Battles unfought, p.5
Battles Unfought, page 5
The Cheshire Cat spoke for the first time now. “Charming, isn’t he?”
“Fuck you, old man,” Mahone shot back. “If you hadn’t been so stupid, we wouldn’t have got caught in the first place.”
“I don’t remember inviting you to my table,” Chesterton said mildly. Other than his moved, he still hadn’t moved. He lay reclined on his cot, watching us from the corner of his eye.
“Yeah, well, that was my mistake. I thought you were all you were cracked up to be.” Mahone turned back to me. “But come on. Don’t tell me you’re going to hand me over to those Union species-mixers and traitors.”
“You must not have got a good look at their team, bud,” Chesterton said. “They’re not exactly a humans-first crew.”
Mahone’s expression took on a contemptuous note. “Is that what this is? You’re species-traitors?”
“I have no idea what that means,” I admitted. The fact was, I suspected that anything he opposed so vehemently must be alright. But I wasn’t going to let myself keep getting drawn into his argument. “Nor do I care. Now, I’m going to tell you for the last time: hand over the blankets, or we will take them from you.”
He looked me over from head to toe, and the gleam in his eyes made me shiver. It was something beyond hate, beyond anger.
Beyond sanity.
When he spoke, he kept his tone low and almost calm. Only a hint of something sinister lay under the surface. “Try it, bitch.”
“Happily,” Syd said, trundling toward the cell. “Please wait there, Katherine. I will handle this.”
Mahone went on watching me as Syd reached the cell door. He still watched, while Syd put in the passcode. Only when the door opened with a beep, and the click-clack of robotic track sounded in the cell did he turn away.
He remained defiantly on the cot while Syd approached, but faltered as one of the robot’s metal appendages reached for him. Then, with a cry of indignation, he leaped off the cot, tossing the blankets aside.
“Keep your robotic abominations away from me,” he cried, as if Syd was some sort of Frankenstein’s monster set upon him. A mere henchman that did my bidding, rather than a thinking, feeling creature in his own right.
Syd retrieved the bed linens and said, “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Mahone.”
Mahone stared daggers at Syd’s back as he retreated. “So that’s it?” he demanded. “You’re going to what? Leave me to freeze here?”
“If the cell is too cold, we can adjust the temperature,” I said.
“Too cold? It’s an iceberg in there.”
“Then we’ll adjust the temperature.”
He scowled, and Syd said, “Let us go, Katherine.”
“You’re a human, aren’t you?” Mahone demanded. “Pure human? You look it. Is this really what you want? Them, running the show. Replacing us?”
I ignored the questions and turned to the door.
He went on. “You’re okay taking orders from a robot? From aliens?”
We’d reached the brig door now, and Syd opened it.
“Hey,” Chesterton called, animated for the first time since we’d arrived, “what the hell are you doing?”
I glanced back. Syd asked, “Did you require something, Mr. Chesterton?”
“Uh, yeah. The mute button, please. You think I want to listen to this shit?”
Mahone shook his head. “Goddamned traitors.”
“Oh,” I said. “Syd?”
“Both of you. You’re human, and –” His voice faded to a faint murmur as Syd lowered the sound dampening field.
“Thank you,” Chesterton said, reclining once again. “It’s bad enough to lock a man in a cage. But to force me to listen to that crap?”
“And yet,” Syd observed, “you were entertaining him when we apprehended you.”
Chesterton’s face wrinkled in a show of disgust. “That, my metallic friend, is where you’re wrong. I was not entertaining him. He’d sought me out. I didn’t know him from Adam.”
“Why?” I asked.
“What’s it to you?” he asked.
Which was a fair question. It really wasn’t anything to me. I didn’t care, not really. In a week’s time, we’d be free to hand them over to the Union, and we’d never have to think about either of them again.
“Never mind,” I said.
At the same time, he said, “Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter if I tell you. He wanted me to do a job. He had a scheme. A rather harebrained one, if you must know. Involved a mob-run casino on Kularisi.” He added confidentially, “I may be a thief, but I’m not a fool. I don’t – to paraphrase for a lady’s benefit – defecate where I eat. Nor do I tangle with the mob. Certainly not both at the same time.”
Chesterton sat up now and rolled his shoulders in a languid shrug. “But even if it had been a brilliant plan, I still would have turned him down. And you know why?”
When neither of us spoke, he elucidated anyway. “Because I also don’t tangle with psycho. And that boy in there, whatever else he is, he’s not well.” He tapped his forehead meaningfully. “What he does, he likes doing.”
“I should say the same about you, Mr. Chesterton,” Sydney observed.
Chesterton grinned. “True enough. But what I do isn’t what he does, is it? And what I enjoy sure as hell isn’t what he enjoys.”
Chapter Six
The encounter left me feeling uneasy. I couldn’t say why, exactly. Certainly, Mahone’s disturbed rhetoric was upsetting. But people like that existed. Isolationists, extremists, reactionaries. People who insisted that the existence of other sentient species was somehow an attack on their own species.
It was an old school prejudice, the sort of thing that had largely gone out of fashion across most of the Union. But that didn’t mean it had vanished. It didn’t even mean it was hard to find. It just meant that most people who thought that way had the political acumen to keep such opinions to themselves, or share only among those who felt the same.
I had certainly run into it before, both from humans who confided assuming I’d agree, and on the receiving end, from people who viewed my human existence as an affront to theirs and their species.
No. It wasn’t Mahone’s rhetoric, disgusting though it was.
It was the man himself. Chesterton had called him psycho. An imprecise, even stigmatizing, term. Mahone had never been diagnosed with any mental illnesses, and it was simultaneously a copout to blame his issues on illness, and stigmatizing to those with actual illnesses.
There was something there, something in his eyes. Something deeply disturbed.
He was sane, by most definitions anyway. Some would argue that the very act of taking life qualified one as insane. But most experts held that everyone was capable of doing so, and most could be pushed in the right circumstances – so the act, repeated or not, did not itself convey anything about a person’s sanity.
I was no expert, but for my own personal classification, I stuck to the mainstream definitions. Tanner Mahone was as sane as anyone.
But he enjoyed hurting people. He enjoyed being the center of attention, whatever the cause. He enjoyed being feared.
Somehow, even after a hearty breakfast, even as the crew sat down to work on our plans, I couldn’t fully shake my discomfort.
I’d been annoyed with Takahashi the night before for giving us this assignment at all. Now, I didn’t care so much about that. Now, I only wished he’d given us the chance to offload the fugitives first.
To get rid of Mahone.
I didn’t like the idea of spending two weeks in the same space, and it didn’t much matter that he’d be spending that time exclusively in the brig.
Still, we had a full agenda, and as difficult as I found it to concentrate, I had no choice. We had twofold plans to make.
First, we needed to figure out how we’d penetrate the Broker’s security – how we’d get onto the planet at all, into the compound, and finally into the vault. That meant reviewing all the plans Takahashi had sent over. Schematics, order forms, leaked memos, surveillance details – any scrap of information we could find that might help.
And second, of course, we still had to settle how we’d handle the Broker and his gang. As he’d predicted, Syd ran into no problems with Takahashi. The admiral hadn’t inquired why he needed clearance to the Union citizen databases, and Syd hadn’t volunteered anything but the vaguest information.
Still, the approval had come through, and Syd had begun his search. A search that would not conclude for some time.
Not a surprise, considering the size and scope of the search. Individual member planets often housed billions at a time. Then there were the terraformed colonies, the moon settlements, the corporate holdings and the various one-off colonies and settlements scattered throughout space. Add to that the nomads like us, the crews that had no fixed address, and – well, it was a lot of people, and a lot of eyes to run through his comparison.
Even filtering by humans, it would take some time to complete.
And though the search would have taken about half the time if Syd focused only on human males, the slightly higher probability hadn’t been high enough to warrant the risk of missing our quarry.
So after some discussion, we decided to hold off for the time being on the Broker, and focus on the vault instead.
This involved a lot of – frankly, tedious – work, requiring attention to detail and focus. Neither of which I had in abundant supply at the moment. Consequently, the ensuing few hours passed painfully slowly.
Dave had initially skipped the conference due to a headache – one we all knew to be a hangover. As the morning progressed, he excused himself due to being needed in the kitchen. “Food isn’t going to cook itself. Some of us have real work to do.”
When he finally sounded the bell for lunch, I couldn’t have been more relieved. My eyes had been glazing over for the last hour, my mind wandering, as the floor plans all ran together.
The compound consisted of a manor house and series of smaller homes and cottages. Who resided in these, no one seemed to know for sure.
Takahashi’s intelligence reports didn’t even confirm that they were lived in, though that was the assumption.
Aside from residences and – probably – residents, the place housed a fully functional industrial farming complex and several largely automated factories. The place was, in short, designed to be entirely self-sufficient.
Whether it had achieved that goal or not, Takahashi’s notes didn’t say. Ships still came and went, and sometimes those ships brought supplies, but that didn’t tell us whether they carried anything necessary, or merely transported luxuries.
It would be an impressive feat for a terraformed world to be entirely self-sustaining in five years, but certainly not unprecedented. When you were generating your own atmosphere and designing your own biosphere, you didn’t have to worry about hostile climates or wildlife or diseases. Good terraformers controlled for all those variables.
That at least I knew something about. I’d been an engineer on plenty of terraforming crews. It had been a miscalculation on one such mission that ended that career. An uncontrolled variable.
So I knew what was possible when things went right – and when they didn’t.
As far as I could tell, everything had gone right for the Broker. His planet, known among the syndicate by the rather uninspired title of Home, and sometimes Home Sweet Home, boasted plentiful vegetation and a broad selection of imported wildlife. Nothing – as far as Takahashi’s file noted, anyway – predatory.
I turned all of this over in my head, as I turned a pile of pale, lumpy slop over on my plate. Dave had called it kitchen sink casserole, as in, a casserole that came with everything but the kitchen sink.
But that seemed an insult to casseroles. He had made a watery attempt at gravy, and thrown in a hodgepodge of reconstituted meat and vegetables and leftovers. Now, the gravy pooled around a mound of foodstuff – a pale, whitish moat surrounding a steaming mountain of mush.
I was not the only one to lack appreciation for Dave’s efforts. All around me, I could hear the rest of the crew grumbling.
Dave rarely put in enough effort to be considered a really good cook. But his food had been passable – and occasionally, more than passable – since moving to The Lady Bane’s well outfitted galleys. A hangover, however, seemed to do nothing for his skill.
Not that we would have dared approach him with our complaints. After bringing trays down to the prisoners, he’d firmly anchored himself to the far end of the galley, where he guzzled copious amounts of coffee – and scowled at anyone bold enough to address him.
Still, it didn’t silence us.
“Unbelievable,” Frank was saying. “This is barely edible. The vegetables are overcooked, and the meat – is this rubber actually supposed to be meat? Or did he drop a spatula in the grinder?”
“It’s meat,” Jylya sighed, setting down her fork disgustedly. Jylya was Korinthian, and as such, abstained from any and all animal flesh.
Frank shot her a sympathetic glance. She and the Kudarian were a couple, and while their eating habits differed about as much as any two people’s could, they each respected the other’s preferences and restrictions. An unusual pairing, perhaps, but they’d made it a very successful one.
“I suggest,” Corano said, “that we avail ourselves of the crew galley.”
One of the smaller kitchens, the crew galley had been opened to general use. It was only marginally stocked, but we could at least whip up something in a pinch – and without bringing Dave’s wrath upon ourselves, for trespassing in his sacred domain.
Usually, we relied on it if we wanted a snack or had missed mealtime. But every once in a while, as today, Dave proved particularly uninspired, and the galley got more than its fair share of use.
Maggie nodded. “Whatever you do, don’t let him see you doing it. In the mood he’s in today, you’ll be as likely to wind up the starring ingredient in tonight’s mystery meat casserole as not.”
“I’ll go get started,” Corano said. “Give it fifteen minutes, and start following, a few at a time.”
“What are you going to make?” Frank asked.
“What do you want to eat?”
“I don’t know. What do we have available?”
This spawned an entirely new vein of conversation, as we parsed what ingredients we could easily lay our hands on – without raiding Dave’s pantries, and so tipping him off – and what we could in turn do with those ingredients.
We had more or less settled on shakshuka when an alarm sounded. Instinctively, I turned to the kitchen, expecting to see something ablaze.
But it was no fire alarm. A robotic voice blared through the ship’s sound system. “Attention. Attention. Code 10 in the brig. Code 10 in the brig.”
“Code 10?” I asked blankly.
Frank shrugged. Maggie frowned. Corano said, “It must be a military code.”
“No code I know,” Maggie said. Before she’d been a privateer, Maggie had been a Union captain. But that had been some years prior.
“We had better check it out,” Corano said, glancing at Ria. She was already on her feet, and now she nodded.
But I think the rest of us heard it as a general command, or at least a recommendation. I know I did. Maggie got to her feet too, and Frank and Jylya.
In fact, while the overhead continued to page out the mysterious code ten, we all abandoned our plates and fell in behind Corano.
All but Dave, who watched us go from under scowling brows, and over the rim of his coffee mug.
We met Syd halfway to the brig. He could at least tell us the meaning of the code. It was, he explained, a proprietary new system the vessel had been trialing.
A code ten meant a medical emergency among the prisoners.
“It is an automatic alert,” Syd explained, “generated by the brig’s medical monitoring system. I cannot, however, find out the nature of the emergency.”
“Probably someone choked on that so-called food Dave served,” Frank said.
Chapter Seven
Although no one had actually choked, Frank still hadn’t been too far from the mark. The catastrophe centered around lunch. We found the two men in very different situations in their respective cells – Jonas Chesterton calmly eating his lunch, and Tanner Mahone laying in a small pool of blood staring blearily at the bars of his cell.
His tray lay at his feet, the food and the rest of the silverware scattered – all but his dinner knife, which he clutched tightly in one hand. A few drops of red still stained the blade.
But the main share of blood oozed from his other arm, specifically from a small slit in the wrist. A clumsy cut that clearly missed any veins – he would have been in far worse shape had the cut been more effective – but one that bled a good deal anyway.
Fredricks pushed to the front of the group, swearing at the sight of the knife. “What the hell was Dave thinking?” he demanded, punching in an access code.
Syd pushed in ahead of the doctor, trundling up to the prone man to take the knife. “Drop the knife.”
“Stay back, robot!” Mahone flung his arm up in a feeble stabbing gesture, but the blade glanced off Syd’s armored chassis and clattered to the floor.
Syd retrieved the blade and all the remaining silverware while Dr. Fredericks treated the injured man. A superficial wound, it required only a bit of skin adhesive – though this was not obvious from Mahone’s reaction.
He protested the entire time, insisting that we let him die, demanding that we remove “the robot” and “alien filth” from his presence, insisting that he had a human right to die in the company of his own kind, and so on.
Fredericks displayed the patience of a saint in treating him. He refused to be baited by any of his wilder claims or demands, and stuck to a businesslike manner when addressing his injuries.
“Come now, Mr. Mahone, no one dies from a scratch,” he’d say. Or, “If you are dying, Mr. Mahone, you may be the first person in history to pass from losing a few ounces of blood. A remarkable medical feat, if I may say so.”
