The Ferrymen (The Culling Book 3)

by Ramona Finn

  “But since I’ve been messing around with the chip, I think I might have figured out a way to fundamentally change how it works. Instead of using its shielding capabilities as a weight overlaying the brainwaves of a user, we use them like a window. So, it doesn’t confine a person’s brainwaves to the point of harming them, it augments them. In other words, a Datapoint wouldn’t be able to get a clear view of what they were looking at.”

  “And you really believe that you could do that?”

  I shrugged. “I’m pretty sure that I already have.”

  “But you need a Datapoint’s tech to be able to verify?”

  “Exactly. I need Cast to look at the brainwaves of a person wearing the chip and tell me if he recognizes the pattern as cullable. If he doesn’t, then we’ll know it works and that we have more options besides the dampening technology. Which comes in handy, but is gonna become obsolete as soon as they outfit Sullia with this.” I held up the dead tech on my arm. They would have to kidnap Sullia and toss her in a dampener for it to be an effective weapon of defense against the higher-grade tech, but this would help until then. Meanwhile, I knew Sullia could be remotely culling anyone Haven told her to.

  Kupier reached out and took my arm in his hands; he traced the tech with one finger. He’d thoroughly inspected my tech before, as he was just a curious person, but this time was different. He seemed to be lost in thought. His tracing of my tech seemed almost comforting to him. This thought really did not compute. Whenever I looked down at my tech, I saw only horror.

  “You said you could turn off his tracker?”

  “Yes. Once we get him started up, I could definitely turn off his tracker.”

  “How long would it take?”

  “A few minutes. Maybe three.”

  Kupier pulled himself up to a sitting position so that his back was on the same wall as mine. He pulled his knees up and balanced his elbows there. “You know I can’t say yes to this, Glade. I can see how it makes sense, what you’re proposing. But it’s too risky.”

  “Why?”

  “Because what if they’ve figured out some way to control Cast through his tech the way that they were controlling you through yours? What if we turn his tech on and he culls all of us? I trust Cast as a person, but the kid is just a kid. What if he hurts himself again? What if in the three minutes it takes you to turn off his tracker, they track all of us, and then we have the entire Authority bearing down on us? Not to mention the fact that all of this requires you implanting an untested prototype chip into someone’s head.”

  “I’ll volunteer for it! And I swear, I swear, I’m good enough at hacking that I could run diagnostics on Cast’s tech as soon as we turned on his tech. If I sense even a whiff of something different than usual, or anything sinister, we’ll toss him in the dampener and be done with it. As for the tracking, I mean, don’t you think they know that we’re headed to Charon? We can wait until we get there, and then the worst thing that happens is their guesses are confirmed. They won’t follow us all the way there, though. It’s too far, and besides... If they think that we’re on Charon, they probably won’t blow it up.”

  I was sure that Haven wouldn’t willingly destroy me. Even if he hated me now that I’d defected, he’d still choose to have me back at the Station in one piece. Even if they had to keep me sedated for the rest of my life, the idea of exploding his precious chosen one would grate against him.

  “Glade, I know you’re a gifted hacker. But we’re talking prodigious levels here. You’d have to be a better hacker than a computer to get into his tech that fast. And you’d have to do it all without your tech helping you.”

  “I can do it. I swear. And besides, I’d have Aine there to help me.” I hadn’t asked, and the idea had just kind of plopped out of nowhere, but I had a feeling she wouldn’t pass up this particular offer.

  “I don’t know.” His shoulder pressed into mine. “I need to think about it.”

  I grinned at him through the dark, hoping he could see the flash of my white teeth the same way that I could see his. “Well, since you’re awake, wanna go over our Bring-Down-the-Authority-and-Send-Haven-to-Hell-and-Live-Happily-Ever-After Plan one more time?”

  Kupier groaned and looped an arm around my neck as he toppled us down onto the cot. “Don’t you ever sleep, you freak?”

  “I’ve started to suspect that I’m not very good at it.”

  “Well,” he grumbled good-naturedly as he shoved half of his flat pillow under my head and hauled the sheet over both of us, “take your shoes off, because you’re about to practice.”

  It was there, in Kupier’s tiny room, with our shoes on the floor and his heavy arm against mine, that I finally clicked my brain off.

  I couldn’t help considering Charon to be much more beautiful the second time I saw it through the window of our approaching ship. This time, I didn’t see a wasteland. This time, I really looked at its intoxicating swirl of red swallowed up by white clouds and white dirt.

  This time, I sat in the main room with Cast on one side and Wells on his far side. Kupier was in the cockpit, bringing us home.

  “That’s the same red as Io,” Cast said, surprising me.

  “Yeah.” I cocked my head to one side. “But Io is completely red. The whole planet looks like it’s been baking in the sun.”

  “Europa is kind of orange. And all scarred up,” Cast replied. “Like someone was beating it with a whip.”

  “I don’t even remember Enceladus. How sad is that?” Wells asked.

  How we’d all started talking about our home colonies, I wasn’t sure. But it felt important, all the more so as Charon got larger and larger in the big window. As we got closer and closer to our new home. We were three outlaws now. We had no other home than Charon. This colony was the catch-all. This was where all the rebels lived.

  “What do you mean, you don’t remember it?” “I’ve been on the Station since I was five or so.”

  “What?” This blew my mind. I’d never seen a child on the Station before. Other than the Datapoints, who were twelve when they were brought there. But twelve was a lot older than five.

  “Yeah. The technicians are allowed to have families. They just mostly stay on the sub-levels. Have you ever really explored down there? It’s like a little city.” He shrugged when Cast and I just looked at him blankly. “Anyway, I grew up down there. Both my parents were mechanics. When I hit ten or so, I started apprenticing on the landing pad. And now I’m here.”

  “How old are you?” I asked him.

  “Sixteen.” He jutted out that sharp chin of his as if challenging me to tell him how young he looked.

  “You look like you’re twelve.” This came from Cast, along with an elbow to Wells’ ribs and that face-cracking smile of his that had all three of us lightening.

  “Were?” I asked after a moment, and then immediately wondered why I’d asked. What kind of answer was I really looking for.

  “What?” Wells turned to me and, for a second, his head obscured the view of Charon beyond him. I realized then that his hair was a similar red to that of the swirling, nutrient-rich soil of the moon.

  “You said that your parents were mechanics.”

  “Oh. Yeah. They died.” Wells turned toward the window again and I watched Cast’s arm, still skinny, lay over his friend’s shoulders.

  “Mine, too,” I said after a moment had passed. It was the only thing I could think of to say in reply. I’d thought I might be able to speak the words cavalierly, but the words ripped the scab off of my mother’s death, only a month old, and I found myself sitting there, watching the rebel colony grow in front of me even as the truth of her death hit me once again. And here I was, heading to Charon. My new home. I felt wet on the inside. And cold. And tender to the touch. Like a fresh cut of meat.

  “I don’t even know about mine,” Cast said.

  “What do you mean?” I couldn’t imagine not knowing whether or not my parents were alive.

  “I mean,
I haven’t gotten in touch with them since the Culling on Europa.”

  The Culling that Dahn had done. That I’d been his second for. It had been that Culling which had taught me that culling wasn’t what I’d been born into this universe to do. That I didn’t have what it took to pull the plug on another human’s life. Dahn had had to cull everyone. And then he’d had to carry me out of there.

  By the time we’d made it back to our skip, I’d seen the people in the streets. Those who had been out and about when they’d been culled. They’d looked so normal. They haunted me still.

  “You never checked the list?” I asked quietly. There was a list of culled citizens that was kept on the Station.

  “I never had the courage to,” Cast admitted. “I didn’t think I could stay there, keep doing what I was trained to do if my parents were on that list. And, I mean, I had to stay there. I didn’t… know there was another option.”

  He hadn’t known that escape was an option until approximately eight minutes before I’d dragged him and Wells off the Station.

  “Cast,” I finally asked, “how long had you wanted to leave the Station?”

  His gaze flicked to the side, and I didn’t miss the steely look in Wells’ eyes as he looked back at Cast.

  “About half a year,” Cast replied.

  “Since you started learning more about being a pilot. And spending time on the landing pad.”

  Cast nodded, but neither he nor Wells said anything more. I could guess the rest. Cast had realized he wanted to leave the Station, and quit being a Datapoint when he’d started spending time with Wells.

  Well, I understood that. I would never have thought of leaving the Station, or spurning the Authority if I hadn’t met Kupier.

  A fist closed over my heart as I wondered if, maybe, I could have been that person for Dahn. Maybe, just maybe, if I’d laid everything out, in some unimaginable, perfect way, he would have come with me.

  He’d given me the little metal figurine of a horse that, even now, I kept in my pocket. The figurine was a relic from Earth, centuries old, maybe something a child would have played with. The horse was forever frozen in a moment of defiance. It was up on its back feet, its mane in the wind. If he’d given me that, thought of me when he’d found it, then he had to believe in the concept of freedom. He just had to.

  Yet, he hadn’t trusted me enough to come with me. Or even to believe that I would keep him safe. Now we were on opposite ends of the solar system, and if we did meet again, it would be as opponents.

  Opponents, not enemies, I reminded myself. Aine was right. The Authority had taken too much from me already to also tell me who to hate. They couldn’t make me hate Dahn.

  “Here we go,” Wells muttered as the first wisps of Charon’s atmosphere flickered past the window and made the ship shudder.

  We all strapped ourselves in along the bench seat as we watched Charon get larger and larger until it filled up the entire view. The remnants of the man-made atmosphere of the moon made the Ray tremble on her hinges, but that was normal. It wasn’t until I felt the great ship start to fishtail that I realized that something very wrong was going on.

  We were screaming into a landing, fast as hell. Too fast? I turned and exchanged quick looks with Cast. He was a much more experienced pilot than I was, and he clearly thought this was too fast, too. The Ray jerked massively as it hit a low-pressure pocket in the atmosphere. I grabbed the edge of the table in front of us as the Ray started to spiral down toward the desolate surface of the moon.

  “Pull up. Back thrusters. Recalibrate the pressure in the engine…” Cast muttered instructions out loud as if Kupier could hear him all the way in the cockpit.

  The Ray juddered again, and this time it was enough to send us toppling into one another. We were less than four minutes from the surface, and practically free-falling. Moat, Charon’s main city, was underground. The landing pad was through a set of retractable doors that I could already see starting to yawn open for us down below, a small black square against the white sand. But we were going too fast; we’d be lucky if we could even aim for the doors. And if we did somehow make it through, we’d never be able to brake in time to not take out every parked skip and landing technician on the dock.

  Apparently, Kupier had realized this also, because I felt the nose of the Ray dip up. The front thrusters kicked on as he attempted to level us out and bring us back up into the atmosphere.

  “Something is really wrong!” Cast shouted out over the noise of the ship creaking on its hinges, the atmosphere jostling us in every direction. Cast unclipped himself from the bench and sprang up. “I’m going to the cockpit in case they need an emergency pilot.”

  “I’m headed down to the engine room,” Wells agreed. “In case they need a mechanic.”

  “Does it sound mechanical to you? The problem with the Ray?” I asked, grabbing Wells by the shoulder as he lurched past me.

  “Not especially,” he responded. “It sounds like the ship’s trying to do two things at once; she’s not talking to herself.”

  That had been my thought exactly.

  I nodded at Wells and tumbled after Cast toward the cockpit. The ship’s mainframe was in a small annex off one side of the cockpit, so that’s where I needed to be. Cast and I stumbled against the hallway’s walls as the ship slid from one side to the other. The Ray wasn’t in free-fall anymore, but now she was sort of diagonally backsliding. Not good.

  I steadied Cast as best as I could, terrified that he’d break a bone in his frail state. But, he held his own. Stumbling forward, I reminded myself that, as much as Cast was sweet and kind, he’d still been chosen and trained as a Datapoint. That alone meant that the kid had grit. And an unusual tolerance for pain. Because there he went, digging his fingers into the bolts along the wall to drag himself toward the cockpit.

  I’d be proud later.

  Right now, I needed to concentrate on all of us not turning into a smoking smear on the side of the rebel moon colony.

  We burst through the small door of the cockpit onto chaos. Kupier and Oort were at the landing controls, shouting to one another. Buttons of all colors were chirping and flashing across the entire twenty-foot dash of the Ray. Four or five other Ferrymen were furiously leaning over other sets of controls, all of them attempting to set things to rights. Cast rushed forward and immediately took the controls from a white-faced and trembling Oort.

  The door to the mainframe annex was already open. I bolted through it, my mind already in hacker mode and assessing the damage. I saw Aine there, on her knees, desperately attempting to read the code that was lining out on the diagnostics monitor. Another Ferryman whose name I couldn’t remember was kneeling next to her, his hands flopping on his lap like two helpless lovebirds.

  “Out!” I told him.

  “W-what?” I remembered now, his name was Roon. He was getting damned good at hand-to-hand combat and I’d been told he was a fine mechanic, but apparently, he was terrible in a crisis.

  “Aine and I need room. Go to the engine room and see if Wells needs a hand down there.”

  When he still didn’t move, just blinking up at me, I grabbed him by the scruff of his shirt and hoisted him out of the room.

  “Thanks,” Aine muttered, not taking her eyes off the screen. “He was bothering the crap out of me.”

  “What are we looking at?”

  “I can’t tell. It’s a problem with the Ray’s internal communications board. She’s not getting the messages that the cockpit is sending.”

  “Can you read that code alright?”

  Aine looked away just long enough to send a withering look in my direction. Well, that answered that question.

  “Alright,” I said, grabbing the hacking keyboard off of her lap and taking up the set of tools that was next to her. “You be the eyes, I’ll be the hands.”

  I slid across the floor and used the screwdriver to take the access panel clean off the ship’s main computer. I was immediately relieved by
what I saw. No smoking or sparking.

  “It’s not overheating!” I called back. Which meant that it wasn’t a mechanical problem. This was a coding problem. I stared in at the mass of wires and chips, two huge touch screens sitting atop of it all like twin monarchs ruling over the masses. It was just like the Ferrymen to have a completely outdated and ancient computer held together by state of the art, gorgeous monitors.

  I rose to my knees and connected my keyboard wirelessly. I was sure I could have navigated through the screens, but this way was my tried and true method. And, this was the first time I was attempting to hack something this large – and this important – without my tech.

  Aine had narrowed it down. She shouted out information to me through the grinding and groaning of the ship. There were people shouting just outside of the annex door and I could hear Kupier’s voice mixed in with Cast’s now. By my calculations, we were less than a minute from impact.

  “Looks like the thrusters aren’t communicating with the pressurization system!” Aine called.

  “So, the emergency thrusters have kicked on…” I muttered to myself, my fingers flying over the keyboard. This meant that the ship was warring against itself. The Ray was acting as if she’d been thrown into emergency protocols, trying to take over from the pilots, even though that was just making things worse. I needed to get the ship’s computer to stand down and re-initiate manual drive.

  I navigated through the ship’s schematics, the twin screens showing me exactly what I was hoping to see. I zoomed into the mainframe annex and found the blueprints for the mainframe. There. Run diagnostics.

  “What are you doing?” Aine shrieked from behind me, interpreting my progress through the lines of code on her diagnostics screen. I had no doubt that my own diagnostics test was jumbling hers beyond recognition. She probably thought I was attempting to run the Ray into the white dirt of Charon.

  “Trust me, Aine!” I yelled. One glance over my shoulder and I saw she was on her feet. She was very far from trusting me. In fact, she looked like she was about to attempt to kick my ass. I remembered suddenly that she wasn’t a Datapoint. She couldn’t follow my line of logic. I needed to explain it to her, and fast, or else she was going to derail everything. “I’m trying to locate the exact source of the miscommunication in the computer. Look! It’s there!”