‘Drew…’
‘Is it worth it?’ Drew interrupted him.
Ben just tilted his head slightly.
‘Is it worth it? You who fought and damn well nearly died for the Republic. You clung to that for so long and with such certainty. Is this now worth it?’
Ben stared him down. ‘Yes.’
Drew barked out a laugh. ‘Wrong. Revenge is never worth it!’
‘What makes you think this is revenge?’ And with that one comment, suddenly Drew no longer saw the funny side of it.
‘If it’s not revenge, then what are you doing?’
‘What needs to be done,’ Ben answered calmly.
‘Ah and there we have it – after days mad with fever and death you still clung to it; I knew you couldn’t so easily lose it,’ Drew mused before stepping forward and gesturing grandly, ‘Welcome back to Abantos, Commander Daniels, and may it have mercy on your soul.’
***
‘What do you reckon’s happening out there?’ Simon finally broke the edgy silence that had fallen over the crew as they waited for Ben and Duncan to return. They had, by some unspoken agreement, all elected to wait in the mess for their crewmates; they had dumped their weapons and supplies for their information-gathering trip into Abantos within easy reach around the mess in case of a sudden departure. But having company for the wait didn’t seem to help settle their nerves, although each privately acknowledged that being alone would only make it worse.
‘Well, given that there haven’t been any explosions, nothing exciting,’ Blue responded dryly without even bothering to look up from the engine parts he was cleaning. A Sisyphean task, as they were all destined for the scrapheap, but it made him look busy and helped keep his mind off just exactly what could be happening out there.
‘You really think there could be explosions?’ Simon latched on to the idea with the desperation of someone who didn’t want to consider the real possibilities too closely.
‘Oh, definitely,’ Ash joined in, ‘with the cap, a good explosion always seems to save the day… or at least cause more trouble for his enemies than him, which is all you can really ask for.’
‘Do you reckon he plans it like that?’ Simon continued the discussion.
‘Ha! Not likely; while it nearly always works, I’m not sure planning has much to do with it!’ cried Ash.
‘But almost every time is kind of hard to manage on luck alone,’ Simon pointed out.
‘But not all the time, which would mean planning,’ Ash told him decisively.
‘Do you think we should be ready to leave in a hurry then – I mean in case things go wrong?’ Zhe cut in quietly, stopping all talk of explosions and their usefulness. ‘Not that I think they will,’ she added hastily.
‘They’ll be fine, lass. The captain wouldn’t have gone, if he thought things would be that bad.’ Blue’s attempts to reassure her were thwarted somewhat by Ash’s snort at that idea.
‘Well, come on, when have the levels of danger had any impact on the captain’s decision to do something?’ Ash defended when Blue glared at him over the top of Zhe’s head.
‘Not to mention the veiled references he and Dunc have been making about having been here before,’ Simon added.
‘That was a long time ago,’ Blue told them in an effort to stop this conversation before it really got going.
‘You know about this?’ Ash demanded.
‘Not much; it was before I knew him,’ Blue answered shortly, turning back to the engine parts spread across the table in front of him.
‘Oh, hell no. You’re not wasting your time on those pieces of crap when you’ve got that kind of information.’ Ash swatted a piece out of Blue’s loose grip, who in truth found that this mundane task had lost any appeal it once had.
‘If the captain wanted you to know, he’d have told you.’
‘Since when does he tell us anything important?’ Ash growled, finding this topic a great outlet for his frustrations at the current situation.
‘When we need to know,’ Sophie cut in calmly.
‘You know as well, don’t you?’ Simon quietly accused.
‘Bits and pieces that I’ve picked up along the way,’ Sophie acknowledged.
‘Well?’
‘As Blue said, it was a long time ago and they didn’t make many friends,’ Sophie answered shortly, taking a seat next to Blue and picking up a piece of busted gear housing to work clean, ending the conversation.
***
‘Well?’ Sophie was, quite unsurprisingly, the one who demanded an explanation when Ben and Duncan finally returned to the Coelacanth.
‘We’re good to stay here for the time being,’ Ben replied, looking quizzically at his crew as they all sat around the long table cleaning engine parts that were clearly no use even for scrap.
‘Did we miss something?’ Duncan asked, staring at the same sight.
‘Probably better not to ask,’ Ben replied, having an idea what they were about and decided it wasn’t worth his life to make Sophie admit she was too worried to do anything productive for fear of breaking something important.
‘Do we have a plan yet?’ Ash asked somewhat flippantly, having decided long ago that the captain's plans never worked out exactly how they were supposed to anyway, but none of the fun stuff ever happened until a plan was in place.
‘We do,’ Ben replied, settling in at the table. ‘Drew, our host, has been able to provide us with an approximate location of Sophie’s old friend.’
‘Friend might be stretching it a bit there, Captain,’ Sophie told him with a weak smile.
‘Who is this non-friend anyway?’ Simon asked.
‘She and I… well, we go way back, but that was a long time ago and before she came out here, certainly,’ Sophie paused, her face betraying the memories she was reliving. ‘We didn’t part on the best of terms.’
‘So we’re just going to waltz up to her and expect her to help us out?’ Ash asked incredulously.
‘No, we’ll scope out the area, see who’s in charge around there and how well she’s set up. We need to know everything we can about her and her operations before we walk in. Then if we think it’ll work, Sophie’ll go in.’
‘And if we don’t think it’ll work?’ Blue enquired mildly.
‘Then I’ll go in,’ Ben told them with a touch of finality to his voice.
‘Captain, if she’s not willing to do business with me then…’ Sophie trailed off before forcing herself to finish, ‘she won’t do business with you either.’
‘And why’s that, Soph?’
‘Because, chances are, she knows I sail with you,’ Sophie reluctantly told them.
‘How the hell would an old non-friend know something like that?’ Duncan queried, picking up on Simon’s phrase to refer to their target.
‘Sophie.’ Ben tried to draw her out.
‘She's not an old friend… she’s my sister.’
‘Sister!’ Simon cried in surprise, bordering on alarm; family feuds were always a death sentence for outsiders who got involved.
‘And just when were you planning on telling us that little nugget of information?’ demanded Ash as he threw his chair back.
‘Ash, sit down,’ Ben commanded.
‘Her damned sister. Oh this is just wonderful! We’re about to wander into a family spat with disks containing who knows what, with half the sea trying to get them from us and the other half just plain out to kill us!’ Ash worked himself up into a full-blown rant.
‘Ash, sit down!’ Ben thundered when it became clear that he was just going to keep listing all the reasons that this was going to fail.
Zhe squeaked at the sudden outburst, which thankfully helped diffuse the tension between Ben and Ash, which was bubbling dangerously close to the surface.
Ash took his seat with delibe
rate movements that spoke of the anger just waiting to jump out. ‘Captain,’ he acknowledged stiffly.
‘Thank you.’ Ben returned the gesture in an equally formal tone.
‘Now, Sophie, I think we might need to hear more of the circumstances of your parting from your sister. Hell knows I don’t want to pry, but family spats have an alarming tendency to fester and get a whole lot worse the longer you leave them, so we'd better have all of it before we walk blind into this mess.’
‘Aye Captain,’ Sophie agreed quietly, such a reversal of personality that it only added to the anxiety of the whole crew.
Simon slid his arm around her shoulders, silently giving her his support for what was going to be a painful story.
‘Mel and I… we were always close, even as kids, we had the same love of computers, same interests, same tastes and, well, that was the root of the problem. We grew up coding and hacking, and, well, computers were so natural to us. It became a game: who could decrypt faster, who could break down the walls, who could navigate their way through this system or who could trip the other up. Everything was always a game, a fun game – us against the world. We pulled some stupid shit and, well, got on the kind of radars you really wanted to avoid.’ Here she paused for a moment. ‘And that’s when Max turned up.’ She took a deep breath, stood up and began pacing. ‘Max… shit. Look, okay, all you need to know is we were both in love with him… and he… he played both of us. We went from being a team to at each other’s throats; what used to be a game became a cutthroat competition – who was better? And that’s what he came for; he needed the best and played us to the point that we couldn’t go back – the winner would have to go with him. He pushed us into a world we knew nothing about before. Where we’d done stupid things, we’d now done things you don’t come back from. We did anything and everything for him, and it ended the only way it could I suppose: he picked her and tried to kill me.’ Sophie retook her seat at that announcement and dropped her head into her hands.
‘Shit, Soph…’ Duncan moved to comfort her, but she had one last parting shot:
‘Last time I saw Mel, I was bleeding out on the floor as she left with Max. I heard she killed him later, but that’s just rumour.’
‘Aw hell, Soph. Why are we even bothering with her?’ Ash asked, his anger evaporating.
‘Because she can get into the disks,’ Sophie told them with certainty.
‘Which isn’t going to mean a damn thing if she won’t work with us,’ Duncan pointed out.
‘She’ll do it. I know she will.’
‘Sophie, you’re holding on to the fact that she may regret how things turned out.’ Ben left out the part where that isn’t likely to be true.
‘The rumour was that she had Max introduce her to the people she needed and then killed him for hurting someone she loved. No one knew who,’ Sophie told them quietly.
‘It’s a big risk.’
‘When are we not taking a big risk lately?’ she retorted with a half-smile that was more of a grimace.
‘Do you know who Max worked for?’ Ben asked.
‘No, he never said, but rumour says Mel now works with Kristoff.’
‘Yeah, that’s what Drew’s heard.’
‘Well, let’s go check it out then,’ Duncan pushed for decisive action.
‘You good, Soph?’ Ben asked.
Sophie took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. ‘Yeah.’
‘Then let’s get moving. Blue, you’re going to stay onboard, keep an open comm. line. Soph, set him up with whatever cameras you managed to get a link into; you’ll be our eyes, Blue. Simon, you’ll stay here with Blue, make sure no one gets too interested in the Coelacanth, but I want you to be ready to come out fighting if we need you. Dunc, Ash, Soph, you’ll be with me; we’ll head out and see what we can find; nothing crazy; but we need to watch our backs here.’
‘And me?’ asked Zhe, who had grown so quiet during Sophie’s tale that she was almost invisible.
‘Zhe, I want you watching the monitors with Blue; another pair of eyes will be useful. Especially yours.’
‘Why especially hers?’ Simon questioned as everyone moved to grab their weapons, ready for their foray into Abantos.
‘Well,’ Ben threw a look in Zhe’s direction, ‘she’s spent the better part of her life fading into the background and watching. I’d imagine that’d make someone pretty good at seeing what’s really going on. What do you reckon, Zhe?’ He threw out a smile at her.
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘I’m sure you will,’ Ben replied, checking he had everything. ‘We good to go?’ he asked, receiving affirmatives in one fashion or another from all the crew. ‘Right, let’s get moving. Dunc, you’re out in front on this one.’
‘Right you are, Cap,’ Duncan acknowledged, leading them out of the Coelacanth and into Abantos.
Chapter Eighteen
‘So…’ Simon’s voice edged into the silence of the control room, almost as though sound itself wasn’t sure it was welcome in the tense atmosphere.
With nothing else forthcoming, Blue glanced over his shoulder at where Simon stood as rear guard, raising an eyebrow in question.
‘What… what do you look for, Zhe?’ He latched onto the first thing that came to mind that wasn’t a pointless question on how they thought things would go.
Now it was Zhe’s turned to look inquisitively at the doctor, but a fleeting glance was all she would spare from the monitors in front of her.
‘The captain said you were good at observing,’ Simon elaborated, more for something to say than great curiosity over the subject.
‘You look for… you need to look at body language over anything else,’ Zhe asserted finally. ‘People learn to control their words, tone and even expressions more easily, but body language always outs,’ she explained.
‘So, body language is the key to what a person is really feeling?’ Simon pressed, growing more interested in the conversation.
‘It can be, but it’s more than that.’ Zhe glanced back again to see if Simon really was interested and wanted her opinion. It was an unusual sensation to have her opinion sought, but not as wholly foreign as she thought it would be. Simon’s nod encouraged her to continue.
‘The way they position themselves in a room can tell you what they are protecting or what they’re trying to draw your eye to. Their level of confidence and the shift of their eyes to the hatchways can tell you if there is something about to happen. The same goes for the speed at which they talk or move. But, also, the absence of these things tell you something.’ Zhe paused, wondering if she’d said too much.
‘How can an absence of movement tell you anything?’ Simon queried, leaning forward as if he would learn more quickly that way.
‘Well, if you walk into a room and there’s something out of place then your eye is drawn to it, right? So, if someone doesn’t look at it, then they are having to make a concerted effort not to, which could mean they don’t want to draw it to your attention. And anything your enemy doesn’t want you to know is something that is very probably worth knowing.’
‘Okay, that makes sense,’ Simon said slowly, as if processing what she had said.
‘It works well for social environments, too,’ Zhe added. ‘If you look over here,’ she pointed to the centre left screen, ‘no one is batting an eye at the drying blood symbols on the wall. That means its common and not a new turf war, but a restating of current boundaries. Or if you look at this screen, you can see that this tunnel is the fastest route between Wards Eight and Twelve, but no one is using it; they are all going around the long route,’ she told him, pointing at the next screen over, which clearly showed people scurrying around to an adjacent tunnel. Now this would make sense if the first tunnel were dark, narrow and generally uninviting, and the second a wider, better-lit tunnel, but the reverse was true.
; ‘Okay, so why are people choosing the dank dark tunnel?’ Simon gave in and asked having failed to deduce the reason himself.
‘My best guess would be it’s a traitors’ gate,’ Blue interjected, joining in the discussion.
‘What? How can you know?’ Simon demanded as Zhe nodded in agreement.
‘Watch how they move past it,’ Zhe told him, ‘see how they quicken their steps and each of them can’t help but throw a glance up to the top of the tunnel where those beams cross it?’
‘Well, yeah, but they’re just a feature of the buildings, right? I mean this was the artisans’ home, right?’ Simon questioned, unsure.
‘It was, yes, and a very nice neighbourhood, too,’ Blue commented.
‘But look closer at those beams; don’t you see the ruts worn into them? There’s three or four of them a couple of feet from each other.’
‘Yes, I see them,’ Simon agreed, still not getting the importance.
‘They’re the marks that get left behind from a noose, Simon.’
‘What?’
‘It’s likely that the artisans who originally fought back were hanged here and left to rot as a symbol,’ Zhe explained, not noticing Blue’s rather curious look thrown in her direction at her level of explanation.
‘But… that was decades ago! Surely, they weren’t left…’ Simon trailed off; the image of decades-old bodies swinging across the tunnel was too gruesome to acknowledge out loud.
‘Getting a little squeamish on us, Crippen?’ Blue nudged him teasingly. ‘Not to worry though, lad, I’m sure there have been plenty of other traitors for the Abanitians to string up annually,’ Blue told him jovially.
‘So they just don’t want to walk under where bodies have hung?’ Simon asked.
‘It’s probably a bit more than that; I mean, would you want to walk across the Jigs platform?
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