Enigma

by C. F. Bentley

  Jake would love to know what Sissy had seen while under the influence. He wondered if her previous affinity for the planet Harmony and tendency toward psychic visions would leave her sensitive to the Thorn of God.

  “One in one thousand victims of Thorn of God will suffer a worse reaction with each exposure. We suspect multiple transfusions, filtering of the entire circulatory system, and artificial boosting of immune functions would be required upon the third exposure for those sensitive to the plant,” the report read.

  “I don’t want to take that chance again,” he muttered.

  Then he pulled up the copy of the survey Pammy had given him. Thorn of God wasn’t the only plant missing from the catalog. A few predatory carnivores had also walked off the official survey between Pammy’s desk and his own.

  Both copies indicated archaeology waited to inspect until after the survey crew survived their two weeks of living off the land. Jake didn’t think that was standard procedure. On a project this sensitive, archaeology should have been in right behind atmosphere and zoology. The CSS really needed to make sure no one could make a prior claim to the planet.

  “What are you up to, Pammy?”

  He’d no sooner voiced the thought when his door chimed.

  “I’m not here,” he yelled and continued reading, comparing the two reports.

  The door chimed again.

  “What!” He hit the button for audio only.

  “General Devlin, I have an interesting prisoner ready for interrogation,” Major Roderick said politely. Officious, but polite.

  “An interesting prisoner?” He knew of only one prisoner he wanted captured and questioned.

  “Bring him in,” he ordered, releasing the latch from his desktop.

  Major Roderick pushed a misshapen figure before him. Large ears, reminiscent of a small elephant in the encyclopedia of extinct mammals, flapped forward covering a flat face with barely any nose. A swath of blue and buff fabric and two sets of handcuffs with an extra pair of ankle shackles identified the prisoner as the missing Arachnoid-Labyrinthe crossbreed.

  “General Devlin, I’d like to introduce Mac, the phantom of the First Contact Café,” Major Roderick said, pushing the stumbling figure forward once more. “He’s got something to say about the cargo in the crashed Squid vessel.”

  “Oh? Like where it came from and why it was carrying an escapee from Maril Law Enforcement?”

  Major Roderick raised his eyebrows at that.

  “Doc Halliday noticed something odd about Adrial’s clothes. They have sensors woven into the synthetic fabric. I did some checking. Only Maril equipment can detect them. Interesting concept. Cuts down on escapees. They have to strip naked to get away from the Law,” Jake said. He pretended to give Roderick and the alien only half his attention.

  Doc Halliday had also reported many scars inside and outside Adrial’s body. Evidence of past torture or at the very least repeated severe accidents.

  The words on the screen blurred as he surreptitiously scanned the alien standing before him. Without the restraints he could fold the extra limbs into his blousy trousers and shirt. To the uneducated observer, he’d look just like any other Labyrinthe with smaller ears and nose.

  Mac remained ruthlessly silent.

  “I find it interesting that within a nanosecond of shutting down his computer network, Shuttle One got communications restored,” Major Roderick said. He toyed with the knife sheathed at his hip. Harmony officers rarely got used to carrying blasters or even projectile weapons.

  After six months on Harmony, Jake still felt naked without at least one knife on his person.

  “Interesting, indeed.” Jake looked up from his screen. “Now, why would our phantom here want to jam my attempts to seek medical help for Laudae Sissy? She almost died.”

  Mac’s face darkened a shade just before his ears came forward again, hiding him from close scrutiny.

  Jake had seen Mac’s half brother do the same thing too often to consider it a mask. More like a nervous tick that told him what poker hand he was really holding.

  “Is Laudae Sissy okay?” Mac asked from behind his ears.

  “Don’t know yet. Physician John is still checking her out.” Jake deliberately tapped his stylus against the desktop arrhythmically. He needed to keep this being upset and off-balance.

  “I would never hurt the Laudae,” Mac protested.

  “She could have died from an allergic reaction to a plant she touched.” Jake leaned forward, pinning Mac with his gaze. “I could have you up on manslaughter charges. Good thing I’m officially CSS; we’d only imprison you on a desert planet and work you death in the salt mines. If I resorted to Harmony’s laws we’d take your head. Not a quick and easy death. They chain you to a block so you can’t move anything more than your eyelids, alone in a room without windows. No one to keep you company or mourn you. Then you wait. A robot is programmed to swing a Badger Metal blade at a precise angle to take off your head. But the programming is random. The blow could come in a minute, or in an hour. You never know. You just wait, endlessly.”

  “There is a reason you have never encountered the ‘Squid People,’ as you call them,” Mac said rapidly, folding his ears away from his mouth, just enough so that the words came out unmuffled.

  “And that would be?” Jake toyed with the stylus, as if making corrections on the document before him.

  “I believe the two autopsied by Admiral Marella and returned to continue floating in the abandoned wing were the last mated pair, elderly, beyond procreation. Their ship was also old, beyond repair. I intercepted a distress call at the jump point. They’d lost several major systems. I sent a copy of my report to Doc Halliday because she was curious enough to ask to do the autopsy Admiral Marella had already performed.”

  “And you didn’t alert anyone to the danger the ship was in?” Jake shouted. He initiated a program to hack into Pammy’s private files and Doc Halliday’s. He wanted that autopsy. Now.

  As he suspected, his robot extracted Doc Halliday’s copy while still trying to break Pammy’s security walls.

  “There was no one to alert. And I thought that surely they were far enough away to divert from a direct hit on the station,” Mac said quietly.

  “Apparently not. You do realize that five people died because of that crash. Two of them children,” Major Roderick sneered. He drew the longer of his two knives. The Badger Metal dagger, thirty centimeters long and sharp enough to sever an ear and several fingers and still retain enough edge to take the head.

  “They would have lived if they’d obeyed the alarm and evacuated with the rest of your people,” Mac protested. “Their own ignorance and fear kept them hiding in their quarters. So they died.”

  As much as Jake hated to admit it, Mac was right. Responsibility for those five deaths belonged to the Harmony caste system and their policy of keeping the lower classes as uneducated as possible. Don’t even tell them enough to keep them safe. Workers are, after all, expendable. They produce too many children as it is.

  Jake burned with outrage. Sissy wanted to break the caste system and let Discord rule the empire for a while. He should have let her do it when they had the chance. Instead Jake and Gil had persuaded her to make changes slowly, starting with integrating the schools and absorbing the Poor caste into the workforce rather than denying them the right to work because of a caste mark.

  He had to cease dwelling on past wrongs and work on solving current problems. Like addressing the increasing speed of the station and why no one could figure out how the propulsion system worked, let alone how to fix it.

  “Why were the Squid People coming here, unannounced, and without entry permits?” Major Roderick asked.

  “Check the cargo hold.” Mac clamped his mouth shut and shifted his gaze to the jump point starscape in the window. “I should like to travel the space lanes,” he added wistfully.

  “You can leave the station any time after we finish this interview,” Jake reassured him.
“I’d like you gone so I don’t have to keep suspecting you of murdering your brother and two other workers. Of perhaps murdering the entire station by disrupting the propulsion system.”

  Mac turned a bland face to him, no nervous tics, no change in skin color or elevated respiration. Even the dilation of his pupils remained unchanged.

  “I wish I could help with the propulsion. But those engines were designed and built by a race you might call Dwarves. They are as secretive about their habitats as they are about the workings of their machines. My mother knew how to talk to them, what to bribe them with. She is dead.” He shrugged and looked genuinely regretful. “I love this station. I would never do anything to permanently jeopardize its safety. You must seek another saboteur. Perhaps a Maril spy?”

  “I accept that explanation. For now. What about your brother?”

  “I wondered why I couldn’t find Number Seven. By the time I did, someone else had taken justice into their own hands. I only wanted him humiliated and returned to our siblings as a failure—a worse crime to them than mere murder.”

  “What is so important about a hold full of plant-processing equipment?” Jake changed the subject back to the Squid ship, trying to keep Mac off-balance and therefore truthful. “It’s not illegal. Turns any vegetation into nutritious texturized food.”

  Mac continued to stare out the window.

  “What do you want, Mac?”

  “I want my freedom.”

  “Why should I grant that? So you can return to your terminals and hack into all my systems, disrupt communications, traffic flow, and even the waste disposal? I can still charge you with attempted murder in the case of Laudae Sissy and manslaughter in the case of the crash. Though I am still considering charges of negligent homicide against your brother’s record. I also have to deal with the propulsion problem before we break orbit and drift away into nothingness.”

  “Number Seven no longer lives. My siblings will discard all record of him and reopen negotiations directly with you. Send his body home as evidence of his failure. That will strengthen your position in the talks.”

  “The murderer may have killed the wrong person. No way to tell for sure since you all look alike.” Jake flashed a mirthless grin. “Why should I send the body home if he is not Number Seven?”

  “The body belongs to my half brother. I confirmed his identity. The others will not be recognized or noted by my siblings. I have my reasons for wanting the body returned.”

  “Sit down and tell me about them. While you’re at it, you can tell me about the plant processors in the Squid hold and why they are so special.”

  “Plant processors do more than make food out of alien plant life.”

  Jake had to think about that one. Something . . . just on the edge of his memory. Gone.

  The comm unit on his desk beeped.

  He slapped it off.

  It came back on more urgently.

  “We have not finished this conversation,” he said to both Major Roderick and Mac. Then he opened the line.

  “General Devlin, Lieutenant Cortini in Control, sir.”

  “I know who you are. What?”

  “Sir, I think you’d be wise to tune into the news channel from Harmony. This is the first broadcast since the quake disrupted things.”

  Jake dragged the blinking icon from the corner of the screen to the center. Then he fitted the earpiece so that only he could hear and turned away from the others. The harshness of Cortini’s voice hinted that this was bad news.

  “Any out-of-caste relationship has to be considered rape.” The speaker looked familiar. Jake had seen the middle-aged man stalk pridefully around Crystal Temple during his undercover months as Sissy’s bodyguard. The purple caste mark sparkled, as did only those born and bred at the central religious complex. Except for Sissy. All her caste marks sparkled because of something special within her. And now they glowed with the light of Sanctuary.

  “Rape carries the death penalty!” the priest continued. Laud Andrew. That was his name. Temporary replacement for Laud Gregor. But Jake wasn’t supposed to know that. “We demand that this CSS spy be returned to Harmony for trial and execution.”

  Jake’s gut sank.

  “What is out-of-caste for Laudae Sissy?” asked a mild young man Jake knew well. Little Johnny, chief investigative reporter for the Harmony Broadcasting System and son of the owner of the largest media facility in the empire. He’d recently had his Professional green triangle altered to a vertical black bar as symbol of the unofficial acknowledgment that the Media was now its own caste. “Our High Priestess bears all seven caste marks. Which caste is out-of-caste for her?”

  Relief lightened the heaviness in Jake’s middle. Little Johnny was an ally. One of the good guys who recognized the need for change on Harmony.

  “That man isn’t even human,” the priest hissed—literally drawing out the sibilant so he sounded like a snake. “He’s a spy for the CSS. His caste mark is artificial. He chose to keep the caste mark when he returned to his people. That puts him under our jurisdiction,” the priest snarled. He leaned forward so the hover cam concentrated only on him. “We know that underneath the pink skin and humanlike hair that all the CSS are reptilian, unhuman.”

  Little Johnny did something to push the camera back to a wider view.

  “I was not aware that the CSS were anything but human. The most ancient murals in the funerary caves indicate . . .”

  “Forgeries foisted upon us by the same CSS spy!” The priest’s face darkened. A pulse throbbed in his temple.

  “Careful, Andy, or you’ll have a stroke,” Jake murmured.

  Where was Gil? Wasn’t he supposed to keep things operating and under control during Gregor’s absence?

  This debate didn’t sound under control.

  Still, it was a discussion, broadcast throughout the empire. The first nonemergency telecast after the quake. Previously Crystal Temple would have just ordered Jake kidnapped and executed without the formality of a trial.

  “In previous cases of out-of-caste rape brought to justice, the higher caste was always considered the aggressor,” Little Johnny said. “But, then, cases of Noble or Temple involvement in out-of-caste relationships are never brought to justice, so we don’t know how often they occur. Are you willing to alter the caste system and apply the same law to our High Priestess as to the rest of the empire? Will you arrest and try our beloved Laudae Sissy for this crime, if indeed a crime has been committed? Which has not been verified.”

  Jake forgot to breathe. Making Temple and Noble accountable to the law, the same as the lower castes, was a major step toward justice, a drastic change that needed to happen.

  But not to his Sissy.

  He could keep her safe from further plant attacks. He knew how to protect her from assassins.

  But this!

  He’d kidnap her and take her back to Earth before he’d let that happen.

  Then again, the FCC was fast becoming independent. Harmony had no jurisdiction here. Neither did Earth or the Labyrinthe Corporation.

  Hmmm.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Sissy sat up from the Medbay exam table. It seemed as though lately she’d spent more time in this wing than any other, visiting Adrial and Gregor, discussing Temple politics with Penelope and Guilliam. Now she wanted out, to go back to her girls and the dogs and normal everyday paperwork.

  And go back to the planet. Her Sanctuary.

  “You’re breathing fine for now, My Laudae,” Physician John said, making notes. “But we might consider changing the filter in your lungs before too long.”

  “Excuse me, Physician John, I need to talk to this patient,” Doc Halliday said, entering the exam room without invitation. Two female nurses with Professional lauded caste marks flanked her. Sissy’s two oldest acolytes followed, hands folded prayerfully and eyes downcast.

  “Laudae Sissy is not your patient,” Physician John edged between Sissy and the interloper.

  �
��No, but General Devlin is, and there are things going down that can hurt my patient.” Doc Halliday stood firm, hands on hips, feet braced. She looked ready for a fight, physical or verbal.

  “I will talk to Doc Halliday,” Sissy said.

  “What is this about?” Physician John asked, still not moving from his protective stance.

  “Girl talk,” Doc Halliday replied, equally rooted in place.

  “My patients have no secrets from me.”

  “There are some things women are reluctant to discuss with their doctors, especially if he’s male.”

  Physician John blushed.

  So did Sissy.

  “You may leave, John,” Sissy said quietly, drawing on all her lessons in excising her authority.

  “My Laudae, I formally protest . . .” He swung to face her.

  “You may leave. I have my acolytes and two lauded nurses to protect me if necessary,” she replied more firmly.

  Mouth pursed, eyes narrowed, he retreated to just the other side of the door.

  “Close the door, Mary,” Doc Halliday instructed the acolyte. “And make sure that obnoxious hover cam and the dogs stay out. I won’t have dogs in my Medbay. Bad enough they shed and drool, contaminating the place, but they also snarl and bare their teeth at Adrial. Upsets her to the point of panic attacks.”

  “I’ll turn off the security camera,” Martha said. She climbed on a chair and pressed a tiny button on a small circle embedded in the wall that Sissy had thought was a place to plug in emergency lifesaving equipment.

  “What is this about?” Sissy asked, maintaining the cool tone of one in control. Which she wasn’t.

  “I need to know exactly what happened while you were off carousing with General Devlin. Then, with your permission, I’d like to give you a physical examination.” Doc Halliday stuck her hands into a sanitizer. She withdrew them, looking carefully at the flexible coating left behind.

  Sissy recounted, for about the tenth time, how they’d touched down on the planet, she’d stumbled on the uneven ground because the boots of her flight suit were too big and clumsy. “I remember being too hot on the outside and chilled to the bone inside, dizzy, and then I passed out. I woke up about eighteen hours later and we came home.”