Unable to move, I ransacked my memories. Speculated. Analyzed. Cursed myself out. Regretted. Cursed myself out some more.
My chief regret? How blind I had been. I had never considered the possibility—at this point, the near certainty—that Darin was a co-conspirator. The one ambiguity remaining was whether he had conspired all along, or begun as a victim and been turned. I thought I remembered some famous case involving an abducted Hearst family heiress become a terrorist. The Stockholm syndrome, was that called? Whatever Stockholm was.
Unable to kick myself except figuratively, it was just as well that, soon after my second(?) awakening, the door to my cell opened with a soft squeak. Letting gravity do most of the work, I turned my head. I caught a glimpse of knapsacks, flight bags, and other satchels, all piled against the far wall in the next room. A poster with a woodland scene hung above the luggage. I heard snippets of conversation about . . . birthrates? . . . and laughter. Darin walked in, carrying a folding chair.
There popped into my mind an ancient cartoon of two filthy, bedraggled prisoners dangling by wrist manacles from a dungeon wall. Now, here's my plan . . ., one of them was saying. Blinking, I snapped an image of the other room before Darin closed the door behind himself. The hinges protested in this direction, too.
I said, "I still owe you dinner. Or you can treat."
"I'm good," he said. "But you, funny man? You might want to take matters seriously."
"I am. In hindsight, I should never have paid your back rent." Was that a ghost of a smile? Or an expression more predatory? The look, whatever it signified, vanished before I could decide. "So, what did happen to that bill collector you mentioned?" And am I going to end up like him?
Darin unfolded the chair and set it facing the sofa. He sat, glaring down on me. "Do you even know my father?"
"I told you. I'm his accountant."
"Uh-huh."
Okay, that had sounded dubious, even to me. "But personal accounting isn't why I'm here. I came to network. Representing Earther companies in the Belt will be a big career step."
"Not with the company? Then"—intoned ominously—"you're of no use to me."
Sharing or stonewalling? Which offered the better chance of keeping me alive? I wouldn't get a do-over. "Okay, you got me. I'm a lowly accountant for the company. They send me from rock to rock, my job being to audit physical stockpiles and onsite records for evidence of any pilfering. Your dad was among the miners at the most recent rock I visited." When Darin didn't comment, I added, "And I know why you've been in hiding."
"Uh-huh. Why is that?"
"Because as soon as Les got back to civilization and long-range comm, he was certain to try to contact you. It wouldn't have fit the storyline for you to be reachable. You had to have disappeared months ago, when you were kidnapped, and still be gone."
"Do tell," Darin smirked.
"The thing is, your abductors"—and not that I could lift my arms, I wondered if that last word deserved air quotes—"wouldn't have let you go till they knew whether Les had complied. Whether, as per your heartfelt plea, your father had constructed and deployed an aerosol-dispersing device at the mining base. Oh, he might have reported that he'd done so, but no one would know for many months. Not till the relief ship with your dad's crew returned for their next tour of duty. And that shouldn't happen till months from now."
The smirk had not quite vanished, but I had the young man's attention. Darin said, "He showed you the vid, then. While you were onsite auditing. Why?"
"No, I came upon the vid after. The thing is, Darin . . ." Almost despite himself, he leaned closer. It made no difference that he had put himself within arm's length of me, because my arms were also dead weights. "Your father is dead."
"Bullshit."
"No, really. Haven't you wondered why he hasn't tried to make contact? Even in hiding, you'd have gotten an email."
Darin shrugged. "Everyone in his crew went straight from the rock to company jail, whatever the euphemism the company uses for detention. I guess the strip searches to discourage smuggling of platinum scraps weren't invasive enough."
The crew—what remained of it, anyway—was in confinement. But not over any mundane pilferage. Not directly. The company cover story was holding. (Two dead. Two dead . . .) I shook off my guilt with outrage at Darin's hypocrisy. It's not like I was his guest here.
"He built and hid the device, just as your people ordered." The young man ignored your people, reinforcing my suspicions. "It wasn't his fault another miner found it tucked into a ventilation duct. You can imagine the concerns that discovery raised. And the questions . . ."
"Then what happened?"
"I think Les was terrified at what might happen to you if he gave out any information. Because he believed the vid, you know? He believed you'd been kidnapped and abused. He believed that, to save your life, he had to do exactly as ordered. As much as possible, he had. When the device was discovered, he was desperate to show your captors he had done everything he could to cooperate. Protecting you was more important to him than . . . anything."
"You can't know that."
"You tell me." I stared at him. "Besides whatever nasty stuff the device was meant to disperse, your father also synthed a cyanide pill."
The blood drained from Darin's face. Too little. Too late. "Dad took cyanide? But he wasn't supposed to . . ."
Les was not supposed to die. The vid had directed him to set the timer for two days after his crew was scheduled to rotate out. As for the men and women of the alternating crew, they were expendable. And while I had my suspicions, I had no actual clue as to why they were to have been expended.
Words, if I could find the right ones, were the only tools available. "Yes, your dad took cyanide. In front of his crew. In front of his friends. Because once that device had been found—and no one, of course, admitted to any knowledge of it—everyone was made to turn over their personal comps as possible evidence. Your dad must've figured that if he weren't forced to unlock his comp, the encrypted coercive message to him might go unseen. That protecting those secrets with his life might mollify your abductors.
"Of course, an expert at the company did unlock everything." That expert being me, a fact whose disclosure I doubted would improve my situation. "We saw the vid. We saw how Les had been put into an impossible situation, how he had been forced to build that device."
I strained to lift my head, the better to stare at my captor. "And the people who coerced your father? They are responsible for his death."
Exhausted, closing my eyes and letting my head flop back onto the sofa, I hoped Darin would chew on that.
****
With no timepiece beyond a growing thirst, unsure even if I had nodded off, I had no idea how much time had passed before Darin reappeared. Behind him, past the open door, a woman in dark slacks and a tan sweater strode by. Her head was turned, but though I saw only the back of her head I blink-snapped an image anyway. This wasn't the hostess from the Mexican restaurant. She had been taller, her hair straighter and darker. But, I suspected, my co-abductor was in the next room. The whiff of her perfume, and the start of my nose dripping, were unmistakable.
"Time to continue our chat," Darin announced.
Chat had not come out sounding friendly. Perhaps it didn't matter, but I wondered whether he'd already come to terms with his father's death—plainly, they had had issues—or if he had convinced himself I had lied about it to rattle him.
"Unless you like things messy," I countered, "first you'll return my fuel cell and point me to a bathroom."
He pointed, instead, at the wastebasket in the corner.
"I can't stand without power for the exoskeleton, much less walk."
He canted his head, considering, then turned toward the door. "Back in a minute."
"I'll be here," I called after him. I snapped more images through the doorway as he exited, and again when he returned with a brown paper sack.
With a roll of duct tape from the bag,
he bound my ankles. Around and around he wound the tape, a good ten times. "Hands together now." I couldn't lift my arms and so, grumbling, he maneuvered them together and bound my wrists just as securely. Then, he snapped a fuel cell taken from his bag into the exoskeleton. "I'll be back in a couple of minutes."
"I'll need at least five. And will the camera be turned off?"
He left, not deigning to answer.
It took me more or less forever to maneuver bound legs off the sofa and to sit up. (Seated, I saw that the Panic button had gone missing from the exoskeleton's forearm control panel. Two of the chips visible through the ragged hole bore sooty scorch marks. I pictured the flat blade of a screwdriver prying out the button, in the process shorting the chips immediately beneath. The joke was on them: I hadn't enrolled in the service.) It took me as long to stand, to the accompaniment through the wall of faint sniggers. It took longer—toppling twice, struggling laboriously back to my feet—to shuffle to and from the chamber pot. It's not as if I'd had reason to train the exoskeleton to interpret muscles twitches made while restrained hand and foot. Some hopefully discreet experimental flexing as I shuffled convinced me that even at full exertion, the hardware could not snap my bonds. As for unzipping myself? Doing my business with bound wrists? Those were about as much fun.
Finally, gasping for breath, I plopped onto the sofa, but sitting. I hoped the voyeurs watching through the webcam had found the exhibition compelling.
When Darin returned, he had a clear bottle in his hand. Just to see condensation beads dotting the glass, a few drops running down the bottle and onto his hand, made me realize how thirsty I was. He held out the bottle to me.
I raised my arms, wrists still bound. "Uncap it, please?"
He did, and handed it over. As I drank, clumsily, sloshing some of the water onto my shirt, he asked, "What was that?"
On my left forearm, in a corner of the control panel, the Charging LED glowed yellow. Accepting the water might already have sunk my plan. Such as it was. "What's what?"
He pointed. "That lamp."
"Status indicator of some kind? Not happy with having a button pried out?" As he extended an arm to reclaim my fuel cell, I dipped my head to indicate the bottle. "Let me finish this first. I can't lift my arms without power."
"Be quick about it."
I chugged the bottle, and he plucked it empty from my hands. I had barely rested my arms in my lap when he popped out the fuel cell. The charging LED went dark.
Darin settled into his chair. "You've had your fluid-adjustment break. Now, we talk."
I talked, he meant.
He had sought me out. Why? I assumed, to stop me from continuing to look for him. To stop me drawing attention to him. Had my explanation for the search been credible, I imagined we'd have had dinner and gone our separate ways.
Then there was the so-called bill collector. However expendable the company considered me, they wanted—no, they needed—to get to the bottom of things. If they had retained, and then lost contact with, an Earther investigator, almost certainly they would have told me, if only to tip the odds for my success. By that line of reasoning the bill collector was a fiction invented to rattle me, his indeterminate fate intended to encourage my cooperation.
Almost certainly.
Like a particularly dimwitted rat in a maze, my thoughts thereafter darted every which way and ended up getting nowhere. I'd been drugged, kidnapped, and imprisoned. If I lived to implicate Darin, he could implicate everyone in the cabal. Short of rescue or escape, was there any way back from that?
Two dead. Two dead. I very much wanted not to be number three.
I licked my lips. "Tell me what you want to know." Not that I cared, beyond construing from his answer which lies I could get away with while still earning his trust.
"Why are you here?"
"Because you drugged me and brought me here," I blurted out.
While that crack imparted nothing he didn't already know, what could needless antagonism accomplish? What was wrong with me?
He seemed not to take offense. "Understood. But why did you come to Earth?"
Company business. This time, I caught myself before volunteering more needless truth. What was it Mark Twain had said? If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. Maybe the epigram applied as well to selective truths. "To find you. I told you so upfront."
"To buy me a dinner, as you promised my father. Only you also told me he's dead. Which is it?"
"Both, except for the promise part."
Darin frowned. "So Dad is dead? How?"
"I told you earlier. He took cyanide."
"Tell me about this device you say he made and what happened with it."
I saw no harm in answering. Darin and his associates knew what they had ordered built. "A clear glass bottle. An electronics module of some sort, lots of wires, and a slab of stuff like clay. Stuck into the clay was a metal tube that one of the miners told me was a blasting cap. Everyone was afraid to touch the thing."
"Sounds like a bomb," Darin suggested.
"It looked like a bomb," I agreed. "Apart from the glass bottle part. Logically, that held a gas or chemical or something."
"Logically. Did you or anyone see anything in the bottle?"
Had I? I thought back. "Dust speckles on the bottom of the container."
My mention of dust made him smile. "What else? What did you think about the bottle?"
"That the explosion or a control valve would release whatever . . ."
I froze mid-sentence. What the hell was I doing, rattling on this way? I did a quick mental rewind and replay of the past few exchanges. It was as if I'd forgotten the danger. It was as if I wanted my answers to please.
What the hell was in the water I'd chugged?
"You were saying?" Darin urged.
The Belt is big. Flying from rock to rock on company business, I read a lot. I watched vid after vid. I'd done plenty more of both during the long flight to Earth, mostly detective and spy stories: my homework. Several plots had involved someone compelled to talk under truth serum. And before dropping out, Darin had been a graduate student in biotech. How hard would it have been for him to have synthed a drug? Make that two drugs. He had likely also synthed whatever had knocked me out at the restaurant.
"Umm," I continued, mumbling, "something would release whatever was in the bottle."
But truth serum, like lie detector, was a misnomer. Wasn't it? At least, what I recalled from police-procedural stories was that sodium pentothal and its ilk were basically anti-anxiety meds. They lowered inhibitions. Reduced or eliminated fears. Suppressed higher cortical functions, in theory making it harder to sustain a lie. (Good one, Mr. Twain.) They could be disorienting. They did not so much force truth-telling as make a person want to please. At one time, psychiatrists had used the meds to treat PTSD and the like. Under the guidance of a skilled practitioner, a drugged subject would confirm what the questioner already knew.
And when the questioner didn't know the truth? Drugged subjects in the main still answered with whatever a questioner signaled, intentionally or not, he expected. And so, shrinks wielding sodium pentothal, persistently probing and hinting about abuse to otherwise traumatized child patients, had once gotten a bunch of innocent parents and daycare workers thrown into prison as abusers.
Good thing I didn't read only fiction.
"What was in the glass bottle?" Darin asked.
"The bottle with the bomb? I don't know."
"Why a bomb and a bottle?"
Were my arms not impossibly heavy, I'd have shrugged. "My guess? The explosives were to discourage any attempt, if the thing were found, to move or disable it. If so, the plan worked."
"And the company? Do they know what was in the bottle?"
"I don't see how. The device hadn't gone off when the crew-rotation ship arrived. Everyone abandoned the base."
That was truthful—as far as it went. But auditors flew from rock to rock in single-person shi
ps. I had remained behind in my ship after the miners evacuated, remotely monitoring the deserted base through cameras left inside. Within a few days of the device going off, every sort of plastic, rubber, and synthetic fiber . . . dissolved. Including the nylon layer of backup pressure suits that had been left behind. The base itself retained atmosphere—the airlock was gasket-free, its shaped-metal hatches pressing like springs against the metal frame—but anyone who had stayed behind, or who entered the base afterward, would have been trapped.
Bottom line (and that's what we accountants deal in), I knew what the stuff dispersed by the bomb did. But was it a potent, if selective, corrosive gas? Plastic-loving, fast-reproducing bacteria? Plastic-hating, self-replicating nanites? Did anyone know what, precisely (beyond, perhaps, more of Darin's biotech handiwork), it was? No.
What I did know was that determining what had been set loose was impossible absent venturing inside the stricken base—and that, no simple undertaking. During the hasty preparations for my trip to Earth I'd overheard talk at company headquarters about how they hoped, someday, to regain use of the mine. The thinking had yet to advance beyond generalities, involving a custom-built robot cum mobile laboratory and a hermetic barrier to encase both bot and the mine's airlock. Remotely operated by techies—outside the barrier on the asteroid's barren surface—the robot would enter the base. Unless and until testing identified the contagion and someone crafted a way to neutralize it, that robot would stay sealed within. And short of constructing a new base from scratch, all the precious platinum on that rock would remain in the ground.
"I don't see how," I repeated.
Darin shook his head. "If the company had Dad's computer, they must know what was in the bottle."
For once in this interrogation, I got to speak the unvarnished truth. "The vid ordered Les to digitally shred everything after he'd deployed the device. He did destroy the recipe files used to print it and whatever was in it. I suppose he couldn't bring himself to delete the vid, because that might have been the last he ever saw of you." As, in fact, it had been.
"You must have a theory," Darin pressed.
Grantville Gazette, Volume 73 Page 23
