The Hidden Prophet

by Benjamin Douglas

  A menu projected onto the wall. Lucas saw a handful of files. Ada toggled through their descriptions, and settled on a message titled ‘For Harry.’

  Lady Umbrador sat in a plush ivory chair behind a stylish chrome desk in a study. She leaned forward and looked directly at them. “If you’re anyone but Harry, stop this message immediately. You absolutely under no circumstances have my consent to hear what I’m about to say, and you will face dire consequences.” She paused a moment, as if to give them time to consider. Lucas looked at his hands, feeling awkward. When Umbrador spoke again, it was with a soft, urgent tone.

  “Ronald,” she whispered. “I’ve done as you asked. They’re all accounted for, every single one, and their records have been wiped. But, God, I’m begging you, one more time. Destroy them. Put them on an unmanned tug and hurl it into the sun. This isn’t just war if these get out into the open. This is the end of the world. Ronald, please. Sleep on it before you activate them, before you even begin to charge them.”

  “Stop the message.” Lucas’ ears were ringing. His chest felt tight, and he was having trouble getting enough air. “Stop it!”

  Ada paused the video, looking confused.

  When the room stopped spinning, Lucas looked Caspar in the eye. “Ronald Harris.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  Chapter 24

  “I know you’re new, but I needed to meet you before you run a job for me. Head down to sublevel nine and ask for Harry, he’ll load you up. I just like to get a look at the new faces. I don’t like surprises popping up down the line.”

  Lucas paused Umbrador’s face on the screen. “This,” he said, “is from Battlefield Zeta.” He glanced at Ada. “A game,” he explained.

  Caspar cursed sanctimoniously. “Were those not her exact words to us on Geta-4?”

  “More or less. Seems the game makers take their research very seriously.”

  “And you think,” Ada said, “that this Harry and the other Harry are the same.” Lucas nodded. “And you think they’re also your dead captain? I’m sorry, I’m losing the trail there.”

  “Lady Umbrador.” He set his hands on the table. “Sister of Carmen, a well-placed head of one of the biggest pirating outfits in the inner system, and herself a respectable, wealthy businesswoman with links to Rome Inc., which is apparently the grease that moves all the world’s cogs.”

  “Right…”

  “She knows, somehow, not only about the motherload of Prophet, but also knows exactly who will come burning the world down to get it back. She knows a man named Harry, who seems at first glance to work for her, but on further examination looks to be an associate of much higher import. And his real name is Ronald.”

  “Sure, but—”

  “Now back up a couple of weeks to when a ship chartered by Carmen’s Crews held up the Fairfax, knowing exactly where she would be, and where and what the Prophet was. Fairfax had only made one stop after leaving port orbiting Pluto: Mars. Now I suppose it’s possible I’m wrong and the man who made it all happen is a Martian. But we have to also consider the possibility that it was an inside job committed by someone who’d been onboard all along. And we happen to have someone of some importance named Ronald Harris on that flight—someone who, by the way, was killed in the process of this whole fiasco.”

  “It does seem an eerie amount of coincidence, sure.”

  “Somehow you don’t sound convinced.”

  “I’m convinced,” Caspar muttered. “Much more than I’d like to be.”

  “It’s just, it’s the Empire!” Ada spat out the name. “You think a senior officer of the Kuiper Fleet would be running drugs this side of the belt, flirting in the Empire? Wouldn’t he hate it so much he’d want nothing more than to see it torn apart and sucked into a black hole? Why would he bring a fortune the value of Jupiter nine times over into Empire space?”

  Lucas scratched the side of his face. “Fair question, and I don’t know. But it raises a more troubling question, doesn’t it? Where does the buck stop? Because I thought that getting our hands on the drug, or at least on Taurius, and offering him up to Rome might stop this madness. But now it sounds like Carmen’s Crews were part of it all along—”

  “They’ve been destroyed,” Ada said.

  “—and everywhere Rome shows up to blow things up, the Empire has a presence, but they aren’t doing anything to stop them.”

  Caspar frowned. “That’s the second time you’ve said that in as many days. Are you suggesting the Empire is actively supporting this cartel, or are you taking my tack that non-intervention is complicity?”

  Lucas raised his hands. “I don’t know. My head is swirling. All I know is, we need to keep our eyes and ears open, and be ready to improvise, if we don’t want to all end up dead.”

  ---

  Days passed. The convoy moved at a snail’s pace. They must not have trusted Fairfax enough to give her a slack leash. For Ada, that didn’t inspire a lot of confidence in her tenuous new alliance.

  Lucas had made sure she understood that she and her crew were welcome to stay in the ship’s spacious bunkhouses during the flight. She slept on Cupid instead. Dr. Saran and his associate took the offer, and Joyce and Bone Crusher spent a lot of time with them, but always came back to bunk with Ada. She took some solace in that. For people that hardly knew each other, she felt the three of them shared a bond. Maybe it was as simple as having cheated death together a few times in a row.

  She played Umbrador’s message back over and again. Now that she’d opened the box, she didn’t see the harm in exploring it. But it was useless. The woman didn’t say a thing about Prophet, and she maintained her foreboding obtuseness about whatever the objects were that would herald “the end of the world.” Some kind of bomb, Ada wondered? A new ship design? Had to be something military, surely. If Lucas or Caspar were any hotter on the trail, they weren’t letting on.

  They had been trudging along for days before Ada made her way to the Fairfax engine room. As soon as she stepped onto the deck, she felt tension release from her shoulders. The sound and smell of machinery made memories so prescient, she almost shed a tear.

  “Can I help you, lass?” Their engineer, Adams, found her wandering among the power converters. She recognized him as the one who had coaxed more hard drinks out of Cupid’s dispenser.

  “You’ve really crammed as much in here as you can, haven’t you?” she asked, eyeing the floor-to-ceiling converters. “I didn’t know Fleet ships packed quite this much punch.”

  “Aye, well, she’s a custom job, now.” He rubbed his finger on the side of his nose. “I suppose you’ve heard, we’re not running Fleet jobs this side of the belt. Got us a real-life, genuine cargo to haul.” He stepped a little closer and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Of dubious origin.” He backed up, grinning like a fool.

  “Oh?” she feigned interest.

  “Care to see?” He quashed a little burp, and Ada caught the scent of alcohol. What would Rome Inc. have them hauling all the way to Earth? Her curiosity was piqued.

  “Sure.”

  “This way!”

  She followed him into a lift and up to the middle decks, where the hangars and cargo bays sat. She asked him questions about the ship, what it had been like before the modifications, and his experience flying her.

  “I understand you had to do some creative engineering to get to Ceres after your core was damaged,” she said. “Was that your idea?”

  Adams nodded. “Well, I mean, I can’t take all the credit, that wouldn’t be right. Credit should be given, not taken, that’s what I always say, only seein’ as there’s no one here to give it where it’s due, I guess I have to take it if I’m truthful.”

  “It’s amazing. How did you do it? Tell me about it.”

  He proceeded to spin a tale of how he had almost succeeded in propelling the ship with controlled plasma discharges—Ada was proud that she kept a straight face during this soliloquy—but that he settled on creating an enormo
us solar sail instead, because plasma’s unstable nature might prove too dangerous for the crew.

  “Of course, young Lucas, er, that is, I mean Captain Odin, he didn’t know the difference, might have given me an order to blow us all halfway to Alpha Centuri without knowing what was what, so I just had to steer him in the right direction, if you take my meaning. Ya gotta be gentle with his generation, though. They’re coddled. Too much attention as children, spoiled, every last one of ‘em. Present company excluded, of course,” he laughed.

  “Of course!” He turned around and she frowned. Odin. The name was familiar. She subvocally asked Moses to remind her later.

  “Well, here we are.” They had arrived in a large dimly-lit cargo hold off the back end of the main hangar deck. Adams patted a blue tub. Rows and rows of the same occupied the space. “Not much to look at, I’m afraid, seeing as they’re all sealed up. But you can rest assured, no matter how innocent the contents might seem, they’re origins are, ah, colorful.” He grinned and tried to suppress a belch, failing.

  “So many,” Ada said. “Is the hold full of them?”

  “That’s not all. All the holds are full of these things. Heavier than all get-out, too, I’ll tell you. Tried to have a few of them shifted over to make room for some machinery in need of maintenance work. Nope! Awfully glad those station lads took care of all the loading for us.”

  “You picked these up at a station, did you?”

  “Yup, Geta-4.”

  After her tour, Ada tracked down Doctor Saran and pretty boy number two. She found them lounging on bunks in the lower Fairfax decks.

  “How familiar were you with Lady Umbrador’s business transactions?” she asked.

  “Intimately,” Doctor Saran said. “Why do you ask?”

  She took a breath. “If I told you there was cargo onboard this ship, the loading of which she had supervised, and that this was one of her last jobs before she died, and that the nature of said cargo may be critical to determining whether we live or die in the next few days, would either of you be willing to help me access the cargo?”

  “Nope.” Saran took out a device. The other man looked at her.

  “You can’t get into the tubs.”

  She frowned. “You helped load them, didn’t you?”

  “I’m more than just a pretty face.”

  “But you won’t help me open one.”

  He rolled over onto his back, gazing at the bunk above him. “Wouldn’t help you if I could. Happily, I can’t, either.”

  “It’s true,” Saran said. “She didn’t give us codes. Business transactions we understand. But inside the tubs, no. We’ve never seen that.”

  Ada left frustrated. She sat in Cupid’s cockpit, mulling it over. It wasn’t until she lay down in her own bunk, hours later, that the obvious answer poked her in the thigh. She snuck out of the ship and trotted down the length of the hangar deck, coming up on the entrance to the cargo bays.

  “Moses,” she subvocalized. “Anyone nearby?”

  “Affirmative. Life form inside main cargo bay. Exiting now.”

  Ada cursed beneath her breath and dropped silently to the ground. She was out in the open, but the bay wasn’t lit. She heard a door slide open, and footsteps come out from around the corner. A beam of light passed over her head and traveled along the far wall. The person carrying the light walked the perimeter, and left the deck.

  Security rounds.

  She leapt to her feet and made her way to the cargo bay. Inside was utter silence and darkness. She pulled out her multitool, using the light to find one of the blue tubs, then reached into her pocket, took out Umbrador’s data stick, and plugged it into her tool. The holoconsole popped up, and she cycled through the files.

  There.

  “Moses, can you sync the code in this file to the lock on this tub?”

  “Analyzing. Yes.” The lock clicked open. Ada knelt down, set her multitool on the floor, and peeled the lid from the crate. It didn’t smell or sound like anything. She picked up the multitool and peered in with the light.

  And jumped back at the sight of it. A man-sized polished chrome insect stared up at her, lifeless, from inside the tub.

  Chapter 25

  The morning of the day they would arrive at Earth, Lucas got an early wake-up call from Jeffrey, and banged his head on the bulkhead. He lay still for a moment, wincing, then checked to see if he’d opened the gash again. No, no blood this time; he was healing.

  “Was that really necessary, Jeffrey?” he grumbled.

  “Private Mulligan has requested to see you. She’s waiting on the bridge.”

  “Private Mulligan can wait.” He showered and dressed, moving slowly both to avoid any more domestic accidents and because his body was still heavy with sleep. They had all had a few days’ rest now, but everyone slept with one eye open while they traveled with the Roman convoy. When he got to the bridge it was with a mug of burnt coffee, his now daily fare.

  “Sir.” Mulligan stood.

  “In my ready-room, Private.” He paused behind the chair. Randall was manning the bridge, and Tompkins and Jan were sitting at a couple of unused stations, speaking quickly in hushed but excited voices. Lucas caught the words “Jupiter Wars” and “Battlefield Zeta.” He shook his head and sipped his coffee. Oh, to be free from the burden of command.

  “What’s on your mind?” He sat across from her. She smiled briefly, then grew serious.

  “The Ceres survivors wish to see you again, Captain. They have appointed one of themselves to be their speaker, and he wants to talk, now they know we are going to Earth before we return to the belt.”

  “Sharky?”

  “Tom, yes.”

  “Right.” He sipped his coffee and rubbed more sleep from his eyes. “You know, we’re almost there. Time’s a little short. Can he come up in the next hour or so?”

  Mulligan quietly cleared her throat. “They want you to come to them again, Sir. They feel the bunkhouses are a more fitting location for the nature of your relationship.”

  “The nature of our relationship?” He frowned. Mulligan didn’t budge. “Alright,” he sighed. “You may tell Tom that I will be in the bunkhouses on the hour. Just have to review some things on the bridge first.”

  “Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir.”

  They stood to leave.

  “Mulligan,” he said. “It was your home, too. I haven’t forgotten that.”

  She half-smiled. “A long time ago, yes. But thank you, Sir.”

  Caspar had come to the bridge by the time he reentered. “Care to join me for a parlay in the lower decks?” he asked.

  “Scintillating.” She stood, sounding as tired as he felt. “You know how to show a girl a good time, Sir.”

  “We aim to please.” He set his coffee down at the chair. On a whim, he turned to Jan. “Officer Jan, are you busy?”

  Jan turned around mid-sentence, his mouth hanging open. “Ah, uh, well, officially no, Sir, but I was just in the middle of explaining to Tompkins here that the critical difference between the multiplayer gameplay in Jupiter Wars and BZ really has nothing to do with the HUD, which, as even the prawniest of noobs will tell you, is fully configurable anyway, but is actually the—”

  “With us, please.” He and Caspar turned to go, Jan trailing after.

  The bunkhouse felt different this time. More tense, more organized. The survivors stood at civilian attention at the feet of their bunks as Lucas passed by. Once again, Tom stood beside a small mess table at the opposite end of the room. They shook hands and sat.

  “Captain, thank you for coming.”

  “I don’t have a lot of time this morning. Mulligan may have told you, we’re in the middle of an unplanned detour, and I’m currently answering to a lot of people. But this is the least I could do for you. I thank you and your people for your patience with the delay.”

  Tom smiled at the words ‘your people.’

  “I understand you’ve received some sort of appointment,” Luc
as said.

  Tom waved a hand. “A humble but necessary role to be filled while we are refugees at your mercy, Captain.”

  “At our hospitality.”

  Tom nodded, smiling again. “Yes. We are sure you are fine people—after all, you took us in when we had no hope—but you understand, I’m sure, our need to band together as a community in the aftermath of Ceres’ destruction.”

  He did, and he didn’t. The sentiment made sense, but Lucas was beginning to catch a whiff of politics. He liked to keep the pipes moving on the Fairfax; he didn’t care for backed up sewage. He didn’t understand it. “I’m sure,” he said.

  “Captain, I asked you here to ask you for the reason for our detour to Earth.”

  Lucas pursed his lips. He had no desire to be heavy-handed with a band of civilian survivors, but where and when he took his ship was none of their business.

  “I know.” Tom raised his hands. “I’m sure you have your reasons, and that some of the concerns that have been raised here in the bunkhouse are completely unwarranted. I beg you to indulge us, Sir. We are scared. Our home was just destroyed. You are not naïve, Captain. You must surely understand there are a number among us for whom a visit to Earth space is fraught with peril. Bounties, warrants… unpleasant things await them there.”

  Ah, so that was it. Lucas lifted his chin, considering his response. “Our detour through Earth space has nothing to do with your people. I have no intention of selling, trading, bartering, or otherwise evacuating any of them from this ship. Not without their permission. Not until we’re back in the belt.”

  Tom smiled, some of the tension easing. “We have your word?”

  “You do.” Lucas stood and held out his hand again. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience, and to give you cause for concern. But rest easy for a few days. And make sure everyone has a plan for departure once we’re back.”

  “I will. Thank you for your time, Captain.”

  On their way back to the bridge, Lucas motioned for Jan to walk beside him. “Alright kid, who did you recognize?”