Yesterday's Legacy

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  “Because of the food they grow?”

  “Because when the Endurance reaches Destination, we will all be living outside, growing things for ourselves and that is what it would smell like.”

  “That’s what you were dreaming about? Destination and the farm?”

  “Not the future. I’m not even sure what Destination will look like. You and I will never know. Only, that’s what I was thinking of when I woke. Yet, the dream was all about the farm.”

  “And that is odd?”

  “Victoria Greytore was on the farm, scolding me about cross-breeding.”

  Marlow muffled laughter and settled her head on his shoulder. “That is odd.”

  “Cross-breeding…” Jonah breathed. There had been such a sense of urgency about the dream, as if time was running out. “Crossing lines.”

  “Huh?” Marlow asked, sounding as if she was already half-asleep.

  Jonah sat up, carefully laying Marlow back down. His mind was spinning.

  Marlow pushed herself up. “Jonah?”

  “Crossing lines,” he said.

  “Didn’t you just say that?”

  “I did. Marlow, listen. All the trouble, the riots, the unrest, it’s all split between the patricians and the plebeians, dividing the ship, right?”

  She rubbed her eyes. “Yes.”

  “What if there was another factor weighing in? One that crossed the lines between plebeians and patricians?”

  Marlow yawned. “Pretend I can’t think right now.”

  “The institutes, Marlow. I forgot about the institutes. They have as much interest in how the ship is run as any of the districts and they don’t align themselves with any of the districts. Victoria Greytore was the head of her institute. The farm is a learning institution in its own right, as well as being a productive farm. They employ people from all districts. Siegel’s Capitolino. Erron is Esquilino. They don’t care where their workers come from. None of the institutes do. They only care about the competence of the applicants and the longevity of the craft they are teaching and that is what gives them a stake in how the ship is run.”

  Marlow crossed her legs and yawned again. “If you bring the institutes into the discussion, they will blur the lines?”

  “Not bad for half-asleep, my love.” As soon as the word left his lips, he stiffened, shock circling through him. Then a sense of rightness settled over him and tension eased in his shoulders and chest. Yes, she was his love.

  However, Marlow was half-asleep. Her head was hanging. “So…this is how you get your ideas? From weird dreams?”

  “From everywhere, not just dreams,” he replied, relief touching him. “Go back to sleep, Marlow.”

  She lay down again with no protest. “Already there….”

  Jonah made himself lie down, too, even though sleep was far away now. His brain was busy, turning over the implications and possible lines of action. He would get the heads of the primary institutions together. Explain it to them….

  He blinked, processing the bright light outside the window and the heavy arm over his middle. He’d fallen asleep almost immediately, anyway. Now it was morning.

  He turned his head to look at Marlow. She was lying on her side, watching him.

  “You love me?” she asked.

  “It wasn’t intentional.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You think too much, Jonah.”

  “Probably.”

  Marlow lifted herself up over him. There was a warmth in her eyes that speared his chest and made his heart ache. She wasn’t protesting. She wasn’t screaming at him to leave.

  Instead she brought her lips close his. “Here’s a hint. Now is not the time to think.”

  “Yes, sir,” he breathed and pulled her down on top of him, his body already throbbing in anticipation.

  * * * * *

  Marlow dragged herself away from the apartment barely in time to catch the train to the Aventine and report for work. It wasn’t Jonah holding her back, it was her own inability to let him go and get moving.

  He loved her.

  The thought warmed her all the way to the Bridge. No man had ever told her that before, except for her father and he meant it in a different way.

  To be held in such high esteem, especially by someone like Jonah…it was making her think in odd ways that she didn’t mind at all. Thoughts about family and warmth and togetherness that all her years with Taniel had not provided.

  The small kernel of hope she’d had when she and Taniel had taken delivery of Erron, that she thought had died a long time ago, stirred in the center of her chest.

  Cantrell gave her a strange look as she settled behind her desk.

  “What?” she snapped. Why would he look that way at her? Her thoughts were not written on her forehead, after all.

  “Your hair…is down,” Cantrell said stiffly, sounding winded. “I didn’t realize how long it was.”

  She reached back to feel her hair, as shocked as Cantrell. She had forgotten to knot her hair at the back of her head. She had never forgotten to do that before. Hastily, she gathered up her hair in one hand and got to her feet.

  The general call alert halted her. She looked down at the stream of text on her screen. So did Cantrell. A general alert was an all-hands-on-deck cry for help and usually, she was the only one in the division with the authority to send out such an alert. There were only two circumstances where a guard could make the call. One of them was if the ship had been breached and atmosphere was being vented. The other was—

  “Murder,” Cantrell said, sounding ill. He was reading the screen over Marlow’s shoulder.

  The last murder aboard the Endurance had been more than a hundred years ago. Myron had been spaced for his crimes. No one on the ship wanted even his energy returned to the system. His DNA had been removed from the gene pool. Myron’s last name, a gift from his parents combined, had been expunged from all records. He was left with just his first name, which only the civil guards remembered because it was part of their basic training. Nothing of his life remained in public records. Every adult on the ship had agreed that he did not deserve to be part of the ship’s history.

  Marlow hastily coiled her hair and held it down, heading for the ready area where her locker was located. “I’m right behind you!” she told Cantrell, who was already running for the door.

  * * * * *

  She caught up with Cantrell and his squad as they were crossing into the Capitol. “Where?” she asked shortly. She hadn’t stopped to recheck for herself.

  “Fourth wall,” Cantrell said, a little breathlessly, for everyone was running. “Eastov called it in.”

  Fourth wall. That was Jonah’s.

  Her stomach clamped hard. Jonah had left the apartment at the same time as she. He would have made it home long before she did because he had planned to use a cab to get back to the Capitol, not the train, where everyone would see him leaving the Esquiline district first thing in the morning.

  His concern about her reputation had warmed her, yet she had agreed with his reasoning, too. He was notorious and he had not yet publically broken his association with the Spanners faction. The Esquiline district was plebeian, just as the Capitol was, yet the Spanners were a Capitol team and there were some Esquilinos that resented them speaking on the district’s behalf.

  There were even more Esquilinos who would be concerned that Marlow was associating with someone like Jonah and would possibly intervene in some way if they learned that Jonah had been in her apartment overnight.

  “Who is the victim?” she asked Cantrell.

  He shook his head. “There’s some confusion about that. His ID doesn’t match the apartment code.”

  Her heart squeezed even harder and her pulse screamed. She couldn’t run fast enough. “Tell them they have permission to scan his chip. My order.”

  Cantrell looked shocked. It was rare that anyone on the ship was given legal permission to access someone’s chip and the data stored there. Only passive monito
ring and security systems and the AIs that controlled them generally handled that information. It was part of the datariver that the AIs used to help with accouchement decisions and more.

  As she ran, Marlow fumbled with her communications earpiece and inserted it, so that she was plugged into the division’s broadnet. Instantly, the babble of voices sounded. They were talking over each other, some of them tight with anxiousness and others thick with fear.

  None of them had been faced with dealing with a murder, before. Even the civilians would be reeling with shock.

  Marlow switched the broadnet over to a dedicated channel and reached out to Selena Roscoe.

  “Marlow,” Roscoe said shortly. “I heard. Is there anything we can do to assist?”

  “Thank you, sir,” Marlow told her. “Could you reach out to the medics? There are going to be many upset people, even among the guard.”

  “Consider it done. Anything else?”

  “Not until the victim’s identity has been confirmed.”

  “Let me know when you have that.” Roscoe switched off.

  Marlow turned the link back to the division broadband. There was too much shouting and uncontrolled venting to make any sense of anything, so she switched it off and kept running.

  The six walls were just ahead, the Sixth Wall the farthest from them. The depressing First Wall faced the ship’s interior hull and was the least desirable residential area on the whole ship, because of its bleak and dark outlook. The other walls were not much better, though.

  Space aboard the Endurance had always been at a premium. Marlow had not looked back into the ship’s history far enough to find out whose smart idea it had been to stack living quarters into a wall. The modular living quarters that could be found all over the ship, except for the patrician and snobby Palatine, were built with efficiency of space in mind. They were stackable, yet nowhere else except the wall suburbs in the Capitol district were the units stacked more than two deep.

  The walls in the Capitol were just that—walls of stacked modular apartments, welded and girded into a solid mass. The First Wall and Second Wall had only ten levels of units, many of them defaced, rusty and abject. Like the Third and Fourth walls and the Fifth and Sixth walls, the First and Second walls were stacked with their backs to each other, making up a solid mass.

  But the Third and Fourth Walls were forty-eight units high. The top units were right underneath the upper hull of the ship itself. All the walls were hundreds of meters in length, with nearly a hundred apartments along each length.

  The Second Wall and the Third Wall faced each other, as did the Fourth and the Fifth walls. These walls were considered more desirable residences than the First or Sixth, yet they were only marginally better.

  As they turned into the broad terrace that ran between the Fourth and Fifth walls, Marlow was struck as she always was by the squalor and hopelessness of the Wall area. No one ever attempted to improve their quarters the way many in other districts did. The walls of any living quarters could be programmed to display any color at all. No one here took advantage of that. They were all the standard gray or brown of raw metal, some with rust streaks running down them from condensation. The coding on each apartment was faded.

  They were uniform, cramped little boxes, with minimal living space inside and only bare necessities provided. If there had to be a murder on the ship, it seemed to be appropriate that it would be here in the Wall area, where lives were so pitiable.

  Where was Jonah?

  There were hundreds of people milling about in the terrace, looking up at the Fourth Wall.

  There were six spatulas hovering around the middle of the wall, at perhaps the twentieth level.

  It wasn’t Jonah’s apartment they were hovering in front of.

  Marlow stopped running as her knees gave out on her. She was weak with relief, almost sick with it. She briefly considered contacting Jonah to confirm absolutely that it was not him, yet Cantrell had stopped, too. He was looking back at her expectantly.

  She made herself move on, at a slow jog this time. “Find Eastov and have him report to me,” she told Cantrell. “I want all those spatulas moved away until we’ve looked at the site ourselves.” Dusty procedural methods were stirring and rising to the forefront of her mind. “They will contaminate the scene,” she added.

  “I think the AI has already been over the apartment for all DNA traces,” Cantrell said. When Marlow looked at him, he raised his hand in defense. “I’ll tell them anyway.”

  “Take a spatula,” she told him. “The broadband is useless with everyone shouting as they are.”

  “I think there’s a spatula over here I can grab….” He hurried away.

  Marlow looked around, taking in everyone there. They were nearly all civilians.

  One of the guard came up to her. “Reporting in, sir.”

  “Send the civilians home,” she said. “I don’t want to be tripping over them while we’re trying to do our job. They can see it all on the Forum, later.” She glanced up at the omnipresent lenses that recorded everything that happened in the public places on the ship. She would access those feeds later, to see who had visited the apartment in question.

  More guards came up to her and she sent them off to complete the necessary steps—crowd dispersal, finding authority figures and corralling them, including the manager of this wall. As she dispensed orders, she watched Cantrell’s spatula rise to join with the others at the twentieth level. There were a dozen people standing on the other spatulas and if Cantrell wanted to access the apartment, he would have to step across their spatulas and push his way through them to do it.

  She could see him speaking and gesturing to the people there. There was some argument. After a few short minutes, the other spatulas drifted back down to the ground.

  “Commandeer all the spatulas,” Marlow told the next guard to report to her. “No one gets to go in or out of any apartment until we have all the information we need. They can go and wait in the marketplace, instead, or anywhere that isn’t here.”

  “That’s going to upset a lot of people,” the young guard pointed out.

  “They’re already upset, Adem,” she told him. “This, they will barely notice. Get to it.”

  He nodded and hurried away. She didn’t follow up to see if he was doing his job, because no other spatulas lifted off after that. It was possible Adem would have to be belligerent about insisting no one use the spatulas and if he was smart, he would recruit a fellow guard into helping him. Her guards knew how to be proactive.

  “Report, Cantrell,” she said, looking up at the single spatula. Cantrell wasn’t on it anymore.

  “Eastov is here. So is the Fourth Wall medic he called in to determine they were dead.”

  “They?” Marlow said sharply.

  “Two bodies, sir,” Cantrell said. He sounded stressed.

  She sighed. “Get the DNA and spatial scans up and running, then seal the apartment. The bodies will need to be recycled. Have the IDs been sorted out yet?”

  “I’m coming down to you, sir,” Cantrell said.

  “We’re on a secure band,” she reminded him. She could see him now. He was on the spatula and drifting down to terrace level. “Who are the victims?”

  “I’d rather wait to tell you in person, sir,” Cantrell replied.

  Marlow gritted her teeth together. It was very rare for Cantrell to go against her wishes this way and it was usually justified. So she held her tongue and waited, watching the spatula float down. Then she lost sight of it, because there were still far too many civilians milling around the terrace, looking up at the apartment and speculating among themselves. She knew her guards were dispersing civilians as fast as they could. More were emerging from the wall behind them and from other areas of the district, drawn by the drama. For all she knew, the headlines had already flashed across the Forum, alerting the entire ship.

  She grabbed the arm of the nearest guard. “What are you doing right now?” she demanded.<
br />
  “Crowd dispersal, sir.”

  “Find another guard, I don’t care who. The two of you are to erect some sort of barricade at both ends of the terrace. No one in or out. Then you’ll only have the Fifth and Fourth wall residents to worry about.”

  He hurried away and she saw him grab the arm of another guard.

  Cantrell came up to her and she crossed her arms. “Well?” she demanded.

  Cantrell was looking at her oddly. “Sir, I have spliced in Commander Roscoe and she is listening.”

  “Standing by,” Roscoe said, her voice airy and disinterested.

  Marlow stared at Cantrell. “Why?”

  He wiped sweat from his temples with the sleeve of his shirt. “The victims, sir. They’re known to you.”

  Her heart creaked. “Who are they?” she asked.

  “The apartment belongs to a woman, Hannah Lucia,” Cantrell said.

  Marlow pressed her hand to her chest. Her heart was hurting. “No…”

  “The other victim was male.” Cantrell was looking at her with something she thought was pity. “It’s Taniel Error, sir.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The news flashed across the marketplace, faster than thought itself. Jonah turned to look at the stall manager, shocked. “What did you say?”

  The manager looked at Jonah, startled. He had been talking to someone else entirely.

  “There was a murder, in the Fourth Wall,” the woman the manager had been speaking to said. Her eyes were wide and frightened. “Are you from—”

  Jonah didn’t hear the rest. He was already moving, weaving among the unusually large number of people heading into the marketplace, his heart working way too fast even for the pace he was using. There were still more people between the market and the wall areas, many of them wandering around in a daze, barely able to decide on their direction.

  There were many others with their heads together, talking fast and low.

  When he got to the edge of the Fourth Wall, he found string had been spread out between the two walls. There were people on this side of it, looking down the length of the terrace, obediently staying behind the string.