Scouts

by Nobilis Reed

  “Enjoying looking at you.”

  “Really, Challers. It’s one thing to get jealous of someone who might, in some perspective, be a threat to you. But him?”

  “I’m sorry. So easy to let those feelings take over, you know?”

  She gave me a hug. “I know all about letting feelings take over, Challers.”

  Valka’s image stared at me across the little desk. It seemed that she was even more drained than before, tension twisting her features.

  “Challers, I’m worried about Masters. He’s turning inward. Not really talking to me, not really opening up. Could you ask Shirley if something happened while they were together, or maybe if he said anything to her about something before they were together? I’ve tried everything I know to reach him.”

  Her gaze dropped to her hands, clutched together in front of her. “I know you don’t like Masters much, or at least, my relationship with him, but I’m kind of stuck with him and, well . . . I hope you understand. I need to get through to him.”

  The message cut out and I slumped back in my chair. My first thought was, “How dare she? Wanting me to help her get closer to Masters?”

  Then Shirley walked into our quarters and put her arms around my neck and kissed my cheek. “Another message from Valka?”

  At that moment, I knew I had to help her. How could I deny Valka the kind of relationship with Masters that I had with Shirley? I squeezed her head to my cheek and then rose to my feet.

  “She wants my help,” I said.

  “What kind of help?”

  “I’m not sure. I need to figure out how to give her what she needs.”

  “Well, if there’s anything I can do to help, let me know.”

  “Actually, there is. Can you tell me what it was like on your cruise with Masters?”

  “What do you mean? It was a cruise. We were just delivering mail most of the time, making the circuit from station to station. Not really much of a big deal.” She turned away, and I could feel a tension come over her.

  “There’s more you’re not telling me.”

  “I’d . . . I don’t think it’s proper to compare one partner to another. I’m sure Valka will do fine with him.”

  I stood behind her and put my arms around her, hands resting lightly on her belly. “I don’t think you’re sure at all.”

  “You’re right. Masters is . . . wounded. Somehow. It happened during his stay at the academy, but I swear, I don’t know what it is. I tried to get through to him, but after a while, it just turned out to be easier to let him be. Whatever was bothering him seemed better left buried.”

  “Valka seems to have picked up on that. She’s trying to get past his defenses and having a rough time of it. You never looked into the matter?”

  “What could I do? We were out on our cruise.” She sighed and her shoulders slumped.

  “There’s more you’re not telling me.”

  She gently pulled my arms away from her and stepped into the fresher. “I really shouldn’t. It’s not my place to talk about him. It’s between Valka and Masters, really, to work this out.” She picked up a washcloth, wet it under the tap, and ran it over her face.

  “This is for Masters and Valka. If he’s as wounded as you say, he’s not capable of making this work between the two of them. She needs our help.”

  She let out a deep breath and closed her eyes. “The woman he arrived with . . . Cassandra. She was reassigned by headquarters halfway through the academy.”

  “Reassigned? To where?”

  “I don’t know. He never found out. It’s a secret. Completely need-to-know.”

  I stepped closer and put my arm around her. “It hurt you, to see him in such pain, closing himself off like that.”

  A tear ran down her cheek. “Yes. It was like . . . it was like living with a walking corpse. He walked and talked and made all the right movements, but there was never a connection there. I think he decided that if he couldn’t have Cassandra, he wouldn’t have anyone.”

  I kissed her. “I’ve kind of felt that way myself, here and there. It must have been terrible.”

  “I’m sorry, Challers, but I just don’t have the information. I can’t help Valka. I couldn’t even help myself. If there had been anything I could do . . .”

  I squeezed her. “Come on. Let’s go to bed. I don’t think Valka knows about Cassandra. That’ll be a place for her to start.”

  She turned and hugged me back. “I’m so glad you didn’t go that way, Challers. If you had, I don’t know what I would have done. I was so afraid, so afraid that when you and Valka broke up, it would happen all over again.”

  “You held back because you thought I was going to go the same way, turn cold and dark, and you didn’t want to get pulled into the same black hole with me.”

  She nodded. “I’m sorry. It was the exact wrong thing to do.”

  “We got it worked out. They can too. I’ll tell her about Cassandra. Maybe she can use that to get more information.”

  “Please tell her not to do any searches in the system for her. It really is need-to-know. If she does look, it could easily get traced back to us.”

  I made a noncommittal sound.

  “I’m serious, Challers. Cassandra is a taboo subject. Just looking for her name almost got me kicked to the bottom of the prestige ladder. Make sure she understands. Command doesn’t make a big deal about many things as long as we complete our missions. Some things, though, get their attention. Cassandra’s one of them.”

  “Okay, I’ll warn her.”

  I returned to my tablet and started my own recording. “Hi, Valka. Shirley doesn’t know much about what happened with Masters. He was already pretty closed off by the time she met him. I’d like to talk about it, though, face to face. I’d like to meet you down by the water, where we met those newgens the first day of class. Maybe tonight, after the dark shift begins on the oxygen deck? Let me know when you can come.” I ended the recording, sent it off, and sat back in my chair.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” Shirley came out and ran her fingers through my hair.

  “No, it’s best if you don’t, I think. She came to me for answers, and I’m going to give them to her myself.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Lights from the far side of the river reflected on the surface of the water, merging and splitting and sweeping out short, quick elliptical arcs.

  Valka sat down next to me, close enough to hold hands if she wanted to, but she wrapped her arms around her knees instead. “So.”

  “Thanks for coming,” I said, looking over to her face.

  She stared into the water. “You have something for me?”

  “Not a lot. Masters hadn’t told Shirley much more than he told you.”

  “That’s not hard. He hasn’t told me anything.” Valka’s tone held frustration and sadness.

  “Her name’s Cassandra. She was pulled out of the academy about a quarter of the way through, and disappeared. Anyone who looked into it got slapped down, hard. It hurt him pretty bad.”

  Valka sighed. “I figured it was something like that. He looks at me sometimes and I can just tell that he’s wishing I was someone else.”

  “Yeah. Well, anyway, Shirley says not to look into it. It’s too dangerous, for all of us.” I looked back out over the water, at the lights winking out one by one in the far side of the ring. “At least people like Shirley and Robert have some hope that someday they’ll have a cruise together.”

  “Robert?”

  “He’s the guy Shirley was recruited with. Her true love.”

  “And they’ve never had a cruise together. How old is she? How many years has she been a Scout?”

  “She said she’s been a Scout for ten years. That makes her what, almost thirty?”

  “Vack. I wish I had a safe tablet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Anything you look up on your tablet is keyed to your ID. I’ve seen the data taps. You can’t do anything wit
hout the Scouts knowing. Too much sniffing around sets off alarms. I know. I tried.”

  “You did? What happened?”

  “I got a stern talk from Director Kal. She said that, prodigy or no, if I went poking around secrets beyond my station, I’d get sent to the Merchants.”

  “Vack.”

  “Yeah.”

  My jaw fell open, and I looked over my shoulder at the robot standing in the vineyards behind us, my heart beating fast. “Wait. Wait . . . come with me.” I stood up, grabbing Valka’s hand. “Come on. I need to show you something.” I pulled Valka towards the vineyard, nearly breaking into a run.

  “Have you gone crazy?”

  “No. You have to see this.” I stepped over the border of narcotic plants. There was no time to pick one and no need. In minutes, we were in the hideout. Luckily, it was just the two of us, alone. I pulled a chair from the table in the center of the room and set it in front of the tablet. “There.”

  Valka looked around. “What is this place?”

  “A refuge. I come here sometimes to get away from the academy. No rules, no supervision.”

  “You set this all up?”

  “No, it’s been set up like this for a long time, long before we got here. A cadet named Trace brought me here and showed me everything. Look. This tablet. It’s logged in. Not you, not me. Autonomous.”

  “No. Tablet’s don’t work that way. Someone has to be nearby, someone with an implant, or it just shuts down.” She leaned down and examined the case in minute detail. “Oh, vack.” She pointed to a lump stuck on the side of the unit.

  I looked. There, suspended in semi-transparent epoxy, was a tiny silver square. “Someone dug out his implant to keep this tablet running.”

  It was an operation that couldn’t have been done painlessly and, what’s more, the Scout who did it would be discovered in no time. There simply was no way to get around, no way to get anything done at the academy, without it. Someone sacrificed everything to keep that tablet running.

  “Yeah.” Valka examined the holograms suspended over the table. “You need these?”

  “They keep watch for us, let us know if anyone’s coming.”

  “Fine.” She waved her hand through the interface and the images floated up out of her way. “Watch them. I need to see what this thing is connected to.”

  She pulled up new screens and interfaces, typing commands on virtual keyboards faster than they could be spoken. I watched for a while, recognizing some things from when we were data management students on Stakroya, but many of them were new to me.

  “You’ve been studying.”

  She smiled up at me briefly before going back to work. “You can’t give me toys like these and expect me not to play with them. Now quiet. I’m working.”

  I pulled up a second chair and sat down behind her to watch the monitors. Normally, no one was going to show up on them, except possibly Suna or Zun, but given what she was doing, the chances of that were somewhat higher.

  Not too much higher, I hoped.

  For an hour, the only sound was the little beeps and clicks the tablet made to acknowledge commands. I kept watch as well as I could, but my gaze kept drifting to the back of Valka’s head and body. Even from the back, even after everything that happened, she was still beautiful to me.

  Finally, I caught myself nodding in my chair and stood up. “Valka. It’s getting late. You need to get some sleep. Masters is going to get worried about you.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Suspicious, then. You need to go back to the academy.”

  She sighed. “You’re right. This is going to have to wait.”

  She shut down the screens she had been using and returned the external monitors to their old positions.

  “Did you learn anything.”

  “Lots, but nothing really useful—yet.”

  I opened the hatch and started down the robot’s leg. “Like what?”

  “The cable that runs down the robot’s leg doesn’t just go to the toe sensor you use to open the hatch. It’s connected to a major information hub, probably running down into the soil to the next level below this one. It’s pretty sophisticated. It functions by rerouting data requests that were sent from elsewhere, so it doesn’t get profiled by the system. Its activities get lost in the noise.”

  “Wow. Impressive. So what did you learn with all this?”

  “I spent most of my time just getting familiar with this system. Next time, I can start trying to track down where Cassandra went.”

  “You really want to get them together.”

  “Masters can never be whole until they are. I can’t just let him suffer like this.”

  Hmm. Suffer. That wasn’t a word I had thought to associate with Masters, but if Valka said he was suffering, then he was suffering. An ugly little part of me was glad—the jealous part that I thought I had killed. I shoved that thought out of my head. What if Valka had been taken from me the same way? What if the possibility of piloting a Scout craft with Valka wasn’t even a nebulous possibility for the future? How would I react to that? Besides, if I could give Masters the love of his life, maybe he’d leave me mine.

  “Right. Well. First step to getting them back together is finding her. Are you coming back tomorrow night?

  Valka nodded as we stepped back out onto the road. “Yah. I don’t know how long this will take; I don’t want to pass up any opportunities.”

  My heart leapt. Maybe we weren’t going on a date, but the fact that she was coming back, that I would see her again, left me giddy.

  When I got back to our quarters, Shirley was waiting for me. “How did it go? Is she going to investigate?”

  I groaned. I didn’t want to lie.

  Shirley shook her head. “You made it clear how bad it could be if she pokes around in this?”

  “Yes, she knows.”

  “Then you’ve done what you could. If she’s smart, she’ll let this go. Find some other way to get through to him. I should probably have a talk with him, myself.”

  I nodded.

  Over the next few days, I slipped out to meet Valka at the hideout every night. It felt a lot like when we were studying the Scouts’ data for the secret that would get us selected. Hours spent poring over immense mountains of data, looking for correlations to a secret that wasn’t quite contained within it, because there were holes.

  Someone had expunged massive amounts of data to conceal what had happened to Cassandra. Her name didn’t appear anywhere. As far as any of the records were concerned, Masters had arrived alone, which we knew wasn’t possible. Everyone arrived as a part of a couple.

  Very quickly, it occurred to us that Cassandra’s disappearance would likely cause an imbalance—a male Scout with no partner. We looked for him, looked for disruptions in the pairings that such an assignment would cause. We found more than one, but most were easily eliminated. Trace’s switch from male to female, of course, caused a surplus on the female side, but it appeared to be balanced by another switch in the opposite direction, though we couldn’t find exactly where.

  “Here he is,” said Valka and pulled up a record on her screen. “Joco Gata.”

  “That name sounds familiar.” I snapped my fingers. “I met him. He’s a robot tech; he works nearby.”

  “That makes sense,” said Valka. “This is his tablet.”

  “What?”

  “It’s his ID implant glued to the side. I assume it’s his.”

  “Why did he get thrown out of the Scouts?”

  She did a few more queries. “Looks like he got too curious. Had several disciplinary actions because of information breaches. It says he was a mentor at the academy, but doesn’t say who his student was—to me, that’s a sure sign that she was his student. He was probably looking into her disappearance.”

  “That sounds right; look at this setup. Seems like exactly the thing someone would set up for surreptitious access to the network. One thing doesn’t fit, though. Why does his ID impl
ant have access to all this information? Wouldn’t it have been locked down when he was kicked out?”

  “It doesn’t. That’s just signed into the tablet; that identification isn’t going out beyond here. There’s a slave process running on the hub that hijacks data queries from elsewhere on the system and substitutes its own. When the response comes through, it plucks the response out of the stream and reports the message lost back to the system.”

  “Wouldn’t that eventually cause the hub to get reported as faulty?”

  “Not if we don’t use it too much.”

  “That explains why you’re storing most of the information locally. So it looks like Joco is the one who set this system up. He may even have set up the whole hideout. I wonder if Suna or Zun know about him?”

  “Who?”

  “Suna and Zun are newgens who come around here from time to time. I haven’t seen either of them for a while, though.”

  “I hope they won’t mind us using the computer.”

  “Doesn’t matter if they do. This is too important. Just be careful, okay? Looks like Joco’s under the equivalent of house arrest over this.”

  “I will.”

  I stood up. “All right. I think I need to talk to Joco and find out if he knows anything about what happened to Cassandra. Maybe talk to Suna and Zun, too.”

  In order to catch the newgens attention, I set up a new holographic monitor on the tablet and opened a simple text document with big glowing letters.

  WE NEED TO TALK. MEET HERE ONE HOUR AFTER DARK SHIFT STARTS.

  Leaving that open while we were out would catch their attention next time they came to the hideout.

  Joco wouldn’t be so easy to get to, though. I only knew where he was during the light shift, and even then, only a vague notion. I needed a reason to go down to the river again to look around for him. Maybe I could claim I dropped something? No, that wouldn’t work; we were naked going down the river. There didn’t seem to be any good excuse to go looking for him.