Flyover Planet Ch. 15: Straight On Till Morning?

Chapters One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen Pt. 1, Fourteen Pt. 2., Sixteen.
(Non-SF Flyover Valley starts here.)

"Do you remember the plan?"

"Of course, Captain Seti!"

They had wanted to go home. To Wayside. If they managed to break out, if they took over the ship ("unless we are all airlocked," Cheers had said with his usual gloom), they would finally go home.

But Buda was weeks away from Wayside, even for the fastest newest ships with the biggest engines. And while Guns could read the geck, she could not read the Trawl without direct computer access. So what would they find if they made it to Wayside? Were their families still there, still alive? They remembered the blue flames, the black rain that burned like acid. And the Eds. Would the Eds chase them? Forseti did not know but he figured that the smooth-faced bastards probably would, otherwise why had they gone to the trouble of abducting him and his friends and pumping them full of some crap or other? (Forseti did not take the Doc's words about anti-aging seriously, or any of that old drunk's words. And Forseti was not yet sixteen; aging was an alien concept to him anyway.)

"Can you hide us from scanners, Guns?" Forseti had asked, and Guns gave that new vague smile.

"Oh yes, Captain. We are already hidden. They are afraid of the Eds too," she added seriously. "I think I can make us more hidden though. From everybody."

So that was the plan that Forseti insisted on. Hide the ship from scanners; and hide it physically, in the Buda Cloud, a short flight away from Buda itself. Get on the Trawl. Find out about Wayside. Then...

And now somebody wanted to talk to them.

The Fair Heart was equipped for visual though it was hardly ever used, for reasons that were self-evident. In Captain Raglan's line of work, the less face time you got, the better. Now Guns, ensconced in the geck's seat, turned to Forseti, her eerie eyes flickering with streams of data:

"Captain, would you like the video on? To receive and transmit?"

"Receive only," Forseti said. Everyone had come to the bridge, from Fenny to Rotor, all Martin of them. They had the right to be there but he wouldn't show their faces to whoever it was. "Who is it? How far away? Are they moving toward us?"

"Unknown sender from Buda Spaceport, static point," Guns sounded more like a geck now that she was answering questions; or maybe it was being in the geck's chair. She had to raise it to its fullest height to reach those controls that she had to touch.

Forseti glanced back and nodded at XieXie, whose eyes were huge in her face. For a moment she looked like a stranger, lost and pale, unlike herself.

"He can't get you anymore, XieXie," Forseti said forcefully. He swept his eyes over all of them. "He can't get any of us anymore. I promise." XieXie smiled a little and stepped closer to him, slipping her cold hand in his.

"Guns, tell me the moment anything, any..."

"Flying object," XieXie supplied.

"Right, flying object appears... Starts moving toward us or appears..."

"Understood, Captain. All threats shall be reported immediately. We are ready to receive."

The bridge looked a lot like what Forseti had seen in the vids, all dashboards and nav glass, the only thing that was reasonably clean on the whole ship till XieXie got to work on the sickroom. The comm screen was a little frame just under the ceiling of the cramped room, out of the way. Guns brought it down and Forseti rubbed the dust off with his sleeve, leaving grimy tracks across the surface. XieXie did not even give a disapproving "tsk." Her hand was gripping his as if he was anchoring her. Forseti looked at the camera eye for a moment, then let go of XieXie's hand for a moment and ripped off a piece of his bandage — the cut was healed anyway — to stick it over the camera.

"Hey, are our jinking guns charged?" Cheers asked. Guns answered only when Forseti repeated the question, feeling a little silly.

"Oh yes, Captain."

"All right. Let's see who it is. Everyone be quiet," Forseti leaned in over Guns. There was a whisper of something Tia Mara said to him many times at the back of this mind. Don't hand your name to enemies, she used to say.

"And no names, you hear! That's an order."

The screen lit up but to hardly any change. There seemed to be little light in the room at the other end, and none on the face of the shadowy figure leaning into the viewer. A hubbub of voices, rising and falling, came from off-screen. The image was grainy, whether because of their screen or the distance, Forseti was not sure. That was one of those problems Tian Teacher and Guns used to like solving...

"What the jink is going on, you geck junkpiece? Who the hell let the escape pod go?"

Forseti did not need XieXie's whispered "Raglan" to know the voice. Raglan, in the meantime, had added a few words that Cheers was sure to have committed to memory right away.

"Pull it back in, you piece of technogarbage, do you hear? This is your bloody captain speaking!"

"Former captain," Forseti heard his own voice almost before he knew what he was going to say.

"WHAT!"

There was a sudden hush in the dark room, and then some scraping and shuffling sounds, as if people were pushing back their chairs maybe, getting up.

"You are the former captain of this vessel," Forseti said in a stronger voice.

Lights went up. They could now see Raglan more clearly, and other men crowding behind him. They looked about the same as him, rough, predatory. One was very fat, with a round jowly face and narrowed little eyes; the host himself, most likely. If so, the name Fatso Moonface suited him perfectly.

"That's you, isn't it, you little rat? Number Three," Raglan spat out. Forseti squeezed his fist, the number starkly black against his skin. "What do you think you are playing —"

"I am the Captain of this vessel," Forseti said. In the room on Buda, the fat man gave a sudden bellow of laughter.

"You did say this cargo was special, Rags," he drawled, putting a hamlike hand on Raglan's shoulder. "Guess that's true. Who's the boychick?"

Raglan’s reply was unintelligible in its filthiness.

"When I get back you are gonna wish I'd given you to Backer before I'm done with you," he snarled. "Whatever you've managed to do to the geck and that drunk buffoon—"

"The geck and the drunk buffoon will be able to tell you themselves if the pod makes it," XieXie interrupted. Raglan's eyes went wide.

"Green Bean."

"That's not my name," XieXie said in a voice dripping with contempt, "and if you really thought I would betray my friends, help you sell people, and be some kind of toy wife to a man like you..."

“Marry me, sweetheart,” Fatso Moonface guffawed. "You sure bit off more than you could chew this time, Rags." At a nod from him two men gripped Raglan’s arms professionally, twisted them back. He was struggling madly but they knew their business.

"Two-Bit!"

"Excuse me, captain," came Two-Bit's calm voice from somewere inside the room.

"To me, man! Don't you see—"

"I'm sorry, Raglan," he really sounded regretful, "but you aren't captain anymore, without a ship. I was speaking to Captain Moonface," the fat man turned his head to the right, "I was hoping you might have an opening for me, sir. I will be useful to you as crew and I know quite a lot about the special cargo."

"Can we get into The Fair Heart's logs?" Moonface asked someone, raising his voice. "And shut that idiot up," he added irritably as Raglan yelled profanities at Two-Bit, struggling. He broke off in mid-yell and slumped over, winded — someone had punched him in the stomach.

"No, sir. We've been trying but they got some good mojo there. Can't even get the coordinates where they are parked."

Forseti glanced down at Guns. Her eyes were flickering faster than ever and she was smiling a little, fingertips running up and down the dashboard.

"They are really slow, Captain," she said softly.

"Right, Two-Bit, you are on my crew," Fatso Moonface snapped and turned to the screen again, stepping forward. Somewhere in the room, Raglan gave a half-stifled yell of pain or anger.

"I will find you, you know," Moonface said conversationally. "I could use another good ship, and Rags here obviously thought you could buy him quite a bit of goods. But I like a fair game, so I might give you, let’s say a half-hour’s start. You sound like a pretty bright little pair of—"

"Bunch, Captain," Two-Bit corrected. "There are eight of them. All good value though dangerous to handle."

Moonface rubbed his hands together.

"Forget the head start then. Assem—"

"Turn off the comm now," Forseti said. The screen went dark and slid back up to the ceiling.

"Take us into the Buda Cloud, Guns, like we planned."

Guns's hands flew over the controls.

"We can say our names now?" she asked brightly.

"Yes," Forseti said. "We can say our names now."

Anais studied the man in front of her. By Wayside standards he was not old; he'd been called "a decent body of a man", with his bright keen grey eyes, weathered skin, salt-and-ginger hair, all his limbs in place too, even if one leg was a bit lame. He had had a short beard before being put into a coma, and of course it had been shaved off. Now he was awake, gazing around the clean little room, jutting his bare chin out a little this way and that, as if it irked him. His fingers twitched a few times, as if he wanted to touch it, but as his arms were strapped to the armrests, this was as far as he could get.

To Anais, the man looked like a mass of crawling wrinkles, saggy loose skin. A bag of age. Worse than the old ones, somehow. Unfixed; unmodified. Yet that terrible old harridan had called him "a well set up young fellow!"

"You are the Wayside schoolteacher. You have a name, but Tian Teacher is your preferred form of address?"

He said nothing, studying her openly, the lines in his face deepening, especially the awful furrow between his eyebrows that seemed to her a worm. (His fiancé would call it his "deep-thinking" line and drop a kiss on it laughingly when no one was near.)

Developers, preparing to unleash their firepower or chemical weaponry, would say "Only open if you close," meaning "Don't start unless you will finish." But Anais, though she had been certain about closing, paused. She did not often second-guess herself. But the terrible, terrifying invasion of her body and her mind by the Epsilons had added a dimension to her decisions that had not been there. Fear. A deep fear for her beautiful body, wonderful mind, that no amount of released soothers could banish. She did not need to glance at the black Epsilon cluster emblem with its spiky petals at the back of her right hand, but she did it anyway; it was part of her now, embedded in the very molecules of her skin.

"Now, you have been well-treated," Anais began, and the man snorted. His eyebrows (what a disturbingly mobile face) went up. She could read his emotions; he had no data cloud surrounding him, of course, but his face showed them just like in the illustrations and diagrams Anais had to learn when she was training to become a Negotiator. Surprise, amusement, scorn.

"You have been well treated so far," she began again.

"No."

"No?" Adult biomaterial (adult assets were rare) was usually processed out of existence or used in some other way. That this man could not know of this was obvious. He had been kept in a sleeper cell, fed with nutrients; his awakening had been run carefully, gradually, as if he were a real person. He had lost his outdoor color of course, but his muscles had been taken care of, and he was completely awake.

He was studying her again, eyes narrowed, mouth pinched. His face was giving her no clue now about his feelings. Strange, for such a broken face.

"Why do you say you have not been well-treated?" she said patiently.

"You attacked my home, destroyed our land, kidnapped or killed our children and God knows," Anais tamped down a small flare of irritation at the three-letter-word, "God knows how long you kept me, in a medical sleep apparently," he glanced at his pale hands. "Are you really as stupid as you look? What have you done with our kids?"

Our kids? The man was listed as childless, and had no genetic connection to any of the Wayside assets. She filed it into her data cloud to check again.

"You will be given an answer if you cooperate with us," she said, infusing some warmth into her voice. "They might be in danger—"

"My God," the man said explosively, and she almost flinched at the expletive. "Decades, centuries of your forced evolution, your manuals, and yet you are still just thugs and bullies, that's all you are capable of. How long have you been in this kidnapping job? Twenty years? Forty? A hundred? Men like me, people like me are foul in the eyes of your kind, worse than garbage. You probably have to release a constant stream of junk into your system just to keep looking at me. Usually we are just killed — what you call processed," he said contemptuously. "Kept in a coma till then. And yet here I am, alive and awake. You are disgusted with me, angry at me, surprised that I know your procedures, even though you think it does not show on your face, just as your kind think they look young if they modify themselves."

Anais was struggling with her fury. How dare he? How dare he, that... thing?! This scrapyard of a man, how dare he read her, insult her, her with a face tailored for a perfect balance between action and emotion, and he had no mental file, no data cloud visible to him to interpret her?!

"I could have your memory erased and remade where you sit," she said coldly. "You would think you are one of us and weep at your own reflection." This was bluffing; she needed him as he was. She could not even physically motivate him with approved stimulation techniques (like mild electrocution, or the ancient water-based motivation technique.)

"Something happened," he said softly, ignoring her words, his eyes on her face, leaning forward in his chair as far as his restraints would allow him. "Something to do with the kids. Which means they are, at least some of them are alive." There was a flash of joy in his eyes.

"They are... They are lost." She had not been going to tell him straight out, but her Neg training did not seem to be helping her now.

"We have tracked their path to an extent." They had found the missing geck; had tracked him to a ship, a freetrader ship, smugglers and slavers. They got little from sweeping the area where the shuttle with the assets had been lost but there was enough trace debris to be sure at least that the vessel had been destroyed; the assets, she was sure, were not. The Eds had moles in every big freetrader and slaver company; sometimes headed them even. Buda was buzzing, and Captain Moonface was combing the area with all his ships, looking for another ship that had disappeared; The Fair Heart. Nobody seemed to know what had become of the previous captain and crew, but Anais was not concerned with that. She needed the assets.

"A group of ...your children," she said with a minute hesitation, "seem to have been kidnapped in transit by slave traders."

"Yes, I was there when you blew us up and captured them," the teacher said, eyes flashing.

"No, I mean by a freetrader vessel," Anais said. He still looked skeptical. Well, she needed him; and she was going to process him after anyway. Process him slowly. She said, choosing her words:

"And the children... seem to have broken free and... stolen the ship."

Tian Teacher threw his head back and laughed.