Children of Scarabaeus Page 3

  Finn pulled another mysterious gadget from the duffel bag. It was clear there were no personal belongings in there, only endless Saeth tricks. He turned it on and began walking.

  “Echomapper,” he explained.

  A holo bloomed over the device, showing a blueprint of the corridor they were in and the cargo crates to either side with the indistinct shapes of their contents. One deck above and below were also mapped, their edges fading at the limit of the echomapper’s range.

  “There should be at least a couple of crates with cryo capsules,” Finn said.

  A rumbling noise came from behind them. Cat shone her flashlight. A cargo crate was advancing at an alarming speed, filling the entire cross-section of the corridor with no leeway around the edges: it would crush them.

  “This way.” Finn jogged down the narrow track. He ducked into an alcove, pulling Edie in with him. Cat pressed herself into the small space just as the crate rumbled past. They peered out to see the crate stop a few meters farther along, then it moved sideways into an empty bay.

  “Must’ve been loaded at Barossa,” Cat said.

  Finn climbed up, and Edie realized the alcove was a maintenance access area. There wasn’t much on the ship that was built for humans, but this alcove had a ladder.

  On the next deck, Finn walked up and down, mapping as much as his device could register, while Cat and Edie waited, listening for approaching crates. As Finn returned, another strange sound echoed through the ship.

  Edie pressed herself back into the alcove. “Is that—?”

  “It’s the engine,” Cat said. “We just entered nodespace.”

  Which meant they were safe from the Crib, at least for the duration of this jump. Nothing could track a ship in nodespace. And if the node had several exits, as most did, the ship might take any one of them. Its itinerary was flexible—recalculated after every port by the nav computer. As the Lichfield moved farther into the Reach, the Crib’s search would become even more futile.

  “Found what we need,” Finn said.

  He led the way down the corridor and turned when it branched. They stopped at a crate that looked much like any other, except that instead of the usual loading doors, this one had a tiny airlock, locked from the inside.

  “Your turn,” Finn said to Edie.

  She pressed her fingers into the port and found it to be a standard mag lock. She snapped the airlock open and the three of them crammed inside. The inner hatch cycled and they stepped into the cargo crate. Ghostly blue striplights came on and illuminated the neat stacks of cryo capsules. With the plaz windows misted over, Edie couldn’t see the occupants’ features clearly. She didn’t want to. She shuddered to think she’d soon join them.

  Finn checked a panel near the hatch. “We’ve got atmo.” He turned off his breather, and Edie and Cat did the same. The air was freezing and smelled of antiseptic. “The air automatically replenishes and heats a little when the hatch is used,” he said, his breath misting the air, “or when the cryo capsules turn off.”

  Meaning when someone woke up. At least there were safety features.

  “Who are they?” Cat asked.

  Edie checked the panel, which listed the names and origins of the occupants along with short bios.

  “I don’t think they’re colonists,” she said. “No specific destinations listed.”

  Finn looked over her shoulder. “Migrant workers. They move from planet to planet until someone decides their skills are wanted and defrosts them.”

  “So how long have they been in cryo?” Edie scrolled the list and answered her own question. “Fifteen months, nine months…Jezus, this one’s twenty-two months…”

  Cat examined the capsules. “There’re half a dozen empty ones back here,” she reported. “They look fine.”

  Finn went to check them himself.

  “So where are we getting off?” Edie asked, still creeped out by the thought of all these sad people—so desperate for work and a home that they froze themselves indefinitely until someone needed them.

  “We can’t access the ship’s route from here,” Finn said.

  “Then where? Where’s the bridge?”

  “There’s no bridge. There’ll be a command center in the heart of the ship, but it’s not worth the risk of raising an alarm.”

  “What are you saying?” Edie felt more uncomfortable by the second.

  “We need to hide among these people,” Finn said. “We’ll create bios like they have, and wait to be defrosted.”

  “What if that never happens?” Twenty-two months in cryo—or more—was unthinkable.

  “We can set a maximum sleep time. Say, fifteen months.”

  “What?” That sounded almost as bad. “Over a year in cryo?”

  “A year for our trail to go cold,” Cat said. She didn’t look happy about it either.

  “The whole point is to get to the Fringe and help people,” Edie said. “A lot can happen in a year. Thousands of people will die…”

  “I know you’re impatient to get started,” Finn said, “but there’s no sense rushing into this and getting caught.” He pulled equipment out of a locker. “I need you to dream up some fake stats for us, something that will appeal to impoverished planets. That way, the people who do wake us will be more likely to need our help.”

  While he and Cat sorted the equipment and read over the capsule instructions, Edie jacked into the panel where all the migrant workers had recorded their stats. She created new bios for the three of them, adding bits and pieces from the other bios so that their names, planets of origin, qualifications, and various details blended with the other workers. There was room to list all kinds of certifications and idents. Many of the workers had written nothing for those, so the omission in Edie’s case didn’t seem strange. She listed op-teck as her profession, in the hope it would appeal to anyone with biocyph troubles, and grouped them as a family so they would be brought out of cryo together. Then Edie entered the maximum sleep period as fifteen months and authorized port authorities of any Fringe world to wake them sooner if they could provide employment.

  Finn brought her a set of biosensors. He placed a cuff around her wrist.

  Edie tried not to look at the three cryo capsules that Cat had pulled forward from the rack. They lay open—chilled coffins of white and silver. Cat helped Finn check them over one last time. Edie wrapped her arms around herself, trying to stop the shivering.

  Finn beckoned to Edie. For a moment they looked at each other. She wanted to say something to him, in case this was the last time she saw him alive. But no words came. He watched her steadily.

  “In you go.” A smile flickered on his lips, a wordless acknowledgment that he understood. At least, she hoped so.

  She climbed into the first capsule. He hooked up her sensor cuff and fired up the unit. Edie felt a spike inside the cuff slide into her vein. The cover snapped shut over her and locked with a hiss. Through the lozenge-shaped window in the front, she saw Finn checking things again. On the far side of the rack, she watched Cat climb into her capsule and its cover close.

  After a few seconds Edie was aware of feeling far less apprehensive and claustrophobic than she should. The spike fed her tranqs, a precursor to the cryo fluids. She no longer felt cold, either. She concentrated on Finn’s face as their eyes met through the plaz. The crease between his brows settled into a familiar look of concern. Her blood ran ice cold and her lungs hurt. Her breath misted the window and formed delicate ice crystals across the plaz. As her eyelids grew heavy, Finn’s face blurred and faded.

  Edie closed her eyes and drifted.

  Something was wrong. She was burning up. In a panic, she raised her hands to push open the coffin. But there was nothing there. She opened her eyes and blinked to clear her vision, expecting to see Finn’s face, expecting to hear his voice telling her everything was okay.

  But the face that looked down at her was young, serious, unmistakably military.

  Unmistakably Crib.


  CHAPTER 3

  Her warmed blood felt like fire as it pumped through her veins. The rest of her was still cold. Edie rolled her head to one side, trying to make sense of her surroundings. She was on a bunk, not in a cryo capsule. In a medfac, not a cargo crate—more of a screened-off cubicle. And there was no sign of her fellow sleepers.

  No sign of Finn.

  “Where’s Finn?” Her voice was a dry croak. How long had she been asleep, anyway?

  At her side, a young milit fiddled with the IV bag next to the bunk and checked the readout on a med tom attached to the bunk’s railing. “Take it easy. The doc says the effects of cryo will wear off in another hour or so.”

  “How far away are we?” Her brain couldn’t quite produce the question she needed to ask. Is Finn nearby or is he more than two thousand meters away…and dead?

  “You’re on the Peregrine, ma’am.” The milit had the correct professional tone, but he had an awkwardness about him that made Edie think he was out of his depth. As if having Edie on board was a situation he didn’t know how to deal with. “I’m Sergeant West. We’re heading to rendezvous with—”

  “Where’s Finn?” Edie yelled. It came out as a hoarse cry. She tried to sit up. West reflexively grabbed her arm and eased her back.

  “We retrieved no one else from the Lichfield.” He sounded taken aback, even a little apologetic.

  That didn’t stop his words digging into Edie’s chest like daggers. A wave of desperation lifted her off the bed and carried her across the cubicle as she threw herself at the sergeant. She didn’t know what she screamed. Her lungs ached with the effort. She flailed against West and the faceless milits who came to his assistance from the other side of the screen.

  Finn’s dead.

  She’d seen the bloody result of what happened when a serf’s boundary chip went out of range. Since the moment they’d met, she feared this. It was only a matter of time before Finn met that end, too. He was just a serf. No one to mourn him but Edie.

  They cuffed her to the bunk, reset the IV spikes she’d pulled free, and tranq’d her. Not enough to make her sleep. She lay listlessly, her mind dull as minutes and hours ticked by. She saw Finn, a lifeless body in a cryo capsule, now a coffin, his skull blackened by the bomb. Blood splatters dripping down the window.

  Her logical mind clicked back into place, overshadowing the emotional turmoil: Finn was frozen. No dripping blood.

  Could the bomb detonate when it was frozen?

  She didn’t know its specs. The Crib had put it there. No reason to believe it wouldn’t work in freezing temperatures. But the rovers had modified the bomb trigger with biocyph—circuitry that required a biological interface. It was embedded in his brain—and his brain was frozen.

  Edie yelled for help until someone finally came to see what the fuss was about.

  It took a few minutes for them to track down West. While she waited, Edie listened to the sounds around her. This was a small ship, judging from the engine noise and the proximity of people passing to and fro on the other side of the screen. If not for the restraints, she would have explored it on foot.

  The scratch down West’s cheek that Edie only vaguely remembered inflicting might have had something to do with his wariness when he finally returned. She’d explained about the leash and the bomb to anyone who would listen, and somehow her garbled ranting had made it back to him in a fairly coherent form.

  “I understand you want us to turn this ship around,” West said, “and pick up an escaped convict from the Lichfield?”

  “Yes. Right now. Before he wakes up and dies. If you don’t fetch him—”

  West shifted uncomfortably. The young man clearly did not relish the assignment he’d been given as liaison to a runaway teck.

  “This is the serf who kidnapped you from Talas Prime Station thirteen months ago?”

  Edie stared at West. Thirteen months? Assuming they’d woken her up as soon as they’d retrieved her capsule, that meant she’d been in cryo for a year. The revelation disorientated her, momentarily dislodging her thoughts of Finn.

  “You guys are slipping. It took you a whole year to track me down?”

  West grimaced. “The Peregrine’s a border patrol vessel, ma’am. Our assignment in tracking you down, as you put it, started only nine days ago.”

  “This is a Crib vessel. Milits. You’re all the same to me. Do you know how many treaty points you contravened by crossing into Fringe space and boarding a commercial courier ship?”

  “Not something you need to worry about. We had authorization from the highest—”

  “I don’t care,” Edie interrupted. Only Finn mattered. “First of all, that serf didn’t kidnap me.” That wasn’t exactly true, but there were extenuating circumstances. “He was tricked by rovers into the whole thing. And second, if you don’t bring him back here alive, I won’t cooperate. I know Natesa’s plans for me and I won’t do it. If you force me, I’ll sabotage everything.” She’d done as much once before, for what now seemed like a far more trivial reason.

  “You can’t expect the captain to turn this ship around and waste ten hours for a serf. He’s dead either way, you know.”

  Edie stilled, her blood pounding in her ears. West was right. She was safe in Crib hands because they needed her. No one needed Finn or cared about his fate. He’d be charged with kidnapping, or escaping at the very least, and shot.

  And refusing to cooperate with Natesa probably meant little to West. It was likely he knew nothing about Project Ardra, anyway.

  “Let me speak with the captain.”

  “Uh—no, ma’am. That’s not going to happen.”

  “Then let me speak to Natesa.” She could hear the defeat in her voice.

  “That I can arrange. As a matter of fact, she’s been requesting permission to speak with you ever since we informed CCU of your recapture.”

  The acronym sent a shiver down Edie’s spine. The Crib Colonial Unit had been Edie’s self-appointed benefactor since she was ten years old, her employer since she was sixteen. More specifically, Edie worked for the Special Branch responsible for terraforming new colony worlds and for other projects…such as Ardra.

  Project Ardra was Natesa’s baby, and she needed Edie on the team. Edie had refused to be involved, even talking her way into a three-month reassignment on Talas’s space station in a last-ditch effort to avoid the project. Now it looked like Ardra was her only bargaining chip in negotiating for Finn’s life.

  They set up a comm next to Edie’s bunk and mercifully released the cuffs so she could be more comfortable. Natesa was not at the Crai Institute on Talas as Edie had expected. The call trace said she was on a CCU ship, the Learo Dochais, and its location was hidden.

  Natesa looked as poised and coiffed as ever, and Edie knew from experience that the woman was just as controlled—not to mention controlling—on the inside. The gleam in her eyes no doubt resulted from her glee that her protégée was once again in Crib hands.

  “Edie, my dear. Our last encounter did not go as I’d hoped.”

  That encounter took place a year ago for Natesa. To Edie, it was a very recent memory. There were a dozen smart-mouthed things Edie would like to have said. She bit her lip and kept quiet.

  “But let’s put all that behind us.” Natesa tilted her head with a sad smile. “You disappeared for a year. You can’t imagine how that devastated me.”

  “Because you need me for Ardra.”

  “Because I care about you, Edie.”

  Were those actual tears welling up in Natesa’s eyes? Edie didn’t trust them for a second.

  “You know how I feel about Ardra,” she said.

  “You have contractual obligations…”

  That damn contract. Two years of service for every year of education the Crib had given Edie in training—the standard deal, and it had seemed like a good one when she first left the Talasi camps. Short of another disappearance, though, there was nothing Edie could do to get out of it.

 
“I know that. And I’ll work for you until my contract expires in eleven years—on one condition.”

  Natesa had visibly relaxed, but now her eyes narrowed. “And that would be?”

  “The serf from Talas Prime Station who escaped when I was kidnapped—Finn—is still in cryo on the Lichfield. The rovers hijacked his boundary chip to make me his boundary, forcing him to serve as my bodyguard. The range of the leash is just under two thousand meters. Beyond that, the bomb in his head will explode. The fact that he’s frozen is keeping him alive—at least, I hope so. I want him picked up immediately.”

  “And what then? Keep him frozen?”

  “Find a way to cut the leash without killing him. You have an army of tecks at your disposal.”

  “What if that’s not possible?”

  “Then he comes with me. He stays at my side until you find a way. As long as you keep him alive and unharmed, I’ll work for you.”

  “Is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  Natesa shrugged, as if the request was a mere triviality. “Very well. I’ll arrange to have the Peregrine retrieve him. Meanwhile, you take care of yourself. We’re so looking forward to having you join our team.”

  Edie cut the connection and tried not to think about eleven more years of servitude.

  Less than an hour later, Sergeant West was back in the cubicle looking somewhat bewildered, which Edie decided was his way of being pissed off.

  “Well, ma’am, you have friends in high places. You have us all intrigued. A few days ago our orders were to board and search the Lichfield for an AWOL teck. Suddenly you’re important enough to call the shots over a runaway serf.”

  “He was a POW. He should have been freed four…five years ago.” She had to remember to account for that missing year.

  West made a dismissive gesture. “Maybe you can get him a parole hearing.” He pulled up a stool and sat, awkwardly, as if someone had told him to be affable. “The captain is curious about you, so I made it my business to check your files—at least those files the CCU has made available.”