by Adam Carter
“I didn’t react at all,” I said. “My face is blank.”
“I meant her.”
I looked across to Cassiel. I had been so focused on controlling my own reactions that I had failed to notice Cassiel had almost fallen from her chair.
“Fine,” I said through gritted teeth, “so we have beef with Securitarn. Who doesn’t?”
“Actually, most people. What did they do? Fire you for gross misconduct?”
“I’ve never worked for Securitarn,” I said. “What do you know about them?”
“That they’re bad people. They’re an incredibly wealthy private organisation and they all but monopolise the field of private security; but they didn’t get to where they are now without being ambitious, and ambition breeds immorality.”
“You’re being very vague,” I told her. “Do you have any specific accusations you’d like to make?”
“Are you sure you don’t work for Securitarn? This would be an excellent way to ferret me out.”
“Ferret you out?” I asked with a laugh. “You make it sound as though you’re trying to expose the company and bring them down.” I stopped laughing when I noticed she looked uncomfortable. “Oh.”
“Oh,” the countess echoed. “There’s a lot more to it than that, obviously, but you’ve learned enough about me to warrant Securitarn disappearing me in the night. I think it only fair to learn something of the two of you in return. You were arrested with that gang employed by the drug runners. I don’t think you had anything to do with them other than to annoy their employers and, from various things I’ve heard, I think you stowed away on their vessel to get yourself here. That means you came from outside Ganymede just to do something terrible to Securitarn, seeing as though they’re legally based on this moon.”
“Do you know what we don’t like about Securitarn? You seem to know everything else about us.”
“No. And that intrigues me. Did their security guards kill someone you loved?”
“There’s more to Securitarn than security guards.”
“Then you’re talking about their experiments?” she asked, her eyebrows rising.
That was not the answer I had been expecting, mainly because it was so blunt. “What experiments would those be?”
“There are a few we know about, others we suspect. Which was the one which annoyed you?”
It unnerved me that she was being so open. That told me one of two things; either this was a trap and the countess worked for Securitarn, or else she fully intended to kill me and Cassiel once she was done talking to us. Either way, it seemed destined that this would end badly for us and I knew I would have to be careful in whatever I said next.
“I don’t have a problem with Securitarn,” I said. “I’m not on their radar and I’d like to keep it that way.”
“Then your Themistonian companion has something against them.”
“She’s never had any dealings with them, either. We’re only on Ganymede because we’re looking for someone. Someone connected with Securitarn.”
“I see. You weren’t surprised when I told you a massive corporation like Securitarn was up to no good, though, so I assume you already knew about that aspect of their nature. Is your friend a victim of theirs?”
“Our friend, if indeed we are talking about a friend here, used to work for them.” We were getting nowhere in our own investigations and the countess already knew enough to piece together what we were doing there – her curiosity would supply the rest and before long she would have both Iris and Gordon. I figured if I could give her something, she would be satisfied and back off. She may even be able to help us. Securitarn believed Iris was dead, of course, so saying we were looking for her was definitely not something I should have considered doing; but they knew Gordon was alive, so that was the route I was going down.
“Roz, no,” Cassiel said before I could say anything. “You can’t.”
“Trust me, Cass.”
“Yes,” the countess said, “trust her, Cass.”
“Gordon Hawthorn,” I said before Cassiel could say anything else. “The man we’re looking for is an ex-employee of Securitarn and his name is Gordon Hawthorn.”
“Interesting. And what is Hawthorn doing back on Ganymede?”
“Then you know who he is?”
“I’ve come across the name during my investigations into their shady affairs.”
“Then you’ll know that while he worked most of his time on space stations and whatever, he’s originally from Ganymede. After leaving Securitarn and his life falling apart, I guess he just came back home.”
“Interesting.”
I wished she would stop saying everything I said was interesting. “We’re just concerned about the welfare of our friend,” I said. “After everything that happened to him, I doubt Securitarn would be very welcoming if they found out he was here.”
“So you admit he’s your friend?”
I had forgotten I had been elusive when it came to stating our relationship with Gordon. “Just for the record,” I said, “I find you a little intimidating.”
“Good. It just so happens that Hawthorn is someone of interest to us as well.”
“Us?”
“The group to whom I belong. The group attempting to bring down Securitarn; you have been listening, haven’t you?”
“Why is Gordon of interest to you?”
“Because he was the last person to see Iris Arowana before her unfortunate demise. Securitarn have hidden all the evidence, but my sources tell me she kidnapped Hawthorn and forced him to fly her to Ceres. It was on that moon that Arowana died, yet there are no details in the Securitarn databases. We want to know what happened on Ceres and the only person who might even talk to us would be Gordon Hawthorn. So yes, we would very much like to speak with him.”
I was surprised the countess had managed to discover as much as she had, but then if she had enough contacts within Securitarn there was no limit to what she could have found out. It was good to think we were not the only people onto the truth of Securitarn’s nature, and I knew Gordon and Iris would be very interested in the information once we met up with them again.
“Do you know where Gordon is?” I asked.
“We do.”
“Is he alive?”
“So far as we know.”
Cassiel released a strange noise which very much sounded like “meep” but which may have just been her impression of a very happy mouse. I steadfastly ignored it but the countess frowned and opened her mouth to say something. Seeing my stony expression she perhaps thought she had imagined the sound and opted to ignore it.
“One of our operatives caught sight of him,” the countess said, “but Securitarn were also onto his being here. He disappeared before we could pin him down, but our agents within Securitarn say the company is still actively searching for him, which means they don’t have him. It’s our guess that he’s gone into hiding and that he’s probably trying to get off-world as quickly as possible. He has a legal passport, having been born here, so he may already have gone.”
Gordon may have had a passport but Iris certainly didn’t – or at least if she did it would flag Securitarn’s attention. It meant the two of them may not have been able to get back to their shuttle, wherever they had docked it, so they would indeed still be around somewhere.
“We’re not having any success finding him, either,” I said. “Maybe we could help each other.”
“That was my plan, yes. Take these.” She held out two small red pin badges. “Wear these and you’ll be recognised as among our number. If you see anyone wearing one, you’ll know you can trust them.”
“You’re not wearing one.”
“No.”
I took the badges, pinned one to me and handed the other to Cassiel. “Countess, who are you? Most people can’t just grab prisoners from an interrogation room.”
“I’m rich, dear; I can do anything I please.”
It was a fair enough answer.
“Our people now. He was last seen by the river, near the bakery museum.”
“There’s a bakery museum?”
“Why wouldn’t there be?”
“Just ignore me. Cass is going to need her sword back.”
“As you wish. But if you go anywhere near the bakery museum with that thing you’re going to be arrested. It’s a better part of the city than this area.”
Cassiel moved over to collect her sword. “I’ll take it anyway,” she said. “I can always stash it somewhere.”
We took our leave of the countess and she surprisingly let us go without any complaint. It was a surreal experience and not one I even now quite believe happened the way it did, but there you go. Without even the need to discuss things, we headed towards the river and the bakery museum. We at last had a lead and, flimsy though it was, it was still more than we had managed to achieve thus far.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The bakery museum was in a much better part of the city. I say ‘better’ but that’s not my personal opinion. I prefer the clubs and the slums and the greasy spoons to the grand architecture of sunlit buildings surrounded by expensive cafés where for the price of a coffee you could go back to the slums and get a three-course meal. Of course, the rich folk still liked to build their palaces as high as possible while they competed with their neighbours, but beside the river some sunlight actually managed to get through to the ground; and there was no way anyone was going to build a museum thirty storeys high.
With the open space, there were a lot of green areas around the river, with trees and some semblance of a park. Children ran and pets chased balls, but we were not interested in such things. What we needed was to talk with someone who might have seen Gordon and Iris, yet now that we had reached the river we realised the enormity of that task.
“It’s not as though people are going to be hanging around waiting to tell us what we need to know,” Cassiel said. She had kept her sword and it was attracting even more attention than her costume; however, I couldn’t think of anything to do about that. It seemed in upper-class areas walking around dressed in form-fitting black attire did not go unnoticed.
“Maybe we should try the museum,” I suggested. “Someone there might have seen something.”
“Pardon me,” a voice said. There was a man standing nearby. He was wearing a soiled green uniform and cap and pushing a wheeled bin/trolley. He clearly worked in the park, picking up leaves and whatever.
“Sorry,” I said. “Were we stepping on the grass or something?”
“A lovely day, isn’t it?”
“Depends whether you have a sunny disposition, I suppose. You want something or are you just being creepy?”
He scratched his chin and as he moved his hand away he kept one finger extended. At first I thought he was making a rude gesture and I was about to clout him one; then I realised the finger was pointing to something pinned to his uniform. It was a red badge.
“Oh, yes,” I said, catching on, “a lovely day. We were supposed to meet some friends here. If you’ve been working in the park, maybe you’ve seen them?”
“I think I know the friends you’re talking about. There was a boat here earlier.”
I looked out at the river. There were a few boats there, moving in both directions. They looked like passenger craft to me, ferrying tourists around the city. “Our friends went on ahead of us?” I asked, feigning disappointment. “Do you happen to know which ferry they caught?”
“I didn’t catch the name, but it was a private boat. They went upriver.”
“Sorry to break out of the cryptic weirdness, but if you know they went on a boat why haven’t any of your people gone after them?”
The man looked to the left, looked to the right and leaned closer as though he was being targeted by snipers. “No one in command takes me seriously. Besides, I didn’t get the name of the boat.”
“You’d still have thought they would have sent operatives to look into it.”
He glanced at my badge. “They have.”
“Great. We’ve been drafted because this is a wild goose chase.”
He shrugged, which told me something else.
“Oh, I get it,” I said with a groan. “We’ve been drafted because this is too dangerous for any of your people to do.”
“They’re afraid we’re going to be arrested?” Cassiel asked.
“If they thought that,” I said, “they wouldn’t have let us meet the countess. If we were arrested we could expose everything. No, they’re afraid we’re going to be killed.”
The man shrugged again.
“All right,” I said, “we’re going after that boat so you may as well tell us everything you can about it. What’s its name and who owns it?”
“I honestly don’t know its name, but it’s owned by a woman named Hilda Myers. She works for Securitarn.”
“Our friends: were they prisoners or did they steal the boat?”
“I’m not sure. I saw them on the boat, but I couldn’t be certain.”
I heaved a heavy sigh. All this misinformation was not sitting well with me and I was wondering why I was putting my neck out. Again I reminded myself that I didn’t even know Gordon and Iris all that well, but I was in this too deep to back out now.
“We’ll ask around at the harbour,” I said.
Cassiel and I left the man to tend to whatever it was he was doing and followed the river until we found what passed for its harbour. It was not the large, extravagant affair I had seen on some rivers, with a rising bridge to separate the harbour from the rest of the waterway and a dozen seafood restaurants lining the wharf. It was pretty much just a couple of long wooden jetties to which boats could be tied. There was only one there presently: a speedboat the size of a small shuttle. I could also see a cordoned-off area where the tourist ferry likely docked, so the passengers could get a good view of some real boats.
There was a single woman on duty at the docks, and she was busy hauling in some old rope. She was around sixty and had a stony expression. The closer I got to her, the more I noticed she smelled of seaweed.
“Hi,” I said. “Do you work here?”
“No, I’m just stealing rope,” she said, deadpan.
“Oh. Is that naval humour?”
“Best you’re going to get out of me. What do you want?”
I could see she was not wearing a red pin badge, which was almost something of a relief after speaking to the strange man earlier. “There was a boat here owned by Hilda Myers.”
“The Dogstar.”
“Do you know where it went?”
“Back to Hilda Myers, presumably.”
“Oh.” I could not believe no one from the countess’s little group had not thought to come down to the docks to question this woman. “Do you know where that is?”
“Nope. But you can just set the navigation of your boat to follow it.”
“We don’t have a boat.”
“Then you can’t set the navigation of your boat to follow it.”
I looked over at the docked speedboat. “Could we take that one?”
“Sure.”
“Really?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Great. We’ll bring it back in one piece.”
Cassiel and I hopped onto the boat and tried to work out how to operate the thing. I had never before controlled a speedboat and the controls were far more complicated than I would have thought: it was like sitting in the cockpit of an aeroplane. I looked over the side of the boat to ask the woman for advice, but she was already making off with the rope she had gathered and did not hear me shouting at her.
“Looks like we’re on our own,” I said. My hands hovered over the control panel, my fingers danced in the air as though I was operating a marionette, but I dared not touch anything. “Cass, any ideas?”
“There’s a lever. That’s always a good sign
.”
She pushed the lever before I could stop her and the boat moved forward. There was a time long ago when speedboats had engines, yet we found this one could move silently and swiftly just by pushing a random lever.
Cassiel gave a cry and I saw a group of people rushing down the quay towards us. Frantically, I pushed buttons and shoved the lever forward as far as it would go. The boat sped away from the jetty just as the group reached us and we pulled away from them before they could board. They did not look like Securitarn to me: in fact they looked more annoyed at us rather than wanting to kill us.
It was then I realised the woman who claimed to have been stealing rope was there because she really was stealing rope; and that this boat I asked to borrow had not belonged to her. It belonged to these people, which meant Cassiel and I were stealing it.
“Sorry, fellas,” I called back as I used the lever to steer the thing away from them. “We’ll try not to break it.”
“Wow, those guys were angry,” Cassiel said from where she was standing at the rear of the boat, looking back. “I wonder who they were.”
I decided not to tell her. She would only start crying again.
The boat itself proved extremely easy to handle, for it turned out most of the buttons and switches did nothing. Perhaps it was a retro thing, for retro has always been fashionable, which is an ironic thing when you think about it. It turned out all we needed was that one lever, although then I remembered the tracking thing the rope thief had mentioned. I examined the controls, but nothing leaped out at me so I tried a few things at random. One button I pressed produced an interesting result, for an image appeared on a small screen beside it. The screen showed two lines meeting in the distance, like how a long road looks if you’re standing on ground level looking down it. On one side of these lines was a snowy trail, and I turned the boat slightly so the trail fell between the lines.
“What are you doing?” Cassiel asked.
“I’m not sure, but I think I’ve just set us to follow the wake of the Dogstar. All we have to do is keep the trail between these lines and it’ll take us right to them.”