“No. His place.” Moire pointed at Alan, who stared at her.
“I thought we don’t know where it is,” Yolanda said.
Moire took a breath. “I think those coordinates are correct. Wouldn’t you put a place like that in the middle of nowhere?”
“Yeah, but….”
Moire recited her reasons why a pilot was needed to steal the ship after the initial reconnaissance. “I think Kilberton would be willing, but I know more about the place from what Alan told me. Besides, he’s not my first choice for any job that involves sneaking around.”
Yolanda snorted and nodded. “What about everything else, though? You gonna shut down the rest of the operation?”
“We can trust Kilberton with that,” Moire said. “He’s gotten us this far. I’ll teach him what he needs to know before I leave.”
Moire felt Alan grab her wrist with painful strength. “If you are going away I want to go with you,” he said. His face was pale, his eyes worried.
“I’m going back to the place you escaped from,” Moire pointed out gently. “Are you sure you want to go there?”
“I don’t want to go there,” he said, impatient with her lack of understanding. “I want to go with you.”
“You don’t like it, and I can’t blame you,” Gren said. “But it makes sense. He’s the only one of us that has even been there. He’ll protect you, too. I don’t like the idea of your going any, but if you do, take him.”
A long silence followed. Harvey broke it. “How are they going to get on this ship, if it is so secure and all?”
“They can go in a crate. We know that works,” Gren said dryly. Everybody else nodded, grim. That was how the pirates had gotten aboard Ayesha.
“They got working scanners, though,” Yolanda said. “How are we gonna shield the crate?”
Argument swirled about. In a lull, Montero asked calmly, “Why don’t we fix the scanner?”
Moire looked at him with approval. Every now and then Montero came up with a really good idea. The trick was remembering that the rest of the time when he was being a foggy idiot.
“OK—who wants to figure out how we diddle their scanner?”
¤ ¤ ¤
Ennis leaned his full weight on the corner of the printout unit until the signal pinlight changed from amber to green. Everything on Lambert Station seemed to have some idiosyncratic requirement to work and he was disturbed at how quickly he was starting to accept it as normal. In the three weeks since his arrival from FarCom he had learned about the printout unit’s sensitivity to artificial gravity fields, how to deal with the data grid’s habit of occasionally sending open files to random destinations, and the correct method to shut off the heat regulator in his quarters when it thought the temperature was fifty degrees lower than its set point. He still didn’t feel ready to operate the drink dispenser in the mess hall, though.
The printout unit whined and pitched out a handful of sheets, and Ennis let go. Taking the printout without looking at it, he left his office with a feeling of doom and despair. Judging from his new posting, Namur had been furious but determined to make him useful if at all possible. He’d murmured something about making it easier for Cameron to contact Ennis by posting him in the Fringe, but that must have just been an excuse.
He went down the main corridor, detouring around a crew pulling cables out of a hole in the decking. He hoped they were pulling the right ones, and they would know what to do if they did. It was a gamble.
Maybe finding Cameron was Namur’s condition for returning him to his real Fleet post. At least he was still in Fleet. Other than that, he couldn’t find any positives to his situation.
The commanding officer of Lambert Station, Colonel Garner, was hardly ever sober off–duty. The second–in–command, Voss, alternated between fits of arrogance and petty vindictiveness. The noncoms were at best only borderline competent, but that hardly mattered since they were never called on to do anything more complicated than routine maintenance of the two Fleet ships and rescue of inebriated barge pilots. And of course, there was no library.
He reached his destination too soon. Standing rigidly at attention, Ennis took the printout and fastened it with exactness in the proper section. More proof that the base on Lambert Station was a low–priority backwater—it had an old–fashioned bulletin board. Not a display wall, not even a cheap textsheet—an actual, physical surface you pinned things to. This was one of his most important duties so far, at least the one that would be noticed if he didn’t do it. Posting the base pookball schedule.
Ennis shuddered. Pookball was the deranged creation of Vyasandran, the station sergeant, who was definitely the brains of the operation. It was played in one of the hangars with a range of implements scavenged, or, in some cases, liberated. None of them were the same, which made the rules extremely complex. Most of the game seemed to involve deciding which set of rules to apply. Turning away, he glanced at the text and sighed deeply. His worst fear had been realized. His name was on the schedule.
Everybody on base played pookball. There was nothing else to do. The books he’d ordered wouldn’t come in for at least another three weeks, and that was if he was lucky. There must be some other form of entertainment in the civilian part of the station, judging from the amount of trouble the noncoms got into, but he’d decided that was too dangerous. Toren was still trying to find him and there was no reason to make that any easier.
Walking back, he saw that the colonel’s office was still dark. He shook his head, wondering if he should risk a comm call. She must have had another bad night.
It didn’t matter. There wasn’t anything that needed her attention, and it was better if she didn’t come on duty until she’d recovered. Still, it set a bad example. Garner was a good officer when she was sober. So why couldn’t she stay that way?
He entered the main room and headed for his desk.
“Hey, Commander! They got a new circular out.” Sergeant Vyasandran waved him over. “Must have come in on that ore freighter.”
The sergeant had introduced him to the Fringe “circulars,” a curious kind of patchwork news service added on to at every stop. The writing was breathless, the vids rough in quality, and the reliability of the reporting dubious.
“Seems like they got some pirates around Cullen,” Vyasandran said, pointing to the section in question.
“What happened? That area has been safe for years.”
The sergeant shrugged. “Maybe it isn’t true. I thought maybe you might know, eh?” He grinned.
“Sorry, they haven’t told me anything.” They must think it strange Lambert had been sent an intelligence officer when there was nothing even remotely connected to Intelligence for him to do. By default, he had inherited Communications—hence the pookball schedule. He could justify his data research as intelligence–related, but he really did it for a sense of contact with the outside world when so much was changing. His former commanding officer, Shabata, had been promoted and was no longer on Canaveral. He hadn’t seen where she’d been posted yet.
Of course, the courier didn’t show up very often, and when it did the Fleet data was short and to the point, and never had enough information about the war with the crabs. Even that was happening somewhere else.
Sitting at his desk, he checked his old mail–link out of habit and was surprised to see a message waiting. He kept forgetting all ships carried mail out here. It was from Harrington.
Continued survival astounds self and others. Advise avoiding seedy docks and friendly strangers. H.
The origin code said it came from a public kiosk at Criminy. You could get a ship almost anywhere from Criminy; he was probably on his way somewhere else. On a job for Namur? If he had been right about Harrington’s second occupation then Namur should have someone shadowing him here, but everyone on Lambert had been there for at least three months. He’d still been on Canaveral then. Unless he’d been wrong, and nobody had followed him at a
ll. No. Somebody told Namur about that datatab before I did. It had to be Harrington. Nobody else knew.
Ennis reread the message, smiling grimly. He carried the scan–resistant gun everywhere he went, and he never left the base alone. That should lower the chances Toren would be able to get him.
He glanced at the clear polyacrylate block on his desk. Inside it was the ceramic needle he’d shot Moire Cameron with. Sometimes he thought he could still see the blood. Ennis sighed. Wherever Cameron was, she had to be having a better time than he was.
¤ ¤ ¤
“How many days is it again?”
I should have put him in a separate crate. Sedated. “Got at least another day and a half, kid.” Moire shifted position carefully so the crate wouldn’t rock. How had the pirates survived five days like this?
They must have used drugs. But Moire had wanted to be alert to scope out the ship and spy on the crew, and Madele Fortin had convinced her that drugging Alan was potentially dangerous. They hadn’t quite figured out all his physiological weirdnesses, like the synthetic hormone implant he had, or whether his brain chemistry was that of an adult or a child.
Yet another reason to crack Toren’s secret facility. They would have documentation of what they were doing to the Created, and why. Then she could find a way to fix it.
“What’s a garden?”
It took her a moment to even make sense of the question. Then she saw the reader in his hand and understood. He’d been reading one of his books.
“Didn’t you look at the pictures?”
He shrugged, looking confused. “They don’t move, or say anything. Are they finished? The pictures in the dictionary move.”
“Those are vid clips. They are supposed to move.” She shifted again until she was sitting beside him, back against the narrow end of the crate. She took the reader and called up one of the illustrations of The Secret Garden.
“See? It looks like that because it’s a painting. Not a vid still. Those green things are plants, and the colored bits are flowers. That’s what a garden looks like.”
“Oh.” He thought for a moment. “In the book, they have to get dirt and seeds to have a garden. Can we get some?”
“You want to have a garden?” Moire asked, wondering.
“Yes!”
Moire winced, making shushing motions, and Alan put a hand over his mouth. He looked frightened. She put on the viewgoggles and picked up the control for the spycrawlers, switching to the one she’d left in the hold for backup. Nothing was visible; the hatch was still closed. She played back the audio recording, and was relieved to find that Alan’s outburst had been barely audible outside the crate.
“Montero did some good sound insulation, kid. Looks like nobody heard us.”
His eyes squeezed shut. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“It’s OK. Try to be careful. We can’t tell when the crew will come down here, you know. What else did you read about in that book?” she asked, trying to distract him. If only they could take the risk of getting out of the crate now and then it would be a lot easier. She’d only dared to stay out long enough to get the spycrawlers in position.
He scrunched down, stretching his legs. The crate had just enough room for the two of them, supplies, and a tiny sanitation station. The crate was small for Moire, but for Alan it was downright cramped. His face screwed up with thought.
“Sometimes they…when someone says they don’t have a mother, it makes people sad. Can’t they get another one?”
Hoo–boy. This is going to get interesting. She took a deep breath, thinking furiously. “You only get one. That’s all.” She waited, tense, for his next question. The trick was to only answer what he was actually asking, not what she thought he was asking.
He scrunched down even farther. He didn’t look at her. “How did they get that one, then?”
“They were there from the beginning,” Moire said carefully.
“You weren’t there from the beginning,” he said in a very small voice. Suddenly Moire understood, and she couldn’t explain without hopelessly confusing him. Just answer what he asked.
“I didn’t know where you were,” she said finally. Truthfully. She hadn’t even known he existed. If he had been a normal child, he would know that wasn’t a real answer.
“I thought it was part of the Game,” he said. The Game, otherwise known as Pretending to be Normal. “You really are my mother?”
It took her a moment before she could trust her voice. “Yes. Really.” The fact still had the power to panic her. Sometimes she wished she could forget, could hand over the crushing weight of responsibility she had done nothing to deserve. Other times she wondered how she could ever live without him. That frightened her too.
Alan clutched the reader tightly in his arms, then suddenly pressed his face against her shoulder. Just as suddenly, he turned away and curled up on his side.
Moire blinked. He’d done something like this before. A quick nudge with his shoulder, then away. As if he was afraid he’d be seen.
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Toren’s doing, no doubt. Well, she was doing what she could to fix that. That’s why she was sitting in a crate full of gear for three days. Maybe she wasn’t the best mother in the world, but she was the only mother he had. She would just have to figure it out as she went.
One thing she was sure of was kids needed love. Moire sat up carefully and found one of the blankets. She tucked it all around him, ignoring the way he stiffened when he first felt her touch. He’d done that before, too, and she didn’t want to think about why. But then his tension slowly left him, and he turned back toward her and smiled.
She cupped the side of his face with one hand, marveling at the deep color of his gold–brown eyes. “Get some sleep, kid. I’ll wake you before we get there.” He just nodded and closed his eyes, oblivious to her joke. She still had never seen him laugh.
Better get back to work. It will take my mind off things. She put the viewgoggles on and switched back to the first spycrawler. She’d gotten it up to the crew level, but now she wanted to place it inside the bridge. It took forever. The spycrawler was small, which meant it didn’t have much in the way of speedy movement. It hadn’t been intended for covert ops, either. Montero used them for tracing connector problems in tight areas.
Good thing they hadn’t had to rely on Montero for the scanner fix. That had taken too much delicate work, from the long–range focused EMP gun she’d gotten Gren to make, to bribing the station comm operator to allow a temporary reroute of the repair company code. Then all they needed to do was aim the gun in the open hatch of Speedi–Web III, fry the scanner inside, and wait for them to call for a repair. They did let Montero do that part, in a borrowed uniform. Nobody would suspect him of something as complex as an ulterior motive when he seemed barely awake.
It had worked. The newly desensitized scanner let them through without a problem. Now she just had to get as much information as she could before the ship arrived at its secret destination.
She made the spycrawler pick up a scrap of plastic with its grabber arms to hide under as it moved. It hadn’t been very fast to begin with and that slowed it down even more, but she had more than a day to work with. The first priority was to not be caught.
She saw motion through the eyes of the spycrawler, and stopped it. Something in the corridor ahead…but not a human. Something low and compact, moving with slow sweeps side–to–side as it came closer.
Cleaning bot! Why can’t they run a messy ship like everybody else in the Fringe? Quickly, she released the shred of plastic and made the spycrawler shove it out in the corridor then back away. The plastic would delay the cleaning bot, but not for long.
The cleaning bot reached the plastic, whirred angrily, and sucked it up. She swiveled the optical sensor and saw a mesh screen over a vent at the base of the wall.
She trundled the spycrawler as fast as it could go toward the screen. The audio
pickup was getting louder with the sound of the cleaning bot, coming in for the kill. There was the mesh, right in front of her. With skill born of desperation she forced the spycrawler to climb the mesh, using its grabbers in sequence. It wasn’t designed to do that, and she fought to make it release the grabbers to reach the next wire up.
Suddenly the video signal was vibrating wildly, and the audio nearly deafened her. She quickly turned it down. Dammit, if I have to start from scratch with a new crawler… But when the shaking stopped, she could still see the mesh. The spycrawler had hung on.
She rotated the optical sensor again and saw the retreating form of the cleaning bot. Waiting until it had turned a corner, she started the spycrawler back on its way. An hour later it had reached the entrance to the bridge, which was occupied by one of the two–person crew. She parked the spycrawler in a narrow space between two consoles near the pilot’s chair. Remembering the cleaning bot, she made sure to have the spycrawler firmly clamped onto something.
Setting the audio to record and save, she shut down the controls. Alan was asleep beside her, still curled up. Good idea. She slid down beside him and closed her eyes.
¤ ¤ ¤
“Um, sir?”
Ennis looked up from his gloomy contemplation of the data on his screen. Wernicki’s round face was peering around the door to his office, as if she could use the flimsy wall as a shield.
“Yes, what is it?” Of course his one and only direct subordinate would be terrified of him. She was frightened of everybody. He’d tried everything he could think of to get her to show some spine, but it only made things worse.
“The, uh, signal. And I…the manual says to report immediately, but there’s no form reference and all the other report procedures have a form and the general regulations specify a—”
“What signal?” Ennis asked, as gently as he could, considering his growing irritation. At least she’s trying, he reminded himself for the tenth time that day.
Wernicki blinked, visibly restarting her thought process. “Um. I don’t know, sir.”
Raven's Children Page 4