“Of course,” Samson said.
“Go ahead and make contact, then plot it for us.”
It only took the MI a few seconds. “There are three planets,” Samson reported. “Craseus, Liet, and Earth.”
Earth.
“Ansun would never go to Earth,” Decker said. “That would be walking right into a death trap.”
“He might,” I said. “It makes sense in a weird kind of way. He’s got the kind of ego that would make him want to do it, to prove he is better and smarter than Earthers.” I remembered what Ronti had said about too much ego. Unchecked, it would lead to overconfidence and a person’s downfall. We just had to speed up that downfall.
“Are Craseus and Liet inhabited?” Javen asked.
“Craseus is not,” Samson said. “It is a gaseous planet. Liet has a small military base to patrol the 74B sector.”
The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced. “He’s on Earth. I know it. It would be just like him to want to prove he could be there and not get caught.”
“Wait, Quinn,” Lainie said. “You’re really jumping to conclusions. Samson, are there other planets that almost fall on the line? Maybe the transmission data was slowed down at a relay station.”
“There are eleven planets that could also be considered if the calculated transmission speed was off by one percent of the actual speed.”
“He’s on Earth.” I’d never felt so sure about anything before. “There are hundreds, if not thousands of bot factories on Earth. He could take over one that isn’t in use. We know he has to have people who aren’t Fosaanian helping him. Where’s the easiest place to find them? Earth. Will you take us to Earth?” I asked Divana.
“Yes,” she said. “But Earth is a big place. Where exactly on Earth?”
“We’ll figure it out before we get there. We’ve got some time.”
Divana’s face was skeptical. “You might,” she said. “But I’m not willing to go all the way to Earth without some conditions.”
Of course she had conditions. I braced myself for whatever bargain she’d want to strike.
“We’ll make you a deal,” Nic said to Divana. “You don’t charge us, and in return we don’t make any claim on the reward if we find Ansun. Sound good, Quinn?”
“Yes.” I was surprised she’d jumped into the discussion, but that was a deal I could take since I had no intention of anyone finding out we even went looking for Ansun.
Divana pointed at me. “Agreed. But there’s another condition. You have three standard days to figure out exactly where we are going to land. As much as I’d like to get back at Ansun, I do have to be practical. I can’t afford too much more time looking for him, especially if it involves going all the way to Earth without a reasonable chance you can find him. In three days we’ll be close to Baten. There is a commercial port there. I’ll let you off if you haven’t come up with a plan. Agreed?”
Three days. I hoped it would be enough time. “Agreed.”
Chapter Fifteen
I left the cockpit and went back to our room to sleep for a few hours. When I got there I had a moment of panic. The place looked ransacked. Containers were scattered everywhere and Mags’s temporary cage was on the floor. Mags herself was perched on one of the seats that had tipped over, though she looked unperturbed, her head under her wing. I realized it had been the ship tipping to the side that had caused the chaos and was thankful Mags hadn’t been hurt.
I didn’t bother to set the whole room right. I cleared enough space to place the hammock and set Mags’s temporary cage back up, then lay down. I started to drift off to sleep almost immediately and then came awake again. Everything had happened so fast, the presence of the dead man in the space station hadn’t even been mentioned.
I wanted to know why he had been there. I didn’t think Ronti himself had been on the small ship we’d seen leaving, but it was possible he had sent Graster there. Why? If the CF had really believed there was something of value still there, they’d have sent a much bigger search team. And the biggest questions of all—who had killed him and why?
I was too tired to come up with any answers. I fell asleep thinking of floating drops of blood.
We spent most of the next three days combing through information about Earth. Wren managed to convince Manny and Ryger that we should be allowed to use the Z room. Apparently Javen and Decker had scored some points by helping them with the air scrubber containers.
Lainie, Nic, and I gained their grudging approval by helping to clean up the place. Both the loom and the still had been secured when the ship tipped sideways, but other small items had not. Since some of Manny’s brew containers had spilled, the whole place smelled of blossom beer. I didn’t know what Minolian blossoms were, but the beer smelled more like apples than flowers.
I should have listened to Wren. When Manny offered me a taste from one of the remaining containers, I took a sip and nearly spit it out. It didn’t taste anything like apples, unless they’d been pulverized in dirt before they were added.
Manny looked at me expectantly. “Do you like it?”
“It’s … it’s … very unique,” I said.
“More?” He smiled and held out the container.
I set down my glass. “No, you have so little left, you should save it. We can drink it in celebration once we find Ansun,” I said, hoping he’d eventually forget.
“Good idea!” he said, putting the top back on the container. “I’ll make sure this is secure, so if we have any more trouble, it won’t spill.”
“Wonderful,” I said, trying to inject some enthusiasm into the word.
“Quinn, we need you to concentrate,” Nic said from the opposite side of the room, where the others were gathered. “You can drink later.”
I’d never been so happy to hear Nic’s voice. I got up. “You’re absolutely right, Nic. I shouldn’t be drinking right now. But thanks, Manny.”
I joined the others as we talked through the possibilities of Ansun’s location on Earth, but though everyone contributed ideas, we got nowhere. Our three days were almost up.
“There has to be another way.” Lainie jumped up and paced around. “I wish there was more room to move around. I need space to think.”
“You can run the corridor,” Manny said. He was back checking gauges on the still. “It may be a small track, but it’s better than nothing. I’ve got some scene setters placed along it to make it look like a run through a forest. It makes it more interesting. The control panel is right outside the door if you want to turn it on.”
Lainie grinned and then somehow managed a backflip in the confined space. When she was on her feet again she pumped her arms in the air and darted for the hallway. “Excellent!” she called.
Lainie flashed by the open door a total of six times. The rest of us just sat there, waiting for her to run by. I was tempted to join her, but I knew it would make my eye throb.
She came back and flopped down in a seat, a little breathless. “We need to think like Ansun,” she announced.
Decker snorted. “Right. We just have to get in the mindset of someone with an enormous ego and delusions of grandeur, and who is ruthless enough to kill anyone standing in his way.”
“No, we need to think about how he decided where to go and what factored into his decision.”
“There are a limited number of air corridors a commercial spaceship can use to land on Earth,” Wren said. “I don’t think they would travel far from one of those ports. So many people needing transport would raise suspicions.”
“How many is a limited number?” Javen asked.
“Eighty-seven,” Wren said.
Decker shook his head “That’s way too many. We’ll never be able to narrow it down.
“There’s something else I’ve been thinking about,” Javen said. “Fosaanians—the ones from Fosaan, not Reyet—don’t have any Earth-issued identification, so they won’t register anywhere.”
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Why hadn’t I thought of that? I slumped back in my seat. “Then they can’t be on Earth. As soon as they landed, they’d be asked for identification.”
“Maybe Ansun had one of his MIs set up false identities for all of them, just like Tineg did for us,” Lainie said. “It would be easy enough to do.”
“I have an idea,” Wren said softly. She had been sitting to one side, working at the only slip station in the room. “There are places on Earth where raiders come and go easily. Ansun could have been told about those places.”
“What places?” Decker frowned. “All the officials at all ports have a very specific set of rules to follow.”
“If no one important thinks there is anything of value in an area, they don’t really care what happens there,” Wren said. “People get paid to ignore certain things.”
I wasn’t really surprised, not after what we’d seen on Reyet. “So where are those places?”
“Near the exclusion zones,” Wren said.
“What do you mean?” Javen asked. “What are exclusion zones?”
I should have thought of that myself. “Any area where a nuclear bomb exploded or where there was a nuclear accident. Those areas are restricted because of radiation contamination, but people live right outside the boundaries.”
Lainie got up and went over to Wren’s slip. “I didn’t think anyone lived near those. They’ve been closed off for centuries. Why would anyone live there?”
“I suppose it would be cheap,” Nic said.
Wren pointed at the dots on the slip. “They’re also convenient if you need to disappear from normal society. Raiders often live there if they want to go back to Earth without anyone in authority realizing they are there. They come and go, and there’s no record they’ve ever been there.”
“How many sites are there?” I asked.
“Seven.”
That was still a lot of possibilities. “Wherever the Fosaanians went, they’ll stand out,” I said. “Not an individual Fosaanian in a crowd, but a bunch of them together. Too many pale people with white, curly hair in one place is very noticeable. Even if they all dye their hair, they have the same tall, slender build. That would draw attention. They need to be somewhere kind of hidden away.”
Lainie snapped her fingers. “I know! One of the factory cities, like the one Saunder and I lived in when we were younger. Our dad was in charge of security. They’re encased in big domes, which makes for tightly controlled exits and entries.”
“There are whole cities inside of domes?” Javen asked.
“That’s just what they call them. They really aren’t that big, more like small towns. Everything anyone needs is there, and you don’t have to waste time traveling for it. Plus, people like the security.” She leaned over Wren. “Can you find factory domes near exclusion zones?”
It took Wren some time, and Lainie ended up helping. Finally, Lainie turned to us. She was beaming. “There are four possible sites.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “Lengo, on the east coast of Africa. Oblast, in the southern part of Russia. Bismark, in Northwest America. And Manaus, in Brazil.”
Four. Not bad.
“I’ve been to Oblast,” Wren said. “I mean the ship landed there, but I didn’t get off. It looks pretty from the viewports. Very isolated. There is only one small town nearby, and it’s not a nice one. Rumor has it that lingering radiation has affected some of the locals in strange ways. Made them more violent.”
“I say we try Lengo first,” I suggested. “It has a climate closest to that of Fosaan, and the existing factory domes are farthest from its ground zero. The explosion there was massive. Lengo is 1500 kilometers from ground zero, but the exclusion zone is so big it still borders the edge. We just have to convince Divana we might have more than one stop if Lengo isn’t the right one.”
“Assuming one of these sites is the right one, what’s the plan when we get there?” Decker asked. “We can’t just bumble around like we always do.”
I wouldn’t exactly describe ourselves as bumbling, but I decided now was not the time to debate. “Since everyone thought we were tourists on Reyet, I suppose we pretend to be tourists here,” I said. “We’ve got Reyet clothes. We can be from Reyet. That will give us a reason to ask questions.”
“Would tourists from a different planet visit those sites? They don’t sound like great tourist destinations if they are near exclusion zones,” Nic said.
“They might, I suppose,” Wren said, “if they didn’t know much about exclusion zones.”
“Ansun will be at one of them. I know it,” I said.
Once we had settled on our possibilities and convinced Divana of their validity, the rest of the long passage to Earth passed in kind of a daze for me. Divana adjusted the ship schedules to more closely align with the time zone of Lengo, so we’d be better able to function once we got there. I should have stuck with the day/night she set, but I felt the sudden overwhelming urge to sleep at all hours. I supposed the intensity of our time on Reyet had worn me out. I dreamed of Mira a few times, but they weren’t good dreams. She was always somewhere far enough from me that when I called her, she didn’t hear, and when I moved closer, she would disappear. Not hard to interpret those dreams. I tried not to think about them when I was awake.
After a particularly long sleeping session, I woke to find everyone else in our space in complete night mode. Too restless to just lie there, I got up, hoping the Z room was empty. When I looked in, Ryger was there, working intently on the loom. I didn’t think he’d be thrilled if I disturbed him, so I backed away as quietly as I could.
I went up to the cockpit, hoping Wren had shift duty monitoring the cockpit. She had been doing a lot of analysis of the different factory domes at all the sites: what they had been used for, how long they’d been abandoned, all sorts of things that might give us a clue how to narrow our search.
As I got closer to the cockpit, I tried to move quietly. If it was Divana’s shift, I wanted to avoid her.
I peered around the corner of the door. Only Pixie was there, scrolling through images of waterfalls.
“Who is it?” she said, not turning away from her slip. “I hear you, so you might as well identify yourself.”
“It’s me,” I said, coming forward so she could see me. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bother you.”
“You’re not.” She smiled at me. I still couldn’t get over the jeweled silver teeth, but they didn’t look quite so bizarre in the lower light setting.
Motioning to Wren’s seat, she said, “Sit down.”
I did, trying to hide my surprise that she didn’t immediately send me away. “Is that Daekin on the slip?” I asked.
She reached a hand up and touched it. “Yes. Such a beautiful place.”
“Have you ever been?” I asked. I wanted to go there with Mira, but I didn’t know if that would ever happen.
“I was there about a lifetime ago,” she said. “Sometimes I think about going back, but I don’t. The people I knew wouldn’t be there any longer, and the place might have changed too much. Changed in a bad way. And if it has changed, I wouldn’t be able to keep my memories. I’m old enough to know you shouldn’t try to recreate the past. I’d rather just look at how it was.”
I could understand that.
“Why aren’t you sleeping?” she asked me.
“I slept too much earlier. Now I’m awake, and everyone else is asleep.”
She sighed. “I’d like to sleep. I don’t sleep much anymore. The old don’t, you know. But I remember the days when I craved sleep more than anything else. You know, I was hoping to have a chance to talk to you alone.”
That surprised me. “Why?”
“What did you think of Vire? Did she mention me?”
I hadn’t expected that, and I hadn’t thought much about the raider base woman since we’d settled on going to Earth. “She asked how you were,” I said, trying to remember the conversation. “She s
ounded like you’ve known each other a long time.”
Pixie laughed, which turned into the cough I’d heard before. It took her a few moments to stop and catch her breath.
“I suspect she wanted to know how I looked, more than anything. She was always a competitive little squat. She’s never forgiven me for taking someone away from her a long, long time ago. Vire has to win at everything. Her sense of self-worth depends on having more than others and outwitting people to get it. She has always been the perfect raider.” She chuckled, so softly the coughing didn’t start again. “You have some raider tendencies yourself, boy.”
I was totally taken aback. “What? I’m nothing like a raider. I don’t have to win at everything.”
“No, but you do seem to live in the moment, or at least only in the near future, and you throw yourself into extremely dangerous situations. Those are some of the traits that make a good raider. And raiders are always searching for something, but they don’t know what. Since they don’t know what they are looking for, they never find it.”
She was staring at me. I looked away from her.
“All right. Never mind my analysis. You just think about that a little. Tell me about this girl instead,” she said. “What makes her special? I assume she’s beautiful and all that, but there are lots of pretty people in the galaxy.”
How to describe Mira to someone who didn’t know her? It was hard to put into words.
“She … she knows who she is and what she wants.” I’d not thought about that part of her before, but it was true. I liked the fact that she was herself without worrying about what other people thought of her.
“Hmm … Interesting. Difficult to obtain that sureness so young. Since she knows what she wants, does she want you?”
I felt my face growing hot. “It’s … complicated.”
Patting my hand, she laughed and said, “It always is. Now go away. I’ve used up my people quota for the time being.”
I went back to my hammock and fell back asleep. A few hours later I woke. It was still early, but I knew I couldn’t sleep any longer. I got up and went to the mess. It was early for a meal, but I hoped the cook would let me have something to hold me over. I ran into Nic right before I went in.
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