by M. D. Cooper
“Sounds like a plan,” Martin said, “and it’s better than lying here like beached whales, waiting to die. Moving would be a million times easier without these restraints, though. Can you turn over so I can get a good look at yours?”
Isa had to try several times before she finally found the strength and the right sequence of movements that allowed her to face away from Martin. She could hear him shuffling closer, then she felt a tugging.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to get some nano on them to see if it can cut through the straps. Getting my hands on them would be too tricky, so I’m using my mouth.”
“Just don’t waste any moisture,” Isa gave a single laugh at her joke.
Martin groaned, but Isa realized it wasn’t at her joke.
“Eamon tells me that my nano can’t cut through these straps…not in the next ten to twelve hours, at least. Looks like they’re actually military-grade—though normally used on the front with more slack between our ankles and wrists.”
Isa sighed. “Damn. Do you think this was always the Tyrians’ plan? To kidnap us?”
“Who knows? They did seem pretty salty when you told them we weren’t going with them today. Looks like they had something special in mind. Right now, I don’t care why we’re here. What we need to focus on is not being here.”
“Right,” Isa said. “I guess there’s no chance of you chewing through my restraints?”
“No way. The material’s tougher than overcooked calamari.”
“What?”
“Calamari. I’ll make it for you sometime, when we’re free again and back in Carthage—which, by the way, I doubt I’ll ever leave again. This experience is changing my mind about foreign travel.”
“Ugh, mine too,” said Isa. “And I’m going to have mixed feelings about that infomentary from now on, assuming I finish it.” She was facing a substantial segment of crystal. One of its edges was almost touching her nose. “Hey, I’ve thought of something. If your nano’s not enough, maybe we can rub our restraints against a crystal edge to cut through them.”
“Eamon says it’s pretty unlikely, but let’s try it anyway,” Martin said. “But let me take the first crack; you rest for a while.”
Isa heard him shuffling and panting behind her. She began to slowly work her way around in a semi-circle to see what he was doing. By the time she’d managed to move to a position that gave her a view, Martin had his back to a crystal’s low edge. He was straining with the exertion of sliding his restraints up and down the margin.
Isa didn’t hold out much hope that her idea would succeed—she recalled that the crystals weren’t particularly sharp, and the material the restraints were made from seemed to be practically indestructible.
“Martin,” she said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think that’s doing any good.”
“You’re probably right, but it gives me something to do.”
“We should save our strength for getting out of here.”
“Okay, I’m not going to argue. Eamon was telling me to quit, too.”
He stopped what he was doing and rested his head on the floor. He was pale, his hair was plastered to his head, and he looked exhausted.
“I’m so sorry I got you into this,” Isa said. “If I hadn’t had my stupid episode in here, you would be at your site on Knossos, growing and releasing your sea creatures.”
“And you would be alone here,” Martin countered. “Do you think I would want that?”
“I guess not.”
“And besides, I’d be stuck with Malcolm for…company. I much prefer you.”
“Even trapped in a hot, humid cave, kilometers below ground?”
“Even trapped in a hot, humid cave. This place is actually pretty spectacular, now I think about it. If I’d chosen to come here, I would love it.”
“But not right now?” Isa asked.
“Not so much.”
“Let’s try to get out of here, then.” The symptoms Isa had experienced the last time she’d been in the cave were doubling up. Her pulse was quickening, and her head pounded. They had to try to leave. “I don’t know which way to go, but I’m going to head up here. I already feel like a lump of cheese that’s been grated, and this way has the least bumps.”
Martin peered in the direction Isa was referring to. “Go for it. I’ll be right behind you.”
As she wriggled along, Isa imagined they must look like oversized caterpillars, fat and ready to turn into butterflies, trying to find a safe place to become cocoons. The thought reminded her of Martin’s comment about the ancient textile used for their bedsheets in their Athens hotel.
“Hey,” she gasped. “I think you were wrong about that fabric on our bed in Athens.”
“What?” Martin was below Isa’s feet. “What makes you say that? Now? Here?”
“How could anyone make a material out of cocoons?” Isa asked. “They’re too hard.” Growing up aboard a space-borne mining platform, Isa hadn’t seen many insects until she’d lived on Victoria. She still had a love/hate relationship with them, especially the flying kind, but she did know a little about them. A caterpillar’s transformation into a butterfly was a fascinating mystery to her.
“You’re thinking of chrysalises,” said Martin. “They hold developing butterflies. Moth larvae spin cocoons from silk.”
“Oh, right. Ow!” Isa’s head had struck a crystal.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Let’s take a rest though, huh?”
“Sure.”
Isa relaxed. Her shoulders, wrists, and ankles were balls of pain, and one side of her body felt raw where she’d scraped it along the ground, her sweat increasing the friction. She guessed that she and Martin had only moved a few meters, and they didn’t even know if they were heading in the right direction. She didn’t want to say it aloud, but it looked to her like their situation was desperate. Trying to escape was only a way to pass the time before they met the inevitable outcome.
Had Samuel and the others put them there for no other reason than to ensure slow, agonized deaths? Isa couldn’t guess what she had done to antagonize the Tyrians to such an extent. Though they all clearly had some hidden agenda, she didn’t think any of them were insane.
“Isa?” Martin said.
“Yeah?” She hoped he wasn’t going to suggest moving again just yet.
“You never said what happened to you the last time you were down here.”
“I didn’t?”
“No.”
“Uh….”
“If you don’t want to tell me, it’s okay.”
“I don’t mind, really,” she said, though her reply finished there.
Martin remained quiet, perhaps allowing the silence to stretch out so that she would fill it, or perhaps giving her an out if she still didn’t want to open up. Sweat dripped from her cheek and ran into her eyes. Their dire situation didn’t seem an appropriate time to tell Martin what she guessed was the source of her problems, but she couldn’t think of a better time, either, considering that they might not have much longer to live.
“To be honest, even I’m not sure exactly what happened to me,” she said.
“But you have an idea.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you avoid talking about it,” Martin said.
“I just don’t see any point. It can’t be fixed.”
“How do you know? Did you ask someone about it?”
Martin was moving again, shuffling up toward her. When Isa looked down, she could see the top of his head near her knees.
“No, I didn’t,” Isa said. “I guess what I mean is I don’t want it to be fixed.”
“Why not?”
Isa tensed up, and it had nothing to do with her current circumstances. She hadn’t ever told anyone what she was about to tell Martin. If she was going to tell him. She hadn’t yet decided.
Okay, she told herself. This is it.
She opened her mouth to speak, but Marti
n said, “Can you hear something?”
Aside from the noises they made, the cave had been utterly silent. Isa listened intently.
“Yes,” she whispered.
She could hear the voices, far off but steadily growing louder. People were approaching.
OVERWATCH
STELLAR DATE: 03.22.8937 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Tyrian Constabulary Pinnace Darting Fire
REGION: Tyre, New Canaan System
The Tyrian constabulary’s pinnace was hovering in the sky above the central mountain range to the north of Ushu.
Chief Kang had explained that with a respectable stealth system and grav drives, the pinnace was the one piece of new equipment her small force had managed to requisition. The rest of their ships and equipment had already seen considerable use back at Kapteyn’s Star.
Usef had considered calling down the Sark’s pinnace, but the constabulary’s was larger, and its grav drives more efficient.
Chief Kang had also made the point that her force ought to be involved in the operation, as they knew the world far better than Erin and the Marines.
She’d also brought a half dozen of her officers along and one of her pilots was at the helm of the ship.
Erin spread the holo image wider with her fingertips. The light that identified the cave entrance shone out from a wide opening in the mountainside. A clearing lay in front of it where pinnaces and shuttles could land, though there was just the one at present.
The map didn’t identify any other installations or habitations nearby. The area was just a tourist zone.
“They’re spelunking?” Erin said to Usef. “At night?”
“Night or day,” he replied. “It’s all the same underground.”
“I guess,” she said. “But caving at night isn’t what you would normally do after work, is it? Or directly after arriving on a long flight from another planet?”
“No,” the major agreed.
“Any guesses why they’ve come here specifically?” Erin asked the room.
Neither Chief Kang nor her officers had any answers. Onyx had already related all the details she had on Samuel Jefferson, Rahmin Butler, and Ada Grey. All three had arrived on Tyre soon after leaving stasis, and from that moment onward, they’d done nothing to interest the authorities. They seemed to be upstanding citizens, following their professions of vintner, servitor specialist, and sanitation engineer.
Onyx—who was tied into the pinnace’s audible systems—spoke up,
Erin recalled Martin’s message that Isa had been in some kind of incident and had been taken to hospital. That must have been the same rescue Onyx had just referred to, and now it formed another link to Pippa’s Tyrian acquaintances. The connection seemed too much of a coincidence to be meaningless, but she couldn’t imagine how Isa could be involved with Pippa’s machinations.
“I’m going to reach out to Isa,” she said to Usef. “I wasn’t going to tell her I was here, but it won’t hurt just to speak to her. Maybe she can tell us something about Pippa’s friends.”
Erin connected to the planet’s public networks and searched for Isa, but couldn’t find her. She tried Martin next, but he seemed to be missing also.
said Erin.
“Maybe the planetary engineer, Tony, might have some answers,” said Chief Kang. “I’d like to know why he was interested in those people.”
“That doesn’t have to be a problem,” Usef said.
“You’re right,” Erin said. “We can send him our questions via a packet.”
“Do that,” he suggested. “I’ll also send a message to the ship to come back and drop him off. Given his knowledge of Tyre, it would be good to have him on hand, and we will have only delayed the passengers for half a day.”
“Okay,” said Erin, rather enjoying the Marine’s ability to simply order civilian ships to do his bidding. “Let’s do that. And while we’re waiting for Tony to return, what do we do about Pippa and company? Do we follow them into the cave system and try to find out what they’re doing?”
“We could go in with stealth suits,” Usef said, “but caves are often hard to navigate without making a lot of noise, even with military-grade stealth. For the moment, it’s best if we stick to surveillance. If they hear us, they’ll immediately be suspicious; it doesn’t seem like many others come out here.”
“So then what are they doing in there?” Erin asked in frustration.
The knowledge that Isa, and possibly Martin too, had somehow become involved with these dangerous people made her deeply uneasy. What had been a professional investigation was morphing into something much more personal.
“They’ll have to come out sooner or later,” Usef said. “Maybe what they do next will give us some more information we can act on. In the meantime, all we can do is wait.”
“I guess so,” Erin said, resigning herself to the fact. “While they’re doing whatever it is they have to do, I’m going to go over everything we have on Pippa’s friends. I might be able to read something between the lines.”
Erin went to a seat in the corner of the pinnace’s central cabin and settled in for the wait.
She studied the details on Samuel Jefferson first. Like Pippa and the other two Tyrians, he was originally from Earth. Before booking passage on the Intrepid, he’d been a renowned carpenter-sculptor who had created functional works of art from driftwood. He’d also been a vocal member of a movement that advocated population control and a return to a simpler style of living.
The popularity of Samuel’s artwork and his stated interest in teaching others was a part of his acceptance to the colony, but it still seemed odd to Erin that he’d elected to go outsystem. He seemed like a real traditionalist, more the type to remain in Sol.
That he’d chosen Tyre as his home when he’d come out of stasis made total sense; as the least-altered planet, it was closest to its original state of the four habitable worlds of New Canaan. Erin guessed that it had appealed to the man’s conservative sensibilities. But Tyre’s low population meant that Samuel Jefferson wouldn’t be able to recreate his lucrative artistic living there, however much driftwood was freely available along the planet’s extensive coastlines.
Instead, he’d become a vintner. Erin checked the procedures. He’d claimed the maximum allocation of suitable land, and soon afterward, he’d purchased more.
Erin paused. Where had Samuel Jefferson gotten the money to buy more land?
It took two or three years to bring wine to market from scratch, even when farming genetically enhanced, fast-growing vines. Where had the money come from
that had allowed Samuel to expand his operation? Erin searched the Link, but couldn’t find any records of accounts for his business.
Erin sighed, wondering how long that would take.
Given the location of the two planets in their orbits, that could take about forty minutes. Erin hoped it wouldn’t be necessary.
She brought up a map of Tyre and input the coordinates of his vineyards. The pin-prick dots of light lit up in a range of locations—an extremely wide range. Samuel Jefferson owned land on nearly all the landmasses of the planet.
Erin studied the location data, looking up information on the soils and climates. Were these viable vineyards or not? She didn’t know much about grape-growing, so that was something she queued up to query Onyx about.
But the facts were that the man not only owned far more land than he should, but the land was also spread across most of Tyre. Erin couldn’t think of a single reason why it might make sense to grow grapes in so many different areas of the planet. Logistically and economically, the practice held no advantages that she understood. She had a strong suspicion that if she were to visit any Jefferson vineyard, it would be devoid of vines.
So what was the real reason for Samuel’s land holdings?
