Deadly Ghosts, page 19
Imogen looked as though she might throw up so I answered. “Yeah, that about sums it up.”
Louise unbuckled herself and then went to hug Imogen. “I’m so sorry for all that you were forced to do.”
She looked over to me. “I’m so sorry for what the Inquisition did to you. It’s a travesty to think that humanity in the upper species have come so far, only to turn ourselves over to a government that abandons its people and allows zealots to run roughshod over its populace. We can travel across space, we inhabit worlds in all corners of the universe, and we live in relative harmony with all manner of sentient life, and yet people can be abandoned and left for dead on a mining station or turned over to the most vile type of people.
“This. This is why I have dedicated my life to changing the universe.”
I knew what she meant. “That’s why I have, too.”
“Does it count if you were programmed to make a change? To defend humanity and its allies?” Ned asked, sounding almost thoughtful.
Lousie stared at the ship’s console. “I’ll tell you something, computer: it was hard at first to trust you, knowing that you were created by the very government that I’ve spent my adult life seeking to destroy, but I’ve come to understand that you’re a good soul.
“And I don’t say that lightly. You are machine intelligence, but I also know that, like me, you would lay down your life to defend the people of this universe. It’s hard to believe that we can have the same beliefs, but in some way, we can.”
“You’re right but I should also point out that I don’t seek the destruction of the Consortium,” Ned said. “I want to see it improve.”
At that, Louise started to laugh and moved away from Imogen who was still obviously lost in her own reminiscences. “I honestly don’t need it destroyed, either. But I do need it to change. You look around this universe, see what happened to the people who put their trust in the Consortium. Even you, a creation of this government, have to admit that it can’t stay the way it is.”
“On that, we agree,” Ned allowed. “As I said, I want to see it improved. I want to see the Consortium become the beacon of hope it was created to be. When the universal government was established, it was done to help the people. All the people. Many species hadn’t even known what formal governance was but agreed to live by their rules because of what they brought to the table.”
Louise held a hand to stop him. “Whoa there, toaster, let’s get one thing clear: the people of the universe joined the Consortium because their backs were against a wall precisely because of people. We created the Enemy AI. We were the soil in which the Cult grew.”
“Yes,” Ned allowed quietly. “We were both the cause of and solution to all the universe’s problems.”
I had to butt in. “You two seem to agree on more than you don’t.”
Louise opened her mouth to speak, but Imogen cut her off. “Hank,” she said, looking up and meeting my eyes. “Truly, I’m—”
“I know,” I said, returning her gaze and letting her know that I was okay. “You were forced to do it, and you have to let it go.”
“You were forced to do it, but you don’t have to let it go,” Louise corrected, shooting me a look. “You should feel whatever you need to feel for as long as you need to feel it.”
“Thanks but—” Imogen began, but this time it was her aunt who cut her off.
“But nothing,” she said. “You take whatever time you need. The only ‘but’ is that you can’t dwell on it when we hit the surface. We are going to need you sharp and focused. Once we land, you keep your eyes open and your head on a swivel. But for now, you sit in your feelings all you want.”
“Thank you,” she said and stood. Without another word, she left the cockpit and, I assumed, went back to her room.
When it was just Louise and me, the woman looked at me. “She’ll never forgive herself.”
“Maybe she shouldn’t,” I said after a time.
“But we can’t let it consume her,” Louise said, voice breaking.
“We won’t,” I assured her. “Everyone who bunks on this ship lives in the shadow of their past, but how we respond to it, what we become because of it, is what differentiates us from people like John Gregory.”
“You assume to know the man?” Louise asked, raising an eyebrow.
Ned came to my defense. “Hurt people hurt people, as the old adage goes.”
“I think that someone who is capable of doing what he does must have some reason to do it, some thing that happened to make him want to,” I said. “But I also think that there is something he was born with that allows him to do things the rest of us would deem unthinkable.”
“You think it’s nature and nurture?” she asked and leaned forward, interested in what I had to say.
“As someone who has only ever really known their own nurture side, I think that it has to be both for a man like him,” I said, remembering the cruelty I had watched the Inquisitor inflict on people.
“Then Imogen might be in more trouble than I thought,” Louise said quietly. “Her parents, including my own kin, are bad people, and the poor girl has just spent her recent life with someone even worse.”
She shifted to stand right in front of me and lock eyes so that I understood how serious she was. “You have to be the one she looks to for inspiration. The one who sets an example.”
“What about you?”
She smiled. “I will too, naturally, but it can’t be just her family.”
I thought about how passionately she spoke when she made Vince promise to do better and knew that Louise was right. “I’ll do my best.”
“And Hank’s best is pretty okay,” Ned mocked, but we both ignored him.
“Good,” she said. “Between the two of us, I think that we can really help show this young woman that the universe doesn’t have to be an evil place.”
That comment made me wonder something. “Have you seen any Peacer intel on a weapon codenamed Extinction?”
“That sassy AI at the space station already asked me.”
“Libby,” I filled in.
“Ned,” she corrected with a grin. I had walked right into it. “But Libby did too.”
“I see what you did there,” Ned said, letting his voice express his annoyance.
She chuckled. “But the answer was no.”
“Another dead end,” I complained.
“We are getting close,” Ned said. “I can feel it.”
Louise narrowed her eyes. “Fascinating.”
“It is,” I concurred. “He might as well be a human with the way he’s programmed.”
“You guys know I can hear you, right?” Ned asked. “And let me ask you both something: when you have a sense of something, that instinct or intuition? How would you quantify it?”
I thought about the question, but Louise didn’t have to. “I take your point. Lots of what makes us us is indefinable.”
“Precisely,” Ned said. “And just how you can’t quantify it, neither can I. And just how it’s in you either by experience or birth, so it is with me.”
“Your programmers being your parents, essentially?” Louise asked.
“Essentially.”
“Why do you feel like we are getting close?” I asked, returning us to the subject at hand.
“I was looking at the map with all the collected information,” he said. “Something about seeing all the work we had done, the disparate pieces of intel collected together, made me feel like we are closing in on it. One of these connections will lead us to Extinction, I know it.”
With that thought ringing in our ears, nothing more was said. Louise stood and made her way back to check in with Imogen, and I turned to watch the gyre tube. My blinks became slower, and soon my eyelids didn’t open.
When I awoke, it was to the sound of the Buzzard’s alarms.
23
“A debris field,” Ned complained, and my body shot forward instinctively, reaching out to grab the controls, though I didn’t need to. The bleary world came into focus, and I saw the destroyed remains of a starship right where we had washed out.
“Scan for any quality items.” Without me even having to think about it. On a fundamental level, I would always be a scrapper first.
The Buzzard lurched, Ned tilting us out of the way of a cracked broken piece of micro missile canon. More pieces of the ship clattered off our shields.
“Nothing worth saving,” Ned said. “But it’s worth noting that this is a pirate vessel.”
“How can you tell?” I inquired and looked over my shoulder to see Lousie and Imogen entering the cockpit.
“There are several telltale signs of scallywaggery,” he answered. “First, the remaining pieces of the ship had numerous illegal modifications. Second, their Tidal Drive, which is floating just there, is a discontinued model that had been recalled several years ago and that would have gotten a registration signaler flagged and lastly.” Here he turned the Buzzard toward a piece of wrecked hull, shining a light on a skull and crossbones painted crudely on the front.
“Could have just started with that,” Louise said.
I nodded but had to add, “I want to use scallywaggery every day from now on if I can.”
“Figured you would like that.”
As we accelerated away from the wreckage and in the direction of the planet, I scratched at my chin. “If they are refugees on the surface with no defenses, why is there a destroyed starship out here?”
“That’s precisely what I’ve been wondering,” Ned said.
Louise squinted out through the window. “Can you tell anything from the impact marks on the ship?”
“With better scanners or if I brought some pieces aboard but not here now, no,” Ned answered.
“Or we could just go down to the surface and ask,” Imogen noted.
We all turned to look at her, and I saw a smile cross Louise’s face. Before we could even say that she was correct, Ned was accelerating us down to the atmosphere and onto the surface of the small planet.
We disembarked, and I left my mask and goggles on the ship, deciding that it would be better to show up with a face than looking like an off-duty bounty hunter. Louise was attired in all black with an energy weapon holstered inside her jacket and Imogen was back in her runway fatigues.
Stepping off the ship and into the light of the nearby star, the direct beams felt as though they were going to cook my skin if I stayed exposed for too long. The women must’ve felt it too because we all broke into a quick sprint in the direction of an unmanned kiosk that had a little awning.
Stepping into the shade, I felt as though I might freeze, and I immediately regretted not bringing gloves.
Imogen turned and looked up at me. “You never take me anywhere nice.”
I chuckled at that. “What about that one night club?”
Her face fell flat, and she shivered in the shade. “You mean where I discovered that my cousin had set me up and completely betrayed me, which resulted in my parents sending me to the Inquisition? That’s what you are talking about?”
I smiled. “Yeah, that.”
“Let’s keep moving,” Louise said, the cold causing her voice to quaver.
Looking past the kiosk, we saw the camp itself down a little pressed earth road. At its center were several slapdash buildings under a Consortium flag. They were constructed of corrugated tin, had barred windows, and were only half painted; there were several white lines sticking out from the primed part where a person had obviously stopped rolling on the paint to do something else and never returned.
In the area around it were the blue and yellow tents that the Consortium government produced en masse and used everywhere. They were set up in blocks, and you could see that the weather of this planet had taken its toll on them. Sun bleaching, frost burn, and patched tears covered nearly every one of them.
Beyond the official tents were those brought by the people who had undoubtedly ended up here to find that there was no more housing. Some were proper interplanetary survival tents where others were what appeared to be little more than tarps stretched over some kind of stick and then staked to the ground.
The planet’s surface was barren, save for a few tough shrubs that could survive what I had to assume were tough conditions. The color of the surface was something between beige and white—a color I was sure had a name but I would probably have just called blah.
Making our way down the path, we could see people milling about and having conversations in front of their tents. Kids of various species played soccer in a small gap between the tents, and a line of people waited beside one of the tin buildings as we approached. Occasionally, someone would look up at us but take no note or pretend they didn’t see us, looking away immediately.
I scanned every person that we saw looking this way and tried to identify Sharna and Edgar Junior, but I didn’t, and soon a face I did recognize stepped into our path.
Jesk, the man from the video, had hurried over from where he had been kneeling beside an old woman and looked at the three of us expectantly. “Greetings,” he said.
“We got your message,” Louise informed him. “I assume you know what that means… who we are…”
He nodded vigorously and gestured for us to follow him into one of the nearby tents. It was a relief to get out of the blistering sun, but under the canopy, there was a solar powered heater to keep the inside of the tent from feeling like a tundra.
There was a bed on either side of the space, a desk at the back, and a small shelf with several books that looked like they might disintegrate into dust at any moment. The brightness of the day shone through the thin tenting material and cast the space in a perfect light.
“You are Peacers?” he asked in a hushed tone, and it took everything in my power not to derail the conversation by asking where my family was.
“I think it’s better just to answer by telling you that we got your message,” Louise answered.
“Oh, gotcha,” he said and winked theatrically under the scarf he had wrapped around his head. His clothes were old, crusty, and tattered, and I could see where he had pulled the mining corporation’s logo off of the breast.
“That being said, we are here to help,” she said. “I’m Louise, this is my niece Imogen, and that there is Hank,” she said, and he appraised the three of us.
“You, um… there aren’t more?” he asked after a time.
I rested my hand on my stomper. “There are,” I told him. “But we want to do some investigating without drawing too much suspicion before calling on backup.”
He winked again and this time, gave a thumbs-up. “I’m so relieved that you’re here. We desperately need your help.”
“We know,” I said. “But first, we do have a couple questions for you so that we can get pointed in the right direction.
“Of course.”
“When we washed out, there was a destroyed pirate ship in the area around the planet,” I began. “What do you know about that?”
He furrowed his brows and turned up one side of his face as he thought. “It must’ve been them.”
“Whose them?” Louise asked.
“Whoever’s taking our people,” he explained. “Another child disappeared last night, and if there was wreckage around the planet, it must be the kidnappers.”
“There’s no alternative?” Louise asked, not sounding convinced by what he said. “Why would a person who is stealing children from the planet care about some pirates…” She paused for a moment. “No, I understand.”
“Right,” Jesk said. “They protected us so that they could continue to take our people unabated. Presumably, whoever they are doesn’t want competition.”
“That’s terrible,” Imogen said, her voice breaking. “But that’s why we’ve come. We’re here to help you.”
“I’m happy to hear that,” Jesk said, his voice pure sincerity. “The people of this camp have been through a lot already. Not just the people I arrived with but everybody here. For one reason or another, they ended up lost in the universe and came to this place looking for refuge. Instead, what they found is more hardship and loss.”
Imogen looked at me for a moment, and we shared a thought. Hearing what he was saying was not dissimilar to what the people of Korfuu experienced and why they ended up hiring the Ghost.
“What can you tell us about the people who have been taken?” I asked. “You said they were children.”
He tilted a flat palm back and forth. “I should have said young. At this point, everyone under twenty seems like a child to me, but one appeared to be even older than you.” He pointed at Imogen.
“They were all taken in the night, and nobody ever saw or heard anything,” he claimed. “Of course, we’ve started patrols every night, but this camp is a big place and many people would rather stay in their tent and try to protect their own than wander around in the biting cold.”
“Has anyone seen a ship coming or going?” I asked. “Or do you believe that they are being kept on the planet?”
“That’s part of our confusion,” Jesk explained. “We haven’t been able to find any tracks leading away from the camp, and several of the people who’ve been taken had tents near the center by the landing pad. We’ve had people stationed there every night, but nobody’s seen or heard a starship coming or going. At one point, it was even suggested that maybe whoever was taking people was somebody here in camp and they had dug out some kind of bunker under their tent. As a precaution, we checked every tent in the camp for anything like that but didn’t turn up anything.”
“Nobody pushed back?” Louise asked. “Everyone submitted to the search?”
He shook his head. “No, of course they didn’t, but I’m no fool. I was elected leader of this little collective because I’ve got a brain in my nut. So, I’ve had people stationed outside the homes of anybody who didn’t submit to a search and have confirmed that they weren’t involved on the nights when people have been taken.”
“Seems like you have really done everything you can for these people,” Imogen observed.
