The Ferrymen (The Culling Book 3)

by Ramona Finn

  A weight I hadn’t known existed suddenly lightened, just a touch. I hadn’t realized how much pressure had been on me over all this. Until now.

  I’d gone from being Haven’s chosen one to being Kupier’s chosen one.

  But now, if Dahn was really here, then I’d be one of two. The thought was like that first breath of air after bursting above the surface of water. Chokingly life-giving.

  Because you trust me. Just like I should have trusted you the morning you left. I should have known the night before, when you asked me to trust you, that you knew something I didn’t. That you knew something about Haven.

  Through the security system that I was tracking the messages through, I watched as his message came from the ship to my comm. I watched and was certain that the message had originated from the small ship. It wasn’t someone beaming in the messages remotely. The person on that ship was either Dahn or it was someone who had miraculously intimate knowledge of the last two conversations I’d had with him. The last two conversations I had thought we might ever have.

  What? What’s going on? Are you alright?

  That was a message from Kupier on my comm. I scrolled back and saw that, yeah, my last message to him might have been misconstrued as me being in danger.

  I paused for a second, torn between so many decisions at once. In the meantime, another message from Kup came in.

  Where are you? Glade?

  I took a deep breath and sent a message to Dahn, not Kupier. Okay. I’m not letting you down here. But I’ll come up there.

  I jogged over to one of the practice jets that the younger Ferrymen used all the time. They weren’t for long distance travel, but they were great for teaching a novice pilot a thing or two.

  “I’m taking one of these out for a minute,” I told the technician who happened to be nearest to me. Her ears went red at the instant she realized that I was talking to her.

  “Ah. Um. Do you… know how to fly one of these?”

  I smirked at her. “I was a Datapoint. I know how to fly this with my eyes closed.”

  It was true. We’d been trained on almost every type of cockpit known to man. I wasn’t as skilled a pilot as Cast, and there was a good chance that the take-off and landing were going to be ugly. But yeah. I could fly this tin can with no problem.

  She nodded, though she then jogged alongside me as I opened up the side door and started to get in. “Fine. Alright. Do you have permission to fly one of these?”

  I squinted at her. Apparently, the girl had some guts. Perhaps younger Ferrymen had attempted to take these out for joyrides and she was used to having to protect the goods. Or perhaps she was nosy.

  Or, perhaps there was some kind of standing order to keep the Datapoint from getting into a ship and flying away.

  “I’m not escaping, alright? I’m here to stay. You don’t have to worry about keeping me down here.”

  She eyed me, and her look was enough to confirm my suspicions. As much as Kupier trusted me, he must have, at some point, given an order for personnel on the dock to keep me out of the cockpits of anything that could take me back to the Station.

  Well. I couldn’t blame him, really. Neither of us had been prepared for how much my tech had been able to control me when it had been on. If it were somehow turned back on, the landing dock would probably be the first place my tech took me. Straight to a ship that would speed me back to the Station.

  Well, screw that. I wasn’t going back. I’d tear my tech out before I did. But the technician was still standing there, halfway leaning into the cockpit and keeping me from closing the sealed door without having to kick her in the chest. There was a thought… No. It wasn’t this chick’s fault that she was following orders.

  “Look,” I sighed. “I’ll comm Kupier right now to let him know what I’m doing. Then it’s on his head. Not yours.”

  She eyed me suspiciously for a moment, and watched as I dragged the comm up. I’m in a practice ship. I’m taking it out.

  I showed her the sent message and she shrugged, stepping back and waving me on. I booted up the ship and drove it on its spindly little wheels to the take-off area. The technician blinked a yield light at me and started to open up the great roof that would let me escape into Charon’s atmosphere, up to the thinnest layer, where apparently Dahn was waiting. I initiated the ship’s take-off protocols and nearly blew my eardrums out. These old ships were loud as hell.

  Why? Glade, tell me the truth. What’s going on?

  His comm message buzzed my wrist and I frowned at the message. I knew him. I knew he was sprinting up to the landing pad at this very second. If I didn’t take off now, he was going to get to me before I took off.

  The doors weren’t all the way open, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t care. There wasn’t time. Just a few buttons later, the ship lurched forward as the thrusters came on. I heard someone yelling from outside of the ship, but the roar of the launching thrusters was too loud for me to hear the words. Maybe it was a technician telling me not to take off yet, or maybe it was Kupier yelling for me to wait.

  I didn’t know. I didn’t care.

  With the doors only halfway open, I hit the proverbial gas and the ship went fishtailing off the pad and out the doors. I added a little more juice and steadied my hand on the controls. I evened her out and shot straight up into the atmosphere. I figured it would take me about ten minutes to make it all the way to where Dahn was. I’d have to dock onto his ship and see him for myself. With my own eyes.

  If it was really him, if his tech was indeed off if he seemed like he truly trusted me… then and only then would I let him down onto Charon. But if for one second he seemed as if he had an agenda, then there was no way. There was no way I was going to let Dahn down there. Where my sisters were. Where Kupier was. Where Cast and Owa and Misha and Wells and Aine were. No chance.

  When the ship was in auto-ascend mode and I knew there were no other crafts in my path, I quickly typed out a message for Kupier.

  Dahn is in a one-man ship orbiting Charon. There are no weapons aboard his craft and his tech is deactivated right now. I checked for both. He says he’s changed his mind. I’m seeing him in person before I let him dock on Charon and put everyone in danger.

  I sent the message and re-took the controls, but not five seconds later, I had a message back from Kupier.

  So, you’re putting yourself in danger?! Come back, Glade. I’ll go. I’ll make sure he’s safe to come down. Don’t go alone. Don’t go without me.

  But I was almost all the way there now. And bringing Kupier along with me would have been putting him in danger.

  And, now, I could see his ship with my naked eye. Dahn was practically docked along a clunky cargo ship that was taxiing in the atmosphere of Charon. Just two more minutes of careful maneuvers went by as I thought about what I was doing, and then I was there, alongside the one-man ship. And there he was, too. This ship was in the same exact style as the one that Kupier had used to come see me on the Station all those months ago, and I knew that the engineers on the Station must have replicated it painstakingly. If Kupier had used it to get all the way across the solar system, then it must have been equipped with artificial blackhole technology, as well.

  It would pack a killer punch, a ship that had the speed of Ferrymen ships and the jumping technology of the Authority skips.

  The ship had a wide front windshield, and I could see him straight through it. There he was. My friend, Dahn. His silver eyes and dark hair recognizable from twenty feet away, through two separate panes of glass. My stomach clenched at the sight of him, at the complicated expression on his face, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or a bad sign.

  I signaled to him that my ship was too clunky to dock safely, and he seemed to get the picture, bringing his around deftly. He barely even knocked into my ship as he landed our doors next to one another and sent the seal around them. It wouldn’t matter too much, either way. I was wearing an oxygen mask from the landing dock and would
have been able to float to him through space if I had to.

  I didn’t have to. I opened my door as he opened his, and then I was through from my ship to his. The doors closed then, and Dahn and I were jammed together into the small space meant for one person.

  I remembered when I’d been jammed into a space like this alongside Kupier. This was a very different experience. Being jammed in alongside Kupier had been comforting and thrilling and hilarious and… sweaty.

  This was nothing like that. Dahn’s knee jammed into the outside of my leg. His silver eyes avoided mine as he flipped switches and controls on the board of the ship. I could have taken off my oxygen mask, as the seal had worked and he wasn’t even wearing one, but instead, I chose to keep it on. It seemed that I wanted some kind of barrier between Dahn and I. Strange. I’d never felt that way on the Station. But now, he was here, unexplained, and I just felt… off.

  “Dahn.”

  I hadn’t been expecting a hug, but I’d thought that he’d at least say hello to me. I wanted him to turn to me. I needed him to turn to me.

  He didn’t.

  “Dahn.”

  His fingers toggled a few controls on the ship. He still didn’t turn.

  “Dahn!”

  This time, he did turn. And he looked, for one second, like he was turning to hug me. There was that familiar softness in his eyes that warmed me and made me think of times when I actually would have liked being jammed so far into this ship with Dahn at my side. But then that softness went away and something else replaced it.

  There was a fire in Dahn’s eyes, and it wasn’t the kind that Kupier had when he looked at me from this distance. No. This was a bone-deep determination. This was a promise of some kind. This was the kind of look that dared me to get in his way. And for my part, I knew with sudden, horrifying clarity that Dahn had been through something, endured something, since I’d last seen him – and it had changed him as a person. This wasn’t the same man who I’d always known, staring at me point-blank.

  This was a new man. One who I couldn’t begin to know.

  I reared back from him and reached for the door pull. The seal on our ships was still activated and I’d be able to slide back into my ship if I could just get his door up. But his hand speared up into my armpit. He clamped down on a pressure point there that made me see spots and collapse downward across his lap. Then a sharp elbow slammed into the soft v at the bottom of my throat, and something sharp and metal caught the light. I saw the syringe for a quarter of a second. It was a laughably identifiable silhouette against the black universe behind it. Almost comical.

  Dahn had brought a syringe. For me.

  I fought him. Hard and viciously, for just one second. Then I felt a prick at my arm and the world instantly went gooey. I fell into unconsciousness knowing only two things. I was pretty sure I’d just broken Dahn’s nose, and that he’d just ejected my ship from his.

  He was taking me away.

  Chapter Eight

  Kupier had sweat in his eyes and blood in his mouth. He didn’t care.

  He ran harder, his cheek between his teeth shooting blindingly bright pain through him, but this was the only testament to his panic that he was going to allow himself. Glade had just told him that she was on the landing pad and leaving to go rendezvous with Dahn, and Kupier was still an entire level away.

  He trusted her, beyond belief, but he didn’t trust any member of the Authority, and Dahn was about as close to that as one could get without being one.

  Glade knew that Charon had security systems. But she didn’t know the extent of it. She didn’t know that if an Authority skip so much as sneezed at Pluto, they’d know. Hell, if an Authority skip had even gotten within 10,000 miles of Uranus, there would have been a city-wide alert. The fact that her friend was currently orbiting Charon without anyone having been alerted was a big, big problem. Either it wasn’t really her friend who was messaging her, or it was her friend and some kind of heist was already in progress.

  His money was on the second.

  And he was pretty sure he knew what was getting heisted. Glade Io.

  Kupier ran faster, taking the stairs four at a time and nearly skidding out when he reached the landing pad. He slammed an oxygen mask over his face as he watched the landing pad doors start to close. That meant that a ship had just cleared the doors and taken off. Please let it not be her. Please let it not be her.

  Kupier sprinted over to the technician who was operating the doors. “Who just took off? What pilot? What ship?”

  “Ah…” The technician suddenly looked terrified. Like she was just realizing how much of a mistake she’d made. “The girl Datapoint. In a practice skip.”

  “Damn it!” Kupier screamed. Many of the techs stopped what they were doing to turn and stare at him. He was the most well-known face on Charon, being the leader of the Ferrymen, but he was just as well known for being calm, kind, and unflappable. “Keep those doors open. I’m going after her!” he shouted.

  Kupier flipped around, his two palms landing on the ground as he got his footing. And then he was sprinting again.

  “What the hell is going on?” Wells shouted as he sprinted on alongside him, seemingly out of nowhere.

  “Glade just took off in a practice ship and I think it’s a trap meant to lure her out where we can’t protect her.”

  Wells said nothing and just kept running. They both swung up into the Ray.

  “Who’s there?” A voice called from the cockpit as Wells and Kupier pounded toward the pilots’ seats. Aine popped her head out from the ship’s mainframe annex, a wrench and a keyboard in her hands. Her eyes went wide when she saw the expressions on Kupier’s face and Wells’. “What the hell is going on?”

  Kupier tore the oxygen mask from his face and powered up the ship.

  “Glade’s in trouble,” Wells answered as Kupier focused on getting the Ray ready for immediate take-off.

  “What? How?”

  “A friend of hers from the Station messaged to say that he’d changed his mind and wanted to join us. He was orbiting in Charon’s atmosphere. She didn’t want him to land, in case it was a trap and he was here to plant a bomb or hurt citizens or something, so she went up there to check it out.”

  “But if he was able to make it all the way to the atmosphere, then it is definitely a trap, because we would have sensed an Authority skip from half the solar system away,” Aine reasoned.

  “Exactly. Hold on now,” Kupier said as he backed up the Ray and brought it into an easy hover over the landing pad. He didn’t waste time as he swung it into a 180 and went shooting straight out from the doors of the pad.

  “Friend?” Wells asked, holding on tight to the co-pilot’s controls, mostly to keep from sliding out of his chair. “What friend?”

  “Dahn.”

  Wells groaned, and Kupier looked over at him sharply. “Dahn Enceladus? Great. Awesome. No worries, everybody. We’re just flying haphazardly after the second-most dangerous Datapoint in the solar system. With no weapons, I might add.”

  “You know him?” Aine asked.

  “Not personally. But I lived on the Station for almost my whole life. I know who’s who there. And Dahn is definitely someone to know. He was the brightest Datapoint of all time before Glade went into super girl warp speed and turned into the chosen one.”

  “Do you think he would hurt her?” Kupier asked sharply. The way Glade talked about Dahn, Kupier had always had the suspicion that the guy loved Glade. But the way that Wells was talking about him, there was no telling what he would or wouldn’t do.

  “I don’t know, man,” Wells replied. “Datapoints, the real ones, not Glade and Cast, they are truly like robots. They don’t have feelings. He wouldn’t hurt her for no reason, no. But if he had orders to do so? Or if it made logical sense? Well then, yeah, he might.”

  “What do you mean real Datapoints?” Aine asked, gripping her chair as Kupier brought them straight up into the fastest ascent that any of them had ev
er been a part of.

  “Glade and Cast, they’re basically fake Datapoints. They’ve gone all touchy-feely,” Wells said through gritted teeth as the Ray finally leveled out. All three of them leaned forward to try and track the two ships on the Ray’s radar. “Regular Datapoints, they’re not like them. They’re single-minded, goal-oriented. They’ll knock you down as often as they’ll move aside for you. They only consider what makes the most logical sense, what’s the most advantageous for them. Glade and Cast, they’re not the most emotionally intelligent people you’ll meet, maybe, but they have moral compasses; they have feelings.”

  “There,” Kupier growled as he spotted two unidentified blips on his radar. One was definitely a practice ship and one looked like a one-man ship. The kind that he himself had piloted many times. The kind that he knew for a fact the Authority didn’t own. “They must have replicated the ship that Glade pretended to steal from us. That’s how they made it past the radars. Damn it!”

  As they watched, the practice ship fell away from the one-man ship as if it had been jettisoned. Kupier realized that this meant that they had created a boarding seal. Which meant that Glade had had contact with this guy. But was she in the practice ship or in the one-man ship? “Contact the practice ship!”

  Aine scrambled at the controls and immediately started buzzing the practice ship. Since it was mostly designed for the education of young pilots, it was possible for a senior ship like the Ray to buzz right into their comm system; they didn’t need to wait for anyone to answer for them to be able to hear what was going on in the cockpit of the pilot ship.