“I’ll take that bet and raise you ten. Not only was she given the Tureka’s name but she’s been supplied with our coordinates at key points.”
Like when I grabbed the data off that beacon. Something must have been sent at that time.
“We need to look at every transmission Gregor’s sent or received since we left Dock Five,” I said, calmer now, feeling my Fleet training kicking back in. Spies and enemy agents were entities Fleet had dealt with for generations. “And anything sent from any terminal when he was on duty.”
“How long will that take you?”
“An hour, maybe two if he used a code I can’t break and I have to ask you for help.”
That Sully grin was back. “Are you sure you can afford my fees?”
I lobbed my lightpen at him.
He ducked. “You’re cranky. You must be hungry.” He swiveled his chair around then stood. “I’ll go hit up Dorsie for a couple of baked bright-apples.” He turned for the door then swung back and, leaning over the narrow desk, cupped my face with one hand. His mouth covered mine, heat and passion spiraling through his touch.
He broke the kiss with obvious reluctance. “I will do whatever it takes. Believe that,” he said, his voice a deep rumble.
I knew he would. But I waited until the door closed behind him before wondering—with not only Tage and Burke to contend with, but now the Farosians too—if it would be enough.
Gregor was a damned fine pilot. He’d been with Sully for at least seven years, though where he’d been before that Fleet either couldn’t or didn’t care to find out. I didn’t know if Gregor was his first or his last name, or a moniker he simply bestowed on himself when he went AWOL. Of that last fact, I was fairly sure—over and above the fact that he bragged about it. He had a way of doing things that were Fleet-issue. I recognized them because I was one too.
So I broke into his personal files the same way I would any Fleet officer’s, knowing where the fail-safes and trip-alarms likely were, knowing how the files would be structured. Gregor had improvised, customized over the years. But academy training was hard to undo.
Sully brought a steaming, spicy bright-apple and mug of tea while I worked, watched over my shoulder for a while, then left again.
It felt good to have a soluble problem to solve. Hayden’s lab was a cipher; our informant on Narfial an equal unknown. Repercussions from Thad’s arrest were still unfolding. But digging out Gregor’s transmits was something I could do.
The uncoded, general transmits were the easiest and, logically, the most innocuous: confirmations of personal supplies ordered for pickup on Ferrin’s or Dock Five or one of the other rim-world depots Sully felt fairly safe in frequenting. Even so, I read all seven he’d sent or received in the past ten days and then backdated a week and read four more, scanning for hidden codes. A purchase order for a zippered jacket might be just that, or it might be something more.
Nothing appeared out of the ordinary. I cross-referenced his few purchases with withdrawals made through the ship’s crew funds. Both Dorsie and Sully had signed off on all items as required. I’d double check by confirming with Dorsie’s logs, but seeing Sully’s approval codes made me feel more certain nothing here was forged.
It took me longer to get into Gregor’s personal transmits. Fleet had several fail-safes that destroyed the content of a transmit if tampering was detected—adaptations of which could be bought from any number of backdoor techies on Dock Five. Smugglers loved to use Fleet’s own programs against them.
Gregor had three different transmit accounts, very uncreatively labeled One, Two, and Three. Or perhaps not so uncreatively. Open the wrong one first and the other two go poof.
A sound at the doorway made me look up.
“You’re frowning,” Sully said, ducking his head slightly as he entered.
I waited until the door closed behind him before answering. “I’m trying to remind myself not to underestimate Gregor.”
Sully crossed the cabin’s soft gray carpeting then perched a hip on the edge of the desk. He studied the databoxes on my screen. “Aidanar’s Triptych.”
I’d recognized it too. “Gregor strikes me as more secretive than clever. But a triptych fail-safe is fairly elementary-level Fleet methodology. Do you know how long he was with Fleet, and where?”
Sully nodded. “Not quite five years as a transport pilot for Imperial Fleet Security Forces, working Ferrin’s and the ass-end of Baris. He doesn’t know I know, of course. He told me he worked for ImpSec on Port Sapphire on Aldan Prime. He did, but only for a month near the end of the war.”
Ferrin’s Starport was about as ass-end as you could get without being on the rim. “So he never actually worked for ImpSec?”
“Never earned the coveted blue beret. His charming personality held him back. Shame, because he had all the makings of a top security officer. He ended up being a glorified taxi driver.”
“You’ve seen his personnel file?”
“I have.”
I didn’t miss the smug tone of his voice. Fleet personnel records—especially ImpSec’s—were supposedly sacrosanct. But this was Gabriel Sullivan. And he’d quoted mine almost verbatim when he’d found me on Moabar. “His name’s really Gregor?”
“Meevel Gregoran. He doesn’t know I know that either.”
“Meevel? As in Meevel Peevel Goes to School? I hated those books when I was a kid.” The Meevel Peevel series had been around for years. Soppy, preachy children’s stories. No wonder Gregor was always in such a foul mood. He even looked like an adult version of Meevel Peevel—lanky and sharp-faced.
“I guess his parents were fans.”
“What did he tell you his name was?”
“His ID docs—decent forgeries, by the way—state Gregor Verrill.”
“The books, again.” T. Alston Verrill was the author of the Meevel series.
“If you’re going to lie,” Sully said, “keep it simple, logical, and something you can remember.”
Like Ross Winthrop, an alias used by Gabriel Ross Sullivan, whose father’s name was Winthrop.
“So do you think Meevel’s skilled enough to have safeguarded his files with a triptych?” I asked, leaning back so Sully could view the entire screen again.
“If he’s brash enough to think he can play with the Farosians behind my back then, yeah, he’d start investing in some serious fail-safes. Let me take a look.”
I slid out of the seat. I’d been working on Gregor’s files for almost two hours and it felt good to stand. I grabbed the plate with the remnants of the bright-apple meal and stepped toward the galley alcove, thinking of Thad. I reminded myself that Drogue would shortly be alerted to the situation. That was a good start. Though I longed to send Thad a message myself, it would only make things worse. Even if Thad and I never experienced that psychic bond siblings are supposed to have, I prayed he knew that I was not abandoning him. Sully and I would do everything we could to help.
I shoved the dish into the recyc and latched it, then leaned my palms against the counter and stretched out the backs of my calves. I should probably head down to the Karn’s small gym, work off some stress on the treadmill—
“Well, this is interesting.”
I rounded the counter separating the galley and the main room, then sprinted the few short steps to the desk and Sully’s side. He’d opened the account labeled One. And as no icons flashed wildly and no random codes streamed across any of the databoxes, either there were no fail-safes or Sully had disabled them.
Disabled, his voice confirmed in my mind. Easy. I’ll show you later what you missed. Then out loud to make sure I didn’t miss his distinctly affronted tone: “And you complain about my gambling.”
Gregor was in deep trouble, as evidenced by a series of notes sent to him demanding money, and others he’d sent to friends and crew, asking for loans. Nothing about the Farosians, but Blaine’s Justice Wardens could well have provided an answer to some of Gregor’s financial problems.
“So you think he sold out our location for money?”
“Likely.”
“You want to confront him.” I could feel the tension emanating off him. “Unless you’re willing to lock him in the brig until we get to Narfial, and then risk letting him off there with all he knows—”
“After I confront him, he’ll know very little.” Dark eyes glanced up at me, narrowed.
Yes, Sully could do that, wipe a mind clean of its past. While I hadn’t forgotten that, it wasn’t something I liked to dwell on.
“That’s why I have to wait for him to make a few more moves,” he continued, his focus back on the screen again. “I need his contacts, and I need to know what he’s promised them. Now let’s see what’s in box number two.”
Boxes Two and Three held more interesting information. Gregor had been researching Ragkirils and ways to counter a mind-probe. Those files dated back several months, though, to when Sully and Ren questioned the crew. Neither Sully nor I could tell if Gregor had been thinking back then of contacting the Farosians and feared Ren might find out, or if this was simply in response to Sully’s interviews with him.
Sully perused the mind-probe-blocking recommendations Gregor found. “Wasted time and money on those,” he scoffed and left it at that.
More recent transmits showed that the Farosians were providing money. Though there wasn’t any one transmit that said that in blatant detail, the missives for “special packages” and “important contributions” from an aunt and uncle Gregor didn’t have told it all.
I used the data Sully found to locate records of bank transfers that I’m sure Gregor thought he’d deleted. Lesson one: nothing is ever really deleted in a system—especially a system keyed to keeping you alive in deep space. Even after Berri Solaria had loaded a near-fatal worm program into the Karn, Sully and I were able to retrieve or re-create almost all the lost data.
I created another kind of tracker worm to record all of Gregor’s communications and transmits—internal and external—from this point on, with the external actually being sent only if Sully or I cleared it. If he requested a slice of pie, we’d know about it. If he sent data to the Farosians, we’d know about it.
We had the proof. And a little more than four days to Narfial. In every sense of the word, Gregor’s days were numbered.
With the basic question about Gregor and the Farosians’ appearance handled, Sully left the cabin to make his usual rounds. Even though it was his ship, he wasn’t a passenger. Neither was I. We both had duties beyond our mission to find Hayden Burke’s jukor labs and try to stop the Empire from spiraling into what could be a vicious civil war: Takas against humans and everyone against the Stolorths. Part of me still believed the Empire was worth fighting for and that Prew—Emperor Prewitt III—was capable of governing wisely with the help of the Admirals’ Council.
Sully was more—in his own words—pragmatic. Prew was a puppet, but if the Empire fell and xenophobes like Tage and Burke took over, the worlds and colonies on the rim would suffer horribly. A high percentage of the population on the rim was Takan. And young Gabriel Sullivan, alone in the midst of his parents’ lavish, palatial estate, found the only ones who really cared about him were Takan. His role as a smuggler had been a guise by which he helped those most desperately in need.
And, of course, annoyed those in authority for whom he had no respect.
I brought up the ship’s locator log on my screen. Gregor and Marsh were still on bridge duty. Verno was sleeping. Ren was in the hydro for his required soak—Stolorths’ aquatic heritage required them to absorb water into their bodies through their gill slits every forty-eight hours. Aubry was off in the gym. The galley’s power grid icons glowing at 90 percent told me Dorsie was cooking. Baking, probably. The short, jovial woman—who was also Marsh’s aunt—turned up her nose at sustenance replicators. The scents of cinnaspice, sweet basmatt, and flowery kevar often wafted tantalizingly through the Karn’s lower deck.
Aubry had finished repairs to the secondary power grid. I scanned his report with less of a practiced eye than Sully would. Aubry’s repairs looked fine. And I knew Sully would double check them because if Gregor had a friend on board, it was Aubry.
Not that I’d consider them close, but Aubry tolerated Gregor more easily than Marsh, Dorsie, or Verno did. And Ren…Well, Gregor hated Ren with a passion, as he hated all Stolorths. That the animosity wasn’t mutual meant nothing to Gregor.
So in essence, Aubry—a short but muscular man in his late thirties—was Gregor’s only friend. But enough of one to assist him with the Farosians?
Computers and codes were something I was good at. Fifteen minutes later I’d cleared through Aubry’s transmits and found nothing noteworthy. Aubry might be Gregor’s friend but I found nothing to state his loyalty wasn’t to Sully.
I went back to the rest of my duties, reviewing ship’s status and performance. Then, when Gregor logged off the bridge, I waited a few minutes for him to clear the corridor before exiting the cabin and heading for the command sling.
“All’s quiet, Captain Bergren,” Marsh said when I stepped over the hatch tread.
While not as warmly friendly as his aunt, Marsh Ganton had treated me with respect from the moment I boarded the Karn. His relationship with Ren had cooled since the crew interrogations, but his allegiance to Sully was strong. But strong enough to withstand the truth?
“I always like good news,” I told Marsh as I slid into the seat at the auxiliary command screen.
“Hope the guy on Narfial has some,” Marsh said. “Dorsie got a transmit from my mother right before we left Dock Five. Food shortages hit home again. She said if it wasn’t for the support Dorsie and I send her, she’d be hurting worse.”
Marsh and Dorsie were rim-worlders out of Umoran in Calth—not far, relatively speaking, from Ferrin Starport in Baris. In the past five years, the agri-regions of the planet had their massive citrus groves wracked by droughts and then infected by a series of virulent cankers. The canker spread to the soil, killing off attempts to grow alternate crops. Requests for additional funding and assistance were voted down by Tage’s Legalist politicians because, it was rumored, Umoran’s independent agricultural collectives were well known to be anti-Legalist.
For very personal reasons, Marsh didn’t want Tage or Burke in control of the Empire.
“Sully feels this is the best lead we’ve had so far,” I told him.
Marsh nodded. “My family’s always been grovers, you know? That’s where Dorsie gets her love of cooking. So it’s not like they can go north and work the mines. Some of their friends have, but with so many farms being closed, the mines aren’t hiring as many unskilled. We have no choice but to stay with the farms, hope they start producing again.”
“How’s your nephew? Did he make the team?” Last I’d heard from Dorsie, Marsh’s nephew had a chance at making right-wing on a regional hoverblade team.
The cloud of worry lifted from Marsh’s dark face. “Rand’s doing great. He got picked up by the Chargers. He’s got a helluva slapshot for a seventeen-year-old.”
“Don’t tell Sully. He’ll probably start placing bets on him.”
Marsh snorted out a laugh. “I hear it’s up to almost five million.”
“It” was the running debt Sully owed Ren from their continual card games.
“Four million, six hundred and fifty-two thousand. Give or take,” said a voice from the corridor. Boot steps came closer and Sully ducked through the hatchway as I turned in my seat.
“Not that I’m counting,” he added, grinning. “I may yet make a comeback.”
That started a bit of off-color banter that left me shaking my head and, more than a few times, groaning out loud as the Karn streaked at specs-plus-ten through the big wide darkness.
Then an incoming transmi
t signal pinged at communications.
Sully leaned over the back of the empty chair at the station. “Ah! Dredosh the bookie never fails me. Could be time to celebrate. Chaz?”
“The Baris Cup’s far from over,” Marsh warned as I turned.
Drogue, Sully told me silently. Our cabin. Then out loud: “Come with me.” He faced me, one hand extended, a twinkle in his dark eyes. But tension radiated through our mental link.
I played the part, even though my heart started thudding in my chest and Thad’s image was the only thing in my mind. “Across hell and back, forever, Mr. Sullivan.”
I took his hand and he took the opportunity to pull me closer and then slap me on the rump. “Smart ass.”
“Don’t you be abusing the good captain that way, Sully,” Marsh chided.
“Mind the store, Ganton,” Sully called back as we stepped into the corridor.
Drogue’s image on the deskscreen showed the monk’s usual, placid demeanor. His message was more fretful. I perched on the desktop, propping one boot against the arm of Sully’s chair, and listened.
“Commander Thaddeus Bergren is scheduled for Rawton. Actually, he was set for transfer yesterday but there were two attacks on human women in Port January this past week. The entire city’s in a near lock-down. The Takas.” Drogue sighed softly, frowning. “It’s just a small group doing this. Most don’t agree with these violent actions, but now there’s talk of removing all Takas from all local security positions. That will only exacerbate the situation.”
The situation was the mysterious deaths—or so it was labeled by investigative officials—of Takan females, while giving birth to…something. We knew what that something was: jukors. Hayden Burke was using Takan females as surrogates. Birthing the jukors ripped the mother apart.
The authorities denied this was the case. The current official theory was a deranged serial killer.
Shades of Dark Page 4
