Hunted, page 19
“Hold!” I shouted. The picture froze.
Sam. It was Sam.
The honey brown hair, the giggly blue eyes, the spatter of freckles across her nose…twenty years and she’d hardly aged a day. Heaven knows how she managed to get hold of YouthBoost on a planet at war; but if anyone could manage, it would be Sam.
My twin sister was alive. And that picture of her in my memory, with her gold uniform soaked scarlet…the jagged hole punched through her rib cage, gushing out blood…
“Tricks,” I said aloud. Something was a trick. Either Sam’s death long ago, or the picture I was looking at now. Experts could play games with computer images, everybody knew that. I couldn’t trust what I was seeing. But who would be cruel enough to send such a thing if it wasn’t real? And who had the authority to deliver the message with eyes-only status?
“Ship-soul,” I said, “identify message’s sender.”
“No identification.”
“No name? No transmission information? Nothing?”
“Negative. The recording itself is dated by the Troyenese calendar, 23 Katshin.”
Which meant Sam had made the recording the day after Willow picked me up from the moonbase…unless the date was a trick too. Gritting my teeth, I told the ship-soul, “Resume play.”
Sam’s picture came back to life. “Poor Edward,” she said, “I hope you’re not having a heart attack or something. This must be an awful shock for you, but you’ve handled worse stuff than this.”
She was talking the way she always did to me, kind of imitating the way I spoke. When she was playing diplomat, Sam could toss off flowery phrases with the best of them, but behind closed doors with me…well, I guess a really good diplomat always suits her words to her audience.
If this really was Sam. I had to remind myself it could be fake. But a fake by someone who knew exactly how Sam talked to me in private.
“The thing is, Edward,” she went on, “I’m still alive. As you can see. It’s way too complicated for me to explain right now, but I will someday, I promise. In the meantime, I want to make sure you’re all right…and that means you have to join me on Troyen.”
She reached toward the camera lens and turned it to one side. It swung around to show a golden summer afternoon in a place I knew well—the Park of the Silent God, on the outskirts of Unshummin city: no more than fifteen kilometers from Verity’s palace. Sam and I used to go there for walks all the time, especially during the redfish migrations each spring; the park’s creek would turn scarlet with thousands of new hatchlings, and the air would fill with the strong smell of sugar-sap, as Mandasars heated cauldrons on the shore. Redfish boiled in sugar-sap…we ate that every year, sitting on the creek bank under the diamond-wood trees.
The trees were still there—I could see them in the camera shot. Twenty years taller and thick with green leaves. I always liked those leaves: they were the same color of green as the oaks on my father’s estate.
“Not much sign of the war, is there?” Sam said in a soft voice. “That’s because it’s almost over. One queen has come out on top, and I’m her favorite advisor. By the time you get here, there’ll be peace; and I can protect you from those bastards on the High Council of Admirals.”
She swiveled the camera lens back and looked straight at me. “If you want the honest truth, Edward, I know everything that’s happened to you. I found out about Willow, and how they sneaked in to get a queen. The idiots took Queen Temperance, Edward—the last queen who was standing in the way of peace. She’s one of the outlaw queens and nearly the most vicious tyrant on the whole planet, even if she has a placid-sounding name.
“So I know what’s going to happen,” Samantha went on. “Willow will pick you up, then head for Celestia. Dumb idea—the moment Willow crosses the line, the League of Peoples will execute Temperance and most of the ship’s crew. Maybe all of them. You’re safe, brother, because there isn’t a more innocent person in the entire universe but when Willow coasts into Starbase Iris and the navy sees all the corpses, the High Council will have a grade A large conniption.
“Next thing you know, they’ll try to get rid of you, Edward. That’s how admirals think—when they screw up big-time, their first reaction is to lose the witnesses down some deep hole. And I don’t want to let you get lost.”
She smiled again: a big bright smile that made me want to smile back…even though a dozen worrying thoughts were nibbling at the back of my mind. If Sam didn’t want me getting lost, why had she let me sit on the moonbase for twenty years and never once tried to contact me? If she was the top queen’s closest advisor, couldn’t Sam have found a way to send a message? But no word at all—no hint she was alive—till suddenly I left the Troyen system, and that’s when she got in touch.
Like she was happy to ignore me, right up to the point when I headed home.
But the message kept playing, and Sam kept smiling: my smart and pretty sister who taught me everything I knew. “I didn’t find out about Willow right away,” she was saying. “Not till they’d taken you with them. But I’m sending people after you, Edward, to get you back. It turns out I have a starship: a nice black one, run by Mandasar friends. If you want the honest truth, it used to belong to the navy—a sweet little frigate named Cottonwood. But, umm…” She leaned toward the camera and said in a loud whisper, “I stole the ship, Edward. Just before the war started. I knew the navy would stop all traffic to and from Troyen, and I wanted an escape route in case things got really bad.”
“Hold!” I snapped. My sister froze in the middle of a blink, her eyes half-closed and clumsy-looking, the way people always come across in blink-pictures. It was a pretty unflattering shot, but I wasn’t so interested in Sam’s appearance at the moment.
Not when I knew she had a ship—the black ship that had stolen Willow. The ship’s crew must have hoped I was still aboard; they’d taken Willow in tow so they could drag me back to Troyen.
So: Sam had left me alone on the moonbase for twenty years, but the second she heard I was gone from Troyen airspace, she sent her starship to get me.
And how had Sam stolen a starship? I guess it wouldn’t be hard; my sister was a high-ranking diplomat, and an admiral’s daughter. She could get herself invited on board, maybe with some helpers, then drug people, gas people, mop up with stunners…but that wasn’t the tricky part. What had she done with the crew members after she’d taken the ship? A frigate carried a crew of a hundred. If you only had to deal with one or two sailors, you might bully or bribe them into silence; but not a hundred people. Someone would refuse to cooperate. Where could Sam put them so they’d never tell the navy what she’d done?
I hoped there was some brilliant answer I was just too dim to figure out—the most obvious possibilities made me go all queasy. Sam! I thought, what did you do? And why was she cheerily telling me this stuff? Did she think I was so stupid I wouldn’t ask questions?
For the tiniest of moments, a thought flicked through my mind: Yes—there was a time when these questions wouldn’t have occurred to me. But that was scary too and not something to dwell on. I snapped at the ship-soul, “Resume play.”
Sam’s eyes smoothly finished their blink as she said, “So I’m sending my ship after you. With a bit of luck, you’ll still be on Willow when Cottonwood reaches Celestia— that’ll make it easy to bring you back. If not, my crew has to assume you’ve been transferred elsewhere; so Cottonwood will squirt this message to every navy vessel in the Celestia system…eyes-only.” She gave a girlish grin. “Dad showed me a sort of a kind of a back door into the navy computer system: how to pretend I’m an admiral. The High Council would barbecue him if they found out, but they probably do the same for their kids. In case of dire emergencies.”
She paused for a moment, then made a big show of looking right and left, as if checking to make sure no one else was listening. It was kind of a code gesture the two of us used as kids—a “just between you and me” thing that meant Sam was going to say something really really important. She leaned back in toward the camera, her eyes bright and piercing. “Okay now, Edward, I want you to listen very carefully.” Her words came out so slowly…had she always spoken to me like that? “The absolute most crucial thing now is that you get away from the navy. Understand? If people say they’re taking you home, don’t believe them. Escape, Edward; you have to escape. Don’t let them trap you, or hurt you, or put you under a microscope…”
Sam’s gaze dropped for a second, and she took a breath. Then she looked up again, and said, “I’m going to give you something very valuable, Edward: Dad’s special backdoor access code to the navy computer network. You can use it to pretend you’re an admiral, a High Council admiral, invoking Powers of Emergency. You’ll be able to give orders, look at confidential files, whatever you need. Don’t do anything crazy—if you draw too much attention, you’ll get in serious, serious trouble—but think smart, and make sure you escape.”
Her eyes drilled into me for a moment more; then she relaxed and smiled. “Once you’ve got away, Edward, come back to me. To Troyen, to the high queen’s palace in Unshummin. Okay? Go straight to the palace, and I’ll be waiting. It’ll be safe and happy like old times. Queen Temperance was the last holdout against the new high queen; with Temperance gone, there’s nothing in the way of peace but a few leaderless troops. By the time you get here, Edward, we’ll be finished mopping up, and no one will ever have to fight again.”
She lifted her fingers to her lips and kissed them, staring straight into the camera the whole while. “Come home, Edward. Come to Unshummin, to the palace. Please. This is where you belong. This is where you can do good. This is where you’ll be loved.”
Samantha’s face stayed on the screen a moment longer…and even though she was smiling, there was something saddened about her, as if something hurt inside. Then the image went black and the ship-soul was informing me that the message carried attached data—the backdoor access code. I told the computer to save the code in a file, then slumped back in my chair.
For a long time I just sat there, chewing my knuckle.
24
HAVING A CHECKUP
Sometime later—I don’t know how long—a knock came at my door. Not a real knock, of course; the person out there had touched the REQUEST ENTRY plate and the ship-soul had interpreted that signal as knock-knock-knock. You could customize your door signal to anything you want: a bell, a buzzer, a dog barking, whatever suited your fancy. Sam always liked a real knock, soft and deferential, as if the person outside your door was a shy little servant begging permission to take a moment of your time. Naturally, if that was the signal Sam used, I wanted it too. Sort of. I couldn’t remember actually asking for the knock, but Sam had programmed it into my permanent navy records, assuming that’s what I’d want.
Um. All of a sudden, that bothered me. Maybe I should change the knock to a ding-dong. Or a chime. Or one of those frittery bird-chirp sounds. Except as I thought of all the possibilities, it seemed like a lot of work to choose something new when a knock was perfectly okay.
The knock came again. I looked at the peep-monitor and saw Tobit standing there, glowering into the camera’s eye. “Let him in,” I told the ship-soul.
Tobit didn’t stop glowering as he entered, but he aimed the glare at the room rather than me. “Just like my cabin,” he growled, “except you don’t have underwear strewn about the floor for convenience.” He glanced my direction. “You settling in okay? Or do you want me to bug the quartermaster for some doodads to brighten the place up? He’s got some glass figurines that shatter real nice when you throw them against the wall.”
“No thanks.” I gave a sideways glance at the vidscreen on my desk, but it’d gone blank. Sam’s message must have automatically purged itself from the databanks after playing.
“Well,” Tobit said, “if you aren’t busy, Festina wants you down in sick bay. Since you’ve done the do-si-do with hive-queen venom, she wants to make sure you’re all right.” Tobit rolled his eyes. “I’m supposed to be your escort. In case the poison drops you into a writhing heap and you need to be dragged the rest of the way.”
“I’m not going to drop into a writhing heap,” I said.
“Glad to hear it,” Tobit replied. “I’ve got a bum arm, and I hate heavy lifting.”
He motioned me toward the door. It slid open in front of us…and I was just about to step out when Tobit grabbed me by the back of my shirt. With a yank that almost ripped the fabric, he jerked me back into the room and spun me around.
My fists came up of their own accord. Wild ideas dashed through my head—like the whole ship had been spying on me while I listened to Sam’s message, and now Festina and Prope and everyone intended to get me. I came a millisecond away from punching Tobit straight in his purple-veined nose…but he backed up fast and pointed at the floor outside my door.
The deck was covered with carpet—this part of the ship was all prettied up for visiting VIPs—and the carpet had a pattern of red jacaranda trees surrounded by multicolored swirls. For a second I couldn’t see anything where Tobit was pointing; but then, on one of the jacarandas closest to my door, I saw a little fleck of glowing crimson.
“Ship-soul,” Tobit said in a strained voice, “turn off the lights in this corridor.”
The passageway went dark—except for five patches of crimson spores twinkling up from the broadloom. They’d been planted right on five red jacarandas in the carpet’s pattern, where they’d be hard to spot and easy to step on.
“Um,” I said, swallowing hard.
“Kaisho seems to be exfoliating,” Tobit muttered. “I just caught sight of a flicker before you stepped down.”
He flumped on the edge of my bed and lifted his feet to check the soles of his boots. No glowing red dots. “Either I was lucky where I walked,” he said, “or the Balrog knew better than to bite into me. My bloodstream has enough liquor left over from my drinking days to pickle any damned fungus that tries to take root.”
I just kept staring at the glowing specks: one straight in front of my room and two on either side, likely to get stepped on whichever way I turned. “Do you think Kaisho deliberately wanted…I mean, it’s my door…”
“York, buddy,” Tobit said, “the fucking moss has a bone on for you. Or Kaisho does. Or both. If you try to buttonhole her, I’m sure she’ll swear it was only a ‘darling wee joke.’ Only teasing, the spores wouldn’t really eat you. Just lick you a bit, then let go…the Balrog’s way of flirting.” He scowled. “Better watch your step, pal—you’ve got all kinds of conquests drooling over you.”
He said that last with a grumbly sort of snappishness: like maybe there was a woman he was interested in, except she liked me better. But the only women on Jacaranda who’d even seen me were Prope and Kaisho and Festina…
Oh.
“Christ,” Tobit muttered disgustedly, wiping his boots on my floor, even though the soles were already clean. “Let’s call a vacuum cleaner and get the hell out of here. People are waiting for us in sick bay.”
I nodded quietly.
“We aren’t supposed to do this,” the doctor said. Yet another navy kid—in his thirties, but that’s pretty young for an M.D. His name was Veresian and he’d just accessed my medical history. “There’s a note on York’s chart, NO MEDICAL EXAMINATIONS EXCEPT IN EMERGENCIES. Certified by the Admiralty. Certified.”
Festina frowned. “That’s ridiculous. Everyone in the fleet gets regular checkups.”
“Not quite true, ah, Admiral, sorry,” Veresian said. “The navy will make exceptions. Usually on religious grounds—Opters, for instance.”
He turned to look at me. The doctor couldn’t straight-out ask who or what I worshiped—not with the navy’s strict policies on religious tolerance—but Opters are never shy about stating their beliefs. Their god disapproves of all medical treatments; you’re supposed to let heaven decide whether or not you recover. (Don’t ask me why a god would create a universe full of medicines, then tell you not to use them. Gods have a real fondness for making great stuff and putting it right under your nose, but saying, “If you love me, leave this alone.” Kind of like my sister hiding her diary in my room so Dad wouldn’t find it.)
By now, everyone in sick bay was looking at me—Veresian, Festina, and Tobit. “I’m not an Opter,” I said. “I’m…um…different.”
“You’re an Explorer, pal,” Tobit replied. “We’re all different.”
But I was illegally different. I didn’t say that out loud, of course—if there was one thing hammered into my head, it was keeping quiet about how I came to be. Not just because I’d been engineered. If you want the honest truth, I was also a sort of a kind of a clone of my father.
Pretty awful, right? Being him.
Of course, I wasn’t him exactly—the doctor who designed me started with Dad’s DNA, then fiddled with it to make me better. Samantha was exactly the same as me: the same person exactly, our dad’s clone, except she got an X chromosome where I got a Y.
Which meant she wasn’t the same person at all. Do you know about sex-linked gene deficiencies? Where if you’re a girl you’re all right, but if you’re a boy you don’t get built properly? Sam tried to explain it once with big blowup pictures of actual X and Y chromosomes, but I didn’t feel much like listening. It couldn’t be changed, could it? That was all I needed to know.
Even if Sam couldn’t make me understand how my brain went stupid, she sure made it clear I had to keep everything secret. Cloning had been banned for centuries in the Technocracy, and gene manipulation was strictly limited to fixing “catastrophic disorders”—if you just wanted your kids prettier or smarter, you got thrown in jail.
Worse than that, the children were classified “potentially non-sentient” since no one could predict how a DNA tweak would affect “moral character.” There were just too many variables to calculate…and too many awful examples over the years, people trying to make perfect offspring and ending up with monsters: psychopaths, killers, people whose brains were messed up worse than mine. If the navy knew the truth about Sam and me, we’d never be allowed on a starship again—on the off chance we might suddenly turn crazy and inhuman and non-sentient.
