“You could give him a job. A new life.”
“As what? Sage doesn’t have an army.”
“He’s a human being. Give him some options. Let him retrain.”
“As simple as that?”
“What else can you do? You can’t dump him in the woods and fly off without . . .”
Eliska’s sentence was cut off by an incoming message from Dallas. The interruption startled her, and she realized that while she had been talking about Vasper, they had forgotten to monitor the ground crew’s progress.
“Compound is secure,” Kettle stated. “We’ve got Kettle, and we’re getting ready to move out.”
“That’s good news,” Mr. Toad said. Eliska let out a sigh of relief.
“Gonna steal a truck,” Dallas told them. Some heated discussion followed, and Eliska got the sense that things were happening quickly down there.
“Damn it!” Soup yelled out. “No goddamn keys!”
“Check the other one.”
“I did! I checked all of them. No bloody keys!”
“Hey, Toady,” Dallas called out. “Do pickup trucks use keys on this planet?”
“Yenshian ones, definitely. Probably sensor keys. Look for a plastic fob, about seven or eight centimeters long with buttons on it.”
“Soup, help me check the bodies.”
“On it.”
“Saeliko! You, too. Help me check all their pockets. One of these bastards must have a key.”
“Bodies?” Eliska said, entering the conversation for the first time. “What bodies?”
“Had to take out some Yenshians to get Kettle,” Dallas replied. “We’re kind of in a hurry down here. Didn’t have time for anything more subtle.”
“How many did you kill?”
“Twenty or so.”
Eliska put her hands up to her mouth.
“Is this it?” Saeliko’s voice came in.
“Let me see,” Soup demanded. “Yes! That’s got to be it. Let’s go, let’s go!”
The sound of running boots was followed by some more confusion as they sussed out which vehicle the keys belonged to. Eliska could clearly hear some groaning that belonged to Kettle, but she also heard him say a few words, indicating he was conscious and coherent.
“Where’s Haley?” Dallas yelled.
“She’s about twelve kilometers northeast of your position,” Mr. Toad told him. He had called up his holographic topographical map, zoomed in to show all the dots of the players on the board. “Still moving away, but they’re not driving quickly. If you floor it, it won’t take you that long to catch her.”
“Northeast?”
“That’s right. Follow the road leading east of the compound.”
“Got it.” The sound of an engine roaring to life signaled their success with the keys.
“Dallas, you need to deactivate Kettle’s decoder. It’s still broadcasting.”
“Affirmative. We’ll do it en route.”
“Sooner’s better than later. And Dallas?”
“Yep?”
“That Kye-shiv is still bearing down on you. Once you kill off Kettle’s decoder, I’m guessing it’ll head straight for Haley. You guys need to get to her as fast as you can.”
“Don’t need to tell me twice.”
“Good. And one last thing, Dallas.”
“What’s that?”
Mr. Toad took a deep breath and put a hand up to his forehead. “If that Kye-shiv gets too close . . .” He inhaled again and slowly exhaled.
“I’m listening.”
“. . . If it gets too close, you leave Haley behind.”
“Nope.”
“I know how it sounds, Dallas. Believe me, I know. But we can’t lose sight of the big picture here. Kettle and Haley are both Zero Stock, which means at the end of the day, one of them must make it to Zero Site 1607.”
“They’re both going to make it to 1607.”
“Look, if luck is on our side, this won’t be an issue. You’ll make it to Haley and kill her decoder before the Kye-shiv gets close. But if things go sideways, you can’t put Kettle’s life in danger.”
“We’re getting Haley,” Dallas said again. “End of discussion.”
“Think about it, Dallas. Think about what’s at stake here.”
“Gotta go. Dallas, out.”
There was a soft click as the communication line went silent. Mr. Toad cursed softly under his breath and massaged his temple before putting his elbows on his thighs and steepling his fingers in front of his face.
Eliska felt sick. Her stomach was queasy, and a spout of dizziness forced her to lean back in her chair lest she topple over forward. She fought against the narrowing of her vision.
“What’s wrong?” Mr. Toad inquired, noticing her symptoms.
“I . . .” She put her hand in front her mouth again. She hadn’t expected this sort of thing. She hadn’t known what she was getting into. “We killed them,” she said.
“Who?”
“Those Yenshian soldiers. Dallas said twenty of them.”
“Ah. Yes, he did.” His eyes glanced at hers. She didn’t see remorse in his gaze, or if she did, it wasn’t nearly enough.
“Twenty people just died. Their lives are gone now. That was us; we did that.” Eliska felt the bile rising in her throat and wondered if she was going to throw up. She looked around for a container.
“They were soldiers, Eliska. And they would have probably killed Kettle, given enough time.”
“They were human beings. They didn’t have anything to do with any of this. They got caught in whatever stupid game our companies are playing.”
“That’s why we need to get Kettle and Haley to the Zero site. So we can stop our stupid companies from playing these stupid games.”
“There had to be a different way. We can’t justify . . .”
“What the . . .” Mr. Toad held up his hand, and for a second time, Eliska was prevented from finishing her sentence.
“What?” She looked at the Sage man and saw his eyes pinned to the holographic map with great concern. It took her a few moments before she realized what had happened. “Oh,” she said. “What does that mean?”
Other than the blinking green dot representing the Cloudrunner, all the dots on the map were gone.
“I think it means the IT guys at Zodo just figured out Sage was hijacking their systems.”
3.3 KETTLE
Soup hammered the accelerator of the green pickup truck they had stolen from the compound, getting as much speed out of the Yenshian military vehicle as possible down on the dirt road’s long straight stretch before the next corner. Dallas sat next to him in the passenger seat. Kettle and Saeliko sat in the rear seats. Kettle was fingering the back of his neck, thinking about his decoder, which Saeliko had just deactivated with a weird little doohickey. He was officially invisible now.
“Watch your speed,” Dallas told Soup. “You put us in the ditch and Haley’s dead.”
“Don’t tell me how to drive. I was named after a sports car.”
“Toyota Supras don’t usually drive on dirt roads with washboard sections.”
“Relax, I got this. I’m not letting Haley down.”
The tail end of the truck shimmied back and forth over a series of potholes in the road, and Kettle suddenly felt compelled to put his seatbelt on. He was about to suggest the same to Saeliko when he saw a look on her face that he’d never seen in all the time he’d known the Sollian pirate.
“Saeliko?” he said tentatively. “You all good?” He made sure to speak loudly so she could hear him over the reverberations bashing through the truck’s components.
The Saffisheen’s hands were clutched tight to the headrest of the seat in front of her, and her eyes were fixed with no small amount of concern on the windshield and the road beyond. Whenever the back end drifted sideways over the loose gravel, her body tensed, bracing for an impact that never came. Her breathing was erratic – long, deep breaths when the rattling and sha
king were at a minimum and no breathing whatsoever when they weren’t. The wheels on the left side went through a particularly gaping pothole with a great smacking sound, and what was left of her composure was pilfered away with a concerted groan.
“Hey,” Kettle said, trying to get her attention again. “Saeliko.”
She hesitantly tore her eyes away from the view offered by the front windshield and looked at him with wide eyes. The truck bounced over more washboards and her hair bounced up and down as if it were being pulsated by the bass from an oversized subwoofer. “If this is the future, you can leave me in the past,” she told him once the vibrating subsided enough for her to talk.
“Well, I’ll be damned. You’re actually scared.”
“Of course I am! How are you not!”
“I am! I just never expected you to be afraid of anything short of the devil himself, and maybe not even then.”
They hit another rough section and everyone in the truck had their ass go momentarily airborne. Saeliko’s head nearly hit the ceiling, and once she came down, she let out another groan. “How can he go so fast and keep this thing on the road?”
“Part skill, part luck, I think. Here, see this belt?” He pulled his seatbelt from its recoiled position and clicked the buckle into place. “Put it on.”
She copied him and then asked, “Will this save us if we crash?” She was looking at the belt with a robust dose of skepticism.
“Definitely maybe.”
“Hey, Toad!” Dallas yelled over the ruckus the truck was making. “Toad, you read me?”
Kettle looked at Dallas, who was holding a finger to his ear and staring ahead at the road, and then back at Saeliko. “What’s he doing? Who’s Toad?”
“I don’t feel like explaining that right now,” she told him and tugged on the belt buckle to make sure it was still secure.
“How close are we?” Dallas asked. “We must be gaining, right?” There was a long pause while he waited for the response, and then, “Umm? What does umm mean?”
Kettle prodded Saeliko again. “Who the hell is Toad?”
“He’s the guy who organized this mummer’s farce of a rescue. Well, her and Eliska.”
“Eliska? Eliska Tannishoy? I thought she was a scientist. Isn’t she a scientist?”
“She has other interests now, like keeping you and Haley alive.”
Dallas punched the dashboard of the truck. “You’re joking. You have got to be kidding me. What setback?” Another pause, and then “No more dots on the map? Why? You’re supposed to be a tech company, Toad. Why in the hell don’t you have dots? No. No, no, no! Firewalls, my ass! You’re Sage Systems. Use your own bloody systems to put dots on the map. Jesus Christ, Toad! Retrospect doesn’t do us much good right now, does it? Okay, where the hell was Haley’s dot was the last time you laid eyes on it.”
“This doesn’t sound good at all,” Kettle said.
“I’ve got his voice inside my head, too,” Saeliko admitted. “You’re right; not good.”
“Toad, you fuckwit, where was Haley? Uh-huh. Yep. Okay. Gaining fast, or gaining slow? Uh-huh. And what about the Kye-shiv? What’s the ETA on that, do you figure?”
“Kye-shiv?” Kettle asked Saeliko. “Friendly Kye-shiv, or bad Kye-shiv?” She shushed him while she listened to the rest of the mysterious man’s reply.
“No way,” Dallas said. “I already told you, that’s not going to happen. Look, I’m going to disconnect again. I’ll call you back when we get Haley, or if we need something else.” Kettle watched as the Marine pressed a button on a little plastic doohickey and put it in one of his shirt pockets.
“Okay,” Kettle yelled over the rattles and jarring noises. “You guys need to fill me in. What’s going on?”
“Hold on a sec,” Dallas replied and then turned to Soup. “He lost Haley’s signal. Ours, too. He lost all our signals, and the signals of the two Kye-shivs coming to stir the pot. We’re all blind as bats.”
Soup grimaced. “That’s going to make things harder.”
“But the good news is that Haley was still on this road when the dots disappeared, and we were gaining fast, so everyone just keep your eyes peeled to the scenery out here in front of us and look for a green pickup truck just like this one.”
“Hey, Dallas,” Kettle said. “Why did you say something wasn’t going to happen? What did he want you to do?”
“Oh, that.” The Marine shook his head in obvious irritation. “The jackass wants us to abort Haley’s rescue.”
“What? Why?”
Dallas turned his head so he could look Kettle in the eyes. “Because of you. He says you’re too important to risk and we need to get you to the Zero site so you can save humanity.”
“Nope. No way.”
“That’s what I told him.”
“We find Haley or die trying,” Kettle said and meant it with every fiber of his being. “Dallas, I really messed everything up again. I am such a dipshit! I thought I learned my lesson in the Sollian. Remember back when the Epoch sank off the Skag, you told me what a hypocritical asshole I was. You made me see that I just was just letting life carry me along and blaming everyone else for my problems. Remember that? I promised I would make things right, and now look where we are. I’ve done it all again. I let these Zodo creeps take us all for a joyride when I should have been resisting them from the beginning. Radovan saw it. Radovan figured out how messed up Zodo’s moral compass was. He knew they were up to no good, but I just sat there and ate up their smorgasbord of lies and BS. And now I’ve put all of you in danger again.”
“Hey, I was right there with you,” Dallas said.
“No, man. This is all on me. My big fat ego got in the way. They kept telling me I was special because I’m Zero Stock and I was the key to saving a whole goddamn multiverse, and I stopped using my brain. I trusted them. Why the hell did I trust them? I’m sorry, Dallas.”
“Shut up,” Dallas retorted. “There’s no way you could have seen this coming. They made it easy for all of us to trust them. We were all chumps on this one.”
“She wasn’t,” Soup said.
“Who?” Dallas asked. “Haley?”
“No, not Haley. Saeliko. She never bought into any of it.”
Dallas turned around in his seat so he could better see the Saffisheen. He studied her face for a good hard chunk of time and bit his lip. From Kettle’s perspective, it was a shade comical. The Marine appeared contemplative, while Saeliko gave every indication that she was thoroughly miserable and one-hundred-percent done with her first truck experience.
“She never trusted any of ‘em,” Soup continued.
“I still don’t trust her,” Dallas stated and then grunted as the truck sped over a combination of washboards and potholes.
“We don’t have to,” Soup countered. “But did you ever think we might do well to stop trusting everyone she doesn’t trust. Know what I’m saying?”
“That’s an interesting thought,” Dallas admitted. “So how about it, Saeliko? This Toad guy says we should leave Haley to the wolves and head straight for the Zero site. Do you trust him?”
She snorted and said, “About as much as I trusted Brennov.”
“Yeah, I figured as much. That was the easy question, so let’s bump it up a notch. What about Eliska? She’s in there with Toady, and I didn’t hear her put up any protest when he told us to pull up stakes and run for cover. How much do you trust the doctor?”
“I don’t trust her either, but not because she’s a bad person. She’s trying to do the right thing, but she jumps every time she hears a loud noise. You can’t count on her to do what’s needed if things get dicey.”
“She doesn’t trust anyone,” Kettle said. “Probably never has.”
“Not true,” Saeliko said. She was starting to regain her usual composure, and Kettle wondered if the vein of the conversation helped derail her discomfort. All of that discomfort suddenly resurfaced, however, when Soup slammed on the brakes to stop the truc
k from careening off a sharp corner of the road. He somehow managed to keep the wheels on dirt rather than grass and immediately hit the gas again.
“Sorry!” the younger Marine shouted.
“Well?” Dallas inquired, ignoring the interruption. “Who do you trust?”
Saeliko stared back at him and said, “You.”
Kettle watched Dallas’ reaction move from skepticism to curiosity, and then to enmity and back to skepticism. The Marine turned back around and stared out the windshield, so he didn’t see the smirk appear on Saeliko’s face. Kettle did, and he wondered what it meant. There was a distinct possibility that she was toying with him. Nevertheless, a wiggling suspicion inside Kettle’s mind told him that the woman might just be telling the truth. After all, Dallas was an easy man to trust once you got to know him.
He decided not to let the conversation end like that. He wanted some closure, if only to persuade himself that he was making progress. “All right, gents,” he started. “And Saeliko. I think there are a couple things we can agree on regardless of some obvious differences in opinion.”
His remarks were followed by an awkward silence until Soup eventually took the bait and said, “What?”
“First of all, we’re on our own. We don’t trust anyone we don’t have to. Not Zodo, not this Toad guy and everyone he works for, not Dr. Tannishoy, not anyone. It’s just the five of us.”
“Agreed,” Soup said. The other two kept their mouths shut.
“And we can all trust Haley, right? I think everyone here knows that she’d do anything to help us, and we need to do the same for her. We don’t stop until we get her back.”
“Agreed,” Soup said again.
“Agreed,” Dallas added.
“I’m in,” Saeliko stated.
Kettle thought he should say something else, but nothing was coming to mind, so he just sat in his seat and let his mind drift to Haley. He remembered what the bearded man had said. He was going to rape her, and so were his brothers and cousins. He was going to slit her throat and throw her in a ditch. Seething anger swelled up inside his chest. Heat rushed into his face. His fists clenched. He wanted to punch something or find some other method of suppressing his rage while they flew down the road.
Zero Site 1607 Page 27
