Moonsteed

by Manda Benson

  He shrugged. “Where?”

  She considered. “There’s no proper GPS for getting detailed surveillance beyond the base. He could have had an ally put a ship down. The spy took the horse and he was going somewhere. He presumably got his information from someone. It might be John Aaron was an inside informant.”

  Smith shook his head. “Unlikely, but it bears consideration. I’ve no idea how the spy got in here. The ANT reported unauthorized personnel, but we recently had a shipment of goods and a staff change, so it’s most likely he found a way to stow away on that. It is an awfully long way to come to Callisto to steal something, and rather expensive using one’s own transport. Possibly the spy panicked when the alarm went off, and took a horse in some kind of desperate hope, thinking he might be able to hide outside.”

  Verity thought that seemed a bit of a stupid thing for a spy to do, but then she also thought it was stupid of the spy to have reached for a weapon when she had told him twice to stop. It could be he was merely a very inept spy. She said nothing.

  “I’ll need to speak to Inquisitor Farron about the spy.” The Commodore’s face gave a slight twitch when he spoke Farron’s name, and his tone changed slightly. “It makes sense to ask him if he knows anything about Private Aaron while we’re there but, before we go, there’s another matter I need to discuss with you. There’s a breeding program commencing involving the base’s horses. Torrmede have sent someone to oversee it, some sort of scientist.”

  “Vladimir Bolokhovski.” Verity pulled the name off the ANT. “He was hanging around the stable block earlier.”

  “Yes. I’d like you to introduce him to the facilities here, and make sure he knows what he’s doing with this breeding program.”

  “But, Sir,” she said, “it’s Referendum Day! I’m supposed to get the afternoon off so I can read and vote.”

  “Sergeant Verity, I am not suggesting you have to do it this afternoon. I meant for you to arrange with him to do it in your own time.”

  Verity protested, “I’m looking after the core-sampling project already. Sergeant Black’s better at this sort of thing than I am. She harps on about it enough. Why don’t you ask her to do it?” Verity frowned. “Has Sergeant Black been saying things about me?”

  “Verity, we are not discussing Sergeant Black’s profile of abilities, we are discussing yours. I’m aware you have recently been involved in an incident, but may I remind you that you are a sergeant in the Sky Forces, and while this particular branch of the Sky Forces is not a true military division, you are still expected to conduct yourself in the proper manner!”

  Something in Smith’s posture and parlance told Verity her suspicion was correct. Sergeant Black had never liked Verity, since even before Callisto. When she’d confided on the matter to Gecko, he’d thought it was because Verity was younger than Black, and Black envied her Magnolia Order connection. Her enmity had worsened when Verity was promoted to sergeant only a month after Black, who was five years Verity’s senior. Furiously, Verity wondered why, if Black had a problem with her, she couldn’t say it to her face. Backstabbing arse-licker!

  “Do you think it is acceptable, just because certain aspects of your career profile are very strong, that you should neglect other parts of it?”

  Verity folded her arms. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Don’t be disingenuous! You weren’t promoted to sergeant for nothing, but it certainly wasn’t your interpersonal skills that put you in line for it. Now, if you are at all concerned about what I am going to write on my report about this incident, you can put those concerns out of your mind. I’m convinced you acted in a manner that was absolutely judicious and rational, and your training has served you extremely well today. Had you contacted me through the ANT and asked me what to do, I would have told you to do exactly as you did. Only you didn’t, quite rightly, because you knew explaining the situation to me would cost you time you needed, and so you made the decisions yourself, and they were the right ones.”

  Smith paused to give Verity some time to consider this before continuing. “Now, your most recent appraisal shows that your interpersonal skills need work. This is one of two reasons why I’ve decided to give this duty to you. If you want to know my other reason, it’s because I honestly think you are the best member of staff here in terms of handling the horses. Certainly Sergeant Black and I are trained to use them, and do so effectively, but you understand them. Surely you can see that the best person to train someone how to handle horses is such a person who understands them thus?”

  Verity took her gaze away from his face and stared at the surface of the desk. “I suppose so, Sir.”

  “Good, then. Let’s go to the Inquisitor’s laboratory.”

  * * * *

  The Inquisitor greeted them in the entrance to his laboratory. Lloyd Farron had wavy hair with a tawny, auburn color, extending into luxuriant full-length sideburns. With his sturdy, medium-height build, he looked like a lion. He had a mug of tea in one hand and a chocolate biscuit in the other.

  “Morning, Commodore. Sergeant Verity.” Lloyd glanced sideways at Verity and smiled, one eyebrow twisting below his interface apparatus. In addition to the standard fixed neural shunt in the center of the forehead, the Inquisitor had two auxiliary shunts just forward of his temples with a web of diodes and extra wiring interconnecting all three, supposedly to shield his mind from bleed-back off the people he interrogated. Verity doubted the efficacy of those, and there had to be some truth somewhere at the root of the rumor of the inquisitors’ compromised sanity. No one can dodge bleed-back, same as you can’t evade age and death. A hundred years ago, people used to say “death and taxes,” but that no longer worked since the Meritocracy made paying taxes an optional privilege. Perhaps one day scientists would find a cure for ageing, and then there’d only be bleed-back and death left. Verity couldn’t see death ever going away. Probability always wins in the end.

  “Indeed it is morning,” said Commodore Smith, his attention drawn to the windows running the span of the outer wall, where a pale glow lightened the horizon.

  “For the next four days,” said Verity.

  Lloyd rubbed his hands together briskly. “Good Referendum Day. Was there something you wanted to speak to me about?” He glanced rapidly back and forth between Verity and the Commodore.

  “Yes.” Smith fidgeted with his fingers. Tall and sable-haired, he looked very different to Lloyd. Verity could see the discomfort written on his face. People feared a man like Lloyd Farron, who could prize open someone’s mind at will. Verity, on the other hand, had from her first encounter with him seen it as something enticing, something dangerously exhilarating.

  “I’ll need your report on the spy Verity terminated,” Smith said.

  “I don’t have the information yet. It shouldn’t take more than a day. I’ll file a private report on the ANT once I’m sure I’ve extracted everything.”

  Verity had been looking round the lab while they spoke, at the computers and the interrogation chair with its thick straps to restrain the arms and heads of Lloyd Farron’s subjects. In the far corner a lot of machinery had been connected to something Verity realized, with a pang of dread, was the head of the spy she had brought back, mounted on a stick like some grisly trophy. The long hair had been hacked off with scissors, and the face was covered with lacerations from Verity’s makeshift ice pack. The wound at the neck she had made with her katana looked unnaturally straight, perfectly horizontal, and thick tubes delivering oxygenated reanimation fluid had been clamped to its blood vessels. Wires trailed over the table around the head and jacks had been plugged into the shunt on its forehead. Saliva dribbled constantly from the mouth, and the left eye was a mess of clotted blood where a shard of ice had punctured it. The right eye swiveled, looked directly at her, and a chill prickling crawled from her scalp right the way down to the back of her knees. She’d done that...he’d made her do that. Why hadn’t he stopped when she’d told him?

  The
Commodore must have noticed the spy’s head also, for a slight noise of disgust escaped him. Verity turned and saw him staring at the head. “You’re not going to leave him like that, are you?”

  “No.” The Inquisitor dipped his biscuit in his tea. “He’ll be put out of his misery once he divulges the information I need from him.” The biscuit broke as he lifted his hand, plopping into the tea. He made a distasteful face at the stub between his finger and thumb.

  The Commodore took a deep breath and straightened his belt. “You see that you do your job and make him. He may be a spy, but...well.”

  Verity stared at the head. Yes, he’d been a spy. She needed to rise above pitying him, thinking of him as a man, even, because he was a traitor to the Meritocracy, and this was what people who plotted to bring down the Meritocracy deserved.

  Commodore Smith cleared his throat and looked conspicuously away from the head. “Do you know anything of Private John Aaron? I don’t know if you will know the name. If you’ve seen him about before, have you ever picked up any...vibes from him?”

  “Hmm, Aaron.” The Inquisitor dipped another biscuit in his tea and put it in his mouth. He frowned as he chewed, turning away slightly and putting his fingers to his interface. “I think I know the one you mean. He had something he didn’t want others to know. He was very...assured in his convictions on a particular matter, although I’m not sure what it was.”

  “That would fit. It turns out he’s some kind of religious extremist. He just made an attempt on Verity’s life and now he’s AWOL.”

  “Hmm,” said the Inquisitor again. He glanced up at Verity. “Didn’t hurt you, did he?”

  Verity shook her head. Lloyd suddenly grinned. “Didn’t think he could. Ah well, absit omen.”

  “Well, if you have any information, please put it on the ANT.” The Commodore turned to leave. Something in his manner betrayed an eagerness to be elsewhere. Verity could tell he didn’t like the Inquisitor.

  After Smith had left, Lloyd said, “Who was that man you were speaking with in the stables, Verity? Did he come in on the last landing?”

  “He is a nearly-a-doctor who sires horses,” said Verity.

  Lloyd roared with laughter. He offered her his tin of chocolate biscuits.

  Verity didn’t want to eat them in front of the spy’s head, so she put them in her pocket.

  “How do you mean?” Lloyd asked.

  “He says he’s training to be a genetic engineer.”

  “Hmm.” Lloyd tapped his signet ring against his tea mug. It was an odd design, titanium with alternating bands of anodized violet.

  “Lloyd,” said Verity, admiring the strong shape of his brow and nose, and his broad shoulders. She never could think of what to say to him on that front. It wasn’t that he was older, because he couldn’t be more than ten years away from her, but because he was so much more senior. It always felt inappropriate somehow. “When you get the data off the spy, I know you can’t tell me what it is, but if there’s anything I need to know...” Verity found her gaze once more drawn to the head on the bench, where it watched her with an eye that looked somehow furious. “You will tell me? There’s something going on here, something to do with John Aaron. I tried to tell the Commodore, but I don’t think he really understood.”

  She didn’t want to reveal any more of her thoughts in front of the spy’s head. He couldn’t speak, but he must still be able to hear.

  “Of course,” said Lloyd.

  * * * *

  In the refectory she found Vladimir, sitting at a table by himself.

  She sat unceremoniously on a chair opposite him. “I think you’re a waste of my time, but the Commodore says I’ve to help you.”

  “Thanks...” said Vladimir. “I think.”

  Verity ripped open the top of her carton of food and stuck her spoon in. “I’ll show you the exercise centrifuge tomorrow. We can’t use it this afternoon because it’s Referendum Day today.”

  Vladimir made a pious face. “I don’t care about things like that. There’s work and more important things to be getting on with.”

  Verity stared at him across the table. He had a very fair complexion with light brown hair and eyes of that genuine blue resulting from no iris pigmentation. It occurred to her that with his broad shoulders, he would have been conventionally very attractive if he’d bothered to care about such things. “Ya. Right. Well, if you don’t exercise here, you’ll waste away in the low gravity. And you’ll have to exercise your horse too. I’ve never put a horse that’s not fearless in a centrifuge before. Should be interesting, at any rate.”

  Vladimir looked alarmed. “I have to handle him? There’s not staff here trained in it?”

  “The staff here look after the working horses. He’s your project. You are in charge of him.”

  He looked out the panoramic window at the sun on the horizon, and Jupiter in the sky. “When you say tomorrow, do you mean twenty-four hours-ish from now, or the next time the sun rises?”

  “I mean Terran standard time.”

  “It might have to wait longer than that. I think I caught some sort of cold on the transport ship, and now I don’t feel at all well.”

  “It’s like snot and crap and you feel like shit?” Verity stirred her food. “It’s a reaction to no gravity. All the fluid in your lungs and sinuses comes out of place and it feels like a cold. The other thing’s breathlessness and feeling tired? That’s because the air out here is less oxygenated. It’s like high-altitude air when you go up Olympus Mons.”

  “I’ve never been up Olympus Mons,” said Vladimir. He stirred his soup, looking away from Verity in an embarrassed sort of way. When he put his spoon in his mouth, his face crumpled. “This soup is awful! It’s like something I’d use in the lab! What is this stuff?” Vladimir rotated the container in his hands and frowned as he read the label printed on the white carton in plain black font. “Levigated esculents? It even sounds like something that belongs in a lab!”

  “It’s made out of genetically modified plants grown on sewage,” said Verity.

  “Tastes it.”

  “We have to have sustainable food. It would cost a fortune to keep shipping in proper food from Earth or Mars. Well, although they make an exception for the Inquisitor. He gets tea and complimentary biscuits.” Verity remembered the biscuits and put her hand in her pocket to find it full of melted chocolate, much to her annoyance. She held up her hand, spreading brown-smeared fingers. Vladimir glanced at her and made a face of mock disgust.

  “Don’t you ever miss proper food?” he asked as Verity licked her hand.

  “What, like bloody steaks, sheep’s hearts and liver? Ya, I miss those.”

  Vladimir shrugged. “The kebabs on Mars are the best. Don’t think they deliver out here, though.”

  Verity hadn’t expected him to say that. He looked like the sort of person who didn’t eat meat. “Kebabs aren’t proper meat. It’s just processed rubbish.”

  Vladimir leaned back on his chair and said, “What other animals have you eaten--I mean, worked with? Besides horses.”

  Verity tilted her food carton and scraped the remainder into her spoon. “Birds.”

  “Birds?”

  “Hawks. The Meritocracy uses them for surveillance. They can see in much more detail than people or computers can, and they’re tetrachromats, so they can see into the ultraviolet region.”

  Vladimir tore his bread open and poked at a packet of synthetic butter with his knife. “What things are ultraviolet?”

  “Stuff like flowers. People’s hair and fingernails, that greasy area on people’s foreheads and noses. Urine.”

  “Urine?”

  “When buzzards and things are flying around, they can see places mice have piddled. That’s how they know where to look.”

  “What does ultraviolet look like?”

  “I dunno.” Verity shrugged. “Can’t explain it.”

  Vladimir frowned. “Does it look like blue?”

  “No. It
sort of merges into it, though. Like how green merges into blue going the other way. You see it with the bird’s eyes, not your own. I can’t explain it in terms of how humans see. Same as you can’t explain to a horse what red looks like.”

  “Are hawks better than horses to interface with, then?”

  Verity sniffed. “When they first give you it, you think it’s really ace, but after you’ve had it for a bit you realize it doesn’t do anything else, and you can’t really train it much. All you can do is tell it where to go and analyze what it sees. Dogs are kind of annoying too.”

  “I like dogs.”

  “Thing with dogs is, they always think they’re starving even when they’re not. And then you’re always having to factor in smells. If you’re working with dogs and something smells, it hijacks their attention and they won’t stop thinking about it, and the worst thing is you get bleed-back.”

  “Bleed-back?”

  “The dogs’ impatience and distractedness get transmitted to you through the interface.” Verity tapped the implant on her forehead. “One time a fox or something had shat in the grass and my dog smelled it and tried to eat it, and for a moment I felt like I wanted to eat it too. Was disgusting.”

  Vladimir grimaced and touched his own implant.

  “And then there were cephalopods,” Verity said. “They were experimental. Didn’t work so well.”

  “Cephalopods? How don’t they work?”

  “They might work, eventually. They’re useful underwater because they’re intelligent and dexterous.” Verity opened and closed her fingers in a way suggesting tentacles. “I think it was just because they’re so different to us in terms of how their brains work. They’re a long way from us on those evolutionary diagrams biologists do.”

  “They’re in a different phylum.”

  Verity frowned. “Whatever they are.” She drained her glass of water, and rose. Vladimir pushed back his chair and stood too.

  “I suppose I’ll see you tomorrow, then.” He followed Verity as she headed for the main doors.