The Nightshade Problem: Sol Space Volume Two

by James Wilks

  “What if someone is going to hurt you or someone on the crew?”

  “Well, that’s different. That’s self-defense. I would never want to kill someone, but if it has to be done, then it does. I guess I’d have to decide on a case-by-case basis.”

  Bethany said nothing. Her legs were crossed and her arms were wrapped around herself in a protective gesture that was not uncommon during their scheduled talks. Staples waited to see if she was going to reply or say something else, but nothing was forthcoming. They had been speaking for over forty minutes, and she decided that that was enough for the day.

  “I think we should meet again on Thursday after your shift. How does that sound?” Staples asked as she stretched, her body language and tone communicating the end of the session.

  “Okay.” Bethany nodded. “Thank you,” she added. She stood and headed for the door. Staples knew that she wasn’t thanking her for the session itself. Bethany generally did not enjoy them, she knew. The thanks were for Staples’ choice to allow her to stay on the ship despite her attempt to murder two members of her crew.

  Bethany crossed to the door, opened it, then said, “Oh,” and stepped back. Brutus was outside, holding lightly to the recessed ladder rungs, his camera eyes focused on the small woman.

  Staples leaned to the side to see around her. “Are you waiting for me or Bethany?” she asked, though she suspected that she knew the answer.

  “You, Captain, but I can wait until you have finished your meeting with Ms. Miller.” His voice was light and friendly.

  “I’m going,” Bethany muttered, then pushed past him without actually touching him and began to climb down the hallway towards the elevator and her room.

  “May I come in, Captain?”

  She beckoned him in with her hand, then yawned and re-crossed her legs.

  “Thank you.” Brutus entered and closed the door behind him. Staples noticed that he had successfully reattached his arm, though a few misshapen pieces of metal remained. She supposed it was the robotic equivalent of a scar.

  “I hope I did not frighten Ms. Miller away.” She thought he sounded genuinely concerned, but as always, found herself wondering just how genuine he was capable of being.

  “We were finished. I think she was just in a fragile state, so I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  Brutus sat across from her. “As you say, then.”

  “How long were you waiting out there?” she asked idly.

  “About fifteen minutes,” he replied.

  “Why didn’t you knock?” Brutus started to reply, but Staples supplied her own answer. “You knew she was in here and that we were talking.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  She was annoyed. “Could you hear us?”

  Brutus nodded. “I could hear you, yes, but I chose not to listen. It was personal, I’m sure, and not my place.”

  “And I’m supposed to believe you just tuned us out?” She pursed her lips.

  “You may choose to believe what you wish, Captain, but I assure you I am quite capable of tuning my hearing so that I can hear the murmur of voices without actually hearing the content of a conversation. I am well aware of the human need for privacy.”

  Staples considered this and realized that she had no valid reason to be angry with him. She was still irritable, but there were plenty of other possible reasons for that, not the least of which was Charis’ blow up at her and her subsequent conversation with Templeton. “Well, I appreciate that then. What did you want to talk about?”

  “I have two things, and I’m afraid neither of them is particularly good news.”

  “Give me the bad news first.”

  Brutus took her irony in stride. “As you wish. The particularly bad news is that Mr. Burbank is dead.”

  This took her a second to process. “How? How do you know?”

  “Before we left Titan Prime, despite his rather irate disposition towards me, I helped Mr. Burbank set up a new identity. I supplied him with new identification and computer records to match so that he could start a new life. He obtained employment in a mining crew. Since then, I have been keeping an eye on news broadcasts when we have netlink surges.”

  On and around occupied planets and most outposts netlink was available to everyone. It provided continual informational downloads of maps, news, and data. The ship’s computer stored most of this without anyone ever looking at it. When they were far from civilization, they would sometimes pick up surges of information that planets like Mars and Earth stored and sent as data packages. Brutus had evidently been combing them for news.

  “There was a criminal activities report from Titan Prime buried in the outpost updates. It seems that one Stephen McCammon was killed in a mugging gone wrong on his way home from work yesterday. Just a few sentences, really. No suspects so far. I am truly sorry, Captain.”

  Staples closed her eyes and was still for a moment, then opened them. “I wish I could say that I was surprised, but we knew it might happen. You did warn us. Now we know. We can’t risk getting off this ship for very long. We can’t run.”

  “I’m afraid that’s so, Captain. I can protect someone if they are constantly on the move, if I am consistently reinventing their identity, but as soon as a crew member settles down in one place with one name, I believe that my father will find them.”

  “And hire someone to kill them.” Brutus nodded once. “Did you tell anyone else about this?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Will you tell them, Captain?”

  “Yes. Soon.” There are enough secrets on this ship, she thought. “He knew it might happen. He more or less said that it was an experiment to see if we could just slip away. He thought it was the only way to find out.” She was aware that her explanation was partly a defense. She felt immensely responsible for Declan’s choice to leave the ship, and in a way that made her responsible for his death as well. She had not even moved from the chair where she had sat when she told Bethany that she didn’t believe in sentencing people to death, and here she was, justifying her actions to herself and the robot across from her. She tried to push herself down the path that she knew her thoughts should take: that it was Victor who was the killer, not her, but it didn’t seem to be sticking.

  She rubbed her eyes. “Now give me the bad news.”

  “I have taken a cursory look at the surface Evelyn was able to retrieve from AR-559. I believe that it does contain the information we hoped it would.”

  She blinked at him in consternation. “Sounds like good news to me.”

  “It is also heavily encrypted, and I must proceed very carefully. It is possible that there are traps programmed into the surface that could be dangerous.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “Dangerous how?”

  “I’m not entirely sure, but I will have to take significant safety measures. For example, it could contain a virus designed to upload to the ship’s computer and turn off the life support.”

  “Can you stop something like that?”

  “Yes, but it will take time to make the necessary preventative arrangements. I will need to program Gringolet’s netlink arrays with a killswitch, for example, that will prevent it from being accessible to any wireless signals.”

  “Hm,” she mused. “How long will that take?”

  “A few days, I think.”

  “Not so bad. You’re already working on the computers with Evelyn, yes? Could she help you with this?”

  “Most certainly, though she would have to trust me. Some of the modifications might seem arbitrary to her,” he said.

  “I’ll talk to her and let her know.” The death of Declan was weighing heavily on her, and she was eager to be alone. “Anything else?”

  Brutus stood. “No, Captain, though I would like to say that I am sorry to hear of Mr. Burbank’s death. You have my condolences and my apologies for the actions of my father.”

  “Well, that doesn’t do much for him, but I appreciate it I suppose. You c
an do one thing for me.”

  Brutus cocked his head in query.

  “Declan had an ex-wife and a daughter. He sent them money. Can you… reshuffle numbers or whatever it is you do and see that they’re taken care of?” She stood as well.

  “Certainly, Captain. I’ll see to it right away.” He offered a slightly odd bow and left.

  Gringolet had already made its end-over turn and was decelerating when Brutus turned in his chair to face Staples.

  “Captain, I have received a message addressed to you.”

  “Does it say who it’s from?” the captain inquired.

  Brutus shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

  Staples smiled and nodded. “That’s good news. I was really starting to worry.”

  “From your friend?” Charis asked. The three of them were the only crew members on the bridge at present. It was nearing dinnertime, and the rest had gone to forage for food in the mess hall. The two women had not spoken about Charis’ outburst the day before, and things had been uneasy but functional in the cockpit since then.

  “I hope so,” Staples replied. “Can you put it through to me?”

  “Of course.”

  A moment later, the message was downloaded to Staples’ surface. She took several minutes reading it while Charis continually eyed her in anticipation.

  “She’s not on Mars.” Staples swallowed, and her throat clicked.

  “She’s not?” Charis asked.

  “No. She’s on Earth, and she says she’s being followed. We’d better get to her as fast as we can.” The captain stood and walked over to the astrogation station to look over Charis’ shoulder. “Can we push it up to one point three Gs?”

  The navigator looked at her skeptically; a few strands of hair that had escaped from her pony-tail framed her face. Staples noted that she had finally dyed her roots. “Captain, Earth is still days away. Are you talking about thrusting at one point three Gs for days?”

  Staples bit her upper lip in thought, looking unhappy but resolute. “I am.”

  “That’s bound to be rough on everyone, especially going up and down the ladders.” Charis made the statement broad, but Staples knew that she was most concerned about her daughter. Her conversation with Templeton was still fresh in her mind, and so, wary of sounding like a therapist, she refrained from voicing her thoughts.

  “I know. I’ll have everyone use the safety lines when they go up and down.” Because ships like Gringolet sometimes had to thrust in excess of one G, there were retractable safety lines at the top of each long shaft. No one liked to use them; they took time to lower, attach, and put away, but sometimes they were necessary.

  “You know not everyone will,” Charis pointed out.

  Staples specifically thought of Dinah, but again she refrained from speaking her mind. “I know, but that’s on them. I just don’t want anyone falling because they weigh thirty percent more than they normally do. Can you run the numbers? How fast can we get to Earth?”

  Charis bent to her work. Brutus, sitting two seats away, took the opportunity to interject. “Captain, might I raise a concern? If Victor’s agents are indeed on to your friend, then her choice to send this message was decidedly ill advised. If they know they’ve been detected, they will likely close on her quickly.”

  Still leaning over Charis’ display, Staples looked over to Brutus’ blank face. “The message was in code. As far as I can tell, Jordan always communicates this way. She certainly does with me. Mostly her message reads about the ups and downs of vacationing in Las Vegas. But she’s scared, and that’s enough to scare me. This woman is no stranger to cloak and dagger, and I’ve seen her bring down big execs and shake up multi-national corporations without breaking a sweat. If she’s frightened, it’s with good cause. She wouldn’t risk contacting me at all if she didn’t have something for me. We’re going to need to go to her.”

  “I see,” Brutus said.

  “All right, Captain,” Charis said icily. “We’re already moving at a decent clip. Since we only started our deceleration towards Mars this morning, we could end-over again and thrust for a day and a half. Then we’ll need to decelerate for over two days. Where do you want to put in?”

  “Portland again, I think. She really is in Vegas, that much is true.”

  “Then why not go right to Vegas?” Charis asked without looking at her captain. “If we’re in such a rush,” she added. There was a passive-aggressive undertone in her voice, but Staples ignored it.

  “For the same reason she wrote in code and won’t risk sending whatever she’s got to us over coms. If we tip our hat that we’re coming for her, whoever’s following her might move on her, try to detain or kill her. We’ll land in Portland and take a shuttle.”

  “You have considered the possibility that this might be a trap?” Brutus inquired.

  “God, this sounds like such a cliché.” Staples rubbed the bridge of her nose. She felt a headache coming on. “Jordan’s code is pretty elaborate. I don’t know if Victor could break it. Probably. But I can’t imagine how he could figure it out to the point of sending it. Writing is like a fingerprint. The message is from her, and before you ask if she’s being coerced, I don’t believe she’d ever willingly pull me into danger. She’d find a way to warn me in the message if that were the case.”

  “Very well. Shall I take the liberty of setting up our berthing schedule?” Brutus asked.

  “Yes, please.”

  “I would offer to construct a false identity and registration for the ship, but-”

  “But if we’re detected, that could tip them off as well, I know. No reason to hide unless you’re up to no good. We might as well be ourselves. Besides, we’re not berthing in space. Someone’s going to see the name of the ship written on the hull when we land.” Staples walked back to her chair and sat down as she spoke.

  “As you say, Captain,” Brutus replied.

  “Charis, can you set our course? I’ll have Don inform the crew of the new plan. Let’s plan to start accelerating again in fifteen minutes.”

  “Yes,” Charis said.

  “God, please let her have what we need to get free of this,” Staples spoke out loud so that Charis could hear her thoughts. They needed hope that there would be an end to this perpetual pursuit, and she thought perhaps Charis needed it most of all.

  Chapter 15

  There was a variety of smaller atmosphere-capable ships in Gringolet’s shuttle bay. For their flight to Las Vegas, Staples had left the choice to Bethany and Dinah. The two women had unanimously agreed on the Delta V 416. It was a larger ship, perhaps ten meters in length. The ship was also somewhat maneuverable, though there were faster and lighter ships. The Delta V could hold almost a dozen people, however, and it had a reputation for being reliable and tough. Bethany liked it because she could count on it, and Dinah chose it because its hull was thick enough to stop a bullet.

  The ship was divided into several small rooms, and Jang and Overton were in the rearmost one checking their gear. Staples and Dinah were in the pilot’s cabin, and Bethany was behind the controls.

  “Pretty city,” Overton said as he gazed out the starboard porthole. The Portland metro area sprawled below him, twinkling in the sunshine. There were several dozen skyscrapers interspersed with townhomes and single family houses, some of them dating back over two centuries. Among the urban landscape were sprinkled oases of green that made up Portland’s public parks. Forest Park, the one they had just passed over, stretched for over eight miles and encompassed over five thousand acres. Ahead Overton could see some of the dozen bridges that spanned the river that divided the eastern and western sections of the city. By craning his neck he could just glimpse the iconic lighted sign that marked Old Town.

  “Mm,” Jang grunted. “You should see the National Park in Nairobi. It is over five times larger than this ‘park.’ Here,” he gestured towards the now distant Forest Park behind them, “there are raccoons and deer. In Nairobi, there are lions and rhin
oceros.” His white teeth shone in a rare smile, startling against his dark African skin.

  “I’d like to see that,” Overton said and looked back out the window. The tall buildings of Old Town had given way to a patchwork of residential and suburban neighborhoods punctuated by the odd commercialized street. People walked and biked in the early summer sunshine, though the traffic was light since it was a Wednesday.

  “I could take you,” Jang said. The two men had spent dozens of hours training together since the crew had left Titan Prime. At first Overton had been rusty and a poor shot, but under Jang’s tutelage, many of his neglected skills from his time in the military had reasserted themselves. For the past few days he had been helping Jang run the weapons handling and target practice classes that the captain had requested. Everyone on board had attended at least one class, with the exceptions of Evelyn, Bethany, and of course Gwen. Charis had been to only one, but John had barely missed a class. Even Dinah had made an appearance, though there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that she could have run the sessions if need be.

  “Nairobi is beautiful.” As he spoke, Jang crossed to the porthole next to Overton’s and looked down. Electric cars zipped up and down the winding highways that paralleled the Columbia River. The water flowed through a massive gorge that had been carved during the last ice age. He caught sight of a parking lot and a waterfall in the distance. “This country can be beautiful too, but it has been too tamed. Too civilized. The only savagery here is the human kind.”

  “I think I read that there are wolves and lynxes in some of the parks. They reintroduced them about a hundred years-”

  “Psh,” Jang silenced him with a sound. “They are small and contained. People need dangerous animals about them to remind them of why they are different. Without animals, we forget what makes us human. We become animals.”

  Overton turned to him. “Tell me the truth, Kojo. You talk to Yoli like this, don’t you?” He tried to keep a straight face, but the corner of his mouth twitched.