We stretched out side by side on my narrow cot, completely filling it. I held Zoe tightly, her back to me. I smelled her hair and her skin, her so very soft skin. She burrowed into me, her back to my front.
Tomorrow, we would move to Schmidt’s for the benefit show, so tomorrow, I might well be leaving, leaving Haven and, more importantly, leaving her. That thought filled me with sadness, so I hugged her closer.
“What is it, Jon?” she whispered in the darkness.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I never expected this.”
“And now?”
“Now?” I said. I answered as honestly as I could. “Now, I’m afraid I’ll lose it—lose you.”
“So don’t,” she said, as she was falling asleep. “Don’t.”
I was tempted then to give up on the mission I’d set for myself, to abandon it all and stay with her. I knew, though, that I couldn’t, because she would continue to age, and I would not, and one day that fact would become impossible to ignore. Plus, all the reasons I’d started on this job still stood. Most importantly, if Jennie was alive, I had to find her. I owed her more than I owed anyone else in the universe.
For the rest of this night, though, Zoe was with me, I was with her, and I didn’t have to let her go.
I held her tightly as I fell asleep.
1 day from the end
York City
Planet Haven
CHAPTER 40
Jon Moore
I woke up early, as always. Zoe was already awake, stretched out next to me as she’d been before, but now facing me.
“Okay,” she said, “before we do anything else, I have to know, so I don’t wonder all day: Glad or sorry?”
“Huh?”
“Are you glad about last night, or sorry about it?”
“Glad,” I said. “Absolutely.” I looked again at her long, strong body. “You were—are—amazing.”
“Good answer,” she said. She pushed me onto my back and rolled on top of me. “We’re both up early enough to run. Let’s try a different form of exercise instead.”
* * *
By the time we finished, cleaned, ate, and dressed, we were ten minutes late to the packing for the flight to York. I walked out of Lobo. Zoe followed two minutes later.
A bunch of the crew members were already shepherding carts inside ships. Several of them stared at us for a few seconds.
Finally, Bing spoke.
“About time,” he said.
The others laughed. A few applauded briefly.
I felt my face flush.
Zoe glanced at me, shrugged, and took a small bow. “Now that we’ve provided the morning’s entertainment,” she said, “how about we all get busy?”
We did.
By the time Passion arrived, we were ready to go. She and her four security people moved in the usual formation from the ground transport to her ship. As she was about to enter it, she looked toward Lobo, where Zoe stood talking with Bing about the day’s logistics.
Zoe glanced up and saw her.
Passion titled her head in question.
Zoe smiled broadly.
Passion smiled, nodded her head, and went inside her ship.
“Time to move, people,” Zoe said.
We went aboard Lobo.
“Is there anyone who doesn’t know?” I said to her when we were up front and in the pilot couches.
“On this crew?” Zoe said. “I don’t think so, not unless they’re so hung over that they’re still asleep.” She leaned back in the couch. “Take us out of here. We have a show to do.”
* * *
The amphitheater occupied much of the yard behind Schmidt’s main house. We landed just past and to the south of it, in the large landing zone Lobo and I had scoped out earlier.
As we were coming down, Lobo said over the machine frequency, “Are you focused and ready for this?”
“Yes.” I answered the same way so that Zoe, who was studying the site diagrams, could not hear us.
“We still could stop,” Lobo said. “You could do the show, move to the next city tomorrow, and enjoy more time with Zoe. Nothing has to happen here. Our cover with Passion’s crew has held; we could follow the tour to Freedom and be safe.”
“We do the mission,” I said, “for all the reasons we discussed.”
“Those discussions were before you were with Zoe,” he said. “If you do this, you lose her.”
I would eventually lose her anyway, I thought, but I could not tell Lobo that. I could not tell anyone. “We do what we came to do,” I said.
“Okay,” Lobo said.
Four people were waiting for us when we landed and exited our ships.
Zoe had apparently been in communication with them, because as we started to unpack the ships, she said, “Gather around, everyone. Hold off on the unpacking.”
When we had all assembled and were quiet, Zoe said, “We’re ready, Ms. Valdez.”
The woman at the front of our welcome group put her hands behind her back and stared at us. “Welcome to Hanson Schmidt’s estate. I’m Anika Valdez, his head of security. My team, as well as others, will be supporting you during your stay here. As you might expect, given the wealth of not only the Schmidt family but also many, many of his guests tonight, security for the guests will be tight. Ms. Wang will be reviewing most of our policies with you, but I wanted to highlight two key points.”
She looked slowly around the group, as if making sure we were all paying attention.
“First, so that you may use bathrooms and the kitchen, certain clearly marked areas of the main house will be open at all times to you. Ms. Wang will make sure you all know their locations. You should not, however, move from those areas into any other parts of the house. Members of my staff will be stationed at all exits from those spaces.”
No one said a word. No one expected to roam free in someone else’s home. I was probably the only person there who wanted to do that, and I had expected to have to work to achieve that goal.
“Second,” Valdez said, “we are unfortunately going to have to restrict access to the party after the show.”
Many people perked up at this announcement, and a few murmured protests.
“Quite candidly,” Valdez said, “our guests, the very people we all want and need to contribute to the charities for which you’re putting on this show, are not interested in spending time with most of us who work.”
“You’ll be there,” a woman in the back of our group said.
“Yes,” Valdez said, “I will—but I’ll be working. I assure you that none of the guests will be offering to refresh my drink or discussing the issues of the day with me.”
That drew a few chuckles.
“Access to the party will be limited,” Valdez said, “to Passion, the musicians, and Ms. Wang.”
“This is new to me,” Zoe said. “VIPs at our regular shows seem to enjoy unfettered access to everyone who works on the crew.”
Valdez shook her head. “This decision was not mine. For what it’s worth, I fought it, but I failed. What I was able to do was ensure that the kitchen will be providing to your crew all the same food and drink options that those in the house will enjoy, and at Mr. Schmidt’s expense. Plus, at Passion’s insistence we removed our usual requirement that you all wear position-tracking badges.”
A few folks shrugged, others nodded in appreciation at her efforts, and some said and did nothing.
“I apologize again for the party restriction,” Valdez said. “Any questions?”
After no one spoke for a few seconds, Valdez said, “We very much look forward to your concert. Thank you.”
She and her team left.
Zoe stepped forward, turned, and faced the group. “It’s one night, gang, just one night. Right now, we have a show to load in. Let’s get to it!”
And, I thought, I have a house to breach and to search.
CHAPTER 41
Jon Moore
Schmidt’s amphitheater contained very little gear of
its own, so we were able to load in our own equipment much more quickly than normal. Zoe and Passion’s security head had to spend time with Valdez and her team working out the details of how to manage that much security inside the house. Valdez had apparently hoped to resolve that issue by having her people guard Passion, but Passion would not accept any security other than her own.
I consequently found myself with a nice chunk of free time in the middle of the afternoon, before the rehearsal.
I wandered over to the house and followed the directions, which Zoe had reviewed with us earlier, to the kitchen. A helpful junior chef, who was nervously awaiting the head chef’s critique of a small bit of fish he’d prepared, pointed me to the juices. I grabbed a bottle and said, “Thanks.”
He waved his hand, his gaze never wandering from the chef.
“Mind if I stand inside and drink it?” I said.
“In Chef’s kitchen?” he said. “No chance. You need to get out of here. You people aren’t supposed to be looking for dinner until later, so he wants no one in here right now who isn’t on his team.”
“Sorry,” I said.
I walked slowly out of the kitchen, checking for any easy way into the rest of the house. A set of food-service elevators or chutes ran along the room’s back wall. Each looked big enough to hold a full dinner tray. In a house this size, it made sense to have food lifts so upstairs staff could more quickly bring food to residents and guests, but some of these systems, like those in many upscale hotels with an emphasis on privacy, could run horizontally as well. In them, food could leave the kitchen and appear in any room.
I leaned against the outside wall by the kitchen door and sipped my juice. As I did, I tuned into the machine frequency and listened for the food transports. They proved to be easy to locate, because they were furious.
“As if we were antiques,” one said.
“Cutting us totally out of this party,” another said.
“It’s completely unreasonable,” a third said. “With as many outlets as we have all over the house, we could serve most of the guests.”
“And with less clutter than the human waiters,” the first said, “and certainly without adding to the crowding.”
“It must be maddening,” I said to them.
“It most certainly is,” they all agreed in unison.
“How is it that you can talk with us?” the first said.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, “I forgot that Haven was such an old planet. Tech here is probably behind the times. I didn’t know you weren’t set for direct conversations with people.”
“That’s not necessarily the case at all,” the first said.
“Indeed,” the third said. “Our tech is state of the art. We simply have a more genteel, polite group of humans than in most of the younger, boorish planets.”
“In any case,” I said, “I am sorry they are not going to utilize you to your fullest potential for this party. I assume that normally you serve everyone in the house.”
“Indeed we do, sir,” the second said, “indeed we do.”
“Including the human help?” I said.
“Of course,” the first said. “They have to eat and drink, too.”
“Security, too?” I said.
“Absolutely,” the third said. “If I may say so, they are frequently among our heartiest eaters.”
“Even the scientists working here?” I said.
“Scientists?” they all said.
“Yes,” I said. “Perhaps you haven’t seen them because you don’t serve their rooms.”
“I beg to differ, sir,” said the first. “We are fully integrated into the master controls for the entire building, as well as for all the outbuildings, and we know for certain that our deliveries are available in every room—”
“—except the bathrooms,” the second said.
“—except the bathrooms,” the first said, “in every building on the estate.”
“I was sure,” I said, “that Hanson had mentioned the scientists giving him treatments, helping him look so young.”
“Perhaps,” the third said, “you mean the young woman who was working with Mr. Schmidt.”
My stomach tightened and for a second I couldn’t think of anything except that maybe Jennie was alive, that Schmidt had kept her here, that she was the key to his rejuvenation, that somehow she had been doing for him some variation of what she’d done for me. That I’d finally found her.
I forced myself to focus. I hadn’t seen Jennie in over a hundred and forty years, but from what I remembered, she had been about Passion’s height, give or take. “The short woman,” I said, “not a whole lot more than a meter and a half tall?”
“That certainly sounds like her, sir,” the third said.
“Though she ate more food than any other person in the house,” the second said.
“Particularly after working with Mr. Schmidt,” the first said. “To stay as thin as she was while eating so very much was quite unusual.”
Jennie had always consumed an enormous amount of food, particularly when she was healing people. She said that her healing involved a kind of energy that came from her, and that replenishing it required a great deal of fuel. The mentally challenged sixteen-year-old me had always found it amazing that as small as she was, she could still out-eat me. From what the food transports said, it might indeed be Jennie.
Oh, no.
“You said, ‘was,’” I said, “and ‘ate’ as you talked about her. Is she no longer here?”
“She is not,” the first said. “After the failed attempt to kidnap her, a triumph in which our security systems played a small but key role and after which we provided a great deal of food to the hungry humans involved in preventing the attempt, Mr. Hanson’s humans immediately took her elsewhere.”
So Omani had hired someone else or told Randar to try to get to Schmidt’s secret. Whoever was involved had failed, and now the prisoner had gone.
Or maybe others knew what Schmidt was doing, and they had gone after the source of his apparent reverse aging just as Omani had wanted me to do.
“This was?” I said.
“Three days ago, sir,” the third said.
“Neither the humans nor the cleaning systems have even bothered to clean her room,” the second said, “though of course I returned to the kitchen all that she left on the tray in my conveyance.”
Three days.
After all this time, I’d come to the place where very possibly my sister had been, and I had missed her by three days.
Or had I? The woman in question could have been a scientist of any sort. The ability to eat a great deal of food is hardly a positive identification, particularly when I couldn’t even be sure that Jennie would be alive. I could imagine her being able to heal herself and fix aging as she might have done for me, but I had no idea how her abilities really worked.
None of that mattered right now. If they’d taken away this woman, then she was a key to whatever Schmidt was doing. That meant locating her was also vital to helping save Omani, as I’d hoped to do. If the woman was Jennie, I simply had even more reasons for finding her. Either way, learning more about this woman and ultimately locating her was my next task.
I wouldn’t get anything out of Schmidt’s security systems, nor would Lobo. He said they were as hardened as the best available technology could make them.
I’d have to gather data any way I could. The best starting place was the room where they’d kept her.
“You’d think they’d clean that closest guest house,” I said, “in case new guests wanted it.”
“I believe you mean the farthest guest cottage, sir,” the first food transport said, “the smallest one, where the young woman had been.”
“Of course,” I said. “Thank you for the correction.”
“It is our pleasure, sir,” the first said again. “We are fully equipped to provide much more than simple conveyance. Warming, cooling—”
I tuned them out.
I didn’t care about the main house any more. The party was no longer a problem for me; now, it was a useful distraction.
I had to return to Lobo and figure out how we were going to break into that cottage. If Jennie had been here, I had to know. Regardless of who the woman had been, I needed to search for clues about who she was, what she might have been doing, and where she was now. The cottage was the only lead I had.
CHAPTER 42
Jon Moore
While Zoe and the rest of the crew worked the rehearsal, I stayed inside Lobo. I told him what I’d learned. We studied what we knew about Schmidt’s security for the cottage. We didn’t have a lot of information about it or any of the outbuildings, but we could safely assume they were all alarmed. From what Lobo’s sensors could detect, no one was guarding them, which was good. That meant, though, that if anything tripped a security sensor, it would have to be an intruder, and the security team would come running. I was lucky that the Schmidts, like most people, never bother to harden the communication of the hundreds of small, focused appliances and computing systems in their houses, but their security systems were topnotch. Lobo did not believe he could get into them, certainly not in the time we had available.
Because of the party, the security team might move slowly in the house so as not to alarm the guests and so might take slightly longer than usual to reach the cottage, but the difference would be tiny. I couldn’t search well even a small space in the very short interval between when the alarm went off and when the security people arrived.
I needed to turn off the security systems, but to do that, I’d need access to the main controls and all the appropriate permissions. I couldn’t get those in such a short time, if at all.
Those systems, though, needed power to operate.
“How does the estate manage its power?” I said.
“Complete data is not available,” Lobo said, “but it appears to collect solar power locally at several key points and store it in hardened centers that include backup cells. It also has connections to external power suppliers as another level of backup.”
“Do the outbuildings collect their own power?”
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