by Kate MacLeod
The dogs had found the tattered remains of a very old bedroll with the combined scent of dozens of unwashed bodies worked deeply into the remaining fabric. Scout could smell it from the doorway and quickly backed away. No wonder the black marketers or whoever had left it behind. The mystery was who could be cold enough in the controlled environment of a space station to turn to such a thing for warmth.
Scout went back to pacing the road. It was better than spending the days floating in the microgravity of the moon, but just barely. Walking was good, but not particularly purposeful, and she needed to have a purpose. She had been working jobs constantly since the age of ten. Having this much time with nothing to do was starting to drive her mad.
And yet, once the Torreses got there, would there be anything for her to do then either? Liam had said the Torreses needed the three of them to testify in court, but he had said that could take years.
She knew testifying meant telling what she knew, describing what she had experienced. That wouldn’t take years. No, it would be the waiting again. Over and over again, the waiting. She was going mad just thinking about it.
But she would be in galactic central. Surely someone could find something productive for her to do. There must be a million things that needed doing. Sure, most of them would be beyond a backwater planet girl like Scout, and an uneducated one at that. But uneducated or not, she was clever. There had to be something for her to do.
The dogs came charging out of the building for no reason Scout could see, then ran as fast as they could down the road. Shadow was in the lead, as usual, but he banked hard and came back towards Scout. Gert tried to copy the move and took a tumble. She didn’t have his grace or his low center of gravity.
Scout stopped at Gert’s side as she rolled back up onto her feet and managed to give her a quick pat on the head before the dog took off again, determined to catch up with Shadow. Scout laughed, then, finding herself at the bottom of the staircase, decided to go up to the command deck to see how Emilie was doing.
Emilie never left the command deck, and Geeta never left Liam’s ship. They could speak directly to each other over the comms, but they mostly exchanged greetings and information through Scout. She suspected they were trying to make her feel useful.
“Emilie?” she called softly from the doorway. It was rare, but occasionally Emilie took a catnap in her seat. Scout had woken her once, and as much as Emilie hadn’t been mad or even particularly bothered, Scout didn’t want to risk doing it again. Emilie surely needed far more sleep than she thought she did.
“Hey, Scout,” Emilie said, spinning in her seat to give Scout a grin. “Dogs having fun?”
“As always,” Scout said. “Any news?”
“Nothing moving,” Emilie said. She had reconfigured the systems on the command deck, displaying all the information she wanted not just on the workstation in front of her but also up on massive screens that loomed down over the two of them. One screen was filled with the image of the moon; indeed, nothing was happening around it. Another showed the vicinity of their station: empty space. She had others monitoring the river of traffic that ran from one of the other space stations to the edge of the barricade and back again.
“I don’t suppose Liam ever showed you the process for sending messages through the barricade?” Scout asked.
“No,” Emilie said, taking a sip out of a water bulb. Scout looked to the crate in the corner: still half full. No need to bring a resupply from the ship yet. “I think I’ve worked out the basic principles, but it doesn’t do me any good. I could punch through the barricade, maybe, but I don’t know where to direct the message. Best not to risk it.”
“I suppose not,” Scout said, trying not to let her disappointment color her voice. “Did you break into the Space Farer transmissions? I mean,” she quickly amended, feeling her cheeks flush again, “your upper management channels.” Scout had spent her whole life calling the people who lived up here Space Farers. It was only when she had met Emilie that she learned they didn’t call themselves that—and that some of them, like Emilie, detested the term.
“Yeah,” Emilie said, tapping a piece tucked into her ear. “No chatter that pertains to us. I think we were chased out by black marketers and those people in black not-quite-uniforms, not anyone from the management of Amatheon Orbiter 1.”
“So they aren’t looking for you?” Scout asked. “Isn’t that good news? You could go back.”
“I’m not sure there’s anything to gain by going back,” Emilie said. “Not being chased I guess is always a good thing. I’ve been trying to get news feeds on what happened the day we left—all the fighting and so many people dead—but not a word.”
“Is that weird?”
Emilie shrugged. “I can see why it’s not in the news feeds that go to all employees. It’s obvious why they’d want to keep it a secret. But not telling the other station administrators? That’s harder to guess.”
The dogs burst into the room in a growling tussle. They had gone back for the filthy blanket and were now engaging in a fierce tug-of-war for it.
“That smells rank,” Emilie said.
“What do we do if more squatters come while we’re still waiting here?” Scout asked.
Emilie took a moment before answering. “I think most of them, when they see the lights on, will move on without stopping.”
“They can see the lights on from outside the station?” Scout asked.
“I’m actually not sure on that. I should probably check. They can certainly see it from the hangar, though. They might dock but then undock and leave the minute they opened their hatch.”
“Would you know if someone docked?”
“Certainly,” Emilie assured her. The tussle of dogs rolled her way, and she lifted her feet off the floor, letting the tumble of white and black fur pass under her.
“What’s that?” Scout asked, squinting up at the center screen above, the one that showed the area around the station.
Emilie frowned and sat forward, examining the same image on the monitor in front of her. “What did you see?” she asked as her eyes scanned for the third time.
“I don’t know. Maybe I imagined it,” Scout said.
“Describe it anyway,” Emilie said.
“A flash? Not really a source of light, more like something reflecting light but only dully. But there’s nothing out there. You’d know if there were, right?”
Scout felt her throat tighten when Emilie didn’t answer, just turned her attention to another screen, this one full of data, stacks and stacks of letters and numbers that meant nothing to Scout.
“Maybe you should get the dogs back to the ship,” Emilie said.
“What about you?”
“Just a precaution,” Emilie said, her voice with that dead quality it had when the words tumbled out of their own accord while her mind was focused intently elsewhere. “I can run if I have to. Maybe this is nothing.”
The dogs had stopped play-fighting and were both sitting on the floor, panting loudly and looking up at Scout and Emilie as if they sensed the sudden change in mood.
“Stars!” Emilie cried, stumbling back out of her seat. Scout looked at the monitors in front of Emilie, but they still told her nothing.
Then she looked up at the screen in the front of the room, the one she had seen the flash on before. The image still showed nothing but the blackness of space interrupted by the occasional star, but the station computer was overlaying that image with the outline of ships, each labeled with a blast of data that Scout guessed was being sent from their transponders.
Ship after ship, they just kept appearing, as if an entire fleet had quietly surrounded them, then all switched their transponders on at once.
“How?” Scout gasped.
“We’re surrounded,” Emilie said. “I don’t know how they got so close, but they’re all around us.”
“Maybe they’re from outside the barricade,” Scout said. “The tech they have there is so advan
ced they can probably make themselves invisible to your systems.”
“But why would an entire fleet from outside the barricade just show up here, like this? Like they sprung a trap on us?”
“Can you hail them?” Scout asked. “Maybe these are the Torreses?”
“If these are Liam’s friends, I’m going to have some words for them about nasty surprises.”
She leaned forward to touch the workstation controls, but before her fingertips quite reached the buttons, all the screens went blank at once. Then they all flared back to life, every single one showing the same image of two women, one sitting in a throne-like command chair, fingers curled over the ends of the armrests and legs crossed, and the other standing behind the chair but leaning forward as if to peer over the other’s shoulder to get a better look at Emilie and Scout.
“Greetings,” the woman in the chair said. “We’ve been looking for you for a while now. How wonderful to finally see you face-to-face, or nearly.”
“Who are you?” Emilie said.
“We are Mai and Jun Tajaki,” the woman in the chair answered. “Given the crowd you were running with back at colony ship Tajaki 47, you probably know us as the Months.”
Emilie gave them a puzzled frown, but Scout knew what the woman was talking about. She and Geeta had told Emilie about the conversation they had overheard when looking for the captive Liam McGillicuddy, but Scout wasn’t surprised the detail of that nickname had gotten lost in the sea of other details, especially with Emilie, who always focused more on the technical stuff than the people stuff.
But Scout and Geeta had heard someone refer to the Months. They had been the unseen force directing the black marketers that traded in the hidden corners of Amatheon Orbiter 1. They had been trying to exert an influence over the counterculture kids, Emilie’s friends. Many of them had died the day Scout and her friends found Liam and made their escape, and Scout would bet whoever had been attacking the kids had really been trying to get at these two and their organization.
But the conversation Scout and Geeta had overheard had been between two people working for the Months who had been bent on infiltrating the rebellion down on the surface. They had exploited a weak leader, parlaying his trauma at the loss of his wife into a chemical dependency in an attempt to control him.
Scout knew that attempt to control the rebellion for their own aims had failed. She had stumbled over the dead body of the man who had been the go-between, bringing galactic-quality drugs to the rebel leader Malcolm Haley. Without those drugs, he had gone increasingly deranged. He had ordered the rebels to capture Scout, wanting her to divulge information she didn’t have. Scout didn’t want to think about what he would have done if his own children hadn’t turned against him and helped Scout escape.
But what she couldn’t afford not to think about was these two women and how far they would go to get what they wanted.
7
The two women up on the screen were focusing all their attention on Emilie. Scout took a step back, then another, but no one’s eyes tracked her movement. She was unnoticed, for the moment. She looked the women over carefully, searching for any tiny detail that might give her a clue as to who these women really were, deep down inside.
First off, they looked to be in their early twenties, but in galactic central, where marshals had body modifications to fight off any kind of disease and most kinds of injury, that might not tell Scout much. They could really be that young, or they could be older than time.
The barricade and the mysterious interference in the Space Farers’ world had only appeared since the war, in the last six years. Considering that Amatheon, the surface, and the structures in orbit with all the people contained therein were at the heart of an inheritance dispute, Scout was willing to bet they were actually as young as they looked. The legal battle started as soon as they were old enough to take possession.
It was a theory, anyway.
They dressed alike in black leather pants and low-cut bodices over which they wore long scarlet robes of some shiny, drapey material. Scout was certain she knew what it would feel like in her hands if she touched it. Gertrude Bauer had worn a white shirt that had looked something like what they were wearing, and holding it had been like touching a shimmering cloud. The Tajaki sisters likely wore something even more delicate. Their dynasty was one of the largest in the galaxy, Scout had been told.
Their hair was long, longer even than their robes, and hung loosely in shimmering waves. Scout resisted the urge to touch her own hair. It was growing out, and what had once been closely shaved was now a chaos of curls with no agreement as to the direction of curling.
She wished she still had her father’s bush hat. At least the orange color was starting to fade.
Scout had assumed at first that the Tajaki sisters were twins, like Geeta and her sister Seeta, but then she started to see some subtle differences. The woman in the chair had a more buttony nose, rounder cheeks, and thin, arching eyebrows. The woman behind her had a sharper nose and cheekbones, her eyebrows thicker and straighter, low over her eyes as she scowled. The cosmetics they were wearing looked as if they were attempting to bring both sets of features to a middle ground, as if they wanted people to think they were twins. If they were matching each other’s expressions, it might have worked better.
But they would never quite pass for each other, not with those eyes. They were the same deep shade of brown, but while the woman in the chair looked like she was amused by everything that was going on and was willing to indulge Emilie and her suspicions as long as they remained amusing, the one standing behind the chair had something else going on within her eyes. Something wild and dangerous, dormant now but clearly waiting to spring to life at the first perceived provocation.
Scout swallowed hard. There’d been something similar in Malcolm’s eyes. But Scout had only ever seen him when he was coming down from the drug he had grown all too dependent on.
What was going on with this woman?
“You have heard of us?” the woman in the chair asked when Emilie failed to respond. She gave a little frown, like a stage gesture.
“I’ve only heard you mentioned once, and that was secondhand,” Emilie said. So she had remembered what Scout and Geeta had told her. “I, of course, have no way of verifying that you are who you say you are.”
“You must be Emilie Tonnelier,” the one in the chair said. “My dear Emilie, who else could we be?”
“Which one are you?” Emilie asked.
“I’m Mai. My sister is Jun,” she said. Jun said nothing.
“And you’ve been looking for us?” Emilie asked. “Who are we, exactly?”
“You and Geeta and Seeta Malini were all ensigns working for the Tajaki colonization division up until the day you left colony ship Tajaki 47, although I acknowledge you now refer to it as the Amatheon Orbiter 1.” Scout took another half step back. They didn’t seem to be aware of her at all. They didn’t even mention her. Was that a good thing or a bad thing?
“So you’re saying we’re your employees?” Emilie asked, folding her arms over her chest.
“You’re employees of the colonization division, which is a holding of the Tajaki trade dynasty,” Mai said.
Scout noted that it wasn’t a “yes.”
“I understand it is a holding under contention,” Emilie said.
“You are, of course, correct,” Mai said. “You’ve been approached to speak on that matter, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” Emilie said. “But not until after we left Amatheon Orbiter 1.”
“Interesting,” Mai said, giving a brief glance back over her shoulder to her sister Jun. “Perhaps not relevant,” she added, turning her attention back to Emilie.
Scout looked down at the dogs, holding her hand palm out to them, fingers spread wide. They knew the gesture, or at least Shadow did. It meant to stay still, stay quiet. Shadow sat in rigid attention, but Gert, bored with the lack of play, flopped down to nap until things got more int
eresting.
“How could it not be relevant?” Emilie was saying. “You said you’ve been looking for us since we fled Amatheon Orbiter 1, but no one had approached us yet about the legal matter. So why were you looking for us?”
“I understand why you feel distrustful,” Mai said with something that didn’t quite approach real empathy. “You were swept up in a series of events as you left your home behind, events outside of your control. But you do know we didn’t start them. We were the ones in control at the end, but we didn’t start any of it.”
“The outbreak of violence? It seems not,” Emilie said.
“I assure you, once you know us, you’ll see that’s not our style.” Mai looked up at her sister Jun, who made a grimace that Scout was very afraid was meant to be a smile.
“Do you know who did?” Emilie asked. “I lost a lot of friends that day.”
“I know—our condolences,” Mai said. “The friends you lost were all people of importance to us as well. We feel their loss, if not as deeply.”
“Do you know who started the violence?” Emilie asked again.
“Yes,” she said. “We are working to bring those people to justice. That’s why we are here. We need your help. You were witnesses.”
“We were already on our way to testify,” Emilie said. Her head made a little twitch as if she had been about to look back at Scout but then thought better of it. So she too suspected the Months hadn’t noticed Scout there. Scout wasn’t sure how that could come in handy, but they weren’t in a position to squander any potential advantage.
“Were you?” Mai said with a smile.
“I suspect you know we were,” Emilie said, her voice gaining an edge.
“You are, once again, quite correct,” Mai said. “You are so very astute. I wish I had found you before you were forced to flee. I could have found so many uses for you.”
“I don’t like being used,” Emilie said.
