A Pale Light in the Black

by K. B. Wagers

  “‘Built-in population control’? What’s he talking about?” Max whispered. Alex had to be referring to the dangers of the dupe here, Max’s gut was certain of it. She was also still reasonably sure Ria knew more than she was telling her. It shouldn’t surprise her that her sister would lie to her, but it did sting.

  The question was, if Gerard had died, who’d taken over his legacy and his name?

  The movement out of the corner of her eye dragged her attention back to her surroundings and Max jolted involuntarily at the person on her right.

  “Sorry, was trying not to startle you.” The blonde smiled and waved a hand, her handshake reading Lieutenant Sammi Alexander, she/her. “Good morning.”

  “Morning.”

  “I don’t usually see anyone else here this early.”

  “Trying to clear my head.” Max stopped the treadmill and hopped off as she scrubbed at the sweat before it could drip in her eyes.

  “Lieutenant Sammi Alexander. Like it says on the handshake.” The woman extended her hand. “Are you new here?”

  Max shook her hand for real this time, feeling the solid pressure of Sammi’s grip. The woman looked oddly familiar, but she couldn’t quite place where she’d seen her. “Lieutenant Max Carmichael. I’m not stationed here. Just visiting. I’m with the Interceptors.”

  “Oh! You’re on Zuma’s Ghost. That’s why you look familiar. I watched your fights.” The woman laughed and gave an awkward little wave. “Big fan.”

  Max smiled, relief at being recognized for something other than her name flooding her. “It’s nice to meet you. You work here at HQ?”

  “I’m an instructor’s assistant at the academy, marine biology. Plants, mostly—I focus on resurrection of extinct species.”

  “Interesting.” Max’s thoughts immediately went to the algae used in LifeEx. The tightly controlled, otherwise extinct algae.

  I wonder if it could be grown on the planets in the Trappist system? That would explain the lab and the shipments back to Earth. If someone else involved with the serum agreed with Gerard and took samples . . .

  Almost lost back in her own thoughts, Max remembered to say, “It was really nice to meet you,” as she headed for the door. “Ow!” She looked down at the spot of blood welling up on her upper arm and then up to a pair of cold green eyes.

  “Your security is too good,” Sammi said, her voice smooth. “But everyone slips up eventually.”

  Max kicked Sammi in the chest and ran for the door, activating the panic button on her DD before her legs stopped working and she dropped like an Interceptor ship coming in for the kill. Two men, recognizable as the ones from the bar, came through the door of the gym and hauled her to her feet.

  “Oh, Max.” Sammi was rubbing at her chest, wheezing a little from the force of Max’s kick. “I wish you hadn’t done that. You really want me in a good mood. Have a nap, we’ll chat in a bit.”

  “Fuck you,” Max managed as she saw the fist. There was answering pain and then the world went black.

  “Gone? What does he mean ‘gone’?”

  “Jenks.” Rosa’s reprimand was quiet and almost not enough, but she watched as Jenks wrestled her anger under control and backed out of the face of the hapless Neo who was standing at attention at the door of the officers’ gym. Luis was behind her, his jaw tight and his eyes worried.

  “He means someone tailed Max to the gym, broke in, drugged her, and kidnapped her before we could respond,” Stephan said, waving at the trio. “Get in here.”

  “The others are right behind us,” Rosa said, her stomach twisting at the blood on the mat just inside the door.

  “It’s Max’s,” Stephan said quietly once Jenks was out of earshot. “Enough for maybe a broken nose. I’ve already talked to Ria, she’s on a transport with Bosco headed this way.”

  “What?” Rosa rubbed both hands over her face. Her head was pounding from the residuals of the alarm attached to Max’s DD that had gone off in her head. “Let’s back up. What was Max doing here?”

  “Running,” Jenks said. “It helps her think.”

  “Most likely. The surveillance footage is scrambled.” Stephan scrubbed a hand over his short brown hair. “We fucking dropped the ball on this, Commander. I am so sorry. I don’t know why they came after Max.”

  Jenks bounced up from her crouch. “I do. She’s a Carmichael. These people are producing a dupe. It makes sense for them to go after a family member.”

  “They may want to use Max to blackmail Ria about the drug,” Luis said, “since we’ve been pursuing them on Trappist and LifeEx has eliminated all the dupe serum that made its way into production. This could have pushed them to do something reckless.”

  “We’ve got a face. Camera down the street caught the attackers as they were coming around the corner. Also got a name—Sammi Alexander.”

  Jenks snorted as Ma, Sapphi, and Tamago spilled into the gym. “That’s not a real name. Those dinguses at the bar had fake handshakes; ten feds says she did, too,” Jenks said.

  “What’s going on?” Ma said.

  Luis filled them all in.

  “Do we have a trace on Max’s DD?” Rosa asked.

  “Yes and no,” Stephan said. “Hitting the panic button started an instantaneous tracking beacon. We were able to follow it about halfway across the Atlantic and then it vanished.”

  “They took her off-planet?” Jenks muttered a curse.

  Rosa shook her head. “It would have tracked even off-planet. If it just vanished they figured out some way to stop her beacon.”

  “How?” Stephan frowned. “Those are supposed to be tamperproof, except—”

  “Don’t.” Jenks held up her hand. “Don’t you say it, Stephan. We already established they wanted her alive.”

  “All right,” Rosa said with a nod at Luis. “You stay here and get what you can from Max’s sister. We’re going to the spot of the last transmission from her tracker to see what we can find from there. Send me the coordinates.”

  “Gear’s in the ship,” Ma said.

  “Go. Jenks and I will meet you in the hangar.”

  Ma nodded and took off with Sapphi and Tamago on his heels.

  “Have we pieced together anything more?” Rosa asked as she watched them leave.

  “We hit another dead end with the stuff from the ’net, but if Jenks is right, then Max was maybe trying to sort something out in her head.” Stephan frowned. “I shouldn’t let you go after them,” he said. “Not if we don’t know what we’re dealing with.”

  “We’re the same rank, so you can’t really stop me,” Rosa replied, mouth twitching into a wry grin. “More important, though, she’s our teammate, Stephan. I’m not sitting around waiting to see what they do to her.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to. Just be careful.” He pulled her into a hug. “I’ll take Angela to your mom’s and leave a detail on them just in case.”

  “Thanks.” As she pulled away she spotted Luis with his forehead pressed to Jenks’s.

  “Of course. Bring her home, Rosa.”

  She nodded tersely. “Call me if anything changes. Jenks, we’re moving.”

  The dull taste of blood was in her mouth as Max regained consciousness in little bits and pieces. She kept her eyes closed as the events that put her here filtered to the front of her throbbing brain. Once things were in some sort of order she took a quick inventory.

  Arms cuffed together. Legs too. It’s zip ties, though, not metal cuffs.

  Still have my shoes on. Good decision on going for a run, Max.

  DD chip is—inactive? She frowned. No, it’s still working . . . sort of. She could flip through her internal files, but there didn’t seem to be any signals going or coming. Wherever she was being held was shielded.

  My face hurts. She wiggled her nose and the burst of pain that accompanied it confirmed the readout in the corner of her vision warning of a broken nose.

  Max let the sounds of the room sink into her. It was silent, mostly
, but the same familiar humming as on Jupiter Station had her heart dropping in her chest.

  Did I get taken off-planet?

  She cracked an eye. The room was dim, shadows from the single overhead light thrown about the corners like Jenks’s scattered clothing on her bunk.

  A door opened on her right, the person silhouetted against the light. “You awake, Max?” It was Sammi. “I brought you some water.”

  “My hands are sort of occupied.”

  Sammi stepped into the room and rattled the cup in her hand, the metal straw clinking on the side. “I planned ahead.” She held the cup up to Max’s mouth. “Go on, it’s clean. I want you awake and aware.”

  Max debated the merits of trusting this woman for a moment before deciding she didn’t know how long she’d been without water and getting the copper taste from her mouth was too appealing to pass up.

  The water had a cold, familiar recycled taste and the surety that she’d been taken off-planet settled in once again. “Who are you? Where are we?”

  “My name is Sammi Gerard. Thomas Gerard was my great-grandfather.”

  “Thomas Gerard didn’t have any family.”

  “And yet, here I am.” Sammi spread her hands wide. “As for where we are, you know I can’t tell you.” She smiled, pulling the cup away. “Even with the DD chip blocker active, it’d be silly of me to give you coordinates.”

  A flash of hope that she wasn’t going to get killed sprang to life in Max’s chest. “I’ve seen you—at the Boarding Games. I was talking to Scott on the street.”

  “Good job, Max.”

  The condescending tone reminded her so much of her mother that Max had to choke down the snarl before she could speak. “What do you want?”

  “Not here.” Sammi’s pert nose wrinkled. “It’s dismal, don’t you think?”

  “You are not going to want to let me out of these.” Max lifted her legs.

  Sammi laughed and rubbed her free hand over her chest. “Yes, I learned that the hard way. Sorry about the broken nose, by the way. Watching you compete and experiencing it firsthand are two very different things. Plus, I rather like you, Max, and I don’t want to have to kill you. Which is what I’ll do if you come after me again.” She snapped her fingers and the door opened. “This is terribly undignified, I’m sorry.” Sammi shrugged as one of the goons from the bar came in and hoisted Max over his shoulder.

  “Thomas was a genius. So was Alexander, from what I’ve heard. Even exiled and forced into hiding so far from home, my great-grandfather always spoke of yours with a certain amount of respect. I want you to know this, because it’s important for how the story goes.”

  “You’re responsible for the fake LifeEx,” Max said as Sammi walked beside them. The goon’s shoulder was shoved into her stomach, and with her hands locked behind her back there was no way for her to reach the knife at his belt.

  “I am a cog in a very complex machine,” Sammi replied. “No more or less important than anyone else who’s joined our cause.”

  “Are we alone here?” Max jerked her head at the goon. “I mean, besides this guy. Hi there, asshole. Jenks is going to kick your ass again when she gets here.”

  Sammi laughed. “Oh no. My people are here working.”

  “Where is here? And working on what?”

  “You’re persistent about that. Okay, we’ll swing through the atrium. It will answer your question, though not to your satisfaction, I suspect.”

  There was a long moment of silence as she went left and continued down the hallway, coming to a sealed doorway. Sammi stepped around them and pressed her hand to the panel. The door slid open and Max gaped in shock as the goon carried her farther into the room.

  The atrium was dominated by a single curving window and beyond—the endless black of the ocean rather than the stars Max had been expecting.

  “We’re underwater?”

  “A proper hero’s hideout,” Sammi replied with a self-deprecating smirk. “When things started to go sour between my great-grandfather and yours, he told Alex that this place flooded. It had been a minor lab, dedicated to attempts to grow the seaweed, which had already been accomplished by that point. So who cared?” She shrugged. “I guess no one ever double-checked to verify it really had flooded. Now I use it as a good base for Earth. It’s cool and quiet and, best of all, unknown.”

  “You’re not growing the algae here now, though. Your operation is off-planet, isn’t it? It has to be. You couldn’t risk the authorities discovering it was being produced.” Max muttered a curse. There was a slight whoosh behind her as the door closed. “That’s why we found the dirt from Trappist, isn’t it?”

  “Very good. You’re smart, Max. I like it. Trappist-1e was wild enough we were able to hide our production facilities on the opposite side of the planet. In the early days we could blend in with the others in the habitats and have access to supplies and shipments from Earth. But lately we’ve had to accommodate the spread of humanity across the surface. Trappist-1e has water at the right salinity levels, though just a smidge higher than Earth’s seawater. There’ve been some payoffs for having more people there. It was trickier initially, but now there’s so much traffic no one knows who’s coming from where. And IDs are easily hacked.”

  It was more than a little terrifying how she said that with such light dismissal. IDs should not be easily hacked, and the things Sammi was telling her spoke of an organization with a far greater reach than she’d thought. To have hidden this on Trappist . . . Shaw had been right.

  We had no idea who we were messing with.

  A second door opened on the far side of the atrium into something that looked like a small mess hall. It was as deserted as the rest of what Max had seen, and the goon carried her over to a table, dropping her on her feet and then pushing her down before she could even contemplate rushing him. Sammi took a seat at a different table, crossing one leg over the other in a pose of careful nonchalance, and waved a hand at the goon in dismissal.

  “So,” Max said. “Want to tell me Thomas’s side of the story?” She wasn’t about to admit to Sammi that she didn’t know the details of what had happened to cause a grudge that had lasted past her great-grandfather’s death.

  “They were partners, Max, at least until Alex decided he wasn’t going to listen to Thomas anymore. And the reality is, Alex wouldn’t have gotten very far without my great-grandfather. He’s the reason they had a breakthrough with the seaweeds. He’s the reason why the serum works so well to protect against radiation. Your great-grandfather balked when it came time to make the hard decisions. He wanted to make an inferior product because the ‘risks’ of going all in were beyond him. Even though Thomas had developed a way to hide the odds from the government.”

  “You mean the fact that one in twenty people would have died from it?”

  Sammi stared at her for a long moment, a muscle ticking at the side of her jaw. “It’s a necessary flaw in the design, if you even want to call it that. Thomas knew that it was the only way to make the treatment work for longer and not require follow-ups. But the newly formed Coalition government never would have gone for something in the early days that would have put people at risk like that. So he told Alex they needed to hide the results.”

  “Alex refused.” Sorry, Great-Granddaddy, I underestimated you. “He was doing the right thing.”

  “Don’t act like Alex was some saint. He chose to sell it. He chose to put a leash around humanity for all time in the name of making a legacy for himself. Endless boosters and still less effective than what we’ve developed.” Sammi fisted her hands. “He betrayed my great-grandfather! He was going to turn him over to the Coalition government, testify against him on charges of attempted mass murder and danger to the survival of humanity!”

  Max lifted an eyebrow.

  Danger to the survival of humanity wasn’t a charge the CHN threw around without reason, but she could see it being applicable in this case. The images of the dead people in her sister’s
office flashed through her mind and Max picked her next words with a great deal of care.

  “So what happened?” she asked. “At the risk of getting you mad at me, this is the first I’ve heard of any of this. There’s no record of your great-grandfather in any of the history books.”

  “Thomas knew the authorities were closing in on him, so he paid a man to do a DNA sheet and then blew up his car with the man in it. Everyone was so relieved to think that he was dead, they just erased him from the narrative and didn’t bother to look any deeper.”

  Max swallowed down the horror as Sammi so casually talked about her great-grandfather murdering a man so he could run instead of facing the consequences of his choices. “So he hid here on Earth?”

  Sammi smiled. “He had samples of his drug, enough for him and those few he still trusted after your great-grandfather turned everyone against him. He developed a plan to get off-planet as soon as the habitats on Trappist were finished, and the ships started leaving.”

  “The missing system jumper ships.”

  “Some of them. There were only two from the first group. The others had far more recruits, especially the later waves. We needed the ships and the people to work in the labs. All those unregistered would stay off the radar, made it easier to move about.” Sammi stood and spread her hands wide. “Plus, everyone thought he was dead.”

  “Is your great-grandfather still alive?”

  “No.” Sammi shook her head. “As good as the first serum he developed was, it won’t keep a person alive forever. But my grandfather and my father made it off this planet. I was born on Trappist and it’s far more my home than Earth will ever be.”

  “So, the big question,” Max said. “What do you want with me? Hostage? Ransom?”

  “Oh, no. We’re working on something even better than what my great-grandfather created, Max.” Sammi leaned against the table, bending over to look at Max, and the fanatical flame in her eyes was terrifying. “I want you to join us. I know you don’t like your family. Help me destroy them and you’ll live for a thousand years.”