Hunted lop-4

by James Alan Gardner

  "So I know what’s going to happen," Samantha went on. "Willow will pick you up, then head for Celestia. Dumb idea — the moment Willow crosses the line, the League of Peoples will execute Temperance and most of the ship’s crew. Maybe all of them. You’re safe, brother, because there isn’t a more innocent person in the entire universe… but when Willow coasts into Starbase Iris and the navy sees all the corpses, the High Council will have a grade A large conniption.

  "Next thing you know, they’ll try to get rid of you, Edward. That’s how admirals think — when they screw up big-time, their first reaction is to lose the witnesses down some deep hole. And I don’t want to let you get lost."

  She smiled again: a big bright smile that made me want to smile back… even though a dozen worrying thoughts were nibbling at the back of my mind. If Sam didn’t want me getting lost, why had she let me sit on the moonbase for twenty years and never once tried to contact me? If she was the top queen’s closest advisor, couldn’t Sam have found a way to send a message? But no word at all — no hint she was alive — till suddenly I left the Troyen system, and that’s when she got in touch.

  Like she was happy to ignore me, right up to the point when I headed home.

  But the message kept playing, and Sam kept smiling: my smart and pretty sister who taught me everything I knew. "I didn’t find out about Willow right away," she was saying. "Not till they’d taken you with them. But I’m sending people after you, Edward, to get you back. It turns out I have a starship: a nice black one, run by Mandasar friends. If you want the honest truth, it used to belong to the navy — a sweet little frigate named Cottonwood. But, umm…" She leaned toward the camera and said in a loud whisper, "I stole the ship, Edward. Just before the war started. I knew the navy would stop all traffic to and from Troyen, and I wanted an escape route in case things got really bad."

  "Hold!" I snapped. My sister froze in the middle of a blink, her eyes half-closed and clumsy-looking, the way people always come across in blink-pictures. It was a pretty unflattering shot, but I wasn’t so interested in Sam’s appearance at the moment.

  Not when I knew she had a ship — the black ship that had stolen Willow. The ship’s crew must have hoped I was still aboard; they’d taken Willow in tow so they could drag me back to Troyen.

  So: Sam had left me alone on the moonbase for twenty years, but the second she heard I was gone from Troyen airspace, she sent her starship to get me.

  And how had Sam stolen a starship? I guess it wouldn’t be hard; my sister was a high-ranking diplomat, and an admiral’s daughter. She could get herself invited on board, maybe with some helpers, then drug people, gas people, mop up with stunners… but that wasn’t the tricky part. What had she done with the crew members after she’d taken the ship? A frigate carried a crew of a hundred. If you only had to deal with one or two sailors, you might bully or bribe them into silence; but not a hundred people. Someone would refuse to cooperate. Where could Sam put them so they’d never tell the navy what she’d done?

  I hoped there was some brilliant answer I was just too dim to figure out — the most obvious possibilities made me go all queasy. Sam! I thought, what did you do? And why was she cheerily telling me this stuff? Did she think I was so stupid I wouldn’t ask questions?

  For the tiniest of moments, a thought flicked through my mind: Yes — there was a time when these questions wouldn’t have occurred to me. But that was scary too and not something to dwell on. I snapped at the ship-soul, "Resume play."

  Sam’s eyes smoothly finished their blink as she said, "So I’m sending my ship after you. With a bit of luck, you’ll still be on Willow when Cottonwood reaches Celestia — that’ll make it easy to bring you back. If not, my crew has to assume you’ve been transferred elsewhere; so Cottonwood will squirt this message to every navy vessel in the Celestia system… eyes-only." She gave a girlish grin. "Dad showed me a sort of a kind of a back door into the navy computer system: how to pretend I’m an admiral. The High Council would barbecue him if they found out, but they probably do the same for their kids. In case of dire emergencies."

  She paused for a moment, then made a big show of looking right and left, as if checking to make sure no one else was listening. It was kind of a code gesture the two of us used as kids — a "just between you and me" thing that meant Sam was going to say something really really important. She leaned back in toward the camera, her eyes bright and piercing. "Okay now, Edward, I want you to listen very carefully." Her words came out so slowly… had she always spoken to me like that? "The absolute most crucial thing now is that you get away from the navy. Understand? If people say they’re taking you home, don’t believe them. Escape, Edward; you have to escape. Don’t let them trap you, or hurt you, or put you under a microscope…"

  Sam’s gaze dropped for a second, and she took a breath. Then she looked up again, and said, "I’m going to give you something very valuable, Edward: Dad’s special backdoor access code to the navy computer network. You can use it to pretend you’re an admiral, a High Council admiral, invoking Powers of Emergency. You’ll be able to give orders, look at confidential files, whatever you need. Don’t do anything crazy — if you draw too much attention, you’ll get in serious, serious trouble — but think smart, and make sure you escape."

  Her eyes drilled into me for a moment more; then she relaxed and smiled. "Once you’ve got away, Edward, come back to me. To Troyen, to the high queen’s palace in Unshummin. Okay? Go straight to the palace, and I’ll be waiting. It’ll be safe and happy like old times. Queen Temperance was the last holdout against the new high queen; with Temperance gone, there’s nothing in the way of peace but a few leaderless troops. By the time you get here, Edward, we’ll be finished mopping up, and no one will ever have to fight again."

  She lifted her fingers to her lips and kissed them, staring straight into the camera the whole while. "Come home, Edward. Come to Unshummin, to the palace. Please. This is where you belong. This is where you can do good. This is where you’ll be loved."

  Samantha’s face stayed on the screen a moment longer… and even though she was smiling, there was something saddened about her, as if something hurt inside. Then the image went black and the ship-soul was informing me that the message carried attached data — the backdoor access code. I told the computer to save the code in a file, then slumped back in my chair.

  For a long time I just sat there, chewing my knuckle.

  24

  HAVING A CHECKUP

  Sometime later — I don’t know how long — a knock came at my door. Not a real knock, of course; the person out there had touched the REQUEST ENTRY plate and the ship-soul had interpreted that signal as knock-knock-knock. You could customize your door signal to anything you want: a bell, a buzzer, a dog barking, whatever suited your fancy. Sam always liked a real knock, soft and deferential, as if the person outside your door was a shy little servant begging permission to take a moment of your time. Naturally, if that was the signal Sam used, I wanted it too. Sort of. I couldn’t remember actually asking for the knock, but Sam had programmed it into my permanent navy records, assuming that’s what I’d want.

  Um. All of a sudden, that bothered me. Maybe I should change the knock to a ding-dong. Or a chime. Or one of those frittery bird-chirp sounds. Except as I thought of all the possibilities, it seemed like a lot of work to choose something new when a knock was perfectly okay.

  The knock came again. I looked at the peep-monitor and saw Tobit standing there, glowering into the camera’s eye. "Let him in," I told the ship-soul.

  Tobit didn’t stop glowering as he entered, but he aimed the glare at the room rather than me. "Just like my cabin," he growled, "except you don’t have underwear strewn about the floor for convenience." He glanced my direction. "You settling in okay? Or do you want me to bug the quartermaster for some doodads to brighten the place up? He’s got some glass figurines that shatter real nice when you throw them against the wall."

  "No thanks." I gave a sideway
s glance at the vidscreen on my desk, but it’d gone blank. Sam’s message must have automatically purged itself from the databanks after playing.

  "Well," Tobit said, "if you aren’t busy, Festina wants you down in sick bay. Since you’ve done the do-si-do with hive-queen venom, she wants to make sure you’re all right." Tobit rolled his eyes. "I’m supposed to be your escort. In case the poison drops you into a writhing heap and you need to be dragged the rest of the way."

  "I’m not going to drop into a writhing heap," I said.

  "Glad to hear it," Tobit replied. "I’ve got a bum arm, and I hate heavy lifting."

  He motioned me toward the door. It slid open in front of us… and I was just about to step out when Tobit grabbed me by the back of my shirt. With a yank that almost ripped the fabric, he jerked me back into the room and spun me around.

  My fists came up of their own accord. Wild ideas dashed through my head — like the whole ship had been spying on me while I listened to Sam’s message, and now Festina and Prope and everyone intended to get me. I came a millisecond away from punching Tobit straight in his purple-veined nose… but he backed up fast and pointed at the floor outside my door.

  The deck was covered with carpet — this part of the ship was all prettied up for visiting VIPs — and the carpet had a pattern of red jacaranda trees surrounded by multicolored swirls. For a second I couldn’t see anything where Tobit was pointing; but then, on one of the jacarandas closest to my door, I saw a little fleck of glowing crimson.

  "Ship-soul," Tobit said in a strained voice, "turn off the lights in this corridor."

  The passageway went dark-except for five patches of crimson spores twinkling up from the broadloom. They’d been planted right on five red jacarandas in the carpet’s pattern, where they’d be hard to spot and easy to step on.

  "Um," I said, swallowing hard.

  "Kaisho seems to be exfoliating," Tobit muttered. "I just caught sight of a flicker before you stepped down."

  He flumped on the edge of my bed and lifted his feet to check the soles of his boots. No glowing red dots. "Either I was lucky where I walked," he said, "or the Balrog knew better than to bite into me. My bloodstream has enough liquor left over from my drinking days to pickle any damned fungus that tries to take root."

  I just kept staring at the glowing specks: one straight in front of my room and two on either side, likely to get stepped on whichever way I turned. "Do you think Kaisho deliberately wanted… I mean, it’s my door…"

  "York, buddy," Tobit said, "the fucking moss has a bone on for you. Or Kaisho does. Or both. If you try to buttonhole her, I’m sure she’ll swear it was only a ‘darling wee joke.’ Only teasing, the spores wouldn’t really eat you. Just lick you a bit, then let go… the Balrog’s way of flirting." He scowled. "Better watch your step, pal — you’ve got all kinds of conquests drooling over you."

  He said that last with a grumbly sort of snappishness: like maybe there was a woman he was interested in, except she liked me better. But the only women on Jacaranda who’d even seen me were Prope and Kaisho and Festina…

  Oh.

  "Christ," Tobit muttered disgustedly, wiping his boots on my floor, even though the soles were already clean. "Let’s call a vacuum cleaner and get the hell out of here. People are waiting for us in sick bay."

  I nodded quietly.

  "We aren’t supposed to do this," the doctor said. Yet another navy kid — in his thirties, but that’s pretty young for an M.D. His name was Veresian and he’d just accessed my medical history. "There’s a note on York’s chart, NO MEDICAL EXAMINATIONS EXCEPT IN EMERGENCIES. Certified by the Admiralty. Certified."

  Festina frowned. "That’s ridiculous. Everyone in the fleet gets regular checkups."

  "Not quite true, ah, Admiral, sorry," Veresian said. "The navy will make exceptions. Usually on religious grounds — Opters, for instance."

  He turned to look at me. The doctor couldn’t straight-out ask who or what I worshiped — not with the navy’s strict policies on religious tolerance — but Opters are never shy about stating their beliefs. Their god disapproves of all medical treatments; you’re supposed to let heaven decide whether or not you recover. (Don’t ask me why a god would create a universe full of medicines, then tell you not to use them. Gods have a real fondness for making great stuff and putting it right under your nose, but saying, "If you love me, leave this alone." Kind of like my sister hiding her diary in my room so Dad wouldn’t find it.)

  By now, everyone in sick bay was looking at me — Veresian, Festina, and Tobit. "I’m not an Opter," I said. "I’m… um… different."

  "You’re an Explorer, pal," Tobit replied. "We’re all different."

  But I was illegally different. I didn’t say that out loud, of course — if there was one thing hammered into my head, it was keeping quiet about how I came to be. Not just because I’d been engineered. If you want the honest truth, I was also a sort of a kind of a clone of my father.

  Pretty awful, right? Being him.

  Of course, I wasn’t him exactly — the doctor who designed me started with Dad’s DNA, then fiddled with it to make me better. Samantha was exactly the same as me: the same person exactly, our dad’s clone, except she got an X chromosome where I got a Y.

  Which meant she wasn’t the same person at all. Do you know about sex-linked gene deficiencies? Where if you’re a girl you’re all right, but if you’re a boy you don’t get built properly? Sam tried to explain it once with big blowup pictures of actual X and Y chromosomes, but I didn’t feel much like listening. It couldn’t be changed, could it? That was all I needed to know.

  Even if Sam couldn’t make me understand how my brain went stupid, she sure made it clear I had to keep everything secret. Cloning had been banned for centuries in the Technocracy, and gene manipulation was strictly limited to fixing "catastrophic disorders" — if you just wanted your kids prettier or smarter, you got thrown in jail.

  Worse than that, the children were classified "potentially non-sentient" since no one could predict how a DNA tweak would affect "moral character." There were just too many variables to calculate… and too many awful examples over the years, people trying to make perfect offspring and ending up with monsters: psychopaths, killers, people whose brains were messed up worse than mine. If the navy knew the truth about Sam and me, we’d never be allowed on a starship again — on the off chance we might suddenly turn crazy and inhuman and non-sentient.

  The more I mulled it over, the more I wished I hadn’t let Tobit bring me down to the doctor. But I hadn’t thought things through fast enough.

  Sometimes you just get so tired of being slow.

  "Um," I said. I knew better than to make up some story of why I shouldn’t be examined. Lies get complicated real fast. It would have been nice if Dad had told me about the NO CHECKUPS order so I wasn’t taken completely by surprise; but of course he hadn’t. All I could do was mumble, "My father didn’t like doctors looking at me too much. It bothered him."

  Festina gave me a sympathetic look. She probably thought my dad was an Opter, and I was all embarrassed about it. "Don’t worry," she told me, "if you’re allowed to have medical exams in an emergency, I’d say this counts. You’ve had two doses of hive-queen venom, Edward, and that’s serious business. Only a few humans have ever suffered venom poisoning, but several ended up with chronic metabolic imbalances. Isn’t that right, Doctor?"

  Veresian looked flustered by the question. It’s tough being a doctor in the Outward Fleet — every new planet that humans visit has a thousand diseases nobody’s seen before. The medical databanks have write-ups on millions of ways to get sick, and for many there’ve only been three or four cases ever. Veresian couldn’t possibly hold all that information in his head. If he was like other doctors, he looked up what he needed when he needed it… and at this moment, he knew absolutely zero about Mandasar venom.

  Too bad. Festina was an Explorer, and Explorers did their homework.

  Veresian mumbled, "Y
es, yes, dirty stuff, that venom." He looked at Festina once more, then decided you seldom went wrong agreeing with an admiral. "Definitely, we can say this qualifies as an emergency. Definitely." He turned to me. "Could you take off your shirt, please, Explorer?"

  "Do I have to?"

  "Come on," Tobit growled, "forget about your dad hating doctors. No matter how loony he is, your old man wouldn’t want you to Go Oh Shit."

  Going Oh Shit was a term Explorers used for dying. My father wouldn’t care if I went Oh Shit, I thought, as long as I just went. On the other hand, Dad had let me see a doctor now and then. And it wasn’t like a sign would flash BIO-ENGINEERED CLONE the moment I hopped onto the examination table. Veresian wouldn’t find anything suspicious unless he went to the trouble of sequencing my entire genome… and why would he do that?

  "Okay," I grumbled, and began unbuttoning.

  Festina and Tobit watched as the doctor listened to my heart and looked down my throat. Veresian was just passing the time — while he mucked about with a stethoscope, sensors around the room were taking far more detailed readings and checking them against every possible index in the databanks — but Sam always said people were suckers for personal attention. "Medicine is nine-tenths showmanship," she once told me, "just like diplomacy."

  The doctor wasn’t the only one providing a show. After all, I was the one with my shirt off; and neither Festina nor Tobit made a move to leave when the examination started. They weren’t gawking or anything, but… well, actually, yes, they were gawking, particularly when Veresian got me to take deep breaths. I told myself they must come from parts of the Technocracy where people weren’t all self-conscious about their bodies. Even so, if the examination headed below the waist, I didn’t want a bunch of spectators.