouth, regretting my impetuous decision to come to the Moon. I could have been swimming in a beautiful tropical sea. Instead I was in a third rate VacEnv with uncomfortable sleepers, at least the one I slept in was, and my back hurt.

I stumbled out of the sleeper and read the suggestion on the Devscreen beside the sleeper. The hot springs seemed like a good idea to clear the stuffed nasal passages and ease my sore back, so putting on a pair of inners, I walked barefoot down through the carved rock tunnels outside of the room until I came to the hot spring. The corridors from the rooms were laid out like spokes on a wheel, with the hot spring as the hub.

Lying down in the pool letting the low gravity float my body on the water, I laid my head back on the rock edge.

Crazy, I thought. Jonah James Oliver, you are completely crazy. You deserve to be recycled for this idiocy. Thinking that a word a runner has said in an interview is a clue as to his whereabouts and somehow you are going to track him down? What were you thinking? It’s OK, I just won’t tell anyone exactly where I’ve been. I’ll tell them I just came to the Moon because I wanted to see what it was like to be in zero gravity. That’s it.

Directly opposite the space that I was lying in, a woman emerged from one of the spokes. She laid a towel down beside the spring and, sitting down on the edge, put her feet in the water. Even at thirty meters away I could see she was beautiful. She smiled and lifted a palm from the edge of the spring in greeting. I smiled back and raised my hand in return. She was tall, at least one hundred and seventy cents and slim but not skinny. The white outer she was wearing showed off her long legs and was clinging tightly enough to her body that I could tell she wasn’t wearing inners. Her long black hair reached down to her waist, spanning out in a solid black wave over her tanned shoulders. I guessed Polynesian extraction or perhaps Indian.

Despite the beautiful woman sitting across from me, somehow my mood just didn’t suit the pool and after just ten minutes, still with stuffed nasal passages and a sore back, I headed up the spoke tunnel of unfinished rock and back to my room.

Leaving wet footprints on the blue matting that covered the distance to the room I had credded for the night, I checked my Devstick. I hadn’t been able to use it when I arrived here from the Lev port, but it was back up now, with an explanation from the comms team at Peary that sun flares had knocked out the Satcom relays orbiting Shackleton. I did a find on ships leaving Shackleton or Peary for the Earth Orbiter. There was a ship leaving directly from Shackleton to the Orbiter in another twenty-five minutes - if I hurried I could make it. I noticed it was Friday the 13th.

I quickly threw the spare inners and outers and the ‘Life’s a Beach’ bag I had brought with me into the Virgin Galactic carry on and headed to out to the reception area. I thumbed my Devstick at the Dev on the reception counter and checked the cost had been deducted from my cred. They charged me full rate for the canceled night but I wasn’t going to stick around and argue with them.

I checked the map to the Lev on my Devstick and got the walkway lights going. I was short of time and I didn’t want to miss that ship back to Earth’s Orbiter. With luck I could be back in New Singapore by before 9pm. The tunnel from the Nineveh to the main walkway tube was quite empty, but traffic in the main tube was busy with people headed towards their contributions.

Most of the people around me were wearing mining suits with the logos of their respective Ents emblazoned over their right breasts and writ large on their backs. I threaded my way through the crowd, my Virgin Galactic carry on marking me for the tourist that I was, and got to the Lev. There was a queue. The Levs were moving pretty quickly but it was obviously a busy time. Standing in the queue waiting for my turn, I suddenly felt a tap on my shoulder and turned.

“Hi, it looks like you and I had the same idea,” said the beautiful woman from the pool.

I noticed the envious looks from the other men standing around waiting for Levs as this gorgeous woman spoke to me. She too had a Virgin carry on and I said, “Yes I’ve only been here for a few hours but the novelty’s worn off.”

That comment got me a few glares from the people around me, but I didn’t care.

Deal with it, I thought.

The woman too noticed the looks and, smiling at me, said, “You think you’ve been having a hard time – the ratio of women to men on the Moon is one to twenty and I’m getting zoned out by all these stares I’ve been getting.”

As she said this the Lev arrived and we bustled in. I took advantage of the shuffle to move to an area that was reasonably far away from the people that had been standing around us while we were chatting. The woman followed me.

“I think we upset some people,” I said to her as we stood waiting for the Lev door to close. It was standing room only and her face was only thirty cents from mine. Smiling, she had white even teeth in a full mouth set in a strong jaw. Her cheekbones flared up and out in a slash under her green eyes. The green eyes crinkling now at the corners in a smile.

“I don’t care what those freaks might think right now. I’ve been undressed in so many once-over looks this morning that I feel like I’m walking around naked.”

“Where on Earth are you going?” I asked, making a very sincere effort not to glance at the breasts that I had admired in my brief glance at her in the pool – instead looking directly into her eyes.