The Lost (The Maauro Chronicles Book 3)

by Edward McKeown

  I reach out with sensors that have no analogue in Confederation technology and thus should not be detected. The trawler is twenty kilometers away at the far edge of its planned rendezvous with us. We’d hoped not to need this contingency but planned for several ways of exiting the base. Twenty kilometers was as close as we dared bring the trawler and Wrik’s air supply cannot last that long.

  I put on the maximum speed I dare. I hear grunts of pain through the connections between us but I cannot slow. Still this concerns me as they grow more frequent.

  A metallic tang of blood is in the water, I slow instantly, realizing that my left-handed grip has torn his skin. We surface.

  We come up in a valley between huge black waves. I start to tear my mask free then stop as the wave knocks us under.

  “Do not remove your mask,” Maauro shouted. “Now that we are on the surface, I can replace the air in your tank.”

  I almost disregarded her until another wave smacked me.

  Maauro floated next to me. The two black airbags she mentioned projected from her back like dark angel wings. She struggled with the piping to my air tank.

  The sky above was purple, the sun must be setting, but in the trough of the waves I couldn’t see it. I struggled with panic, then felt cool air blow on my face, with my mask on and oxygen back in the tank I could breathe even in the rough water.

  “Get behind me,” Maauro ordered, “between the air wings.”

  I managed, wincing at the sting of salt water on my left arm, where Maauro’s grip had cut the skin, despite her best efforts.

  “Now wrap your legs around my waist but keep them pulled up.”

  Maauro leaned forward as I did so and I found myself riding on her back. She began scissoring her legs back and forth and we started forward at a good speed. But a minute of two of climbing the Pacific waves revealed the futility of trying for quick progress. The waves knocked me off.

  “Can we signal Jaelle, to come toward us?” I asked after the third time. “I’m nearing exhaustion.”

  “Unwise, the communication would be picked up. We make too good a sensor target on the surface. But unnecessary in any event, your air tank should be sufficiently recharged by now. We have to go underwater again. This time you hang on to me so I do not injure you further.”

  I nodded, too tired to argue against a return to the dark and the cold. Down we went. Relief from the waves was immediate, but the cold began eating through me. Fortunately Maauro’s body was generating a lot of heat and I pressed against her, grateful for it.

  Something flashed in the middle distance. Maauro swerved violently and whipped up her right arm. I heard the whoosh as she fired flechettes from her fingertips.

  “What was that?” I shouted.

  “A shark,” she replied.

  “Did you get it?” I said, trying to look in all directions.

  “Yes. Hopefully it will give the others sufficient distraction as a food source to leave us alone.”

  “Others! No, don’t tell me.” I kept telling myself that so long as I was with Maauro I was safe, over and over.

  We plowed on through the Pacific. God, will this night never end, I wondered. I felt like I’d been cold and wet forever. My eyes strained to pierce the blackness, but dreaded seeing anything. Gradually, I became aware that it was not all black, that lots of small pinpricks of light, some flashing, some pulsing, lay about me, like tiny bioluminescent stars.

  Maauro pulled up and fired at something again. Then she sped up and we headed for the surface. I saw lights, the trawler, and was almost overcome by relief. But we were not out of the woods yet. The trawler rolled in the heavy seas as we broke the surface near it. Maauro shone lights from her big beautiful eyes at the trawler, shouts came immediately. I spotted Jaelle on the deck, grabbing men and pointing in our direction.

  “Maauro,” I managed. “I don’t think I can climb out of the water.”

  “My energy is depleted too,” she replied. “But I do not think we will need to. Look.” The boom of the trawler reached out, a heavy fishing net dangling from it. As soon as it was close enough, Maauro reached up and grabbed it. I dimly heard Jaelle shout, then felt us lifted, Maauro had her left arm in the net and the right around me. My limbs had gone numb and I wasn’t sure if I was holding onto her or not.

  Jaelle and the men grabbed at us as they swung us onboard, but we still fell awkwardly to the deck, Maauro rolling under me to preserve me from the shock. But the last jolt was too much and I faded out.

  A feline face swam into view as my vision returned. Warm yellow light fell on my face. I realized I was in a bed, under a pile of blankets. I must have been out for a while.

  “Wrik,” Jaelle said. “Honey, are you all right?”

  It was an effort to talk but I forced myself. “Yeah. Good to see you. Thought for a while there, we weren’t going to make it.”

  “Here,” she said. “Hot tea and soup.”

  She helped me up and I greedily slurped down the soup and the tea, the warmth spreading through me. “Is Maauro ok?”

  Jaelle nodded. “She’s down in engineering, plugged into the engine, sucking down as much power as she can without disrupting the ship’s systems. I’ve never seen a haggard-looking android before, but even she looked like she’d been through the wringer.”

  I nodded, then caught myself. “Yeah, rough trip on the way out.”

  “Did you get what you needed?”

  “Maauro has the samples in her body along with scans and records. She’s probably already doing an analysis.”

  “Don’t bet on that,” Jaelle replied. “I think she’s going to eat a small nuclear reactor before she does anything she doesn’t need to.”

  “I know how she feels,” I said.

  Jaelle picked up the tray and locked it down on a nearby table. Then she came back and slipped under the blanket with me. “You still need some warming up.”

  “Sounds great to me.” My arms slipped around her. I noticed the bandages on my torn left arm, remembered the sharks and shuddered.

  “Very bad trip,” Jaelle said. “Tomorrow, I want you to think about whether heading back to Star Central makes sense. How many more times will your luck hold?” Then her lips were on mine. “That’s tomorrow. We have a few hours before the seajet takes us off this trawler. Forget about it for now. We’ll be back at Stardust in 24 hours.”

  My head hit the pillow and I slid back into sleep.

  Chapter 8

  The seajet, a stealthy model, landed next to us in the darkness and we and Candace’s crew transferred aboard. The trawler was fully automated, so there would be no one to question when the ISM investigated it later. The seajet took off, going supersonic and hypersonic shortly thereafter. It slid into the wake of a commercial transport bound for Gatwick. It made for a bouncy trip, but with the seajet’s ECM and stealth mode, we’d be hard to spot even from satellites.

  We landed in Spain and transferred to a legitimate short-haul airliner to London, with vacation clothes supplied for our cover. As promised, we were back at Stardust soon after. Maauro disappeared to the reactor room. Jaelle and I relieved Dusko so he could get away from the ship for a while. We were not to remain undisturbed long. Maauro appeared to tell me that Candace had sent her another message. This time the meet was at a private and exclusive restaurant, an easy place for Candace’s security team, the Earthbound contingent of which she was evidently more confident in.

  Jaelle remained with the ship. Maauro and I made our way to the Windsor after raiding our wardrobes for our best clothes. Well I raided mine. Maauro merely retexturized her exterior casing to a simple black dress and wore some of Jaelle’s jewelry.

  Seeing her so feminine, with her hair done in an elaborate style that had taken her mere seconds, given that she could literally tell it what to do, took me aback. I tried not to show my surprise. />
  We were picked up by a limousine and taken to a restaurant called the Criterion, then shown into a private room upstairs and in the back. We sat in the curtained alcove, under the antique lamps and ordered some appetizers. We weren’t kept waiting long.

  Candace Deveraux walked up to our table. The low-cut, orange gown she wore showed off winking Frosteer sunstones that glowed against her dark skin. “Good evening.”

  “Candace,” I said. Maauro only nodded.

  “ISM is up in arms. They’re circulating artist sketches of both of you, seems that for some reason, no camera retained an image of either of you.”

  “How curious,” Maauro said drolly.

  “Don’t get too confident,” Candace said. “They’re good likenesses of you anyway, Maauro.”

  “Well,” I said to Maauro. “You are the pretty one.”

  “What progress have they made in regard to our intrusion?” Maauro asked.

  “Very little; there were a lot of trawlers and small vessels in the area. There always are, that close to Japan. They could only do a cursory check and our trawler’s memory banks retained no record of being boarded.

  “They know where you were in the base and where you went, but not why. I doubt that their scans of the bodies and the lifeboat were detailed enough to determine what you did—”

  “They should not be,” Maauro said, “other than some small nondescript pieces of the shuttle, my work was on a molecular level. It would require their best machines and a perfect baseline to detect my sampling.”

  “So they have a mystery,” Candace continued. “They think you escaped underwater to a submersible, or possibly drowned in the attempt. No one can understand how any being could have covered so much distance in so little time. They are still searching around the island, expecting you to wash up.”

  “It’s too much to expect that they will write us off as dead,” I added. “They know what we looked at. Whoever was involved in the Rainhell Op will put two and two together.”

  Candace shrugged. “People disappear at sea all the time. Even now. Still, big planet that it is, ISM has a lot of resources. I’ve blocked information on all of you out of every database I can. I still believe that no one outside of Confed Intelligence knows of Maauro’s capabilities. To most you’re just a big-eyed teenage girl from a lost colony. A junior member of Jaelle and Wrik’s Lost Planet Company, but the sooner you get off Earth the better.”

  “Did you have some additional information for us?” I asked.

  “What, I can’t just drop in on two of my favorite operatives?” Candace said. The waiter came by with two bottles of wine and three glasses, Candace must have ordered them before coming over. We were quiet as the waiter poured.

  I observe the Confederate spymaster closely while the waiter pours red fluid into our glasses. Deveraux would like to have me examined in detail by her scientists. Only the certain knowledge that I will destroy myself before permitting it forestalls her, that, and my avowed intention to take her with me. I do not trust this human and do not consider her part of my network.

  “You did not come to enjoy our company or dine with us,” I state.

  Candace’s friendly mien smoothes out into coolness. “You’re right. I came with a mission specific reason. You have a problem, you’re down an operative. Jaelle Tekala is not going. That leaves you and Maauro and one former Guilder. Not an ideal team.”

  “How did you—” Wrik begins.

  “How did I what?” Candace snaps. “Find shit out? I am a professional shit-finder-outer. Now back to the point. What do you plan to do about it?”

  “No immediate solution occurs,” I admit.

  “One does for me,” Candace says. “Take one of my people with you.”

  “No,” Wrik and I chorus together.

  “Hear me out,” Candace says, raising a hand to ward off our protest.

  “We are not taking on someone we don’t know,” Wrik states.

  “You do know her and, in fact, it was your idea,” Candace replies.

  Wrik looks confused, a feeling I share.

  “What are you talking about?” Wrik says

  “You did recommend Olivia Croyzer to me in the highest terms,” Candace says.

  “The police chief of Tir-a-mar,” I add, giving Wrik a searching look, “formerly of the Confed Marine Military Police?”

  A flush of anger crawls over Wrik’s face. “I did recommend her, but not for this.”

  “Of course not,” Candace says with feigned innocence. “This wasn’t even in the cards when you did. But I took her on immediately after the Predictor mission, despite that little blot, well not so little blot, on her record.”

  I am in a dilemma. Croyzer was court-martialed for protecting the son of her former commanding officer in what had appeared to be justifiable self-defense, but was merely the overture for a serial-killer. The murderer had fooled her into believing his tale of being mugged until the other bodies showed up. Then it was too late. This information was told to Wrik in confidence and he does not know that I spied on the two of them, so I cannot use it.

  “You were right, Wrik.” Candace continues. “Human potential like hers isn’t common and even that mistake didn’t make her less valuable to me, or now to you. You know her—”

  “Knowing her is not the same as trusting her,” I say.

  Candace picks up her glass and regards me over the rim of it. “Trust, Maauro? Do you trust Dusko or Jaelle? Do you even trust Wrik?”

  She has passed my guard in a fashion I did not anticipate. Something in my demeanor warns her and she leans back, alarm in her face. Foolish, if I intended attack she would be dead before she could react. I am supersonic at need.

  Wrik’s hand has come to rest on mine. “That’s enough,” he says to Candace, his voice harsh.

  “In any event,” Candace says, putting the glass down with only a slight tremor in her hand. “She owes you, Wrik. She’ll be easier to integrate into your team than anyone else and surely you can trust her more than anyone else you could find on your own.”

  I must admit the logic of what Candace says. Croyzer is tough and smart, so much so that I had wondered if she had abilities beyond normal humans. Despite her earlier misjudgment, she had proved incorruptible on Tir-a-Mar and instrumental in extracting Dusko and Jaelle from Guild trouble. While we could have succeeded without her help, we would not have, over her opposition.

  “We wish to discuss the matter privately,” I advise Candace.

  “Sure, I’ll go powder my nose. You two chat.”

  I wait until she is out of earshot before turning to him. “Wrik, I do trust you.”

  His expression toward me is neutral. “I know, Maauro. I return that trust. Even though I know you have occasionally lied to me, occasionally also withheld information. I know that even when you did that, you felt you were doing it for my own good.”

  I am disconcerted. This is not what I expected. I focus all my mental powers on an analysis of this issue for 1.233777 seconds, I go autistic to concentrate.

  “Candace has made me angry,” I finally say, “because as is often the case with her, she has told the truth. My trust with the others is rationed. Dusko has the smallest portion, gained only because he has seen that no enemy has survived engaging me. It is not in his Dua-Denlenn nature, with its totally self-centered moral code, for him to even resent this. I deal with him as his own would. Jaelle too, is closer to you than to me, while I have protected her with my life, she too has been subject to manipulation by me.

  “Worse yet is the fact that what you have said is also true. I have on occasions lied, or withheld information from you. At those times I perceived this as for a greater good, or to cope with a flaw in you, such as when you were using Anodyne Dust back on Kandalor.”

  Wrik looks startled, even angry. “So that’s why no one w
ould sell to me.”

  “Yes. I eliminated several dealers and injured others to persuade them. It was effective.”

  He nods slowly. “I shouldn’t have been doing it. I wish I could say that you should have talked to me first, but I was too broken to listen back then.”

  “Perhaps. The longer I operate networked to you, the more I have come to question myself. Maybe I should thank Candace for making me face this squarely. My believing that I know best is a failure of trust. Please forgive me. I will try to do better in the future.”

  “Dammit, Maauro, if you’d trusted me then, we’d be dead.”

  “That was then, this is now. I must change.”

  “I have no complaints of you,” he says, closing his hand on mine.

  “Perhaps you should. I may have been a bad friend.”

  “That’s my call and I say no. Do you hear me? No.”

  “Thank you, Wrik. I am reassured and not so sad now.”

  “So what do we do about Croyzer?” he adds. “She’s as good and as tough as anyone. We can certainly rely more on her than on anyone else outside of Lost Planet, so long as it doesn’t cut against Candace’s orders.”

  “As Jaelle is not going and I do not give Dusko a vote in such matters,” I say, “it falls to you to choose.”

  “Maauro, I am not sure that I am completely objective when it comes to Olivia, she affected me in ways I didn’t expect.”

  “You cannot defer this decision to me. I am not competent to judge human motivations to this degree and I have just been reminded of how very much I have to learn about such interactions.”

  Candace’s walks up to our table. “Got a decision?”

  I remain silent looking steadily at Wrik.

  “How soon can Olivia join us?” he says

  “She’s en route to Earth and can be at your ship by 0400, two days from now. Girl travels light, well, except for guns. She’ll be ready to go. But that brings up the question, where will you go?”

  “We’ll go to Eta Cassiopeia, the last place Bexlaw was seen,” Wrik says. “We may find some clues there or in what Maauro sampled.”