Children of Scarabaeus Read online

  Galeon cocked his head suddenly. “Someone’s coming.”

  He raced past them and disappeared down a different side corridor in a streak of white. Seconds later, someone strode past the end of the corridor—an off-duty meckie, probably. He glanced disinterestedly at Edie and Finn as he passed.

  Edie set off after Galeon, Finn trailing behind. “Dammit, Finn. She’s using children.”

  “What?”

  “Galeon is Talasi. Natesa’s using Talasi children on her new improved cypherteck team.” Her head filled with questions. How long had these children been in training? Why did the Talasi elders relinquish them to CCU? What kind of life did they have? And why had she never heard of any of this before?

  Finn caught her arm and pulled her to a halt. “Wait, Edie. What does this have to do with us?”

  “How can you ask that? I can’t stand by while—”

  “The plan is to get out of here.” He dropped his voice in case anyone else was near. “Take the cryptoglyph to the Fringe. Cut the leash. Not run around after children. Besides, that kid seemed fine.”

  “He’s fine now. He’ll grow up to discover he’s being used to feed the Crib’s greed. And that he has no other options. I know what that feels like.”

  “What can you do about it, anyway?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Specifically, what can you do about it that doesn’t interfere with our plans?”

  Nothing. He was right. She was furious and brokenhearted about Natesa using children, but she couldn’t stop her. She couldn’t refuse to participate or make a fuss—she was bound to cooperate until she and Finn managed to escape.

  CHAPTER 8

  The mess at breakfast time was noisy, crowded chaos. Edie counted fifty people, at least, gathered around long tables. At one table, everyone wore work coveralls and the conversation was particularly lively. Half the seats were empty. Edie wasn’t tempted to join them. Lively people tended to ask questions and demand participation.

  She carried her tray to a small table in the corner and waited for Finn to join her. They ate in companionable silence until a thickset older woman with curly ash-blond hair got up from the meckies’ table and came over to theirs.

  “Winnie Tanning,” she announced. To Edie’s surprise, she addressed Finn. “Mr Finn? I was asked to find a job for you.”

  “It’s just Finn.” He put down his fork.

  “Okay. What can you do?” Winnie sat down beside Edie and folded her arms on the tabletop.

  “I’m versatile. What’s on offer?” Finn matched her no-nonsense approach.

  “Well, we have a new group of workers arriving and I’ll have to assign them. But it seems you get first pick. Let’s see…Bernie Kunek over there is in charge of the ag-teck processing rigs. They’re setting up half a dozen of those on the surface and doing some preliminary tests.”

  “He can’t work dirtside,” Edie said. At least not while she was on the ship and well beyond the leash’s range.

  “Okaaay.” Winnie flicked an annoyed look at Edie, who felt suitably chastised for butting in. The woman didn’t ask for details. “So, my project is the beanstalk and we have shipside and dirtside teams.”

  “A skyhook?” Finn said over the rim of his water glass.

  “That’s it. A series of space elevators to pull goods out of the gravity well, once the ag-teck comes online in a few months. We already have one skyhook in operation. The Learo Dochais serves as its counterweight. We’re building three more. I can always use an extra hand if you know your way around a toolset. What are you—a meckie?”

  “Near enough.”

  Winnie gave a brisk nod. “I think we’re going to get along well, Finn. Report to my office, Deck G, soon as you’re finished here.” She hesitated a moment before adding, “Most of the guys don’t know you were a Saeth. I’d keep it quiet, if I were you.”

  He returned the nod and she left.

  “I bet that’s the shortest job interview you’ve ever had,” Edie remarked.

  “It’s the only job interview I ever had.”

  It was a strange feeling to part ways with Finn as he left for the lower decks and she made her way to the labs. She was used to having him at her side.

  As she entered the lab through a small foyer, a man and a woman were bent over a holoviz, studying readouts. They wore official CCU tunics, which made Edie wonder if she was supposed to have picked up similar garb at Ken’s.

  The wiry woman with a shock of cropped black hair and dark bright eyes straightened and held out her hand. “Morning. I’m Ming Yue Huang, chief op-teck for Ardra.”

  Edie shook her hand but her gaze drifted to the man. When he half turned to stare at her, she recognized him from news-caps. He was in his midfifties, of average build and average looks. There was nothing average about his reputation, however.

  “This is Caleb Chessell, chief cypherteck,” Ming Yue said.

  He didn’t offer his hand, so Edie didn’t offer hers. Instead he went back to his work without acknowledging her.

  “Friendliest face on the ship,” Ming Yue muttered. “Just to get this out in the open, he’s a little worried about being usurped.”

  Edie couldn’t tell if she was joking. “By me? I’m not exactly employee of the month.”

  “I’m just glad to have you on the team,” Ming Yue said, and she sounded genuine about that. Perhaps she was grateful for the opportunity to work with someone other than the revered Chief Chessell. “I supervise the day-to-day logistics of the seeding project. You’ll work mostly with Caleb. He can bring you up to speed.”

  Caleb didn’t look like he wanted to do that. He gave a tiny shake of his head that made his stringy hair shiver.

  “What about the other cyphertecks?” Edie asked. “The children?”

  Ming Yue cocked an eyebrow. “I didn’t think…Natesa told me you didn’t know about the children yet.”

  “I know about them.”

  “I’m supposed to take you to the training lab tomorrow to meet them. The classroom, we call it. We don’t have a lot of contact with the kids. They can be challenging to work with, as Caleb can confirm.”

  “Are they all Talasi?”

  “Yes. Natesa set up a school for Talasi children outside Halen Crai six years ago, to train them as cyphertecks.”

  Edie had spent her teens in Halen Crai, Talas’s only city—built inside a sealed mountain to protect its inhabitants from the toxic ecosystem. Six years ago she was eighteen years old, a newly qualified cypherteck, already disillusioned after stepping foot on Scarabaeus two years before that and witnessing the beauty the Crib intended to destroy. Six years ago…also when Lukas, her bodyguard, vanished without a trace, without saying goodbye.

  Natesa had told her Lukas was a traitor. Edie didn’t believe that. But was his imprisonment linked to the opening of the school? Had he known about it, and perhaps raised objections? He’d always been loyal to the Crib and it was hard to imagine he’d go against them, but the timing seemed more than coincidental. Edie filed away the information for now.

  “Strange that I never heard about a Talasi school,” she said.

  “It’s a classified project. I don’t know all the details—”

  “CCU learned from you,” Caleb broke in. He tipped back in his seat at an alarming angle and glared at Edie. “They knew the Talasi kids would have the talent, because like you they inherited biocyph in their cells. So they developed tests to assess the children’s affinity for biocyph. They can pick the good ones at age two or three.”

  “Are you saying those children have been in training since they were babies?” Babies in the Crib’s care…It made Edie shudder. She’d been ten years old when she went to Crai Institute, thirteen when CCU took over her education and her life entirely. How much more brainwashed must these children be? “How many are there, other than the four on board?”

  Caleb shrugged. “All I know is, they brought along the best ones on this mission.”

&n
bsp; “They’re quite remarkable,” Ming Yue said eagerly, clearly hoping to diminish Edie’s objections. “They have a unique way of interfacing with the biocyph and they’re fascinated by it. A little undisciplined, but they get the job done.”

  Edie would have liked to throw in a sarcastic question or two about what kind of childhood they were having, and what kind of future they could look forward to, but this wasn’t the time. These two tecks had nothing to do with it, really.

  Ming Yue left Edie with Caleb, who laid down the ground rules in brisk tones.

  “You only have level-two clearance right now, so I won’t be showing you most of what I’m working on.” His tone held undisguised arrogance. She tried to forgive it. Perhaps his attitude was warranted, especially considering he was dealing with a disgraced junior. She listened politely as he ran through some basic stuff as though he felt she needed a primer.

  “Natesa told me you’d developed some new code that’s proving useful,” she said, to take the focus off herself and onto him, which was where he no doubt felt it belonged.

  “Yes. I wrote the regulator code that we’ve implemented on Prisca. Without it, we’d be using regular boosters on the planet, and we all know what a disaster that would’ve been.”

  Boosters were notoriously unstable. They sent the biocyph into overdrive, usually resulting in ecosystem meltdown. The gray organic sludge that tecks called mash was the result, and it was irreversible.

  “I’d like to look at it.”

  “Not until you have level-five clearance.”

  “Then what can I look at?”

  “Follow me.”

  He led her into the adjoining lab, a smaller room where two tecks were working, holoviz displays spinning around their heads. Both of their CCU tunics displayed a cypherteck logo. Counting herself and Caleb, one teck in the infirmary, four children and presumably at least one on the planet’s surface, took the total to eight cyphertecks on the team. It was unheard of. Most seeding teams had only one.

  Caleb lit a new display and nudged it toward Edie. “These are the specs from Prisca’s primed BRATs, ten months ago, shortly after the planet was seeded. A good place to start.”

  “Wait—the BRATs came online ten months ago, and Winnie’s team is firing up the ag-teck in only a few months. Your code boosted the biocyph that much?” Usually it took a decade or more to terraform an alien world to the point where it was suitable for colonization and farming. Longer, surely, for more complex worlds like Prisca.

  “I won’t toot my own horn, but”—he did anyway—“my code is proving revolutionary.”

  “And the evolution on Prisca is stable?”

  “My sim projections show excellent results.” He gave a small shrug, as though Edie could not possibly understand the extent of his work. Which was more or less true. Studying his innovations had been part of her training, but she hadn’t studied his work on this project. She did, however, find his overconfidence worrisome. Boosters of any kind were bad news.

  “I didn’t ask about your sims,” she muttered. “So where do the children fit in?”

  “Well, we get the usual errors, of course. The ground crew downloads data directly from the BRATs. From that raw data we create error logs.”

  He flashed up a series of logs from the previous day, too quickly for Edie to see much, but one thing was clear.

  “These are just from one day? That’s a helluva lot of errors.” And that didn’t bode well for Prisca.

  “Not really,” Caleb said evasively. “Normally the biocyph would self-correct, but this ecosystem is evolving so fast that many of the errors have to be fixed manually using sim extrapolations. Not something you or even I could handle. But the children have a unique way of working together to interface with a supercomplex datastream. They don’t understand the biology. They’re just trained to pop those glitches back into place.”

  Caleb returned to the other lab. Edie was interested in analyzing how the children handled the error logs, but apparently level-two clearance wasn’t sufficient for that. Instead she was stuck with data that was ten months out of date and really didn’t tell her anything. As she filed through it, her gaze wandered around the lab. Racks of biocyph modules lined the bulkheads. She knew from the CCU seal on each unit that this was stock biocyph, not yet primed. It was almost too much to believe—each module was worth more than she could earn in a lifetime, and there were dozens of them.

  She had to check for herself. Casually, she got up from her console and wandered over to the nearest rack. The other tecks were too engrossed in their work to notice her. She pressed her fingertips to the port on one module and heard the tuneless buzz of stock biocyph, just as she’d guessed. What the Fringe worlds wouldn’t give for these resources! They relied on preprogrammed biocyph handouts from the Crib, because only the Crib had the templates to construct stock biocyph like this. It could be turned into ag-teck or med-teck or environmental jigglers, even used to repair BRAT seeds.

  Could she steal the modules for the Fringe? Her mind spun in a new direction. If she had free access to the modules, what could she create? The possibilities seemed limitless and the temptation to meddle was overwhelming. Could she use the cryptoglyph from Scarabaeus to program the biocyph? Right under the Crib’s nose…

  But she didn’t have free access to the modules. She could do nothing with them during work hours because other tecks would always be around. And if she used her crew key to enter the lab outside her shift, the entry would be logged as a security breach and she’d be found out immediately.

  One of the cyphertecks gave her a suspicious look. Fortunately she’d already drawn her hand away from the port. She moved back to her console and pretended to be engrossed in Caleb’s useless data.

  When Edie was summoned to the conference room on Deck A that afternoon, foremost on her mind was confronting Natesa about the children. Righteous indignation had helped her develop an outraged speech, and she was intent on delivering it. Instead, she walked onto a battlefield where Natesa and Theron were engaged in combat, and her personal objections were irrelevant.

  Natesa stood at the head of a long table, her mood black as the Reach. Theron sat stiffly at the other end, as far from her as possible. Clearly they’d been at it for a while, so wrapped up in the conflict that neither acknowledged Edie when Natesa’s assistant showed her in. Between them sat a thin man with captain’s stripes on his uniform. Edie remembered the kitchenhand had called him Captain Lachesis. He wore a slightly apologetic look, as if embarrassed by the display of emotion going on before him.

  “This isn’t a case of martial law,” Natesa was saying. “There’s no war going on here. Edie works for CCU, and you simply don’t have the authority to reassign her to your team.”

  “Yet you had Caleb Chessell reassigned from my team to yours last year.”

  “Ardra requires the best cyphertecks in the Crib and the project is important enough to demand them. Your pet project with its senile BRATs can hardly compare.”

  “You’re delaying the inevitable, Ms Natesa,” Theron shot back. “I will get the permission I need—it’s only a matter of time. I don’t believe you have as many friends in the Crib as you think, especially not while Prisca flounders.”

  “Prisca is not floundering. Everything is going as expected.”

  “That’s not what I hear.”

  “Who have you been talking to? Read my official updates. CCU is perfectly happy with the way things are going.”

  “Pardon me for not quite believing your official updates.”

  “This is ridiculous. Prisca has been online for less than a year, and you’re judging the entire project on the basis of a few wild rumors. There are people who want to see me fail. That’s no secret.” Natesa sent Captain Lachesis an appealing look, as if he should speak in her defense. The captain remained silent, staring at his interlocked fingers on the tabletop. “I’ve implemented a process that speeds up terraforming a hundredfold. There will be medals all
round, no doubt. It’s no wonder others are trying to drag me down.”

  “You implemented it? My cypherteck created it! You owe me a huge favor.”

  “You have some nerve, after you put a member of my team in the infirmary—”

  “You don’t even intend to use Sha’nim’s talents here. Instead you’ve relegated her to menial tasks.”

  “That will change in time. I know Edie won’t disappoint me.”

  “She can serve the Crib far better by working for my research division.”

  Edie caught her breath. Work for the Weapons Research Division? “I refuse to work for you,” she said.

  Theron and Natesa swiveled to face her, their expressions mirror images of shock, as if they’d only just remembered she was in the room. Her comment was addressed to Theron. He seemed unperturbed by it.

  “You’ll work where you’re told to work.” Theron jabbed his finger on the table to emphasize his words.

  “You tortured Finn. I refuse to work for you,” Edie repeated.

  Natesa looked smug, at what she must have perceived to be a sign of her protégée’s loyalty. “That’s right. You work for me,” she told Edie. “The colonel is getting ideas beyond his jurisdiction.”

  Lachesis cleared his throat as he prepared to intervene. Theron got there first.

  “You’d better hope that Prisca is recoverable.” His expressive brows grew thunderous as he pushed back his chair and stood. “You were only given one shot at this, Adminstrator. If Prisca collapses, as my sources think it will, this discussion is moot and Edie will join my team. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my schooner is ready to leave and I’m eager to get back to my pet project.”

  He left the room with a generic nod of respect to the captain.

  “Damn arrogant sonofabitch.” Natesa fumed. “The audacity of that man! He’s been insufferable ever since he made colonel. Does he have any idea—” She stopped herself and turned to Lachesis. “Surely there’s something you can do about this. This is your ship and Edie is assigned to this crew.”