Song of Scarabaeus (2 page)

She looked away quickly, steadying her breathing, and focused on the link, gathering the strands of data together and double-checking they were fully separated before going back to find the first glyph. The encryptions were standard Crib fare, and it was now only a matter of time before she could break through them.

She hesitated. She could delay, hope Security showed up, hope TrafCon realized what was happening…

The car shuddered and grated against its railing. It started moving.

“Edie!”

Startled by Lancer's voice, Edie turned toward the maintenance platform just as the first code of Finn's chip locked into place and the second glyph sang out, demanding her attention.

Lancer leaned over the handrail. “How do I stop this thing? Where's the manual override?” She sounded annoyed but not particularly concerned.

They would clear the dock and be out on the main track within seconds. Unless the docks were locked down soon, there was nothing to stop the car traveling all the way out to its destination—presumably Lancer's waiting ship. And at some point along that track, the boundary chips would fire.

“It's under TrafCon control,” Edie replied. “You can't stop it.” There was a way, but it would take several minutes to climb up into the platform, patch in, and trigger the necessary overrides. And both serfs would be dead by then.

Lancer was yanked backward and Ademo appeared at the handrail. “You, teckie! Get over here and help me!” He moved out of view again, and the sounds of a struggle came from the platform.

Edie remembered Ademo's earlier brutal rage and went cold with fear. Pulling back, she reached up to disconnect the line from Finn.

“No.”

Finn forced the word through locked vocal cords, little more than a hoarse breath. His hand closed firmly around her wrist, but not painfully so. It was his eyes that held her there. Behind her and above, the navpilot cried out. The spur fired once, the round sizzling harmlessly into the bulkhead.

Edie twisted her wrist and Finn released it abruptly, catching her by surprise. In his eyes she saw a calm, accepting trust—the knowledge she would save him.

She would try anyway.

Pressing her eyes closed, she filed rapidly through the glyphs, setting each one to its task. Her mind flooded with the datastream, the familiar melody she both welcomed and despised. Her subjective sense of time slowed as the biocyph thrummed its rhythm and each tier sang its tune.

It was a juggling act, keeping the glyphs balanced, but one by one they clicked into place. She was aware of the sporadic jolting of the car, of Ademo coming down the ladder, screaming in a wild panic. He must have jumped the last couple of meters—she heard him land heavily and crash into the crates, thrashing about.

Then silence.

The datastream slipped away, the last eddies chasing down the link like whispered echoes. The car swayed and purred. Edie was shaking again. Then the warmth of human flesh as a hand cupped her cheek and Finn disconnected the line at her end, then at his.

She opened her eyes as he stood up. His gaze flicked over her shoulder and refocused, and Edie swung around to see what had caught his attention.

“Ah, jezus.” Lancer staggered down the ladder, nursing a gash across her knuckles. “And I so hoped for a happy ending.”

Ademo lay crumpled against a pile of crates, eyes open, filled with blood, seeing nothing. More blood oozed from his left ear and trickled down his jaw. He must have given up wrestling for Lancer's spur before plunging down the ladder to get to Edie. Lancer still wore the weapon but it was retracted. She hadn't used it to kill Ademo. The boundary chip had killed him.

Lancer addressed Finn. “Glad to see you made it through. Told you she was good.” Then her brow knitted as she looked to Edie. “Why's the car moving?”

Edie dragged her eyes away from Ademo's blank, bloodied face. “It's automatic. Once he fixed the railing, the car took its assigned place in the loading schedule.” She was mentally exhausted and her voice was unsteady—the kickback from
making her wet-teck interface jump through hoops—but the words flowed easily enough now it was over.

“How long until they lock us down?” Lancer asked.

“I don't know. I don't know why they haven't yet. They're probably wetting themselves in all this excitement.” Edie had spent three months dealing with Talas Prime Security, and knew the routine. “Give them time to triple-check their emergency protocols,” she added bitterly. The serf would still be alive if they'd acted faster.

The navpilot grinned. “Hooray for red tape.”

The whine of the car's servos changed pitch abruptly and the docking hatch mated with a soft clunk.

“We're here.” Lancer stepped around Ademo's body and raised her arm to allow the spur to slide forward. It clicked ominously into place.

Edie felt Finn's presence close behind her. She was trapped.

“Hey—I tried to do what you wanted. I couldn't save them both.”

“Don't worry,” Lancer said, “you did the galaxy a favor letting that one pop. Never would have recruited him if I'd known what a shit he was. Finn, get the hatch.”

The serf moved past Edie, a momentary brush of warmth. She shivered.

Lancer lowered her voice. “You did well. Honestly, I didn't think you could do it. Never heard of anyone hijacking a boundary chip before.”

Edie frowned. If the navpilot thought she couldn't save the serfs, what was she doing here? As realization dawned, her unease returned.

“It's me you want.”

“Of course.”

“If you think I'm going anywhere with you—”

Lancer took a step closer, casually menacing. “You're about to get the offer of a lifetime, Edie Sha'nim, so think long and hard about your options before you reject it out of sheer stubbornness.”

“I can't leave. I can't just walk away from my Crib contract.”

“But I bet you'd love to, huh?” Lancer waved her spur toward the hatch as Finn snapped the doors open. “Go through there.”

The mated hatch slid aside. Beyond it was the murky hold of a ship. Two men waited, shadowy shapes in the dark.

A siren blared through the freight car. One of the men in the hold gave a cry of alarm as the hatch doors started to close by themselves. He jumped up to help Finn shoulder them open.

Lancer clutched Edie's arm and pushed her toward the exit, the barrel of the spur bruising her ribs. “They've recalled the freight cars. Dammit, hold those doors!”

Edie grabbed the nearest crate and dug in her heels. If the hatch closed, there was nothing they could do to stop the car returning to the station. She'd be safe.

Lancer yelled and cracked the spur against the side of Edie's head. Disoriented, she tried to wriggle out of the navpilot's grasp. The hatch servos screamed in protest as the men forced them apart.

Something slammed into the back of Edie's knees, and her legs buckled beneath her. The scruff of her coveralls was wrenched aside by a huge black hulk of a man, a manic grin splitting his face. He hauled her up with ease and dragged her out. Struggling against such strength was useless, but she gave it her best shot.

She tripped over the lip of the hatch, and he released her. She tumbled into the hold of the ship, rolled down a ramp, and hit the musty deck. Hard. Her first bodyguard, Lukas, had taught her how to roll safely—years ago, eons ago—and she'd never once needed to know. Until now. She failed him dismally, slamming unceremoniously into the bulkhead, hitting her skull.

A face hovered nearby. A man—an angel with pale bright eyes, but she couldn't make out his words. The siren faded
a notch as the hatch screeched shut, and half a dozen voices tumbled around her in confusion.

The cold of the deck seeped through her clothes. Her head throbbed.

Then a sharp pain against her neck brought instant relief, and she drifted away.

She had the sense of having been unconscious or semi-conscious for a long time. Her head felt like it had been split open. Fractured events drifted through her mind. The navpilot. The unknown fate of Torres. The bloodied face of the dead serf. The other one, who could have been violent like Ademo, but instead had compelled her with a look to save him.

And a more recent memory, an image recalled from the days while she drifted in and out of consciousness—two people having sex, hushed and hurried, in this very room. The navpilot in her gold flight suit, and the angel-man from the ship's hold. Whispered words between them that made no sense, then or now.

She opened her eyes to smooth white contours. White walls, white sheets, white monitors. The unmistakable smell of antiseptic singed her nostrils. A medfac. Compact enough to be on board a ship or station, rather than dirtside. Blinking to clear her vision, she saw the whiteness was marred by scrapes and chips. Not dirty, but very worn.

Out of habit, she pressed her fingers into the crook of her elbow, feeling for her implant. It was still there, just below the skin. An umbilical cord to her homeworld.

Voices soaked through the bulkhead. Real and present voices this time.

“…Never seen anything like it. It's lethal stuff. Interesting. Very interesting.”

“And you can't synthesize it?”

“No, just like her med records say. It has to be concentrated from natural sources. She'll last a few months on that implant.”

And then what? Would they let her go home? Leave her to die?

The voices faded. Edie pushed back the sheets and swung her legs, heavy and stiff, over the edge of the bed. Someone had put her in bland hospital PJs. The sharp pounding in her head made standing up difficult. It wasn't just the fuzzy disorientation of tranqs. A dull but centered ache throbbed at her left temple.

Her splinter. They'd done something to her wet-teck interface. She gritted her teeth and rubbed her forehead. She did
not
like people poking around in her head.

Walking took even more effort. She grabbed the bed rail and monitors and a solitary chair to keep her balance as she hobbled across the room to the wall opposite the door. A palm-sized med tom that had been monitoring her scuttled around the bulkhead to follow her, its sensors flashing. Filling the wall was a shutter screen, covering a window that might give her a clue where she was.

“Would you like to see the view?”

She spun away from the screen, the sudden movement stabbing her head with pain. Two men had entered the room. The speaker was pushing forty, clean-cut, with pale puffy skin that reminded her of any number of outworld daytrippers who spent too much time in the artificial environment of a ship. His clothes marked him as a spacefarer, too—jacket and flight suit modeled pretentiously after the milit cut, popular among higher-ranking commercial vessel crew. He had a palmet clipped to his belt but no weapon.

Looking at the second man, Edie recoiled. It was the huge
man with the shiny black face who had hauled her out of the freight car during her kidnapping.

She recovered with some effort and put on a bold face for her visitors. The first one flipped a switch near the door and she glanced over her shoulder as the screen faded. The view was obscured by a lattice of girders, cables, and access tubes. Between them, in the geometric shapes formed by the haphazard crisscrossing, was space, splattered with stars.

“Where am I?”

Her voice was a scratchy croak. The man in the fake uniform fetched a beaker from the nightstand and brought it over, watching her carefully. As she drank, he spoke as if he hadn't heard her.

“I'm John Haller, executive officer of the
Hoi Polloi
. This is Zeke.” He thumbed the big man at the door. “I believe you've met.”

Zeke looked a little older than Haller, though his bulky build and obvious strength gave him vitality. “Sorry about grabbing you like that.” He had the decency to offer a rueful grin. “Had to move fast.”

“Zeke is our op-teck.” Haller backed away, for which Edie was grateful. “We'll be in spacedock a few more hours and then transfer to the
Hoi
. How are you feeling?”

“I'm feeling like I'd rather go home, thank you.” She'd never heard of the
Hoi Polloi
, but she had heard about cyphertecks being blackmailed or bribed into doing illegal work. Even kidnapped. Hence, the Crib had seen fit to assign her a guard on the station, and before that a series of bodyguards, or so-called bullet-stoppers, for her offworld missions.

“We're rather hoping you'd like to work for us.” Haller gave a thin smile, a halfhearted attempt to put her at ease.

“I can't say I'm impressed with your manner of recruitment. You attacked my guard, kidnapped me, made me feel responsible for a man getting his head blown up—”

“He was just a lag,” Haller said dismissively. “Part of a
Crib labor gang on the station. They knew the risk involved with deactivating the boundary chips, and they chose to take that risk for the chance of freedom. As for your guard—I've no information about what happened to him.”

“Ask that woman. Where is she? How is she connected with this?”

“She's our navpilot. Cat Lancer.”

“She's really a very sweet girl,” Zeke added.

“I'll remember that, next time she jams a spur in my ribs and starts ordering me around.”

“I think you'll find we're all on the same side here.” Haller gestured toward the chair. “Why don't you take a seat and I'll explain.”

Something Lancer had said during their encounter flashed through Edie's mind.
You're about to get the offer of a lifetime.
Being forced to leave her homeworld and work for pirates—rovers, they had to be—wasn't her idea of an offer. Then again, her Crib contract wasn't exactly voluntary, either.

Edie wrapped her arms around her rib cage and stayed where she was. Unperturbed, Haller took the chair for himself. Zeke folded his arms and leaned back against the door. His presence was perhaps intended to intimidate her, yet the executive officer's polished poise was far more threatening than the big man's sheer size. If it weren't for the way Zeke had manhandled her earlier, she would've conceded that his expression was friendly.

“I'm sure it'll come as no surprise to hear we're interested in your special talents.” Haller took the palmet from his belt clip, tapped it, and was silent for several seconds as he studied the holoviz, rubbing his forefinger slowly along his lip in a show of concentration. “Before Cat picked you up on Talas Prime Station we'd been keeping an eye on you, poking around in your CCU records—some of which are highly classified, by the way.” He looked up. “Took us a while to dig that deep.”

Edie shifted uneasily. “I don't have any secrets.”

“Perhaps not, but the Crib Colonial Unit has secrets about you.” He cocked an eyebrow as if waiting for an explanation, but she said nothing. “For example, your involvement in Project Ardra.”

That project was highly classified. Their infojack must be good.

“I'm not involved in Ardra.”

“
Yet
. CCU approved Project Ardra's implementation phase a few months ago. It's only a matter of time. Your contract compels you to participate—and from your performance reviews, I know how you feel about that.”

Edie didn't respond, but the simmering trepidation she always felt when she thought about Ardra made her stomach clench. She'd taken a three-month assignment on Talas Prime, working as a mere op-teck in maintenance, in order to delay her reassignment to Project Ardra. Liv Natesa, sector head of the CCU's BRAT seeding program, had allowed her to work on the station—under milit supervision—because she hadn't had a break in years. But Haller was right. Within days she was due to return to Natesa's new and improved seeding program.

“Your Crib training makes you particularly valuable,” Haller said when she remained silent. “These assessments from your training days are nothing short of commendable—at least from a technical perspective. Have you ever read them?”

He held out the palmet. She felt safer on this side of the room, with the bed between them, so she didn't move. But she couldn't take her eyes off that palmet. Her records. She'd never been allowed to see them, but she was certain they held other information—details Haller would have no use for, but that she wanted very badly.

Edie forced herself to look at him. “Crib-trained tecks are two a penny. Why me?”

“It's a cypherteck we need. A good one. A cooperative one.”

Her heart lurched as she wondered what might happen if she refused to cooperate.

“Just how long do you need my cooperation for? As a native of Talas, I have a biological dependence on the planet. You must have read that in my records.”

“We're certainly aware of your condition.”

“Then you know I'll die in a few months when my implant runs dry.” She'd been using neuroxin implants since the Crib took her, at the age of ten, from the Talasi resettlement camps. Other Talasi got what they needed in their diet, but the Crib kept her secluded at the institute or offplanet on missions. Every few months, her doctor had to distill the drug from crops of native vegetation.

“We'll get your drug for you—if you prove your worth.” Haller didn't expand on what would happen if she didn't prove her worth. “Despite your exemplary training reports from Crai Institute, it's clear you were never exactly enthusiastic about working for CCU. Your superiors note your questionable level of commitment to both the Crib and Talas, your lack of interest in the career they so carefully mapped out for you—”

“So you rescue me from a job I don't like by kidnapping me?” It was hard work maintaining a defiant attitude while her head pounded and her knees kept threatening to buckle under. “Don't paint yourself as my savior. What do you want from me?”

Haller flicked off the palmet with a deliberate gesture. “I want your help. Billions of people
need
your help.” He opened his hands in supplication, as if those statements alone should be enough to make her swear loyalty to him. “The colonies that won so-called independence with the Outward Reach treaties over the last twenty years are being held hostage. The technology that created their worlds, decades or centuries ago, is still controlled by the Crib.” He was referring to biocyph retroviral automated terraformer seeds, known as BRATs, the complex machinery that first
terraformed and then fine-tuned the environment of every inhabited planet. “Every year, the BRAT seeds sustaining their ecosystems automatically fail unless the colonies pay the Crib for a renewal key. If they don't pay up, the seeds shut down and the ecosystem quickly collapses. Those fees have crippled hundreds of Fringe worlds, turned generations of people into little more than serfs who have to export most of their resources just to buy renewal keys. And all because the Crib wants to keep the colony worlds under its thumb—”

“Nice speech.” He was making her head hurt again, and she rubbed at the sharp pain in her skull. Still, she had to struggle to keep the curiosity from her voice. “So you steal BRAT seeds and trade them to the Fringe worlds, right? You need a cypherteck to hack them, calibrate them to new environments.”

“That's right. But we have a cheaper and more efficient method than replacing all those failing seeds. We dig out seeds from recently seeded worlds—the biocyph needs to be in the embryonic stage to be pliable. Then we reprogram the biocyph to create what we call keystone seeds. Only works ten percent of the time, but with your help our success rate will soar.”

Edie ignored the sweet-talk. “Are you talking about some sort of override?”

“Yes. It counteracts the inbuilt failure mechanism of BRATs. We program a keystone for our customer's specific ecosystem—just one per planet. It transmits the override to all the other BRATs on the planet, making a renewal key unnecessary.”

“That's…impossible.” Even as she said the words, her mind was figuring out how it might be done. “The override wouldn't hold for long before the existing biocyph on the planet rejected it.”

“It's not a perfect solution, by any means. The keystones do fail after a couple of years, but still it costs the colonies a fraction of what the Crib charges. Their resources are freed
up to pay for more important things, like infrastructure and med-teck.”

“It's irresponsible. You can't throw biocyph around like that. The Crib has to control it—it's dangerous.”

“I never said otherwise. But do they have to charge so much for it? Must populations be forced into serfdom, generation after generation, to pay the ransom to keep their worlds alive?”

“I think you're exaggerating.” Her protest sounded lame. What would she know? The decades-long Reach Conflicts had fizzled out four years ago, but everyone knew the Crib still censored information flowing in and out of the Central zone for “security” reasons.

Of course, the Crib must already know about these keystones. If CCU wasn't getting its payments, and yet those worlds weren't falling apart, it would investigate. But the Outward Reach treaties protected the independence of the colonies. There was nothing the Crib could do if people on the Fringe found a way to misuse their BRATs. These rovers, on the other hand—their actions were outrageously illegal. Haller and his crew would end up lifers on a serf labor gang if they were ever caught.

Edie's rebuttal hung in the air as Haller tapped a finger against his chin, contemplating her. “Your world was almost destroyed, your ancient race of people decimated over the last few decades by the new wave of colonists on Talas.”

She bit her lip at the mention of
her
people, but kept silent. She had never thought of them that way.

“Your people are hanging on by a thread. Have some compassion for the Fringers, Edie. Millions have already died or been dispossessed after they failed to pay up and their worlds were left to rot. And now Project Ardra will expand the Crib's territory at an ever-increasing rate as it terraforms and mines advanced worlds that were previously off limits. You have to admit, helping the Fringers become truly independent is more palatable than feeding the Crib's endless greed.”