“That’s arranged then. Brimble can give you the details.” He turned to his servant. “Where’s James now?”

  “In your office, Sire.”

  As the two of them talked with their back to me, I reached down with my shirt sleeve pulled over my hand and picked up Stephen’s teacup. I slipped the cup – although it was somewhat large – into the inside pocket of the bulky jacket I had worn specially. There was still some tea in the bottom of the cup and I tried to keep my face passive as I felt the liquid, which had gone cold, run down my side.

  Stephen headed off to his office to meet with his brother, leaving Brimble to show me out.

  To reach the entrance of Londos House, we went down a set of different and less elaborate corridors, which were probably used mostly by servants.

  When we arrived, Brimble asked, “Will we be seeing more of you?”

  “I really don’t know,” I told him. “Possibly.”

  “Then you won’t be needing a souvenir of your visit,” he said. He held out his hand like a teacher demanding a toy off a naughty child.

  I sighed. So I hadn’t been clandestine in taking the cup at all. I reached into my inside jacket pocket and retrieved it for him.

  “Thank you, Individual Cassandra.” He took the cup from me. “See you again.”

  He went back inside Londos House, leaving me to walk out onto the street without the DNA sample I had intended to collect.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I checked my messages when I got back and there was, at last, one from Nick.

  He said he had decrypted Hoggard’s code and I could come to collect it at his workshop in the evening after he’d finished for the day.

  Freddi tagged along.

  “I thought Londos was supposed to be full of people,” he observed as we walked through the streets approaching Nick’s workshop.

  It was quieter, and later, than the first time I had been there. “People like to go home after work,” I said.

  “Townsfolk are strange,” said Freddi.

  I laughed. “Why do you think I like spaceships?”

  I pushed at Nick’s door like the first time I had been there, expecting it to be open, but it didn’t move. It was not only closed, but locked. There were no sounds of music or slightly out of tune singing. There were no sounds of movement inside at all. I wondered if Nick had gone home and forgotten about us.

  I knocked on the door and waited.

  Moments later, I heard the sound of someone coming down the stairs. Nick opened the door and paused on the doorstep.

  “Who’s this?” he said, looking at Freddi.

  “It’s my shipmate, Freddi,” I said. “He’s staying with me in Londos for a while. That’s okay, isn’t it?”

  Nick didn’t say whether it was or whether it wasn’t, he just ushered us inside. Once we were in, he closed and locked the door behind us. He pushed past us and rushed back up to his workshop.

  When I joined him moments later, I saw it looked more or less the same as the first time. It was still a mess, only some of the mess had been moved around a little. There were a few more abandoned drinking cups and one dinner plate with the remains of the meal it once contained congealed into an unhealthy-looking smear.

  Nick leant back on his workbench with his hands in his pockets. “What exactly did you mean when you asked me to do this job ‘off the books’?”

  “Just that the code was given to me by a friend and he asked me to look after it.” It was only a half-lie. Maybe not even that, maybe a quarter of one.

  “It wasn’t because it was stolen?”

  He was starting to make me feel uneasy, but I tried to hide it and be casual. “What makes you say that?”

  “The watermark running through the whole thing saying authorised eyes only.”

  “You de-coded it?” I said.

  Nick allowed himself a smug grin. “I said I did, didn’t I?”

  He took his hands out of his pockets and walked around the other side of the workbench to his computer equipment. “It was a sophisticated encryption,” he said. “But an old one, and there exists decryption software for it if you know where to look. Which, fortunately, I do.”

  “What does it say?” said Freddi.

  “Apart from authorised eyes only?” said Nick.

  “Apart from that.”

  “A lot of scientific gobbledygook.”

  “Can I see?” said Freddi.

  “I don’t see why not.”

  Freddi made his way to Nick’s bench, carefully stepping over several bits of mess on the floor as he did so. Not to be left out, I followed.

  Nick awoke the main screen in front of him with a tap and its bluey-whiteness shone out across us. “It didn’t make any sense to me at first,” he said. “I thought I was using the wrong software or maybe it was double code – when someone wants to make something extra secure, they encrypt it twice – or more, sometimes.”

  He tapped the screen again and writing appeared. But not writing like I understood it. It was one long, unbroken nonsense word that filled the screen in block capitals.

  “Then I looked at it closer,” said Nick. “And I realised the code was made up of the same four letters: A, T, C, G. There’s only one thing that produces a code like that.”

  “The Deity,” said Freddi.

  “I was going to say nature,” said Nick. “But, yeah.”

  I looked at the screen again. He was right. The sequence began at the top of the screen, ATGCTAGCTAACT… and continued on like that in what appeared, to me, to be a random pattern until it reached the bottom of the screen. “It’s a genetic code?” I said.

  “A big long DNA sequence,” said Nick. “What it’s for, I don’t know.”

  He scrolled down and the letters kept coming, pages and pages of them. “After that, the decryption software starting pulling out other stuff. Stuff that looked like an accompanying scientific paper. I read a bit of it, but it went over my head. Then I figured I better stop reading it.”

  The genetic sequence disappeared off the top of the screen and was replaced by writing that I could actually read. Dense paragraphs interspersed with labelled diagrams and, underneath them, in large faint letters written at a forty-five degree angle, the words: AUTHORISED EYES ONLY.

  “Authorised by who?” I wondered out loud.

  “I don’t know, but I would say someone who was worried about the information getting out,” said Nick.

  He tapped the screen again to bring up another page. This time, it was a single paragraph in bold, plain language:

  All materials are strictly for authorised personnel only. Not to be removed from this laboratory, copied or shared with anyone. The contents of this document must not be discussed in any way. Personnel are reminded of the sensitive nature of these documents and the risks associated with allowing their contents to be known outside of those with the appropriate clearance.

  Freddi peered closer at the screen. “Would you mind if I…?”

  Nick took a step back and Freddi moved in, scrolling through to bring up page after page of the scientific document. As much gobbledygook to me as Nick claimed it was to him.

  “Who, exactly, was this ‘friend’ of yours who had the code?” said Nick, turning to glare at me.

  “Someone on my ship,” I said. “They left the code behind, I told you.”

  “It doesn’t look like the sort of thing someone would leave lying around on a freelancer’s ship.”

  “I think the man who left it was in a hurry,” I said.

  Nick’s eyes narrowed. “What sort of hurry?”

  I winced as I told him. “The sort that had the Fertillan Guard after him. I think you’re right, I think he stole it.”

  Nick’s face hardened with anger. “And you decided not to mention this when you brought it to my workshop?”

  “I hoped I could get it de-coded quietly. I hoped I’d find out what it was and no one else would need to know.”

  “You’re damned right no one else is going to know.” Nick pushed Freddi out of the way of his screen. He tapped it and the image of the document disappeared in front of us. He kept tapping and I saw the word, ‘delete’ appear briefly before it, too, disappeared.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” I stepped forward, but Nick pushed me back.

  “Making sure there’s no evidence of this document left on my equipment.”

  “That ‘authorised personnel’ stuff doesn’t really mean anything,” I said. “People put that on important papers just to scare other people.”

  “Works, doesn’t it?” said Nick. Another piece of the scientific paper appeared on the screen and abruptly vanished as the word ‘delete’ flashed in front of our eyes.

  “I don’t understand why you asked me here if all you were going to do was delete the code.”

  He turned to me again. Behind him, the blank screen cast its empty bluey-white light. “Why did you bring this to me?” he asked. “Why did you simply not return it to your friend?”

  “He died,” I said.

  Nick nodded, like he wasn’t surprised. “How did he die?”

  “Not in a good way.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  He turned back to his workbench and hit a button underneath. A drawer slid open and revealed the memory ball sitting in a little holder. Freddi reached for it, but Nick snatched it up ahead of him. “I put everything on the ball: the original code and the decrypted version.”

  I sighed with relief. He hadn’t deleted it after all. At least, not entirely.

  “You can take it away as long as you promise not to come back,” he said.

  “Absolutely. I promise.” I opened my palm and he dropped the ball into it. It was warm from being inside the equipment. “I still need to pay you.”

  “No you don’t. No money changes hands; nothing is traceable.” He looked tense, pale, agitated. “Make sure you delete all data linking us on your devices. Messages, appointments, everything.”

  “You’re really worried,” I said.

  “I’ve got kids now,” was all he said.

  Freddi pulled at my arm. “Come on, Cassy, let’s go.”

  I gripped the memory ball tight in my fist and nodded an acknowledgement to Nick. “Thanks for this,” I said.

  Freddi tugged at my arm again and I allowed myself to be led to the door.

  We had to wait for Nick at the bottom of the stairs because he had locked us in. He said nothing when he came down. He opened the door, we stepped out onto the street, he slammed it shut behind us and I heard the locks click into place.

  I started to walk away, but Freddi pulled me to one side. “I think I know what the code is,” he whispered.

  “You do?”

  “Let’s not talk here.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Freddi sat himself down on the bed in my room in Mandi’s house. It left me with the one hard, and slightly wonky, chair in the room.

  “Do you realise that document shouldn’t exist?” he said.

  “It nearly didn’t. I thought Nick was going to delete the lot.” I pressed my hand to my trouser pocket and felt the reassuring hard, round presence of the memory ball.

  “It never should have existed,” said Freddi. “The science in it shouldn’t be possible.”

  “When did you become a budding scientist?” I said.

  “I didn’t, but I know farming and I saw enough in that document to tell it was research into growing crops. I think Nick saw it too, but he didn’t want to admit it to himself.”

  “Hoggard stole research about growing crops? Why would he risk his life for that? Who would kill for that?”

  “If I’m right – and, as you point out, I’m no scientist – lots of people.”

  I shook my head and the chair wobbled beneath me. None of this seemed relevant, or important. “Freddi, you’re going to have to spell this out in words of one syllable.”

  He sighed and ran his hands through his grey and ginger hair. “Fertilla has to be the stupidest name ever for a planet like this. This planet isn’t fertile. The earth is dust, oxygen levels are negligible, it hardly ever rains, the sun is too far away to be hot enough and yet there’s not the atmosphere to protect us from solar radiation…”

  “I get the point,” I said. “We had to build agro-domes to grow food. Even I remember that bit from school.”

  “But there were already plants growing here on the planet’s natural surface. That’s what gave hope to the original settlers and that’s what scientists hoped to capitalise on. But the alien plants are too different from the plants our ancestors brought from SolPrime. You can’t stick the two together and grow wheat out on the unprotected Fertillan surface, it doesn’t work.”

  “What about the document?” I said, wishing he would get to the point.

  “I think it’s a way to make it work. I don’t pretend to understand it in detail, but it looked to me like someone has made the impossible possible. They’ve taken the genetic material from the natural plants on Fertilla and somehow melded it with the DNA of the plants humans brought with them to create a hybrid which doesn’t need an agro-dome.”

  He looked at me with expectation and excitement as he waited for me to understand. I wasn’t sure I did. “Why is that important?”

  “Oh, Cassy!” said Freddi. He jumped off the bed and paced the room in frustration. “You’ve spent too much of your life on a spaceship.”

  “That’s a matter of opinion,” I said, a little offended.

  His pacing brought him back to me and he knelt next to where I was sitting. Totally unexpectedly, he took my hand. I sat back away from him and the chair wobbled. He squeezed my hand tight like he was pressing the information into me, while he kept his voice low so no one might overhear. “Because, Cassy, you could grow such a hybrid plant almost anywhere. Not just outside of an agro-dome on Fertilla, but on other planets with poor soil and weak sunshine. On moons or asteroids where radiation is a problem. On space stations that need to conserve water.”

  He paused and looked up into my face.

  I smiled back; it was making sense. “It’s food technology that could be exported across the Rim.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “It could feed people struggling on some of the most inhospitable colonies.”

  “Yes!” he said.

  He let go of my hand and sat back on the floor. He leant against the wardrobe.

  I thought about all the many possibilities. I knew nothing about farms, but I had seen the conditions in some of the worst places where people spent their lives worrying about the next meal. “That’s got to be worth a lot of money,” I said.

  Freddi nodded. “Yes.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  A message came through from Nanci. She had finished the repairs to our ship and acquired us a new shuttle which she had almost finished fixing. It meant we would be able to leave Fertilla within a couple of days.

  I caught Freddi to tell him as he was coming out of the bathroom. His hair was wet from the shower and he had a towel wrapped around the waist of his otherwise naked body.

  “I’ve heard from Nanci,” I said, as I stood half in and half out of my room, resting on the frame of the open door.

  “And?” he said.

  “Almost done. We’re more or less ready to leave.”

  “What about the bill?”

  “The bill came with the message. I haven’t dared open it yet.”

  “I can imagine.” Freddi took a step towards his room.

  “We need to decide what to do,” I said.

  He paused. “Well, I was going to finish off getting dry and getting dressed, I don’t know about you.”

  I stepped out into the hallway. “We need to decide what we’re going to do beyond the next few minutes.”

  He reached for the door handle. “Do we have to talk about it now?”

  “Nanci wants to know when we’ll be arriving.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Fine.”

  He opened the door, stepped inside and left it open so I could follow him in.

  The room, like mine, had been given a Mandi makeover. When I was a child, some of the older boys slept there and, from what I remember from the glimpses I had of it when they went in or out, it was so chaotic it lent a new meaning to the word ‘mess’. Now, it was relatively clean and tidy with just the one unmade bed that Freddi had slept in, a wardrobe, and a chair with Freddi’s clothes draped across it.

  “Close the door, could you?” he said.

  I turned around and pushed the door shut. When I turned back, Freddi had whipped the towel off from around his waist and was scrubbing his hair dry with it.

  He threw his towel on the bed and reached for his trousers. “What do you want to do?” he said.

  I threw up my hands in exasperation. I had been asking myself that question all night and got nowhere. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be asking you.”

  “Oh, so you only consult me when you’re stuck, is that it?” he said with a grin.

  I gave him a hard stare. “You know what I mean.”

  While he stepped into his trousers, I went over to his bed, moved the damp towel out of the way and sat myself down on it. It was a cheap bed and bounced several times before I was able to sit still.

  Freddi was facing away from me as he did up his trousers and I saw the deep scar across his back that he rarely let me see. It ran all the way from the top of his right shoulder blade down to the bottom of his ribs on the left. I imagined it was a legacy from his pirate days, but he had never told me about it and I hadn’t had the audacity to ask him.

  “Hoggard said, ‘deliver the code’,” I said. “What does that mean? Deliver it where? Deliver it to who?”

  Freddi grabbed his shirt from the chair and covered up his scar as he slipped his arms into the sleeves. “Whoever was going to pay him a lot of money to steal it, I would think.”

  “But he said it was ‘our salvation’. Why would he say that if he was doing it for money? He must have known it was technology that could feed the Rim.”

 

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