by Sara Creasy
He stared at the patch of blood drying on the deck. “That outworlder woman on the station, Lancer, she bribes our handler to let us escape—if we help her grab this A-grade teckie so her people won’t have to risk their own asses in case it goes wrong. She told us we’d be freed.”
He paused, swallowed, rubbed his throat, having trouble speaking through disused vocal cords. He continued more slowly.
“I didn’t believe a word of it, except the part about you.” His eyes met hers again, and Edie remembered his trust in her abilities, back in the freight car. “I’d seen you around. Heard things. I knew you could break the boundary link, just like she said. Figured it was worth it, even if they were lying about the rest. It was worth trying, for a shot at freedom.”
“But this leash—they didn’t tell you about that.” It wasn’t a question.
Finn set his jaw. “No, I never agreed to this.” He flicked his hand at his skull. “Now it’s a life sentence, right?”
More like a death sentence. Edie hugged her arms around herself. “So what do we do?”
Finn considered in silence. She could see the cogs turning in his mind behind those unwavering eyes. Then,
“When do we jump?”
“We already jumped once. I don’t know where from, or where to.”
“What’s the mission?”
She shrugged, feeling out of her depth. “These guys are BRAT seed rovers. Trading illegal biocyph.” She remembered Haller’s unread memos. There must be information in there about the mission, or at least about a briefing.
Finn stood, eyeing her carefully. “So what are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking we have to get back to that medfac. Find the infojack who made the leash. Or someone else who knows what they’re doing. I mean, if it’s even possible without…” Without killing you. She couldn’t say it.
“How much will that someone cost us?”
“A lot. It’s not a service you pick out of the catalog.”
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m broke.”
She smiled grimly, appreciating his levity. “They told me I’d get twenty thousand for this run, plus the same in bonuses.”
“Is forty enough?”
“Might be. So you’re saying we should go ahead with the mission?”
“What do you think?”
“Don’t keep asking me that. It’s your life we’re playing with.”
“I need to know where you stand.”
Where did she stand? She’d been trying to figure out her own future, but now his was inextricably intertwined.
“I didn’t ask to be here, either. I might’ve stuck with them for a while. But not now. Not with you forced along for the ride.” She swallowed a bitter lump in her throat, remembering the dead serf on Talas Prime Station. She wanted no more deaths on her conscience. “We have to cut the leash—and to do that, we need the creds from this mission.”
He didn’t look convinced. “And you’d spend it all to free me?”
In her mind, there was no question. In his mind, clearly, there were plenty of questions. He had no reason to trust her, or anyone.
“It would be freeing us both.”
Disbelief flickered again in his eyes, but he didn’t voice his doubts. “So, one mission. Then we split, find an infojack.”
Edie nodded, wondering if he had a plan for himself after they cut the leash. “What did Zeke mean—who are the Saeth?”
“Never heard of them.”
His quick response and cold glare told her he was lying and that he didn’t care if she knew it. She let it drop and pinched the bridge of her nose—the burden of the cached data had left her wet-teck groaning in protest. She should copy it to file at the console in the annex, but she didn’t particularly want to leave evidence around for someone else to find, so she wiped it and forced herself to relax. As she turned from the wall, something jabbed her thigh. The voice snag in her pocket.
“Here.” She handed it to him. “A souvenir.”
Finn crumpled it in his fist and headed for his little annex.
“Aren’t you going to say thank you?” She regretted the words as soon as they were out. She had no right to do that, to treat him as a subordinate, no matter how the rest of the crew thought of him.
Finn hesitated in the hatchway, looking down at the twisted metal strip in his hand, and his lips curled into a sneer.
“Thank you.”
The hatch snapped shut behind him.
Edie went to bed, exhausted, not caring what he did or where he went. Caring even less about the XO’s precious memos. She slept solidly. No dreams. The best kind of sleep.
CHAPTER 5
“First morning on board and in trouble already.”
Stifling a yawn, Edie stared at the woman in her doorway. Armed only with a breakfast tray, Cat Lancer still managed to look as formidable as the first time Edie had seen her. She wore a white tank top that showed off the well-defined muscles of her arms and shoulders, and colored pins sparkled against her hair braids that shone black as the Reach. Her cobalt-blue pants were unlike anything that had been provided in Edie’s wardrobe.
“Um, trouble?” Edie said.
Cat grinned and pushed the paper tray at Edie, who took it reflexively. The doughy bread looked unappetizing and she set the tray aside.
“You missed CPT. You do know what the C stands for, don’t you?”
Haller had mentioned CPT the day before, and Edie hadn’t bothered wondering what it meant.
“Compulsory physical training,” Cat said helpfully. “Can I come in?”
Edie didn’t feel like having a visitor this early in the morning, but didn’t object when she saw what was sticking out of the duffle bag near Cat’s feet. Her old boots.
“Where did those come from?” Edie grabbed the boots and jammed her feet into them.
“You’re welcome.” Cat picked up the bag as she entered, and dropped it on the deck between them. “Haller dug them out of the recyc bins, or so he claims. Where’s Finn?”
“In the shower.” Hands on hips, Edie faced Cat and tackled more important questions. “What happened to my guard back on Talas Prime Station? Did you kill him?”
Cat settled into the console seat and pointed at the bag. “Brought you some stuff. How are you feeling?”
“Please, I need to know.”
Cat sighed, her gaze wandering over the holoviz where Edie had been exploring the ship’s accessible logs while meticulously avoiding Haller’s memos. “The guard’s fine, Edie. We just tranq’ed him.”
Edie had no choice but to believe her. External comms were locked down for the duration of the mission—not just because the ship had a captive cypherteck on board. It was necessary because the rovers would soon deviate from their flight path and didn’t want to be tracked. Edie couldn’t get news from Talas Prime or contact anyone there to confirm Cat’s story.
Cat leaned down to unzip the duffle bag all the way. “Bought you a new palmet at the last dock. You don’t want to use the piece of crap they gave you. And a few other things. Some book caps and girl things. There’s stuff for Finn, too—”
“That’s great, thanks,” Edie said without feeling. She didn’t want to deliberately antagonize Cat, but she didn’t need a best buddy, either.
Cat caught on fast. She gave Edie an earnest look and switched tactics. “Look, I’m sorry about how this went down. Haller will never tell you this, but I had this great plan where I’d meet you on the station, make you an offer you couldn’t refuse, convince you to join us freely. Get you on-side from the start.”
Cat sounded genuine, but she had every reason to get Edie on-side now.
“I might’ve said no.” She wondered if, in fact, she would have. Edie had dreamed a thousand times of leaving Talas, but it had always seemed so impossible she’d never seriously thought about how to achieve it. The Crib had her bound by a contract and the planet had her bound by her dependence on neuroxin.
Cat l
ooked dubious. “We knew you were unhappy with your Crib contract and with Project Ardra. As for our XO—well, there’s two things you need to know about John Haller.”
“Uh, let me guess. He’s slick and he’s creepy.”
“Yeah, a real slimemold.” Cat chuckled. “Though I have to admit, he smells better. So that’s one thing. The other thing—sometimes he gets his priorities screwed up. When the client sent us to Talas to pick up a Cribtrained cypherteck with credentials to die for, Haller wasn’t listening to anyone’s ideas but his own. He always barges into a situation like the engine room’s on fire and relies on his charm to extricate himself later.”
“He doesn’t have any charm.”
“Well, he thinks he does.”
That was a fair description, considering Edie’s experience so far with Haller. She sat on Finn’s bunk, tugged the duffle bag toward her, and rummaged through the contents. There were bottles of toiletries that were a cut above the stuff in the shower room, a clip of entertainment datacaps, a crew key, and several colored tees—
surprisingly subdued, considering Cat’s tastes, but perfect for Edie.
As Edie folded the tees in her lap, she asked the other question that had been bugging her. “Who was the blueeyed man in the Hoi’s cargo hold when I was kidnapped? I recall the two of you getting rather friendly at the medfac.”
Cat didn’t answer at once, and Edie looked up to catch her guarded expression.
“That was the infojack.”
“The one who hijacked my interface to make the leash?”
“Yes.” Cat anticipated the next question. “I don’t know exactly who he was, Edie, so don’t ask. I don’t know his name or anything about—”
“You don’t know his name? You two were having sex right next to my bed.”
“We were killing time. Look, he helped us kidnap a cypherteck—that puts him top of the Crib’s shit list. He’s long gone.”
That infojack was her best chance—perhaps her only chance—of cutting the leash, and she didn’t believe that Cat really knew nothing about him. But if she was going to get Cat to talk, she needed to befriend her. She pulled a piece of fabric from the duffle bag, shook it out, and realized it was a pillow slip. Plain white, gloriously soft. There was no denying Cat’s gifts were thoughtful.
She opened her mouth to say thank you, but closed it at the sound of footsteps from the corridor. Finn strode through the hatch, eyeing the navpilot with a look that said he would prefer she leave at once.
Cat gave him an arch smile. “We meet again.”
He didn’t respond. His resentment of Cat was understandable—she’d promised him freedom and he’d been tricked back into slavery. The navpilot wasn’t oblivious to his feelings, either. She seemed to lose her nerve, a far cry from the situation back on Talas Prime where she’d taken for granted his yielding to her authority.
Edie watched with bemusement as Cat forced a smile. “So, Finn. How d’you like your new quarters? Cozier than the Catacombs, I’ll bet.”
Finn took the tray of food from the console and sat next to Edie to eat it, stabbing at the pieces of bread with a fork. He ignored both women until Cat, with an impatient glance in Edie’s direction, backed down with a shrug.
“See you at the briefing, okay?”
She left, snapping the hatch shut behind her.
Edie’s spine prickled self-consciously as she felt Finn’s eyes on her, watching her fold the clothes and make a neat pile of them, along with the pillow slip and the bottles of shampoo on top.
“Hey, I didn’t ask for this stuff,” she said, feeling guilty for accepting gifts from the woman who was at least partially responsible for his current situation.
“Don’t get too cozy with the enemy. You’re not part of this crew.”
“But it makes sense to play nice, right? She brought things for you, too.” Edie tapped the duffle bag with the toe of her boot. “And she gave me back my own boots.”
His looked down at them and his lips curved in a half formed but real smile. Edie ran her hands over the familiar zips and buckles of her boots. They felt great. Despite everything that was wrong, something was right when she had her own boots.
“I should find out when that briefing is.” Edie slid into the console and pulled up Haller’s memos. When she saw the first one, she forgot about the briefing. It was the files she’d asked for—her records.
She glanced over her shoulder to see Finn digging into the pockets of the duffle bag. He pulled out some new clothes, a basic tool belt for shipside duties, an empty spur bracket, and a datastick of caps that must be the books Cat had mentioned. While he packed away the clothes, Edie downloaded her records onto her new palmet, deleted the memo, and went to her room. She didn’t want Finn reading her personal stuff over her shoulder.
Sitting cross-legged on the bunk, Edie opened the files. The palmet extruded a glowing holo-cylinder that displayed her records in a revolving field, each one labeled haphazardly and filed apparently randomly. Education reports. Training program: biocyph interface. Psych evaluation, age 14…
She searched the files for Lukas, her first bodyguard and her only friend after Bethany’s death. He’d been an ex-milit, a loyal Crib citizen who’d guarded Bethany for years and then her. He’d just disappeared one day—
“retired,” or so they told her. It had been a while since she trusted anything the Crib said, including that.
The search turned up zero hits. She tried again with different parameters, not believing her eyes. Nothing. They’d wiped Lukas from existence. Having controlled Edie’s life since she was ten years old, they could certainly control what got written into her records.
Edie scanned through the data again, swallowing the anger that made her throat ache. She could’ve jacked in and absorbed the facts five times faster via a softlink, but there was something about seeing the stark words before her eyes that made cold reality seem more real. And even colder.
One of the oldest documents was her guardianship-transfer paper. After the Crib discovered her extraordinary affinity for biocyph, her rescue from the camps had come in the form of Liv Natesa, a newly promoted ’crat from the Crib Colonial Unit whose personal ambition drove her to argue for establishing a seeding program on Talas. The idea had the full support of the local gov, which would do anything to boost its standing with the Crib. With Natesa’s help, they’d petitioned Crib Central for a year to get the CCU program up and running, and to get permission to train Edie. From Central came a string of excuses: she was too young, she wasn’t a Crib citizen, she was native born and should never have been taken from her people in the first place. What stopped the flow of excuses was a change of minister, quickly followed by a change of policy.
The Talasi Elders had had no say in the matter. Natesa had accused them of mistreatment—only slightly embellishing the extent of it—and brought Edie as a ward of state to the institute in Halen Crai.
Edie lingered over a three-line consent form, signed by Natesa, for the splinter and softlink implant. She remembered the surgery, the pain, the itchiness in her fingertips where the wires were embedded. She’d accepted everything they did to her.
There were education and training schedules, psych as sessments and recommendations, ongoing evaluations of her rapidly developing skills. She skimmed the copies of her seeding missions with CCU, and of Liv Natesa’s investigation into her first mission. They’d buried a thousand BRATs on that world, but the world described by Natesa bore little resemblance to the one Edie recalled. The investigation was a sham, its purpose designed to salvage Natesa’s career after the mission failed.
Bethany’s death was dealt with in a few brief lines.
“What’s wrong?”
Edie jumped at the sound of Finn’s voice. He stood with one foot inside her room and made no move to come nearer, respecting her space. She blinked, hoping he hadn’t seen her crying. But her eyes were dry. She’d cried out her tears for Bethany a long time ago. Why would he
think there was something wrong?
When she said nothing, he nodded at the holoviz. “What is that?”
“My records from Talas.” She switched to on-screen display so he couldn’t read them from where he was standing.
“You’ve got a memo saying the briefing’s in ten minutes, top deck.” His voice was hoarse, as though speaking was still a huge effort.
“Give me fifteen and we’ll head up there.” She didn’t want to arrive early and appear over-eager.
“I’m going to skip it. Still sleeping off those tranqs they gave me.” He looked unsure of himself, as though he hated to admit to any vulnerability.
“But they won’t dose you up any more, right?”