Osprey chronicles comple.., p.84
Osprey Chronicles Complete Series Boxed Set, page 84
“You broke my nose!” Petra tried to scramble to her feet. She didn’t know what she intended to do, except maybe dish out a little payback.
Amy grabbed her by the arm, holding her steady.
“Hey,” she soothed. She had a surprisingly soft voice for such a beefy girl. “It’s fixed now, Petie. It’s fixed.”
Petra fell back onto the narrow bench where she had been sleeping and groaned. Her head spun. A quick jab of the tongue told her that Rush’s punch had broken more than just her nose. The prosthetic teeth were crumbling to pieces in her mouth. She turned her head and spat out a few ceramic chips. There was a sore spot beneath her tongue, but if she remembered correctly, she had managed to spit out the memory drive before passing out.
“Oh gawd,” Petra groaned, taking the mug Amy offered her. It was more of Scraps’ awful tea, but she drank it without complaint. “I ain’t felt this hungover in years.”
“We gave you some painkiller for the nose.” Amy sounded a little sheepish as she fingered her ear stud. Her touch changed it from lime green to a pretty pink hue. “Maybe too much. You were pretty out of it for a few hours.”
“Hours…” Petra mumbled. Then she sat up again—slower, this time—and faced Rush. “Hours, huh? What happened?”
Rush sighed, head falling. He massaged his temples. The TNN news broadcast on the screen behind him told Petra all she needed to know.
Two pictures filled the screen. One was a mugshot of a square-jawed older man with fine white hair, one a formal headshot of the handsome young guard Rush had killed.
Terrorist attack on Internal Affairs leaves two dead, five injured, the headline read.
Smaller story headlines scrolled past the bottom of the screen.
Manhunt for Fugitive Potlova Continues. Commander Kelba Speaks about Yesterday’s Broadcast Interruption. Up Next: What Serenity Can Do For You.
“Oh no.” Petra covered her mouth with a hand as all the memories from before the punch flooded back to her.
“They’re listing Scraps and the guard as dead,” Rush said hoarsely. He had shed all of his disguises and slumped in the tattered office chair, his hair disheveled around his bloodless face.
“What about Juice?” Petra asked.
Rush shook his head.
“No word on Juice,” Amy said quietly.
“My ears in Internal Affairs say she’s not in the brig,” Rush added.
“Oh.” Petra let out a wavering breath. She didn’t need them to tell her how bad that was. By the look on her companions’ faces, none of them had any illusions that the older woman had managed to avoid capture.
Now Juice was being held in secret. You could do almost anything to a prisoner held in secret.
“We had to abandon the storage bay HQ,” Rush said. “If the MP or the Seeker Corps have Juice, it’s only a matter of time before they find out about that place. If they haven’t already.”
“It’s a spare airlock chamber,” Amy explained, rapping a knuckle against the curved wall that formed the high-tech tin can around them. “Not very big, but well-shielded, rarely inspected or monitored, and with an exit at both ends. Also, impossible to live in if you don’t have some special gear, so nobody would think to check a place like this for resistance fighters.” She gestured at a black, chest-sized device sitting beneath the bench on the opposite wall. It was a small space heater and air scrubber.
Petra shivered, pulling a thin blanket tight around her shoulders. Spare freighter parts—big parts, like full-sized airlock chambers and docking cradles—were kept in a barely-pressurized outer loop that circled the freighter like one of the rings of Saturn.
No wonder it was so cold in here.
“I am sorry about your face, Petra,” Rush murmured, turning back to the screens.
Petra’s jaw worked, but for a good minute, no sound came out. Then she gulped the last of the quickly-cooling tea. “Well, you fixed it, too,” she said gruffly, touching the medfoam ball on her face. It didn’t actively hurt. She took that to mean the cartilage had set just fine. And hey. Maybe a crooked nose would help disguise her better.
Larry always did like my little nose, though, she lamented before shoving the thought aside. Taking Amy’s arm for support, she pushed herself to shaking feet. Gawd, she felt so heavy.
“Please tell me you at least got the memory drive,” she said.
Rush nodded and tapped the screen, tabbing away from the news broadcast.
“It’s not as much as we’d hoped.” He confirmed Petra’s unspoken fear as a list of file names and directories filled the screen. “But it’s something, darling. It’s a start.”
“What is it?” Petra breathed, scanning the names. They hadn’t had time to be selective about which files the drive would copy. Scraps had pre-programmed the drive to snatch data from across the classified servers, casting a net far and wide. Hope that a mermaid will turn up among the mackerel, the older man had told Petra with a wink before they’d left on the last mission. Petra hadn’t had time to ask what a mermaid was—or a mackerel—but she got the gist of it.
Most of the file names were simple alphanumeric code that meant nothing to her. A few lines stood out. Some of them gave her a glimmer of hope that the dirt they expected to find was there, after all. Crusade Master Protocol. CRISPrAgeless.03.
Her gaze landed on one file name, and she gasped, pointing. “Riella 3. There. The, uh, the Tepori and the massacre —”
Rush was shaking his head. “I had so hoped we would find another copy of Jackie’s last video in that file. We could leak that now without implicating Rush Starr.”
“It’s not there?” Petra was dismayed.
“That’s the trouble with casting a wide net, darling.” He sniffed, scrubbing a cuff against the corner of his eye. Petra realized he must’ve been weeping for hours. “There wasn’t time for it to go deep enough to retrieve the video—if it was there at all. There are a few mission reports that talk around the massacre. With a little massaging, we can use them to piece together the full story of what happened and leak that to the web.”
It wasn’t the sort of bombshell they’d hoped for. Not by a long shot. Scraps had died for it and Juice…Juice might be worse than dead.
“I’m sorry,” Petra whispered. She held out a hand to the trembling Rush and paused, unsure if touching the man was the right thing to do.
Rush resolved the matter for her by taking her hand in his bony fingers and pressing a dry, gracious kiss against her knuckles. Then he leaned forward, cradling her hand against his forehead. He was ice cold to the touch.
“Thank you,” he whispered. “They were the last family I had.”
“There’s other stuff, though,” Amy said, once the silent agony became unbearable. “Lots of interesting stuff. There’s info on other planets the fleet knows about, but they haven’t made public. Notes on mod experiments they’ve been running even though they say they don’t. Gene therapies and cloning and all kinds of illegal stuff.”
“Then…” Rush straightened and tapped on one file directory name. “There’s this.”
Petra forced herself to study the screen. She was no dummy, but her specialized training had focused on comms networks, and all the titles and headlines running down the screen before her were about protein sequences and hormone synthesis and other stuff beyond her pay grade.
“What is it?” she asked.
“It’s the truth about Serenity, Petra.” Rush drew in a deep breath. “We’re going to use it to take these fuckers down.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“Ah. Commander. I was about to take lunch.” Professor Grayson slung a generous lunch pail over his shoulder and waved Nicholetta Kelba toward his airlock. “Please, join me on the patio. Leave your man at the door. I only have enough capicola for two.”
The fleet commander nodded at her secretary, who bowed his head and stepped back into the residential hallway.
“I don’t understand why you live down here in the slums.” Kelba held back a faint sneer as she stepped into Professor Grayson’s apartment. The door slid shut behind her. “So cold and heavy.”
“I do it for the view, Commander. A good view is worth its weight in gold. Also—” He punched a security code into his airlock door and shot a strangely boyish smile over his shoulder. “The rent is so much cheaper. Up on the concourse, my housing stipend wouldn’t get me a quarter of this floor space.”
Kelba was professional enough not to roll her eyes. Grayson had turned down offer after offer of stipend increases and pay raises. He was a man of the people he had told her firmly.
He was a man with enough vanity to power a small reactor.
The chill air grew even chillier as the airlock door opened, and Kelba followed Grayson into the little chamber. When the door slid shut behind them and the airlock seal turned red, Grayson surprised her by crouching and removing a panel from the floor. With a few folds of steel lattice, there was suddenly a little table between the two bench seats. Grayson slotted his lunch pail into a basket beneath the table and unzipped the top.
With the pressurization cycle complete, the exterior airlock door turned green and slid open. Kelba felt a faint and familiar sense of vertigo as it exposed her to the naked stars and the Reliant’s jagged, exterior hull. From Grayson’s patio, she could see the edge of the exterior mechanical ring circling the freighter.
She felt the icy bite of vacuum nip at her ears and nose, but thanks to her extensive modding, it would be quite a while before she was in danger of frostbite.
Across from her, Grayson was filling two drink beakers, appropriate for the microgravity, from a green bottle he’d pulled out of his pail.
“You don’t impress me, Victor.” She took the beaker he offered her.
“Impress you?” The professor slipped his bottle away and drew from the pail a small, covered tray. He peeled off the lid to reveal an assortment of white cheeses and spiced, dried meats. “What makes you think I’m trying to impress you?”
“It’s all you do. It’s all you ever do. I know about the mind games you played with LeBlanc, and Moss, Hernandez, and Price before him. It’s my job to know. They won’t work on me.”
“It was your job, Commander. Now you have bigger concerns than merely the Seeker Corps.” Grayson helped himself to a delicately shaved fold of sausage and popped it between his teeth. “You’re almost hurting my feelings. I thought we were friends.”
Kelba sniffed. Then she sniffed again, holding her beaker closer to her nose. “Is this…real?”
“Pinot Noir, Oregon, vintage 2072.” Grayson settled back on his bench with a satisfied sigh. “My last bottle. We’re in for a bumpy ride next week. I figured it was time to drink it if you have it.”
“I am impressed,” she relented, taking a sip of the wine and letting it marinate on her tongue. Far, far in the distance, the opaque white mass of the wormhole rotated into view.
“My people tell me that Phase One of the experiment was a success,” Kelba said once she had swallowed her first sip. She only had thirty minutes for this meeting in her schedule, and there was much to discuss. “The modified unmanned drones we sent through the hole returned with less than point one percent stored memory corruption. The Faraday cages seem to protect digitally stored data from the information-scrambling effects of wormhole travel. As we suspected, the unmodified drones experienced near-total memory corruption.”
Grayson sipped his wine and nodded but kept his gaze fixed thoughtfully on the wormhole rolling across the starfield.
Kelba studied the elfin little man sitting across from her. She had worked with the professor for years. He enjoyed his humble affectation of an eccentric cosmologist. By all accounts, he had earned his position as the head of that particular department. Family connections had given him fingers in every office in the fleet—from bridge command down to waste management. His sway over the Seeker Corps had made her rise to power possible. In matters of organizational psychology, she had even called him mentor.
She still hadn’t the faintest clue how he was getting real cheese that tasted like it had aged in a cave in France for three years.
“What about the manned drone, Commander?”
Kelba, who wasn’t a woman easily perturbed, winced. “He’s a blubbering idiot and a drunkard.”
“Yes.” Grayson’s eyes glinted with humor. “That’s why we chose him for the mission. Nobody misses the man who spends half his nights sleeping off hangovers in the brig. How did he fare?”
“Samuel? Not well,” she said. “He’s lost any notion of who he is.”
“He could be faking it.”
Kelba shook her head and took one of the cheese slices he offered her, along with another sip of wine. “I had the psych unit evaluate him. Near-total episodic amnesia. He can tie his shoes. He can walk. He can talk. He cannot remember so much as his name. Not even the awful pop songs he was so fond of before.”
“It’s good to have confirmation,” Grayson sighed. “And it explains so much of Tribe Six’s bizarre behavior since the mutiny.”
“You still believe they’re waiting beyond the wormhole?”
“Unless something terrible and unpredictable has happened on the other side of that door, yes. Their last reports of this planet, Locaur, described it as perfect. They wouldn’t abandon it without good reason.”
“So a good planet is out there, and our Primal ship.” Kelba sighed, swirling her glass idly. “And we cannot go after either, without all of us losing our memories, too.”
“Don’t despair.” Grayson lifted the bottle and reached forward. Kelba hesitated the barest fraction of a second before holding out her beaker for a refill. She had a strict policy about drinking on duty, but this was likely the last Earth-made wine she would ever taste. “I have my assistants preparing a few experiments as we speak. Our request for a dozen life-supported ejection pods should be hitting your desk sometime this afternoon.”
When she frowned at him, puzzled, he tapped the side of his head with a finger and winked. “We’re building Faraday cages for the mind, Commander. I am quite sure that with the right protections, we’ll see people coming through that wormhole with their memories intact.”
“What people?” she asked slowly.
Professor Grayson tipped his head back and laughed, draining the last of his wine. “Well, rats to start with. We don’t have an endless amount of drunken divas to chuck through the wormhole.” He looked at her, and his eyes were glittering again. “Though if our rats return remembering all of the tricks and conditioning they knew going in, I’ll be making an official emergency request for human test subjects. I have a few candidates in mind, in fact, and our time is running out.”
Kelba could also think of more than a few people whose value would substantially improve as test subjects for the fleet. “Potlova,” she murmured.
“A total memory wipe,” Grayson mused, “could be a devastatingly effective rehabilitation tool for all kinds of criminals, wouldn’t you say? Dissidents clipped of the memories that turned them down the wrong path. Murderers, reset to factory default. No need to waste perfectly healthy bodies on executions.
“Hell, I could even see therapeutic uses for it! A poor soldier with terrible PTSD? He might be better off with a quick lobotomy if he was contemplating suicide as an alternative. Excise the trauma. Leave space for the brain and soul to recover.”
“To hell with the weaklings whining about trauma,” Kelba sneered. “Priority is pitching everyone who saw the Potlova speech straight through the wormhole.”
“Ah, well. Don’t get ahead of yourself. If you want to rehabilitate Potlova and her collaborators via a devastating memory wipe and discredit this whole damned Resistance, you’re going to have to find her first.”
“I have my best people on it,” Kelba said tightly. Her beaker was empty again, and when Grayson offered her the last of the wine, she shook her head. She was already a touch lightheaded, and she had an interview with TNN in a few hours. It was her job to get on screen and reassure the masses that, despite whatever claims that gap-toothed bitch made, competent people were still running this fleet. Competent people who knew what was best for everybody.
“Good,” Grayson said. The humor had gone out of his voice, and now he stared at her somberly over his glass. Frost formed on the rim. “Because if we have another broadcast break-in, there are going to be riots, Commander.”
“Not on my watch,” she said tightly.
“Good. We don’t want to have to break out the Serenity Protocols already. With less than ten percent of the fleet inoculated, we cannot yet rely on Serenity to provide us with reliable crowd control. Plus, it’s going to be much harder to convince people to take it willingly if we tip our hand about all the…unlisted side effects.”
“What happens inside the fleet is my concern,” Kelba said. “I will handle it. Your job now, Professor, is to make sure that we’re prepared for whatever lies out there.”
She lifted a hand, pointing one long, elegant finger at the wormhole. “I will approve your request for materials, of course, but I very much hope you’re correct about the amnesia hypothesis. I have been going over our files on Jaeger and this Toner man. They have the Tribal Prime and all her weapons. If they have their memories and have had an entire year to prepare for our arrival, then by taking the fleet through that wormhole, we’re signing our death warrants. In a firefight, Tribe Six will slaughter us.”
“There won’t be a fight.” Grayson waggled his fingers in a gesture Kelba didn’t find entirely reassuring. “Even if by some miracle Jaeger has retained or recovered her memories and means us harm, she won’t fire on the freighters.”
Kelba’s eyes narrowed. That darkly humorous look had returned to Grayson’s face, the one that said he was the only man alive who knew the punchline to a terrific joke. Kelba didn’t like that look. She’d seen it on cats studying their prey.
