by Ian Whates
She never saw Tull again. None of them did. Leesa learnt from Liat, her noon-father, that despite the alien’s haste Tull had been dead on arrival, and there had been nothing anyone could do to revive him. She further learnt that the Xters called the mites that had killed him ‘red dust’, a name that needed no explanation. Red dust was evidently a hive creature, aggressively territorial. Individually, each bite was relatively harmless, the implants carried by all of Liaise’s citizens would have nullified the toxin as a matter of course, but the mites attacked in the tens of thousands, biting all the while, and in Tull’s case the protection afforded by his implants was simply overwhelmed.
Red dust had been eradicated from the area decades ago, but recent signs suggested that a colony had re-established itself. The Xter that helped them had been one of a number tasked with hunting down the infestation, but evidently it hadn’t occurred to them to inform the human colony of a possible threat.
Liat did his best to put a positive spin on events, telling Leesa that Tull hadn’t died in vain, that he’d discovered the red dust nest and so helped to remove a serious threat. He went on to say that Tull should be considered a hero, but she wasn’t buying it. Tull was simply a buffoon who had tried to show off once too often. That was the problem with Liat: he always treated her as if she were still a kid and overestimated her gullibility. A mistake Kegé would never have made.
When she came awake this time, Leesa was aware of being not quite cold but on the cooler side of comfortable. Her bed sheets lay strewn on the floor and she guessed she must have been tossing and turning in her sleep. Again. This wasn’t the first time she’d relived Tull’s death – it wasn’t a memory she enjoyed but presumably the incident had affected her deeply, or why else would she keep returning to it?
Leesa sat up, dangling her feet off the side of the bed, and rubbed her eyes. She didn’t need a clock to tell her the time, her aug took care of that. She knew it was early hours of the morning, ship’s time. This particular dream always disturbed her. Besides, her throat was dry and she reckoned sleep had been given enough chances for one night. She slipped out of bed and, after making a token effort at tidying things by picking up the sheets and dumping them back where they belonged, she padded to the galley on soft feet, conscious that no one else was likely to be awake yet. Shifts weren’t split aboard the ship. The captain claimed there was no point in keeping a night watch when they were in transit; alarms would soon rouse anyone who needed rousing if anything interesting happened. She supposed he had a point, but she’d have kept one anyway.
Leesa didn’t bother with lights. Her aug could pick up and amplify the slightest hint of illumination, enabling her to see in just about any conditions short of complete darkness, and when that occurred she could always fall back on the infrared.
For company, all she had was the ambient hum of the engines, but she was enjoying the near-quiet, the sense of solitude.
A light flickered on automatically as she entered the galley – the sensor working fine, the light itself less so, stabilising at the third or fourth attempt. The Comet had a lived-in charm which somehow failed to extend to the galley. This place, which should have been the heart of the vessel, struck her as cold and functional – all grey plastic and metal, no sense of any time or effort spent here. Perhaps none of them were cooks. She’d soon change that. Leesa smiled at the thought, pleased to have hit upon a possible way of ingratiating herself with the crew.
She made a beeline for the large cool cabinet squeezed in between the far wall and ceiling, pausing before its double doors. A dilemma: chilled water or juice?
A slight noise from behind sent her spinning around, automatically dropping into a fighter’s crouch as she did so.
The banker, Drake, stood in the entrance. How the hell did he get there without her hearing him? Bastard must move as daintily as a cat.
He smiled and said in a subdued voice, as if to emphasise the intimacy of their situation with everyone else still in bed, “Couldn’t you sleep either?”
“Something like that.” He’d done all right in the fight against the disberos, but something about the man still made her uneasy, and she couldn’t quite put her finger on why. Perhaps it was his air of supreme confidence, the sense that he was always in control of a given situation no matter what. “How’s your head?” she asked because she felt she ought to.
“Not so bad, thanks. Suffering more from the effects of the doc’s sedatives than from any lingering effects of the blow, I think.”
She smiled and then turned her attention back to the juices. The cabinet door slid open at her touch and she took out an orange bulb. The slight weight of the chilled flexible carton felt somehow reassuring in her hand as she lifted it to squirt a stream of juice into her open mouth. Cold and tart, with just enough sweetness to dull the citrus sting. Part of her noted that she was tossing acid straight onto an empty stomach; Night-father would have been horrified.
“Just from curiosity,” Drake said quietly from behind her, “are you ever able to sleep, I mean really sleep?”
She froze on the verge of squeezing a second mouthful of juice, and turned to stare at him. He knew. That carefully phrased question cut to the very heart of what it meant to be her, to be auganic. The words might have sounded innocent to any eavesdropper but they conveyed a wealth of meaning to her. He knew. She read the truth of it in his eyes.
Drake smiled. Not a gloating or malicious expression, in fact it was almost… friendly, but Leesa felt no inclination to respond in kind. Giving a slight nod in the face of her silence, he said, “Well, might as well try to grab a few more hours’ shut-eye if I can. I’ll see you in the morning.” And with that, he turned and strolled away.
Leesa stared after him, her thoughts in turmoil. Without meaning to, she clenched her fist, squeezing the fruit bulb and sending a cold eruption of juice bubbling out to run down her fingers. She barely noticed.
Somehow, that enigmatic smooth-talking bastard knew what she was. So where the hell did that leave her now?
“She really doesn’t recognise me.” Drake was finally able to accept the truth of it. The look on Leesa’s face when she turned around had been unguarded and far too raw to be faked.
No, Mudball agreed. There were no physiological indications of recognition at all, not even a glimmer. Her reaction was one of unmitigated astonishment.
“So, I’m a stranger to her.” He still found the concept an oddly novel one, not to mention intriguing. What could have happened to her memory?
So it would seem. Do you intend to enlighten her?
“No, not immediately at any rate; stranger is good for now.”
Even one she now knows is privy to her true nature? Perhaps tonight’s little scene wasn’t the wisest choice of action.
“I had to be certain…”
Quite. Even so, it’s just as well that one of us doesn’t need to sleep at night.
They’d arrived at Drake’s crewcot. He lifted the flimsy cover and slipped inside. “Leesa would never harm me.”
Of course not; if she knew who you are. I believe we’ve effectively established that at present she doesn’t have a clue. So as things stand you’re merely a stranger who has alerted her to the fact that you know her darkest secret. Congratulations, Drake, you’ve just managed to make an enemy of the most dangerous person on board. Sleep well.
TWELVE
Mornings aboard ship always seemed much the same to Leesa: grey and sombre, with the first few breaths of the day tasting of metal, industry, and recycled air. She was the first up, which was threatening to become a habit. She headed straight to the galley and fixed herself a hot, glucose-rich and vitamin-laden fruit drink. The dreams hadn’t helped her that night, dwelling on a part of her life she already knew well – events that had happened since she’d woken on Babylon, confused and stripped of her past. These immediate memories all started and ended on that world, whereas those she sought lay far beyond. She’d known instinctively that
Babylon wasn’t her home. From the outset she had been ‘other’ – someone who didn’t belong, even on the farm where her life had restarted. A small community, miles from anywhere – all swaying crops and hedgerows, with trees on the skyline and wind and birds and insects… as different from life on the Comet as anything could be. She hadn’t stayed there long; couldn’t afford to linger anywhere until she knew who she was. Her name was all they’d been able to tell her – the farmer who ran the place and his stout and sombre no-nonsense wife. Leesa had considered the name and it seemed to fit, but beyond that no one could or would tell her anything. The couple were middle aged and they struck her as decent, honest folk; hard working but far from wealthy. They were quite open about the fact that they’d been paid to care for her until she woke. When she asked who by, they insisted, “You did.”
Everyone seemed terrified of her, and once she began to discover her body’s capabilities she couldn’t really blame them. Nor could she take issue with the way the farmer and his wife had discharged their duties. She was still alive, after all.
They left her to her own devices for the most part, to wallow in her angst, her confusion and her despair. She had left soon after waking and getting her bearings. She needed answers that clearly weren’t to be found on the farm, and so had set out for the ‘big city’: La Gossa, travelling cross country and by back roads, avoiding people where she could and stealing food when necessary.
This was a dark, dark period. She’d been frightened, confused, and angry; most of all angry. Somewhere between the farm and La Gossa she had killed someone, in circumstances that still weren’t entirely clear. In retrospect, she hadn’t been entirely sane during that period, but she remembered hands on her body, more than one man’s – two, perhaps three of them. Vagrants, she thought; an attempted rape – a young woman travelling alone along a quiet road. There’d been a knife, and at one point her arms had been pinned behind her back, though not for long. She’d broken his neck, she thought; could remember her hands clasping his throat, fingers digging into the tendons while the other hand reached up to fasten onto the side of his head. She shied away from examining what happened after that, and tried to avoid thinking about the incident at all. Not with complete success.
Somehow, she made it to La Gossa. If anyone had helped her along the way she failed to remember them. All she knew was that this was where the space port waited. If she truly had come from off world, La Gossa was the place to start looking. She had a vague hope of finding some record of how she had arrived here, aboard which ship; anything that would give her some clue. No such records existed, it transpired.
La Gossa was intended to be the first step on her journey, but the city proved to be quite an education. Looking back, she’d been lucky to survive those early, fear-driven, memory-blinded days in the capital, relying on her wits and augmented abilities to get by. She had already learned by then to hide the latter.
In La Gossa she fell in with the wrong people and allowed herself to become distracted. She had immersed herself in the city’s seedy underbelly, which enabled her to lose herself, to put off the need to uncover whatever dark secrets her past might conceal.
She shuddered at the memory of that so-recent past, of the lifestyle she’d spiralled into. Not that she regretted the drugs and the fun, or even the sex – well, not the majority of it – but that whole period had been nothing more than wilful evasion of her responsibilities to herself.
If asked, she would have denied ever being a prostitute, but there had been a lot of sex, and if money was on offer, well, how could a girl refuse?
Leesa looked up as somebody entered the galley, glad of the distraction. Anna, the pilot; not that the Comet needed much piloting as far as Leesa could see, but that was how the ebony-skinned woman had introduced herself. Dazzling smile. Leesa was reminded for an instant of another dark-skinned beauty back on Babylon, but suppressed the recollection.
“Hiya, sleep okay?” Anna asked.
“Fine,” Leesa lied. She was still getting used to life on board ship and felt a little wary of how the established crew might react to her, but Anna’s greeting seemed warm enough.
“Hear you’ve got the engines running better than ever,” Anna said, as she poured herself a coffee, programmed some breakfast and then dropped into a seat opposite Leesa. “Thanks.”
The ‘thanks’ likewise sounded genuine, without any obvious guile or sarcasm. “It’s nothing,” Leesa said, unused to compliments and feeling as awkward as she doubtless sounded.
Anna’s breakfast duly arrived. Scrambled eggs, dotted with flakes of something that might have been crisped bacon. Anna ate it daintily though with little attention, while asking Leesa about life on Babylon, questions which she danced around with banalities and half-truths while trying not to sound evasive. She liked Anna.
Eggs finished and plate recycled, Anna stretched and lifted first one bare foot and then the other to rest on an empty seat, flexing her toes. Nice legs, Leesa couldn’t help but notice.
“We’re due to make planet fall early tomorrow,” Anna said, which was news to Leesa. “Can’t say I’m sorry. There’s nothing much for me to do out here once the course has been laid in, except stare at the monitor screens. Which reminds me, I haven’t said good morning to them yet.” She dropped both feet to the floor and stood up.
The comment puzzled Leesa. “Wouldn’t an alarm have sounded if there was any kind of a problem?”
“Oh, sure, but I always like to check in person first thing. Wouldn’t want the controls to get lonely now, would we? I’ll be back in a bit.”
With that Anna bounced from the room with the sort of carefree vigour that Leesa could only envy. No sooner had she left than Drake entered. Leesa froze, but the banker merely smiled and said, “Morning.”
Even when he had his back to her, the brown saucer-like eyes of his genpet stared at Leesa from the creature’s perch near the man’s shoulders. She did her best not to squirm, while reckoning that in one respect mornings on the Comet were much the same as mornings everywhere: they started out greyly and went downhill from there.
During the night things had become a little clearer for Drake, but not as much as he’d hoped; the possibilities hadn’t yet narrowed down to a single irrefutable certainty. He did, however, now know where the Elder cache had to be located and why the captain was being so coy on the subject, but even that realisation opened the door to more questions than it answered. He needed more information, which meant it was time for a bit of deliberate agitation to stimulate a response.
He chose his moment carefully, waiting until there was nobody else in obvious earshot before stopping the captain and asking, with studied casualness, “Just from curiosity, when do you intend telling the crew that you’re taking us all into Xter space?”
Pelquin stared at him for a startled second but recovered quickly, asking, “What makes you think I am?”
“A number of things. To start with, there’s your continued refusal to disclose our destination.”
Pelquin waved a dismissive hand. “A precaution. I wouldn’t want anyone getting drunk in some portside tavern and letting slip something they shouldn’t. Once we’re on the final leg of the journey, I’ll make everything clear enough.”
Final leg? So we’re stopping off somewhere else? “Then, of course, there’s the equipment we took on at Babylon. Some of it is replacement for what was damaged in the attack, granted, but by no means all of it.”
Pelquin tutted. “Mr Drake, I do believe you’ve been snooping again.”
“I prefer to think of it as keeping an eye on things, Captain; which, after all, is what my employer pays me to do.”
“All right then, so what exactly did we take on that has so aroused your suspicions?
“A Ptarmigan; a dissonance field generator.”
Pelquin feigned a puzzled frown. “A what?”
“A device that supposedly works by putting an object marginally out of synch with the rest of th
e universe, making anything within the field it generates very difficult to find. A cloaking system, if you will.”
“Really? I wonder how that got to be there.”
“With a great deal of planning, I would imagine. That’s military grade tech, supposedly classified; a system that isn’t legally available and could only be obtained in a haven of knock-off enterprise such as Babylon. Even then, it’s not the sort of thing you can just walk up and buy on spec. It would have to be ordered well in advance.”
“Would it indeed? My, my, Drake, you’re a positive mine of information today.”
Drake smiled without any hint of humour. “Massaging the estimates presented to First Solar to include enough slack for such an expensive piece of equipment must have taken some doing. I applaud your enterprise.”
Pelquin scratched his chin, keeping up the charade. “So, let’s assume for the moment that you’re right. What if I did commission a cloaking system? Doesn’t mean we’re headed into Xter space. There are a lot of people itching to get their hands on what we know. You’ve seen first-hand how far they’re willing to go. I don’t want us being followed. I’m just being cautious, that’s all.”
Drake shook his head. “No you’re not, and we both know it.”
Pelquin shrugged. “Have it your own way.”
“You’re going to have to tell the crew at some point, Captain. I’d recommend doing so sooner rather than later.”
“Thank you. Your advice is duly noted.”
“You do realise that I can’t condone an illegal incursion into Xter space, don’t you?”
“Trust me, Mr Drake, you won’t have to. Now, if you’ll excuse me…” With that, Pelquin continued on his way.
That went well, Mudball commented. Anyone else on board you’d care to antagonise? Not that there are too many left to choose from.
Mudball…
Yes?