Children of Scarabaeus Read online

  “We need to be at the labs in a few minutes.”

  “Okay.” He started clearing up the bits.

  “I’m glad you’re making him a gift. Maybe it makes up for what we’re making him do.”

  A frown flickered across Finn’s face. “You make it sound like we’re corrupting him. He doesn’t understand what he’s doing.”

  “One day he might. If he grows up to be a loyal citizen, what will he think of the fact that he committed treachery?”

  “If your life with the Crib is any indication, he’s got all kinds of disillusionment in store for him—even without our help.”

  Still, she hated the idea of Galeon becoming disillusioned with Finn, in particular.

  “Is there any chance…” She wasn’t sure if she dared ask the question, but he looked at her expectantly. She had to ask. “Any chance your friends would agree to rescuing the children as well?”

  Finn’s mouth compressed ever so slightly. It made Edie think he’d bitten back what he was going to say. Instead, he asked, “What makes you so sure they need rescuing?”

  “Because I’d have wanted to be rescued at age ten if I’d known what my life would become.”

  “The kids are fine, Edie.”

  “Pris isn’t fine—she’s in a coma!” Her voice rose, louder than she’d intended. “Galeon’s life is reduced to crawling around the ship at night for fun—”

  “Wait—who?”

  For a moment, Edie had forgotten she’d never told Finn about Pris. “She’s the cypherteck they used to torture you.”

  That got his attention. “They used a kid?”

  “That’s what they do, Finn. They’ll use them any way they want to. They can justify anything when they claim the future of humanity is at stake.”

  Finn jammed the pegs he’d made into a tiny pouch that he slipped in his pocket. “Can we ask Valari and Corinth to put themselves at risk abducting these kids on the grounds that you don’t like how they’re being raised?” She wondered if he was playing devil’s advocate. “Anyway, how do you propose to grab a kid in a coma without anyone noticing?”

  “I haven’t thought it through completely, I admit,” Edie said. “Let’s talk about this another time.” She’d planted the idea in his head. Maybe he needed time to mull it over. “So what about these Saeth—do you trust them? With our secret, I mean.”

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  She wanted to ask about Valari—wanted to ask something about Valari. What the woman had meant to him, what she meant to him now. How exactly to put that into words? She had no right to delve into his past and his feelings when their own relationship was barely half formed. In any case, he was not a man who talked freely about such things.

  They headed for the lower decks. A crew member in casual clothes joined them in the lift, nodding a greeting. He got out on Deck C, to Edie’s relief. Finn stared at the lift door as it closed, his eyes unfocused. The lift ascended.

  “You seem distracted,” she said.

  He snapped his attention to her, hesitated a few seconds, then said, “No, it’s nothing. Not compared to what you’re going through right now.”

  “What is it, Finn?”

  “I guess I never expected to see her again.” His lips quirked in a quick grin. “I must be in shock.”

  So, he was thinking about Valari. Edie’s stomach sank but she rallied a brave face. “In shock? I thought you loved her.”

  He gave her a strange look. “I never said that.”

  “Did you love her?” May as well find out.

  “I was nineteen years old and infatuated. She made me feel…Well, it doesn’t matter. I was a stupid kid and it took me a long time to realize that I was just one of many similarly stupid kids.”

  “Do you feel manipulated?”

  “Not exactly. I agreed with her ideals regardless of our relationship. Through her I found the Saeth. Something to fight for that went beyond the politics of individual worlds.”

  His low tone and refusal to meet her eyes told Edie he didn’t want to talk about it further. Fair enough. Despite Edie’s burning curiosity, any personal history between Valari and Finn wasn’t her business.

  But this wasn’t just personal. She sensed the lure of his wartime comrades pulling him away from her. What if the leash was the only thing holding him at her side?

  By the time Valari and Corinth showed up at the lab, Galeon had long since returned to his dorm, following two more rounds of Pegasaw with Finn. Edie explained the boy’s in volvement, assuring them he could be trusted thanks to his friendship—more like hero worship—with Finn.

  “Good thing you have help,” Corinth said, glancing around the lab with the professional eye of a teck. “My crew key gets me into a lot of places, but not here.” He gave a low whistle as he scanned the modules. “Is this stock biocyph? Incredible. This could make enough med-teck to save a million lives. Ten million lives.”

  “We have something that could save billions,” Finn said.

  Valari’s eyes lit up with interest. She had sidled close to him. “Tell us.”

  “I’ll let Edie explain.” Finn moved away from her and from the group, and for the third time checked that the hatch was locked. He remained at the door as if standing guard, although his stance was casual. One look at his face told Edie that he was still working through some emotions. She, on the other hand, had taken some effort to push her grief aside for the moment.

  “It’s an algorithm,” she said, “a cryptoglyph that can permanently break the biocyph lock on terraforming seeds. It removes the need for the annual Crib renewal key.”

  For a moment Valari seemed dumbfounded. Then, her voice thick with doubt, she said, “Does it work?”

  “I think it will, yes.”

  “I’ve heard of rovers selling keystone BRATs to Fringers. They never perform as advertised, if at all.”

  “This is different. Those keystones are patches and the biocyph learns to work around them in a couple of years. This isn’t a patch, it’s a permanent solution because it destroys the lock.”

  “Where is this cryptoglyph? Did you write it?”

  “No. I…found it, and stored it in Finn’s chip.”

  “Is there some reason we can’t transmit it to the Fringe right now?”

  “It’s integrated into his chip. Can’t be downloaded.”

  Corinth had been listening carefully, leaning against the console with his arms folded. If he thought it was too good to be true, he showed none of Valari’s suspicion. “So we’re talking about a new long-term mission—visiting each planet on the Fringe, jacking into the BRATs, and breaking the locks one by one.”

  “Yes. But there might be a much quicker solution.”

  Edie pulled a palmet off her belt and called up an encrypted file she’d prepared, a file she kept isolated from the ship’s databases. A holo bloomed over the device, showing a sim of the biocyph module she’d appropriated.

  “You managed to embed a biocyph lock in stock biocyph?” Corinth looked suitably impressed, and Edie was pleased he knew enough to recognize what he was seeing. Maybe he could help with the leash after all.

  “I intend to crack this lock with the cryptoglyph,” she explained. “Because the lock is embedded in stock biocyph, its form is essentially generic—”

  “—so cracking this should create a master key. A key we can transmit. Holy fuck.” Corinth looked at Valari, excitement gleaming in his eyes.

  Valari was evidently bewildered by the holo display. When it came to the technical details, she relied on his reaction to determine how she should react. Now she looked cautiously enthusiastic. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Are we jeopardizing our escape plan in any way by doing this?”

  “I’ve already configured the biocyph module,” Edie said. “I need an hour or so to create the crack, which I can store in my splinter. Then I wipe the module and leave it on the rack—eventually someone will come to use it and discover it’s a dud. They’ll never k
now why.”

  “As for the transmission,” Corinth said, his enthusiasm gaining momentum, “once it’s out there, it’s out there. Can’t be pulled back.”

  “Can we send it from here?” Edie asked.

  “Well, there are two issues,” he said. “First, we can’t encode the message, else the Fringers won’t be able to read it. Second, if we do it from here, we’d have to hide the origin of the transmission. We’d use a scrambled line, and that would be enough if it was just a single site-to-site transmission. But we’re talking about blasting the entire Reach with this thing. If anyone did manage to track it back, we’re in trouble. My suggestion is to send it to the Molly Mei on a scrambled line, and have them send it out.”

  “There’s a third issue,” Valari said. “Convincing the Fringers that the code isn’t some snippet of a hacker’s bio-bomb, or a Crib trick. They won’t upload it to their seeds unless they trust it.”

  “We need a guinea pig,” Corinth said. “A world that does trust the code, to show the way. Once word gets around that it works—assuming it does work—the other planets will be happy to use it too.”

  Valari nodded slowly, deep in thought. She threw a glance in Finn’s direction. He was still at the hatch, listening in silence. “I’ll find a suitable world. You get this master key made,” she told Edie. “Corinth, help her.”

  Edie felt her hackles rise at Valari’s tone. When had the woman decided she was in charge of Edie’s project? She couldn’t let it slide.

  “I don’t actually need his help.” She took a moment to enjoy the look of surprise on Valari’s face. “I just need Finn.”

  Valari had the good grace to incline her head in acknowledgment. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

  “I know you don’t need my help,” Corinth told Edie, “but I’d like to jack in and watch you work, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure.” Edie reeled out a hardlink from her belt, handed it to him, and moved the biocyph module into place between them. She pressed her fingers to the port while he plugged in the hardlink and attached the other end to a tiny device behind his ear—the dry–wet interface that allowed him limited access to biocyph circuitry.

  Valari wandered over to Finn and engaged him in quiet conversation. Edie found herself watching them both, searching for visual clues that might tell her where their relationship stood. When she realized Corinth was observing her, she looked away sharply, swiveling her seat a few degrees to hide her face, which felt so hot it must surely be flushed.

  It was a relief when Finn came over at last. “Ready for me?”

  “Yes.”

  He sat beside her. She connected their temples with a hardlink and the familiar cadences of his chip filled her mind. His chip was a miniature version of the biocyph module, a single thread of biocyph that the infojack Achaiah had grafted to his existing chip in order to link its receiver to Edie’s splinter. Most of the thread was empty matrix, and Edie had used that to store the cryptoglyph.

  The cryptoglyph could not be copied or downloaded, so the work now had to take place in Finn’s chip, with her splinter serving as a bridge. She gathered together the knot of notes that formed the biocyph lock and fed them into his chip. Finn stirred beside her, frowning as he sensed the added load of data. She was aware of Corinth hovering in the background, interpreting the datastream in whatever manner his interface allowed him.

  The lock formed an input shelf, a query awaiting code. Normally, the Crib provided that code—at a price. Now the cryptoglyph in Finn’s chip flowed around the lock, not to fill the input but to change its actual structure. The two datastreams pressed together like lovers at a dance, moving at first out of time with each other, but quickly falling into step.

  The lock shifted suddenly, unfolding and refolding into a new configuration. The cryptoglyph melted away to leave behind a perfectly tuned string of notes.

  “That’s it? That’s the crack?” Corinth murmured.

  Edie copied the string to her splinter and ran a series of checks, looking for flaws in the code. Once she’d satisfied herself that it was perfectly formed, she disconnected the link.

  Only then did she give herself permission to feel satisfied. She met Finn’s gaze, and his hand closed over hers on the top of the console and squeezed it. She knew he was remem bering those fifteen hours of hell on Scarabaeus, its nightmare jungle that had almost killed them, the seed where she’d reprogrammed the biocyph to save them, and, in the process, found the algorithm.

  The twisted, mutated ecosystem on Scarabaeus that her kill-code helped to create was surely a small price to pay for the freedom of billions of Fringers.

  They stayed in the lab another three hours while Finn and the two Saeth discussed possible rescue scenarios. Edie felt excluded from the discussion. These were professional soldiers, while she was tagging along for the ride. She kept her grief over Lukas tamped down. She kept quiet about the children, too. One thing at a time.

  Before they left, Corinth examined Finn’s chip. He grunted a few choice words at the way its original Saeth comm capacity had been “hijacked and mutilated,” and mapped what he could to a datacap for later review. As for the leash, he wasn’t willing to do anything more than look over it for now.

  “I’ve a few contacts I might ask about this,” he said. “Maybe we can generate some ideas.”

  Edie hoped his confidence was warranted. “Just don’t do anything without me.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Edie rolled over, exhausted and heavy-limbed, as her alarm beeped. It felt like only seconds ago that she’d climbed between the bedsheets and it was already time to get up. She was used to hearing Finn moving about in the next room, but he’d been banished to the workers’ quarters. She rolled over again and dozed.

  Hours later, she awoke feeling groggier than ever from too much sleep. No one had called to ask where she was. On her way to the lift, she passed new faces in the corridor—two smartly dressed women with Crib medallions emblazoned on their suits. They nodded a synchronized greeting without breaking their conversation. Natesa’s guests must have arrived—Crib ’crats visiting Project Ardra to see how their money was being spent.

  “Rough night?” Ming Yue asked when Edie entered the lab.

  Edie made a noncommittal noise and pulled up the latest reports Caleb had sent her from base camp. Natesa had finally upped her clearance, and while Caleb had a tendency to downplay the situation, as if any problem was a direct reflection of his professional abilities, Edie knew it was because he was worried about the way things were going dirtside. She’d seen the error logs the children were dealing with. Things were not running smoothly.

  “When is Caleb coming back to the ship, anyway?” she asked Ming Yue. She knew the conditions at base camp were uncomfortable and imagined Caleb was not enjoying himself.

  “Last I heard, he was working on presentations for our visitors. The VIPs arrived on the Fortitude during the night, so Natesa’s in full-blown hospitality mode and dragging Caleb into it. He’s thousands of klicks away but still can’t avoid it.”

  Edie intended to avoid Natesa, and it looked like that was going to be easy enough for a while. She didn’t trust herself not to accuse her of having Lukas killed. She had to constantly remind herself to stay quiet, keep the anger at bay, do her job. She and Finn had a rescue option now. No point making trouble.

  “I bet he hates that,” she said.

  Ming Yue gave twisted smile. “Actually, he’s often better at it than she is. He loves to show off, and the Crib ’crats love to be wowed.”

  “I hope Natesa doesn’t want me wowing them, too.”

  “Not sure. She dropped by this morning but when you weren’t here, she said it was okay to let you sleep in.”

  That was a little odd. Allowing Edie to shirk off was very unlike Natesa. “Why would she say that?”

  Ming Yue shrugged. “She was preoccupied with something else. Some guy was transferred under guard from the Fortitude.”

  �
��Under guard?”

  “Yeah, he was picked up en route and brought here. That’s all I know.”

  Edie knew more. She’d been expecting the arrival of this criminal. She just hadn’t known until now that he’d be coming in on the VIP ship.

  Achaiah.

  Edie left her work without a word of explanation to Ming Yue and raced to the infirmary. She’d made it clear that she wanted to be there when Achaiah made the attempt to cut the leash—and Natesa had deliberately gone behind her back.

  Expecting to find milits blocking her path, her pulse hammered with the instinct to fight her way through. Instead, she found the infirmary quiet and orderly. One milit, a young man, stood in quiet conversation with the medic assistant on duty at the front desk. In the room beyond, Edie saw the vague outlines of two figures through the frosted screen.

  She was about to charge through when the screen drew back. One of the figures was Finn. His expression sullen, he grabbed his jacket from the back of a chair and stalked across the room. When he saw Edie, he gave a slight jerk of his head to signal her to follow.

  As soon as they were outside the room and a few paces down an empty side corridor, he thumped his fist against the bulkhead in an explosion of anger. Startled, Edie stood back. She’d never seen him so agitated. He leaned against the bulkhead, forehead pressed into his forearm, taking deep breaths. She waited it out.

  “They knocked me out,” he said at last. “Did something to my chip, I’m sure of it.” He looked at her, realized she didn’t know what he was talking about, and started again. “They called me up here for a physical—said it was a prerequisite for the job. They went through all the usual stuff, and then next thing I know there’s a spike in my neck. I saw that infojack in the room, I swear…When I came to just now, the medic told me it was for a routine check of my chip. Since when does that require me to be unconscious?”

  “Achaiah was there to cut the leash—”

  “If it was cut, the interference would be gone, and it’s not.”

  “So maybe he tried and failed. At least you’re still alive.” She was furious, though, that Natesa hadn’t let her be present. That’s what they’d agreed to. “Let me take a look, see if I can figure out if he messed with it in some other way.”