Ghost Planet

by Sharon Lynn Fisher

  Chilling how similar—and yet opposite—this benefits comment was to the one Murphy had made a few weeks ago in camp.

  “You’ll need an influential supporter to implement something like that,” I said.

  Mitchell laughed. “That’s not going to be a problem.”

  The corridor ended in front of a narrow stairway. She stopped and turned to me. “There’s someone staying with us who’s asked to meet you. I think he’ll make a believer out of you.”

  I’d never forgotten the conversation I’d overheard my first day at the institute, between Mitchell and one of her clients. Was I going to meet her patron?

  “Who is it?”

  “I’ll let him introduce himself. If I were you I’d be on my best behavior. He’s asked me to turn you over to him when you and I have concluded our little project.”

  This reminder of just how high the stakes were in this game hit me like a frigid blast of air.

  Mitchell guided me to the top of the stairs and knocked on a door. It was opened by a very tall man, fiftyish, smartly dressed and smiling. Slender, angular, and good-looking, he had a tanned complexion, long nose, and short brown hair. His face was immediately familiar to me, but I struggled to place him.

  “Hello, Maria. And Elizabeth, at last. Please come in.” He stepped aside, and Mitchell led me into the richly furnished apartment.

  She slipped a key from her pocket and released my restraints. “I’ll leave you to it, John. Call for a guard when you’re finished here. I don’t want her going anywhere on her own.”

  “Of course,” he said with a nod. “Thank you for indulging me, doctor.”

  Mitchell smiled, and it was a different kind of smile than the ones I’d seen on her before. It was warm … genuine. I felt sure this was the client who’d been talking with her at the institute—a tall man with a slight accent. Mitchell had used the same tone with him.

  But I hadn’t gotten a look at that man’s face. Why was he so familiar?

  Mitchell closed the door behind her, and I stood rubbing my wrists as I scanned the room. More overstuffed furniture, a dining table set for two, low classical music playing over the sound system. A picture window provided a view of the lake and grounds.

  “Please relax, Elizabeth,” the man said. “I’m a friend.”

  I stared at him. “Whose friend?”

  “Yours, I assure you.”

  I waited for him to say more, but he just stood watching me.

  “You don’t recognize me, do you?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “I feel like I should.”

  “Well, most of the photos of me were taken on Earth. I’ve lost weight here, and finally got rid of the beard.” He reached a hand out to me. “John Ardagh.”

  My mouth fell open and my hand reached out mechanically. I struggled to reconcile this sudden revelation with the image I had of Ardagh as Earth’s altruistic benefactor.

  “So you’re the money behind detachment research.” No wonder Mitchell enjoyed so much autonomy. “But then, I guess you’re the money behind everything.”

  Ardagh laughed. “Not anymore. We have public funding, corporate funding, funding generated by the planet’s own resources—any flavor of funding you care to name. I’m basically a figurehead over a bloated, unwieldy board of directors that is completely out of touch with the reality on the ground here. But I do still have a personal fortune, and a few side projects that are near and dear to my heart—like detachment.”

  I frowned. “I don’t understand why someone like you needs to bring in someone like Mitchell. You have hundreds of scientists on the ERP payroll. Unless…” I swallowed. “Unless you don’t want anyone to know what you’re up to.”

  “ERP had a Symbiont Studies team, once upon a time,” he said, unruffled. “It started out small and shrank to nonexistent as the staff kept going back to Earth. Problematic, studying beings that are inescapable, deemed to be dangerous, and that constantly remind you of a painful loss. That’s where Maria’s proven invaluable.”

  “Because she has no heart, no conscience, and isn’t afraid of anyone, you mean.”

  Ardagh smiled, gesturing me toward one of the fat chairs by the window. “Don’t be so quick to assume you have all the answers, Elizabeth.”

  I sat down and he settled on the sofa across from me. “Why don’t you give me the answers I’m lacking,” I said. “Is your board aware of your goals for detachment?”

  “I certainly hope not, but again you’re jumping to conclusions.” He folded his hands and gazed out at the lake. “The irony of it—all this money I’ve given to Maria’s company, only to have the answer come from a symbiont. Mind you she tried to steal the credit from you, but I know what’s been going on in your camp. I know very well who unlocked the secret to detachment.”

  Concealing my alarm, I replied cautiously in case he was fishing. “What do you mean?”

  His eyes came back to my face. “I’ve been funding Blake Kenner’s colony for the last six months. I believe in keeping a close eye on my investments.”

  “What?” So much for concealment. “Why would you do that?”

  “A smart investor hedges his bets. I wasn’t convinced Maria was creative enough to solve detachment. I found Devil’s Rock the same way most of its residents did—long hours trolling the Net for oblique references to ghost sanctuaries. I set up a phantom bank account for Blake in New Seattle, and I gave him pretty much whatever he asked for. Unfortunately his agenda was on a collision course with my own, and he didn’t have much more imagination than Maria.”

  I could hardly believe it, and I wondered if he was playing some kind of game with me. The layers of manipulation were staggering.

  “We must be talking about huge sums of money. I know the project is important to you, but—”

  “I don’t give a fuck about ERP.”

  I stared at him, astonished. “You founded ERP.”

  “True. More or less.”

  He might be crazier than Mitchell. “Why do you care about detachment if you don’t care about ERP?”

  Ardagh gave me a sympathetic smile. “If you’ll bear with me a moment, I think that will become clear.”

  I sank back in the chair, my fingernails digging into its fat arms.

  “I relocated here with my wife, Ruth, in the earliest days of the Ghost Protocol. We quarreled over it—she cried for weeks—but I didn’t make my fortune by blindly trusting other people to do their jobs. I did care about ERP in the beginning, for all the right reasons. But I’m a businessman, Elizabeth. I’ve been riding the green technology wave for more than two decades. Ardagh 1 looked to be the ultimate green enterprise—if we could get on top of the alien problem.”

  I remembered Murphy describing how Ardagh had recruited him from Trinity. How he’d made Murphy believe in ERP, persuading him to relocate and help fight the greatest threat to its success. Murphy was the one who’d come to Ardagh 1 “for all the right reasons.”

  “After we arrived, we made a brief stop in New Seattle for a tour of the counseling center. Then we boarded a private shuttle for New Dublin, hoping to be settled in our new home before we had to deal with ghosts. An hour into the flight, somewhere over Everglade Isles, gale-force winds started up out of nothing and hurled us into the swamp. When I woke, Ruth was still unconscious, hanging half out of the torn hull. I seemed to have avoided even a scratch. What was left of our ship had lodged in the branches of a huge cypress, over an alligator-infested swamp. We were there nearly a week by the time they found and rescued us.”

  I frowned in confusion. “I thought your wife died in that accident.”

  Ardagh stretched his long legs in front of him as he leaned back against the sofa. “No, I did.”

  It clicked into place with a shock like a physical blow. I sat straight up in my chair.

  “You’re a ghost!”

  “I figured it out that first day—saw my own body hanging from a branch a few meters lower. I climbed down and kicked it
loose, and it splashed into the swamp. The alligators made short work of it. When my wife woke I told her she was my ghost. I told her I’d take care of her, but she had to keep in the background when we were with others—that those were the rules here. God bless her, she never questioned.”

  “Jesus,” I murmured, aghast. What kind of creature was this? Some relative of those swamp dwellers in his story. “How have you kept it a secret all this time? Or have you?”

  Was it possible Mitchell knew? No, she hated us. She would have exposed him.

  “I immediately moved us outside New Dublin, not far from here actually. I conduct most of my business remotely. I really had no trouble until they installed those scanners in all the counseling centers and administrative buildings. I’m allowed to bypass them of course, but sometimes it’s awkward. People think I’m eccentric. Ruth follows me predictably as a shadow, but I’m always worried she’ll get confused and wander through one.”

  “Where is she now?” I asked quietly.

  “She’s here. Sedated in the bedroom. I intend to detach eventually, but she could expose me. For now it’s safer to keep her close.”

  I took a deep breath and fitted the pieces together. “So you’re a symbiont posing as a colonist, and you paid both Mitchell and Blake to help you find a way to detach. But you’re not ready for detachment. What is your larger objective?”

  He raised his eyebrows, surprised. “You don’t see it? When all of this has played out—when we’re no longer dependent on them—we’ll force them off. Make them live on their own fucked-up world instead of fucking up ours. And when they come begging for our resources, we’ll make them pay for them.”

  Mitchell and Ardagh were playing the same game from opposite ends. When they met in the middle, one of the two species would take over the planet with no care or consideration for the other. As I sat studying his face, I wondered how much of this was about ejecting the colonists and how much was about John Ardagh getting back his own. If he succeeded, his board and investors would be gone, and he’d be in a position to soak up all the profits.

  “Why are you telling me all this, John?”

  He rested an ankle on his knee, sighing. “Because I’m tired of doing it alone. I need a partner who can keep up with me. Despite Maria’s accomplishments here, I don’t believe she can pull off planetwide detachment. I believe you can. You’ve been doing it already, at Devil’s Rock.”

  I shook my head, grasping for something to say that might influence such a ruthless man. “You don’t understand—” Suddenly I felt a tickling against my leg. My hand flew to the spot and something squirmed. I gave a startled squeal.

  He eyed me with concern. “Are you all right?”

  “I—could I use your bathroom? I feel a little ill.”

  “Of course. It’s just through there. I’ll call and have our dinner sent up. Maybe that will help.”

  I walked through the door he’d indicated and pushed down my pants. There was nothing on my leg, but I saw something that looked like root fibers poking out of the fabric of one of the hip pockets. I reached inside and pulled out four flower stalks.

  What the hell?

  It looked like some kind of herb, with clumps of tiny white flowers that grew in an umbrella shape. It reminded me of fennel. But it didn’t smell like fennel. Something tugged at my memory—a plant that was a relative of fennel, and Queen Anne’s Lace …

  A dangerous plant. I stuck the stalks back in my pocket and washed my hands. Staring at my reflection, I took a few steadying breaths. All the color had drained from my face.

  Heading back out to the living room, I found a man unloading plates from a tray onto the dining table. He finished and left the apartment without a word or glance.

  “Please sit down, Elizabeth,” John called from the kitchen. “I’m sorry you’re not feeling well. Rest assured this pregnancy was not my idea.” My eyes jerked toward him. He had his back to me and was uncorking a bottle of wine. “If I didn’t need to keep Maria happy right now, I’d help you get it taken care of.”

  I wasn’t sure if the planet or my own will had materialized the weapon in my pocket, but the decision of whether to use it was mine alone. I had only a few seconds. I took out the four herb stalks and dropped two onto each of our salads.

  “Whose idea was it to get me pregnant?” I asked as I sat down at the table.

  “ERP’s lead astrobiologist—a man with more grant money than sense, in my opinion. I think it was a pretty low priority for Maria until she realized it was an opportunity to both punish and control Dr. Murphy. But I was encouraged by her success with you, and I’ve awarded her a new contract to produce offspring from our detached symbionts. Reproductive ability is the next step in ensuring our self-sufficiency.” Ardagh smiled as he came to the table with the wine. “Maybe your next will be one of your own kind.”

  My hands moved to my belly and I ground my teeth together.

  He filled a glass for himself and glanced at me. I shook my head, and he sat down.

  “I know I’ve given you a lot to think about, Elizabeth. Why don’t we relax and have dinner before we continue our discussion.”

  Ardagh poured salad dressing from a small pitcher and handed it to me. My hand shook as I poured it over my own salad.

  “Flowers on salad,” he said, pushing leaves around with his fork. “I don’t understand the fascination. Do you know what this is?”

  He speared one of the stalks and held it up for my inspection. Fear shocked through me and my mouth went dry. I swallowed air.

  “Fennel, I think.”

  “Is it good?”

  “Sure, I like it. Tastes like licorice.”

  He stuck it in his mouth and chewed. “Not bad. But I don’t get the licorice.”

  My gaze fell to my own plate. Heart racing, I set the salad aside and pulled a bowl of stew forward, forcing myself to take a few bites.

  “Could you tell me what’s happened to the others they captured today?” I asked without looking at him. “A couple of them are close friends of mine.”

  “As far as I know they’re fine,” he replied, sipping his wine. “There’s not enough room here to hold them indefinitely—Maria’s got them packed down in the basement—but as soon as we can arrange it we’ll ship the symbionts in the group off to join the others. We’ve started a colony for them, managed by Ardagh Agro, near one of those big wheat operations. Of course they’ll be freed eventually.”

  “What about the colonists?”

  “That’s trickier,” he said. I risked a peek at his salad plate and saw that it was empty. I broke into a sweat. “We don’t have a good solution yet. Unfortunately, the ones you’ve brought with you know too much for us to send them back to Earth. Maria and I agree about that, so at least for the short term, I have to find a place to house them. I’m considering sending them all back to your camp with a detail of security guards.”

  “Sort of like a concentration camp.” I actually hadn’t meant to say this out loud, but I was half out of my head with fear about what would happen next.

  John frowned at me. “You seem to forget, Elizabeth—they’re the oppressors on this world.”

  I folded my arms and rested them on the table. “Tell me something. How do you rationalize the fact we owe our existence to them being here? Has it occurred to you there might be a reason for the bonds between our species? That the planet may need the colonists here?”

  He stared at me, letting his spoon dangle as he thought about his reply. Then his face flushed deeply, and the spoon dropped to the floor.

  “John?”

  Ardagh’s eyes widened and he bolted upright. I launched out of my chair as he lunged across the table. He collapsed with a crash onto our dinner plates, his body thrashing and convulsing. One convulsion flipped him to the floor, and I watched in horror as the writhing intensified … and then broke off sharply.

  Bile rose in my throat. I swallowed the sick feeling and picked through the remains of our
dinner for the other two flower stalks, lifting them with a napkin and tucking them back into my pocket. Then I began searching the apartment for a less poetic weapon.

  Suddenly I remembered Peter.

  “If you’re still there, Peter, our original plan is trashed. We have to get out of here as soon as possible. I’m going to try to find the others. Go get Garvey. It’s time for plan B.”

  I found a handgun in the drawer of a desk by the window, much like the smaller guns in our camp arsenal. Despite the fact I’d killed a person with one, I’d known next to nothing about guns until my recent education along with the others at Devil’s Rock. I remembered this one as the squarish, matte-black pistol with a violent kick. There was an extra clip in the drawer and I stuck it in my pocket.

  I jumped as someone knocked on the door, three sharp raps.

  “John?”

  Shit, Mitchell!

  The knob turned. I pointed the pistol at the door.

  “John, I wonder if I could—”

  Mitchell gave a cry of shock and the security guard behind her reached for his weapon as he darted forward. I aimed at his legs and pulled the trigger, and he went down yelling.

  Mitchell turned and fled down the stairs and I ran after her, snatching the guard’s pistol off the floor as I passed.

  She reached the bottom before I did, and I jammed the extra gun into the back of my pants and launched at her. We crashed to the floor and I hooked my arm around her neck, shoving the pistol against her temple.

  “Get up,” I growled in her ear.

  “Calm down, Elizabeth,” she panted. “Think about your baby.”

  “You don’t want to fuck with me right now. I killed your patron. I killed Vasco. I’m getting good at this, and I’m tired of people threatening me and my family.”

  I staggered to my feet, half choking her as I pulled her up too, and she got her feet under her. At least for the moment, I seemed to have her convinced.

  “Where are the stairs to the basement?”

  “We have to go back to the lobby. There will be more guards.”