Moonsteed

by Manda Benson

  “Vladimir, you remember when you came into the stables the first time and you called me Zeta?”

  Vladimir’s face went red. “I already said I was sorry! The ANT said that was what your name was. It was just a mistake.”

  “It is my name.” Verity sighed. She wished she didn’t have to tell him this, but that wouldn’t stop it being true. “Well, sort of. It’s not a name, it’s a number. Zeta comes after Epsilon. Epsilon was the last of Pilgrennon’s children. I was born as a genetic engineering project from the sperm of Delta and an artificial ova with a genetic code cut and pasted together on a computer. That means I’m Jananin Blake’s grandchild. I’m supposed to have genes that make hypnosis and that kind of thing impossible. It was part of the project.”

  Vladimir stared back at her for what seemed a long time, his expression changing from disbelief to pensiveness, then back to disbelief. “Even if there are genes for such things and you have them, there’s a massive nature versus nurture argument, especially since this is humans we’re talking about.”

  “Look, I’m sorry, but we don’t have time to talk about scientific theories now. I was born to do this. I was trained to do this, and I’ve got a debt to pay. You don’t have any of those things, and I don’t want to put you in danger anymore. I need you to find some evidence you can take with you to prove what’s going on here, and get back to the sun-yacht. Radio Torrmede and make sure the Magnolia Order and the Sky Forces know what’s happened. I’ll deal with Farron.” Verity had a sickening vision of what would happen if Vladimir got caught, Vladimir bound to one of those chairs, unable to move while insanity mantras were chanted into his ears and indoctrination images wired directly into his visual cortex until his own freewill was overwritten and yoked to that which would possess him.

  “But I don’t know how to fly the lander,” he protested.

  “Most of it’s handled by the computer. Just make sure you put the gyromag on before you start the engine.”

  Vladimir bared his teeth in distaste, lines forming on his forehead. “No. I’m not going off without you.”

  “Just go to the lander and wait. You’ll be all right getting out without an override because all the doors have fire escape buttons. If the sun rises and I’m not back, it’s too late for me and it’s too late for Callisto. The Meritocracy needs to know, and it’s your duty to tell them.”

  Vladimir started to say something, but Verity smothered the words with her mouth, wrapping her arms around him. The armor they both wore deadened the feeling of their embrace while she craved the comforts of his flesh.

  She pulled away from him and stepped back. He didn’t look away from her as she backed toward the door. She jacked the override into the port and turned it, then she was through and the door divided him from her. As she moved into the corridor, hand on her katana and keeping against the wall, she realized she didn’t have her helmet. She’d given it to Vladimir. That meant an unpleasant ride back to the lander if she did get out of here alive. She considered going back for it, but fear of being unable to leave him again put the idea from her mind.

  “You know what you told him was a load of bollocks really?” Skepticism tinged Anthony’s thought. “Genes won’t safeguard you from what Farron does.”

  “You don’t know that. You’re not a scientist. I was made as an experiment, and the person who ran the lab’s theory might have been right.”

  “Well, yes I do know that, actually. You think only one experiment of that nature was ever attempted? The Magnolia Order isn’t stupid. They’ve thought of that already.”

  “I was told they wouldn’t be pursuing the research any further. What are you saying?”

  “There wasn’t just one research group. There were two rival ones fighting over the funding. You think you’re oh so special and facing all this angst by yourself, that no one else in the history of life on Earth has ever had to deal with. But you’re not.”

  Verity stopped, hand touching the freezing wall. “So what? Now you’re saying you’re an experiment?”

  “You just told him you were Delta’s progeny. The research group that created you managed to get some kind of highly unethical monopoly on Delta and Epsilon’s genetic code. My research group used Gamma’s DNA instead. If you’re Zeta and there aren’t any others I don’t know about, on which I am not at all convinced, then I am Iota.”

  “What? How can you be Iota? Iota is the third letter after zeta, and you--Anthony Cornelian--was older than I am.”

  “The research group that made you got the funding for the genetic stuff first. After they’d made an embryo, they didn’t have funding for the next part, and the law at the time was unclear. So the embryo that later became you went in the freezer. A few years later, the rival company got funding and permission for genetic research and implantation and created myself and two others. A few years after that, the first company got more funding and implant permission.”

  “But that...that means you’re my cousin! And I had sex with Vladimir and you...”

  “Look, there’s nothing illegal or weird about that. Well, apart from me not technically being human. A cousin is the closest relation you can have sex with without it being incest.”

  “I have―I had―a cousin?” Verity’s vision blurred. She had to take off her glove to wipe her eyes. She’d always thought she had no living relatives.

  “You have other cousins too. I’ll tell you about them later.”

  “I killed my own cousin?”

  “You didn’t kill your own cousin. Farron killed your cousin. Now let’s get the hell on with this and kill Farron and finish this mission.”

  Verity put her glove back on and straightened, pushing her back in against the wall. Another door stood at the end of the corridor.

  “Farron’s main lab is that way.” Anthony directed her. “Down another corridor and on the left.”

  She went to the door, opened it with the override key and stepped through. She paused. Something felt wrong.

  “Anthony, you’ve never been here. Not while you were alive, and not as a ghost on a computer. How can you know the right way to go?”

  “I...” Anthony thought, but it seemed he couldn’t finish. “I can’t remember. There’s something wrong. Don’t listen to me, Verity!”

  “Don’t listen to you?” What did that mean? Could a computer be brainwashed? With a cold sensation, she recalled the head on the bench in Farron’s lab, the head Farron claimed he had disposed of, Anthony Cornelian’s brain and what Farron had been doing to it, which she hadn’t been able to bear thinking about. That was why Farron had kept Anthony’s brain alive. He wanted to plant lies in it. He’d intended for the brain to be rescued, and possibly interrogated by another inquisitor and the lies extracted, perhaps in order to obfuscate the evidence against him. Knowledge of the hidden tunnels below must have got in through bleed-back, and then everything had been transferred onto the computer when he had last interfaced to it, just before Verity’s hand put an end to his suffering.

  Behind her a door crashed open. She spun about to face Lloyd Farron, who wore his heavy fur-collared coat and an insincere smile. Two guards stood in the doorway on either side and just behind him. “Sergeant Verity! How nice of you to come and visit.”

  Verity said nothing, but her right hand fell at once to the hilt of her katana.

  Farron’s expression dropped. “Although I must say your manners leave a lot to be desired. Ad rem.” He indicated with both hands to the two guards flanking him. “Get her. Alive.”

  One of the guards stepped forward. Verity’s feet fell into position and her katana soared from its sheath. Her blade glanced off the guard’s breastplate and tore his throat open. He collapsed to the floor, eyes rolling and mandible hanging in two halves, blood gushing from his neck.

  The other man took a step forward, his eyes sliding hesitantly from Verity’s face, down to take in the bloodied length of steel poised in her hand. His gaze moved to Farron who turned his eyes upw
ard and twisted his mouth impatiently.

  The voice in the back of her mind said, “Verity, you have to disconnect from me, now! I might have been conditioned to say something that will affect your reasoning in this exact situation. Verity!”

  The computer was connected to Verity through the wire plugged into her neural shunt. She would have to pull up her electromagnetic blindfold to disconnect it, not that the station’s ANT knowing where she was would matter now. Still covering the nervous guard with her katana, she reached up with her free hand and pushed up the edge of the bandana.

  A sudden weight forced down on her mind, smothering her thoughts. Searing pain lanced up her right arm, and as her fingers opened against her will, the sword fell. Anthony screamed, “No! No!” An intense expression distorted Farron’s face, and Verity realized her error too late.

  The guard grabbed her, and with Farron’s mindlock her training was useless. In seconds the guard had her arms pinioned behind her back and it was all over.

  Farron reached up to her head and twitched off Anthony Cornelian’s tie. He turned it over in his hands, frowning at the foil that lined it. “Primitive.” He bent, retrieved the dropped sword and held it up so the light glanced off the grain of the steel and the wet blood at the tip. “But effective. Banks, put Sergeant Verity in the chair.”

  Chapter 13

  Verity’s wrists and ankles were bound to the chair. A steel belt locked around her waist held her in the seat, and something else that was all uncomfortable metal edges gripped her around the neck, holding her head back against a three-pronged grip that dug into the sides and crown of her head, preventing her from moving. Twist and pull as she might, she could move very little from the position the chair held her in.

  “You can’t do this,” she snarled at Farron. “Someone will find out, and they’ll make you pay for it.”

  Farron fiddled with something on a table, facing away from her. He threw a glance over his shoulder. “And I’ll only do the same to them, and whoever comes after them, and again, and again, and so on, ad infinitum. In the end, you’re just a corpus vile, perfectly expendable. If I kill you, the Magnolia Order will send more. Don’t assume our friend Cornelian was the first, and don’t expect you’ll be the last.”

  Verity’s fingers tightened on the cold armrests of the chair. “The first?”

  “They sent two others before Cornelian. The first one I killed, hoping that would be the end of the matter. The second one, well, after talking it through with him, he reached the conclusion that his interests and those of the Magnolia Order no longer coincided.” Farron’s eyebrows flicked up. “After that enlightening experience, I realized I was going to have to give the Magnolia Order a taste of their own medicine.” Farron picked up Verity’s wakizashi from the bench at the side of the room and unsheathed it partway, examining the grain of the metal.

  What did he mean? Was he sending spies back to Mars and Earth to attack the Meritocracy? Verity couldn’t see how that would have any impact, not against the entire Electorate, and not with the Magnolia Order having the level of secrecy it did. The only individual within the organization Verity had spoken to was Takahashi, her commander as such, and presumably the only individual Takahashi knew was his superior, and so on and so forth. To infiltrate the Order, Farron would have to send men to kidnap Takahashi, drag him back here, interrogate him to find the identity of his superior, then repeat the process until he worked his way up the chain to identify the true leader. This must be exactly why the Order had structured itself in such a way. When one’s opponent is a man who can prize open a mind at will, being empty-minded has its advantages.

  It struck her that trying to discover more information and analyze Farron’s strategy was a useless endeavor. There was no way she’d be able to get the information back to Takahashi and the Magnolia Order and, if the scientists who’d created her had been wrong, she would merely end up as another of Farron’s mind-slaves. If they’d been right, he’d kill her when he found out the procedure wouldn’t work. Vladimir might not have had time to get out. She had to protect that information from Farron, at least.

  “You see, Sergeant Verity, you threw a spanner in the works of my plans.” He made a distasteful face. “It seems you go about acting rashly, without thinking first, leaving a chaotic trail in your wake. When the ANT sent out the order to capture a spy, you went out, killed the spy and brought the head back instead. Now, I’d intended to interrogate that spy and, after declaring him not in possession of any stolen information, and having planted some information of my own in him, to release him and let him return to the Magnolia Order. There, he would relay certain information to his leaders which, had they acted upon such intelligence, would have been sure to bring about their downfall and ensure a swift and ignominious exposure of the unsavory nature of this Magnolia Order to the Electorate, thus disposing of a threat to my operations here and creating a convenient diversion. Of course, there was not much spy left to go running back to the Magnolia Order after you’d finished with him.”

  Verity’s temper rose, and she shouted at Farron, “What did you do to Anthony? All that time you kept his brain alive! You did something to him.”

  “I decided I could still go through with my original plan in a slightly modified form, of course. If the next spy the Magnolia Order sent here retrieved not some flimsy information after possibly being captured and interrogated, and contaminated, but some barely-living human remnant of the last spy, from whose mind one of the Meritocracy’s other inquisitors had to pry the relevant data, I realized this would give the data in question added authenticity. I kept Cornelian’s brain alive with the intention that someone should rescue it. Of course, I didn’t expect his rescuer to be someone as close to home as you. I knew you were involved with the Order on a low level, but from their informer I understood it was unlikely the Order would call on someone with your particular...deficiencies...for the mission in question. I expected something more precise, another spy getting hold of a cryogenic container in order to transport the head. I didn’t expect you to be so rash as to destroy Cornelian’s brain and any data in it.”

  The memory of the dash through the base and the horse chase came flooding back. “If you meant the data to get out, why send Black after me?”

  “Because I didn’t think you even had the data! Through the monitoring equipment in my lab, I saw you destroy the head. When I saw what you’d done, I thought what I’d accomplished up to that point had been destroyed and I would have to start over with you as the spy-turned-vehicle of misleading untruths. It wasn’t until afterward that I realized you must have somehow persuaded Cornelian to transfer his data onto a computer. Yes, perhaps I did underestimate you somewhat in that effect.” Farron shrugged. “I suppose it helped add to the illusion, at least from your perspective. And the more convinced you are, the more convincing you’ll be to the Order.”

  “You planned this all along? The whole thing?” The memory of the conversation with Torrmede, the journey to the orbital to find that Farron wasn’t there flashed before her. Had he intended all of that to happen? Had he meant all along for her and Vladimir to deduce that the real secrets were down here beneath the base?

  “You think I’d let Cornelian’s yacht and his landing craft--the positions of which were there in his mind for me to see plain as day--stay where they were and provide an escape route to you or him or anyone else had it been otherwise?” Farron lunged forward, leaning over in front of Verity, his hands on the arms of the chair on top of hers, his face inches from hers. The mass of shunts in his forehead gleamed, and his eyes bored into hers with a fierce penetration that was both more intimate than sex and more threatening than a hand around the throat. “You can’t hide things like that from me. You might as well try to hide them from yourself. Now, there’s something you don’t want me to know. What is it?”

  Verity couldn’t let him know about--she mustn’t even think about it. Even if she didn’t say it, he’d know it. Vladimi
r...

  Farron gave a curt nod. He snapped his fingers, and a guard by the door stood to attention smartly. “The Russian genetic engineer. He’s here. Find him and prepare him for the chair next.”

  Verity stared as the guard left the room. How had that happened? Why hadn’t she been able to protect that information from him? How had he got through?

  Farron stepped away. He took something from the table and put it in his mouth. It was one of the biscuits, the same sort he had in the base. Verity could taste the chocolate from the bleed-back, feel the crumbly texture of it dissolving in his saliva. He picked up a mug and drained what remained in it, the mild bitterness of the tea washing away the sugary taste. His back turned toward her, he assembled something from a number of objects standing upon a wheeled metal table.

  When he turned back, he had a thin syringe with a needle, half full of liquid, in his hand. He held it up so she could see it clearly. “Sodium amytal. Crude, but effective for the purposes I require.”

  Although she couldn’t turn her eyes far enough to see it with her head clamped in the chair’s apparatus, she felt the chill of an alcohol-soaked swab touching her arm, and the sharp scratch of the needle followed by the burning pressure as he pressed down the plunger and forced the liquid in. Immediately, a dull, fuzzy sensation began to build in her head. Her limbs started to feel heavy and feeble. “It won’t work,” she murmured.

  “Why not? You think you’re special, that you’re better than other people? That hypnosis can’t possibly happen to you, just because you’re you and Fate has decreed it won’t happen, same as you won’t be part of the statistic that dies in a freak accident, or the statistic that gets caught committing crimes?”

  “I’m Blake’s direct descendant. I was engineered for it.”