The Ferrymen (The Culling Book 3)

by Ramona Finn

  Or, perhaps, that was all she would allow herself to take.

  As often happened, a few times a day at least, a memory whipped up through Kalis’ consciousness so fast that it took her breath away. And with it came a slice of guilt so sharp she almost bent herself right in half. The memory took place on the Io colony. Red dust as far as the eye could see, the volcanoes rumbling in the distance. There was a line of citizens a quarter of a mile long, waiting for their food rations.

  “That was thirty years ago,” she reminded herself as she sat in her dewy, warm, lovely-smelling garden. “Things are much better there now. Besides, the sky is that gorgeous, romantic, navy blue when the volcanoes aren’t clouding the atmosphere.”

  It was a weak attempt to soothe her guilt.

  The members of the Authority and their families got to live here, in Earth’s paradise, while the rest of the human race just barely got by on the colonies.

  To be fair, the Earth wasn’t in any shape to support the hundreds of thousands of humans who populated the solar system. If the Authority were to come clean about the existence of Jericho and invite the citizens home to Earth… well, the infrastructure would collapse. Earth’s habitat itself might even collapse, as it had threatened to do all those hundreds of years before.

  It was an issue that the Authority had combed through the morality of for years before they’d ultimately decided to come and live on Jericho. Kalis Rome still wasn’t comfortable with it. But she also wasn’t leaving, either. Or alerting the masses.

  She sighed. It wasn’t the only decision she’d made as a leader of the government that she was uncomfortable with. There were plenty of things that had led her down long, winding roads of guilt. The stabbing pains she felt when she remembered the rations line on Io were not an anomaly when it came to reactions to her memories.

  Kalis Rome wondered if, perhaps, guilt and constant double-guessing were just an intrinsic part of being a member of government. She even wondered if she might better serve her people if she turned off her internal morality alarms.

  No. She dismissed the idea immediately. If she did that, then she would be just like Jan Ernst Haven. Who used no moral compass whatsoever to make the decisions he made.

  The man had pushed the hardest to return the Authority and their families to Earth. Yet, he had no family of his own, and he’d never come to live on Earth. Ironically, Kalis Rome thought she might be able to trust Haven more if she could sense some sort of personal agenda wafting off of him. She could scent her own – not that she was proud of it. But the Earth was lovely and safe, and she wanted her family to grow old there. She wanted to grow old there, herself. That was her weakness, her agenda, and that was why she’d ultimately caved in and come to live there.

  Haven, though, who’d fought the hardest, who’d fought so hard for so many things, rarely indulged in them. That disturbed her a great deal.

  It was the same with this culling program that he treated as if it were a child of his own. Haven was convinced that this new way to cull would better the entire society. That it would eliminate crime and violence, and the colonies would thrive with only the peaceful, well-meaning citizens left behind to inhabit them.

  There was something about his reasoning that consistently nagged at her, however. Kalis Rome didn’t believe that Haven actually cared about the livelihoods of the people he was making all these changes for. She’d never really gotten any hint from Haven that the rise in crime and violence bothered him at all. Rather, she’d seen him absorb such statistics with a sort of fascinated detachment.

  It bothered her. It couldn’t be said that she always did the most moral thing, or that she served her constituents with unfailing duty. But the places where she failed came about because she was, in fact, human. Just like her constituents.

  Haven seemed to stop at nothing in his search for a potential utopia. And he seemed as inhuman as the perfection he sought.

  Kalis Rome tipped her head forward when the inner bright red of her eyelids against the sun became too overwhelming. The heat had her skin opening in gratitude, a healthy bead of sweat racing down the back of her neck.

  She’d come out to her garden in the middle of the day not for a comfortable respite. But because she was attempting, at all costs, to calm herself. And, for a few moments, it had worked. But now her rising nausea and fear were overtaking her again.

  It was the thoughts of Haven which had done it.

  The minute she’d first heard the rumors, she’d thought of Haven, and he hadn’t been far from her mind ever since.

  “Please let them just have been rumors,” she whispered, her eyes unfocused against the deep blue shadows of the oak tree that shaded her yard. She’d spoken the words out loud not as a prayer, but as a way to hear them with her own ears. She desperately needed to be grounded. To know where she stood.

  So many of her morals had gotten so muddied since she’d come to Earth. Being a member of the Authority had been easier when her life had been harder. When she’d been working from the city hall on Europa, brushing astral dust off the creases of her jumpsuits just like every other citizen in the solar system. Her life had been worse, but her job had been easier.

  Now, she got to sit in a sunny garden, nectar on the air and an icebox full of food waiting for her inside. And she barely remembered who she was anymore. They’d gotten so far from where they’d started.

  Planet Earth had been an anchor for the human race until they’d spoiled it beyond belief, cut the ties, and spewed themselves out into the solar system. And now civilization seemed to be just that, untethered. There were no cardinal directions in space. Everyone’s moral compass was wonky and skewed, and quite honestly, they were all magnetized toward the Culling. Pinned in place for fear of its ultimate judgement.

  “Madam Rome?”

  The voice had come from behind her. Her assistant, Remi, was back. She’d sent him off two hours ago to retrieve the satellite images that would either confirm or disprove the rumors. And now he was back.

  She enjoyed a single second more of peace, with the sun on her face and the dozy breeze, until she rose and clapped the dirt off of her hands.

  Kalis Rome turned and froze. There it was, the look on his face.

  The rumor was all but confirmed already. His eyes were unusually puffy in his skinny face and he looked as if he’d just witnessed some kind of explosion. He was flushed and exhausted all at once. He clutched a tablet in his hands and, though his arms were limp at his sides, his knuckles were white where he gripped the piece of tech. “Let’s go inside,” she said, keeping her voice steady.

  He followed her, like a lamb, and she almost sent him away. She viciously resented the doting presence of him. The energy he was kicking off, like a lost little boy, hoping his mother could help him find the way home. Kalis Rome would have the answers, that’s what she knew he was thinking. Kalis Rome always had the answers.

  She washed her hands in her sink and watched dirt from her garden spiral down the drain. It looked, for a moment, like the spiral of a galaxy swirling away. When she sat next to him at her small, wooden table, Remi turned on the images, but he didn’t look at them as if seeing them once had been all he could take.

  Kalis Rome instantly understood why.

  The first thing that struck Kalis was the clarity of the images. The photos were surprisingly high-definition images of Enceladus. This particular moon colony was especially hard to get photos of, usually. This was because of the artificial atmospheric shield that the main city manufactured to protect the citizens. Obviously, as seen from the sheer clarity of the photos, the shield was down.

  The second thing that struck Kalis, and it struck her over and over again in a matter of moments, and would for years, was the sheer number of bodies in the images. They lay strewn about in the streets, over fences, in their lawns, and on the streetcars. There were thousands of bodies in the streets. And, she could only guess, thousands more inside of the dwellings.

  It
had, after all, been any old day on Enceladus when the Culling had happened. The colony had been unaware that anything might happen that day.

  And none of them would ever know what had happened because every single one of them had been culled.

  That much was clear.

  “All of them?” she asked, with a voice that sounded so much like her own mother’s that it startled her.

  “From what we can tell from the images. Our guess is that it’s been a few weeks. But without the presence of the atmosphere, there’s been minimal decomposition.”

  “And it was definitely a Culling? Not some kind of neurogas or… or…” Kalis Rome searched for something, anything it could be other than a government-sanctioned tool for peace being used against its own people.

  Remi’s silence spoke worlds. Of course there was nothing else it could be. What else could have killed this many people all at once without outward signs of violence, beyond death itself?

  Kalis Rome pressed her fingers to her mouth, covering her horror, but she made herself finish looking at all of the images. She’d failed this colony so terribly, all of them in the Authority had, that the least she could do was look fully at the images. Acknowledge them as real and true and undeniable.

  A few minutes later, she sent Remi away and he took the tablet with him. She wanted to go back out to her garden, to breathe deeply and attempt to calm herself, but she was afraid that the sweet scent of the pollen on the air might choke her.

  All those people. Dead in the street like dogs.

  How could she have let this happen?

  No. That was not the right question.

  How could he have done this?

  So, she didn’t rise, with heat in her temper and vicious words on her tongue the way she might have done as a younger woman. Instead, she sat until the light changed. It went from high day to melancholy twilight, until finally, her kitchen was painted a clear, inexorable blue. She didn’t turn the lights on.

  When she rose – and it still wouldn’t be for a few more hours – she would take the first steps towards bringing Jan Ernst Haven in to meet his justice. When she rose, she wouldn’t stop rising until she’d caught him. Until he was here and paying for his sins. For the lives of all those people.

  When she rose, she would be the elected official that she’d been born to be. She would be fierce, and she would fight for the humanity of all citizens. She would make Haven choke on his own Culling. But she was an old woman, she knew. And the souls of thousands of Enceladians weighed heavy on her fragile back. So, for now, she sat in the dark and mourned the day humans had ever left Earth.

  Two days after Kupier had showed me his grand plan, I was increasingly aware that his third day was coming up. He hadn’t tried to talk to me about his plan again, though. In fact, he’d acted like nothing had even happened like we’d never had any discussion of any plan at all since getting back to Charon. Instead, Kupier and I had been leading combat classes down on the Ferrymen’s level. He went through two different pilot trainings for any Ferryman who wanted to learn more, and he led a contest where he dismantled various engines, provided scant tools, and saw who could reassemble theirs the fastest. Of course, Wells came in first.

  I had to admit that I was restless on Moat. I was overseeing the manufacturing of the shielding chip, but Charon was populated with so many different kinds of geniuses that they barely needed me there. Once I showed them how to alter the chip, they didn’t need me to show them anything else. Within a few days of Cast’s experiment, half the Ferrymen had already been equipped with them, and loads more were on the way.

  I needed more, though. I often caught myself thinking wistfully back to the days when Dahn and I would program puzzles into an old gaming device we’d found. We’d code bugs and viruses into the device and hand it over for the other to solve. I needed something like that. There just wasn’t a ton for me to do. The Ray had been scanned up and down, left and right, for any other sort of internal issues – and even to my standards, she was as clean as a whistle.

  I cleaned the viruses off the tablets of all of Owa’s neighbors and finally accepted that helping Owa, Daw, and Treb clean out her kitchen was probably the most tantalizing thing that I had on my list of things to do that day. Kupier was nowhere to be seen.

  I let my mind wander as I moved around down on my hands and knees, digging out old pots and pans from a cabinet and passing them back to Daw. She met my eyes when she took a cast iron frying pan from me, and it surprised me. There was a softness there. Maybe even a sweetness. She was letting me in again. Little by little, my sisters were forgiving me for what had happened. And the way I’d told them about it. I didn’t quite understand what was going on with them, but Kupier had insisted that time heals and that I shouldn’t push them. Either way, I knew they didn’t hate me because of the way they snuggled up to me each night. You couldn’t snore in the face of someone you abhorred.

  It was mindless work, the reorganization of the kitchen, and my sisters chatted fondly with Owa as we performed each task she asked of us. I let my mind drift back to Kupier’s plan. To the giant, deadly loophole at the end.

  My eyes came down to the tech on my arm, vicious and beautiful. And then, a thought struck me.

  It was so sudden and so clear, and so formed, that it was as if someone had clanged a bell right behind my ears. I stared down at my tech and rose up. I clattered a jar of mixing spoons that was balancing on the floor next to me.

  “Glade!” Treb admonished me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, with more than a little daze in my voice. “I just thought of something. Realized something. I – I gotta find Kupier.”

  With that, I vaulted over the pile of pots and pans, dodged around Owa as she stood in front of the open oven with two mitts on her hands, and sprinted out of the house and into the narrow alleyway.

  I figured Kupier was down at the Ferrymen’s level of Moat, so I sprinted toward the staircase that would get me there fastest. I held my wrist up to my face and typed while I ran.

  Where are you? I have something to tell you right away.

  My comm buzzed almost immediately and I skidded to a stop so that I could read it. I was so excited and freaked out and juiced that my wrist shook as I held it up to read the message.

  I squinted and read the words not once, not twice, but three times before I sagged backwards onto the dirt-packed wall behind me.

  This was not a message from Kupier.

  Glade. I’m here. I came. I changed my mind. I’m in the orbit in a replica Ferryman ship. I need reassurance that I won’t be killed if I come down there.

  My brain ran through about a hundred different scenarios of who it could be on the other end of that comm, even if, logically, I felt there was only one possibility. And my heart knew the answer. Dahn. It was Dahn. He was here. He’d crossed the solar system, into unknown, enemy territory, to follow me.

  All the excitement of my realization from moments before sort of squeezed through a small tube in my gut. I felt like I could float but in a bad way. I was confused, dizzy, and elated.

  If this really was Dahn, and who knew whether it was, was there any way for him to prove it?

  Is your tech active? I commed him back and held my breath as I waited for his answer.

  No.

  That sealed it. Switching courses, I sprinted back through the residential corridors toward the other end of the third level. I needed to make it up to the landing pad, and fast.

  I was out of breath and sweating when I popped up onto the loading dock, slipping the oxygen suit on with the ease and practice of someone who’d done it enough times to know each move by heart. The other mechanics and technicians who manned the posts and strode around the landing pad left me alone. Some of them were used to me and barely gave me a second glance, as I’d been doing diagnostics on the Ray for weeks now, and some of them were nervous as hell around me and gave me a very wide berth. But none of them stopped me from striding right up to one of
the surveillance monitors and flicking it on.

  There, with the familiar looking radar clicked on, I could see all of the ships in the orbit of Charon. There were two cargo ships, one docking and one leaving the atmosphere. There were four different ships that seemed to be racing one another in one direction – probably Ferrymen who were goofing off after a practice session. There were five patrol ships keeping a tight watch on Charon’s surroundings… and, there! There was one more ship, barely detectable on the radar because of its size and because of the fact that it rode in the blind spot of one of the cargo ships. It wouldn’t be visible from the naked eye of the patrol ships and it was only visible to me on the radar because I’d been specifically looking for it.

  I zoomed in on the ship and set some security scans on it. The machine beeped and told me there was one organic life form on board. Sure enough, it detected no signs of Datapoint technology. There was nothing to indicate that this was Dahn. But if it was Dahn, he’d been telling the truth about being his tech.

  How do I know it’s you?

  There was a long pause, and I took the opportunity to trace the direction that my sent message had gone. Sure enough, the message had been sent straight to the small, unidentified craft. So, I also knew that no one was intercepting the messages or sending them remotely. It was a direct line between me and Dahn. Or, between me and whoever was pretending to be Dahn.

  My comm buzzed again, but it was Kupier telling me that he was on the Ferrymen’s level, and that I should come down and tell him whatever it was that had me so hopped up. I shook my head and answered.

  Can’t. In a sec. Something is happening.

  I typed out and sent that message to Kupier. It was a terribly incommunicative message, but it was the best I could do at this particular second, with my heart racing and my thoughts all in a jumble.

  All I could think about was that, if that was really Dahn on the radar I was seeing, and he was really here because he’d changed his mind about joining me, then everything would be different. Dahn was not only the most competent Datapoint who existed – besides me, of course – but he was also the most in-the-know. He’d been Haven’s apprentice for years. The amount of insider info that Dahn probably had on the Authority would be staggering. It could be enough to fuel the Ferrymen for years. But more than that, I realized that his presence would mean someone with a skillset very similar to mine would be on board with the Ferrymen. I might not have to do all this alone after all. Dahn was an insanely talented hacker. He had exceptional control over his tech, and he was one of the most brilliant problem solvers I’d ever met. I wouldn’t have to be the only key to Kupier’s plan. If Dahn joined us, then there would be two keys to Kupier’s plan.