Dusty and Rachel looked at each other and engaged in a brief and silent conversation of glances and looks. “Ask,” Rachel finally said.
Sighing, Dusty turned toward Natalie and asked, “Say there was,” he began.
“I don’t know where the nearest unregistered imager is,” she interrupted. “Been out of the loop for a while.”
Dusty ran a hand through his hair and noticed Rachel slump in her chair as if her own weight just became difficult to bear. He went to her and sat in the chair across from her and took her hand. “Hey,” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
Rachel nodded. “Quey’ll be mad if we tell him won’t he?”
Dusty huffed, “Naw.”
She looked at him sideways and with a curl on one end of her lips.
He smiled, “He might be a little perturbed, but mad?” Dusty shook his head. “It’s not his way. We’re his crew and to people like us that means something.”
The two of them chuckled a bit but there was no humor in it. Both of them had been shattered into desperate little pieces just trying to figure out a way to be whole again.
Finally, after a long moment, during which Natalie sucked her bottom lip and furrowed her brow, the almost-doctor asked, “How long will you be in town?”
Dusty and Rachel looked up at her.
“I might be able to help you,” she added and the couple looked to each other once again. This time the smile that passed between them was silent and genuine.
When the doorbell rang Natalie answered and Quey could tell that something was amiss. Reggie was standing beside him and he was already a bit put off since Quey had to pull him away from a pair of ladies who’d been in the lobby bar to come out here.
“Come on man,” the big man had protested, “one of ‘em coulda been for you.”
Then he laughed, took a swig of whatever he’d been drinking and patted Quey’s arm. He considered leaving the big man to his business, but the way Natalie looked when she’d called and the fact that he knew Dusty and Rachel had gone to have her examined gave him pause.
“Come on,” Natalie offered and led them into the living room. Rachel and Dusty were sitting unusually close on the couch across from the screen, which now displayed an ocean view.
“Sit,” Natalie offered, waving her hand toward the pair of armchairs, facing one another across the coffee table before the sofa. Quey sat left while Reggie parked it to the right.
“What’s this about?” Quey asked Natalie, as she leaned against the wall beside the door to the kitchen. The air was heavy in the room, thick with tension that radiated from the couple sitting on the couch. It was like a tomb and Quey noticed how tightly Dusty was holding Rachel’s hand just before Dusty spoke.
“Before we start there’s something you need to know.”
Quey and Reggie exchanged a look. “All right.”
After a deep breath Dusty tried to begin but couldn’t so Rachel spoke up. “Do either of you know my last name?”
Another look passed across the coffee table and both men shook their heads. “Don’t believe I do, but what’s that got to do with whether or not your eggs are scrambled?”
Rachel swallowed hard before she admitted, “My name, my real name that is, the name I’m registered under is Rachel Hoss.”
Quey didn’t get it but when he glanced to Reggie he saw the big man’s eyes flare slightly. “I don’t follow,” he began but was cut off quickly by Reggie.
“And I suppose since you’re making a big deal about this you mean Hoss as in-”
“Eric Hoss is my brother,” she admitted
Still, Quey wasn’t sure what that meant, though there was a prickle in the back of his mind at the mention of the name. He’d heard it before, or it seemed familiar or he thought it was familiar because everyone was making such a fuss about it. “Why do I know that name?” he asked, fishing for someone to enlighten him. He caught Reggie.
“Eric Hoss is a terrorist,” the big man said, as if the words left a bitter taste in his mouth.
“He’s not a terrorist,” Rachel snapped.
“He got a lot of people killed,” Reggie nearly shouted from the edge of his seat. His massive hands gripped the arms of his chair and Quey could tell he was about to shoot up to his feet and suddenly he remembered.
Eric Hoss was the leader of an organization called Blackout. In the skirmish on the southern continent, the one in which Reggie had fought, Blackout had been the reason soldiers needed to be sent in the first place.
“What happened was tragic Reggie, and I’m sorry where it led to but you can’t just blame it all on one man. We were trying to help people…”
Reggie sat back in the chair and gaped at her. “Hold the fuck up,” he blurted because those were the first words that came to his mind as he slowly sorted it out. “We? You were with him?”
Rachel shook her head, “Not like that. Not when the… you know… not when it started to go bad.”
“Started to go bad?” he balked. “So, what? You just ran off in time to avoid that princess?”
“Hey,” Dusty protested, “back off a bit, alright.”
Rachel laid her hand on his and gave it a squeeze before she spoke again. “Look, when he started it was just about evening the playing ground—I didn’t know what he was planning.”
“What did you do then? What’s all this about any-fuckin’-how?”
Rachel sighed and took a moment. Her left hand touched her head and her eyes squeezed closed for a moment. “What it’s about is that I need a brain scan and I can’t go into a hospital because Blue Moon has a file on me. I check in anywhere and I trigger it.”
Reggie was steaming in his chair, unable to sit still, on the edge of snapping. Quey made a note but he needed more information. “What kind of warrant are we talking about here?” he asked.
Rachel looked at him.
“I mean, do they just want to talk to you or what? What did you actually do?”
“Blackout wasn’t actually a terrorist organization, and when it started it was never meant to do what it did. We just wanted Blue Moon to listen.”
“What did you do?” Quey repeated softly, encouraging her to tell him.
Rachel sighed slightly and shrugged before finally blurting, “I wrote a program. My brother took it, changed it a bit and used it to disrupt the signal for a bit. It mostly affected targeting and imaging. He didn’t think they’d react as harshly as they did. He was convinced they’d disrupt things long enough to get a message off planet.” She looked at Quey, “I didn’t know what he was doing,” tears trembled along the lids of her eyes.
Quey nodded.
“I wrote the program, along with three other people and he used it to take out the satellite feeds,” she finished.
“Why?” Reggie asked a bit less aggressively. He looked at Rachel.
“The wastes on south continent are worse than they are here, and the ground is dying faster. It’s harder to get food, but when Blue Moon shut down the rain catchers, that’s when the people knew they had to get out. They applied for relocation but they were being stalled.”
“Why would Blue Moon do that?” Natalie asked.
“We didn’t know for sure, but there were rumors that some of the militias had banded together and taken a Blue Moon science station that had been built in the wastes. They’d learned something the company didn’t want people to know.”
“That the planet was dying, and fast,” Quey offered.
Reggie was staring at the coffee table, though Quey doubted the big man saw it at all.
“Things being as they are,” Rachel said, “I don’t doubt it was something along those lines.”
“What was the program supposed to do?” Reggie asked and Rachel looked at him. “You said your brother took it and changed it and used it in a way you didn’t intend, so what was it supposed to do?”
“It was supposed to disrupt the Blue Moon filters and allow unchecked uploading. It was meant so pe
ople could post the truth, if they so chose, and it was also meant to break the lockout of the universal network.” There was a long moment of silence. Rachel looked at Reggie and a few tears fell and rolled down her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “I really don’t believe he thought they’d send soldiers that quickly.” Her eyes darted back to Quey. “The people down there just wanted to get a message out. Later they wanted to get ships off the ground.” She looked down in her lap.
“You got one thing right. You didn’t think, none of you. What did you expect to happen?” Reggie asked.
“Reggie,” Quey said firmly and the big man looked at him with confrontation in his eyes. He was ready for a fight and when a man that big looks at you like that you feel it in your guts. Quey felt his balls tighten a touch but he stayed the man’s gaze with his own.
“I know you’re angry but are you really angry at Rachel? C’mon man, look at her. You know her better than that. Hell can you even really blame her brother. I mean what he did was stupid, sure, but we’re the only grounded colony there is and now we know why. It’s not Anti-Corp, you said so yourself. It’s Blue Moon. We’re grounded because they don’t want the state of things getting known, and they started a war over it. It was going to happen no matter what, you know that.”
Rachel looked at Reggie and mouthed the words ‘I’m sorry,’ before falling against Dusty and letting him hold her.
Reggie nodded slowly and finally said, “You’re right. I got anger but pointing it her way would be a lie. It doesn’t belong there and it doesn’t belong on her brother any more than it did on the people who got killed down there.”
Quey nodded once and said, “I take it we’re hearing about this now because the test didn’t go so well.” He looked to Natalie who was rocking on her heels with her back pressed against the wall. She nodded slightly. “And you need to figure a way to get a better peek at her eggs so you can see just how scrambled they are?”
“That’s about right,” Natalie said, tonelessly. She stopped rocking and stepped closer to the group. “There’s a three dimensional imager at the hospital. It’ll give us a clear view of her entire brain, and if something is awry it’ll show us what that is.”
“But if we take her in for even a routine,” Quey said thoughtfully, “They’ll scan her in and pop goes the weasel. Bout right?”
“Yup.” Natalie popped her lips on the last letter and sighed.
There was a brief silence. Finally Reggie asked, “Say there is something wrong with her. What then?” Glances passed between everyone in the room. Reggie only looked at Rachel and then continued, “I mean, what can we do about it?”
“It’s an interesting point,” Quey nodded thoughtfully.
“So what,” Dusty started to snap but Natalie interrupted him.
“Depending on if anything is wrong and what that anything is decides where we go from there. If it’s something minor, a bit of swelling or a fragment of skull, something along those lines, the tools they use are simple enough a smart monkey could work them. Hell they practically do the work themselves.”
“If it’s something worse?” Quey asked without inflection, looking at Dusty, not Rachel. His friend was gently rubbing the woman’s shoulder and keeping her pressed against him. She looked like a little girl in his arms, and he looked like a scared little boy.
“If it’s worse then,” Natalie shrugged, “At least you know. I have to say though,” she continued and Quey’s eyes went to her. “If it was something terribly serious, something needing a specially skilled hand, I don’t think she’d still be walking around.”
Quey looked over at Rachel and said, “Just a little rust in her tin can?”
For some reason the room as a whole found that funny and one after another they chuckled a bit. Quey thought maybe it was because they needed to laugh in order to clear the tension.
When it subsided Quey asked, “So what’s the plan then,” and Natalie smirked at him.
“You’re going to love it,” Dusty said and when Quey looked over at him he looked like he had when they were kids planning a con or caper. “It’s so simple,” he added with a touch of slyness and a smirk.
“Alright then,” Quey finally said after a long thoughtful pause.
Natalie’s idea would set their schedule back a little more than a week, but aside from that Quey thought it was solid. Dusty had been right, it was simple and that was a good thing because it’d been his experience that every part of a plan was susceptible to a dozen or so complications you’d never be able to spot coming. That being the case the less of it there was the better.
Dusty gave Rachel a little squeeze around her shoulder and kissed her temple. He could tell she had a headache but wouldn’t mention it.
“I’ll go call Maddy, see if I can get everything set,” Natalie said, then went into the other room to get her sheet computer.
After that came the most tedious part of any plan. It was the space between the planning and the execution, when you’re waiting for all the pieces to fall into place.
Reggie did his waiting at the Evening Lilly Inn’s bar. He was hoping to forget what the conversation with Rachel had dredged up and maybe see the girls Quey had pulled him away from, but it seemed they’d moved on. After finishing off his second round and ordering up a third a set of ladies walked in and took a table near the corner. From the corner of his eye he saw one of them glance in his direction, a short tan girl with long dark hair and big brown eyes. He smiled as he raised his glass to her and took a sip. She smiled back and within twenty minutes Reggie was at their table laughing with them.
Dusty and Rachel spent time together in their room, lounging on the bed, trying not to worry. The effort was futile. Any time they managed to forget for a while Rachel would feel a sharp pain behind her right eye and touch the side of her head briefly. Dusty would notice and the couple would go silent.
Quey sat outside and kept tabs on Geo with his sheet computer. He watched the data, an incomprehensible (to him) stream of numbers that poured in by the hundreds every second. Watching the numbers scroll along soothed him and lulled him into a trance and he thought about what they were planning. Though Quey liked the simplicity of Natalie’s’ plan it also scared him because anytime he saw a snag in it the outcome was catastrophic. If at any time Rachel and Natalie were discovered all it would take was a single scan to send up flags, not just at the security center in town but also at Blue Moon headquarters. Eric Hoss was still a wanted man. If they found Rachel they would pursue her with ceaseless vigor and he feared, unlike the situation with the Angels of the Brood, there would be no negotiating a peaceful resolve.
The idea of being on a radar of that magnitude churned Quey’s guts and he knew it was nothing compared to what Rachel and Dusty must be going through.
On the screen in his hand the numbers stopped and the words, ‘cycle complete,’ flashed across the screen. Quey stood and went to the truck where he planned to meet Geo and load him in. Afterward he would call Ryla and inform her of their delay. He hoped this time she would answer because even though she didn’t really need the update he liked seeing what she was up to and enjoyed their conversations, strange as they often were.
Back in his room he watched the words “Calling Ryla” shimmer across his screen, then smiled when she appeared.
“Hello,” she said.
“Ryla? Is that you?” he joked. “It’s been so long, you look so different. I’d almost given up hope that I’d ever lay eyes on you again.”
She smiled slightly. “I’ve been busy.”
“What with?”
She took a long breath. “A project. It’s complicated.”
He nodded. “We’re going to be here longer than expected,” he began, then told her about Rachel and the plan to get her into the hospital. After that they talked. Twice during the conversation she began to explain things unnecessarily but she stopped herself both times. “That’s not what you meant is it?”
He s
hook his head.
“It was supposed to be ‘just for fun.’”
This time he nodded and they moved on.
Natalie was able to get a hold of Maddy and put everything in place within three days, which was about what she thought it would take. The ‘field trip’ was going to be on a weekend because to interrupt class would have required months of notice. This way she could just put a signup sheet in her classroom and tell the students it was for extra credit. Most wouldn’t give up a Saturday afternoon to go tour a hospital under the guise of learning more about the science of the body but enough would out of genuine interest or the desperate need for extra points to make it look good.
Saturday morning came and Dusty, Rachel and Quey met Natalie at the school where a bus and nearly three-dozen students were gathered in the parking lot. Aside from the four of them there were three other adults coming along as chaperones. Natalie had told the class she needed at least one more but that any parents interested in the tour themselves were welcome to come. She was pleased by the three who turned up as it would make it easier for her and Rachel and possibly even Quey to slip away when the time came.
The idea, simply enough, was that the hospital wouldn’t bother scanning the group since none of them were there for treatment. See, you couldn’t ordinarily just wander into a medical facility without cause, you needed to be injured, sick or visiting someone who was injured or sick. A school field trip would be overlooked for two reasons, one is that it didn’t fit into those parameters and the second was that every scan required a bit of paperwork that no one would want to do on a group that size, especially because the paperwork on minors was considerable.
Standing in the parking lot with a brisk breeze coming in from over the trees to the east, Natalie made introductions. Quey shook hands with each of the other adults, two women and a man with a trimmed beard, but a minute later he couldn’t have told you their names if you held a gun to his head.
The Saffron Malformation Page 31
