by Jucha, S. H.
-3-
Tatia hurried to keep pace with Alex and Julien as they entered the Security Directorate. Alerted to the group’s arrival, the twins met them in the entry hall and escorted them to Henry’s holding cell.
As Alain signaled the cell door open, the twins sought to place themselves between Alex and Henry, but despite Tatia’s warning, they weren’t quick enough.
“Look who came to —” Henry managed to say, while getting up from his bunk before being hoisted into the air by his neck. He might have tried to speak, but it wouldn’t have been intelligible, not with Alex’s vice-like grip around his throat.
“I need some answers, and I need them now,” Alex growled, his face twisted in a snarl and close to Henry’s. “You talk, tell me what I want to know, and you live to be tried for your crimes.”
Alex let Henry’s feet touch the floor, but he kept his hands around Henry’s throat and his face close. Freed from Alex’s harsh grip, Henry dragged in great gulps of air.
“What did I do?” Henry managed to cough out plaintively.
“My sister and two of her friends went missing tonight, and I want to know where your people took them. Talk or I hoist you back in the air until you turn the color of the deep dark.”
Behind Alex, Tatia and the twins were arguing via their implants at what point they should interfere with the president when Julien interrupted them.
the SADE sent, having monitored their comms. After a pause, Julien added the thought,
“Someone took Christie?” Henry asked, looking genuinely perplexed. Then the extent of his personal danger occurred to him. “No, no, no … it wouldn’t be my people,” Henry protested, holding his palms out in supplication. “We know what Christie and her friends look like. We wouldn’t touch them. That’s way too much adz.”
“Adz?” Alex queried.
“Yeah, adz … administration pressure … Terran Security Forces … you people … adz,” Henry explained.
“Who do you work for?” Alex asked, relaying the question sent by Étienne.
“I can’t … ulp,” Henry began, but Alex’s fingers cut off his windpipe. “Okay, okay,” he croaked, and Alex lessened the pressure. “But I do my time for any convictions here on Haraken. I don’t get sent back to New Terra.”
“You answer my every question honestly and your information proves out, you can remain incarcerated here on Haraken. What you do after your time is up will be up to you,> Alex said, releasing Henry and stepping back.
Henry eased down on his bunk and Alain passed him a cup of water, which he choked down before he spoke. “Ultimately, we work for Roz O’Brien, but there are layers between us and him.”
“How many of you are on Haraken?” Tatia asked, hoping Alex would allow others to interrogate Henry while he cooled off.
“Five of us.”
“I require their names,” Julien stated.
“I don’t know their names … wait, wait,” Henry yelped, as Alex started to close in on him. “Honestly, I don’t know their names. We use code names. Three others are called Fangs, Legs, and Busty.”
“Who are you?” Étienne asked.
“I’m Wheezy,” Henry replied, ducking his head in embarrassment.
“You named yourself Wheezy,” Tatia asked, shaking her head in disbelief.
“Our leader … she’s the fifth one … she named us, calling us the first things that came to her mind, you know. I had a stuffy nose that day. We were told to call her Cherry.”
“Not exactly names I can search,” Julien commented drily.
“Where do we find your leader and these other three?” Alain asked.
Julien and the humans, especially Henry, were grateful to see Alex step back. Tatia kept Alex in the corner of her eye. Never thought I would be so anxious to see Alex start pacing, she thought.
“What? They’re gone,” Henry said, as if he spouted common sense. “The moment he, or him,” he blurted, pointing to one, then the other of the twins, “chased me, I sent an exit alarm.”
“Gone … where and how?” Alex asked, his body tensing again.
“Escape route,” Henri replied, glancing toward the people in the cell, appealing to them to believe him and keep the president away from him. “The exit routine is itself a secret. When I sent the emergency signal, they would have gone to our leader, and she would have snuck them off planet.”
“Earlier, you stated your people wouldn’t have taken Christie and her friends. How can you be sure? You were in here at the time they were taken,” Tatia said.
“I told you … we know better. Cherry said we were to play it low and slow on Haraken … take our time … build up customers. It was supposed to be a long-haul job, see?”
Alex stepped close to Henry, sat down on his haunches, his forearms on his thighs, and regarded Henry like a dead insect on his transport’s view shield.
Henry stared at the massive shoulders bunched against Alex’s neck, the arteries visibly distended by the pumping blood.
“I don’t like your answers,” Alex stated flatly.
“What? Noooo … it’s the truth … all of it. I swear!” Henry’s eyes pleaded with Alex and the others to believe him.
“But, Henry, there’s this little problem. Shall I explain it to you?” Alex asked in a too quiet voice.
Henry bobbed his head emphatically in reply.
“None of what you’re saying helps me get my sister back,” Alex said, continuing to stare at Henry, as if the man didn’t really exist.
“But I said we wouldn’t take her. We know …” Henry stopped in the middle of his plea, as a light went on in his eyes.
“Tell me, Henry,” Alex said softly, the intensity of his stare betraying the tension coiled inside.
“There’s a new gang in Espero. Came in a month or so ago and set up a private club. Much too big a move, too quick, if you know what I mean … but they’re pretty aggressive. Anyway, they’re new to the planet. They might not know the girls or might not care.”
“Where do we find this club?” Alex asked.
“Please, please … I don’t know,” Henry said, tears forming in his eyes.
“Okay,” Henry replied with a hiccup, grateful to have anyone else asking the questions.
“These people with the club, who do they work for?” Tatia asked.
“Their top man is Craze. That’s what people call him, just not to his face. His real name is Peto Toyo.”
“And where do we find these people … Roz O’Brien and Peto Toyo?”
For a moment, Henry looked at Tatia in confusion and then checked out everyone else, who stood expecting an answ
er. “The moons of Ganymede … I thought everyone knew that.”
Alex, Tatia, and Julien left Henry’s cell while they discussed what to do with the information.
The twins ensured Henry was comfortable and then signaled the close of his cell door as they left.
“The SADEs have searched all visitor entry records for the past year, including visuals of groups of five people, who might match the strange names of Cherry, Wheezy, Fangs, Legs, and Busty. The last name gave us the best indication of the characteristics for our search, but we’ve failed to discover a match,” Julien announced. For one of the few times in his long life, Julien felt the SADEs’ incredible capabilities were failing them when it mattered most.
“We have some threads to pull on,” Tatia said, as if the problem required a Terran Security Forces (TSF) interdiction, where her experience as an ex-major could come into play. “We know there’s a club with people who report to Ser Toyo.”
“It has to be a hidden location,” Alain said, “or we would have been aware of it by now.”
“Probably invitation only … word of mouth. … teenagers and young people and their secrets,” Alex mused, while he paced in a circle around everyone else. “Certainly, none of us are going to get an invitation.”
“An item of note is that none of the young women communicated anything about what they found,” Julien said.
“Comms isolation,” the twins announced simultaneously.
“So if the girls were in the club, their proof is in their implants,” Tatia said.
“You said threads, Tatia … plural,” Alex said, reminding her.
“Yes, we know that Wheezy’s people … I’m sorry. I can’t call a grown man Wheezy. Henry’s people ran an exit route, and someone helped them get off planet. Let’s get the details of the escape route from Henry, and see who we locate at the other end.”
“Julien, you and your associates need to focus on locating that club,” Alex ordered. “Tatia, use your resources and examine all ship traffic. If the girls were taken off planet, we have a narrow window of time to search when that happened and that includes when Henry’s compatriots jumped. See if we can determine the likely ships these interlopers used. Étienne and Alain, you talk to Henry, get the details of the exit contact, and track it.”
When the twins nodded their understanding, Alex stared hard at them. “When you go, you take troopers armed with rifles, and Z in his Cedric Broussard suit. You have no idea of what you may be walking into … think Clayton Downing.” The mention of the man, who worked so hard to destroy the Méridien’s efforts to help New Terra and kill Alex, gave the twins a new perspective on who they might be facing.
“We might be missing something,” Tatia said, but she held up a hand to forestall any questions. She resumed pacing, trying to get a top-down view of the three days’ past events. “We aren’t asking ourselves a critical question,” she said, stopping and extending a finger. “Not just what ships the interlopers are using to enter and exit, but who helped them do it?”
“A judicious question, your strategist,” Julien said, giving Tatia a bow, as would an ancient Venetian courtier.
Tatia mimed a quick curtsy, smiling at Julien for his compliment.
“An inside job! These dirty dogs have someone on the juice,” Julien announced, a fedora canted at a cocky angle appearing on his head. When the humans stared at him in confusion, he said, “Apologies … a Terran detective vid. The interlopers have extorted or bribed a Haraken, who has access to visitor IDs and passage approval.”
“More than likely,” Alex agreed. “I doubt our Librans would be so easily turned. “Julien, concentrate on New Terran emigrants first for a likely candidate. An implant and cell-gen injections are no guarantee of someone adopting Méridien morals.”
* * *
Alex and Renée sat in the gazebo, the lights of the moons glistening off the breaking wave tops rushing toward the shore. Alex updated his father and mother, regretting that he had no good news for them.
The late-night air was heavily laden with mist. Haraken’s climate conditions changed dramatically over the fifteen years since founding, due primarily to the efforts of Benjamin Diaz, known to most Harakens as Rainmaker and to his close friends as Little Ben.
As Minister of Mining, Rainmaker orchestrated the delivery of billions of kilograms of water, trapped as asteroid ice, to Haraken’s oceans. Over the nearly one-and-a-half decades since the planet was resettled, the ice asteroids, shooting through the atmosphere, built dense cloud layers, which filtered Hellébore’s fierce rays and cooled the land’s surface temperature. Strong convection winds, carrying moisture, circled the globe and changed the face of the planet. Rains across the lands, once a rare surprise, were now delivered almost daily during the wet season, which lasted a third of the year.
Four years ago, the Haraken populace attempted to elect Alex for a second, ten-year term, but he adamantly refused, saying, “The last thing any society needs is a president for life or a stale president. The compromise reached with the Assembly elected Alex to a final, five-year term, and he requested the Assembly enact an irrevocable law that said he couldn’t serve another term as president, which the Assembly politely refused to draft.
Teague, now a ten year old, sat between his parents, their arms around him. First and foremost, he was acutely aware of a problem, since he had never been allowed to stay up so late. “Where did Christie go?” he asked. Teague had overheard the concern about his aunt and tried multiple times to contact her without success. That had never happened before. It reminded him of the several Swei Swee youngling friends he had lost to oceanic predators, and the young boy experienced a level of fear the like of which he hadn’t felt before.
“We don’t know,” Renée said, hugging her son. “But we’re looking for her. Everyone is looking for her.”
“You’ll find Tante Christie, won’t you, Dad?” Teague asked.
“I’m going to do everything I can to ensure she’s safe, Teague,” Alex said, lovingly stroking his son’s thick head of hair.
The family grew quiet, alone with their thoughts and fears. With the passing of the years, Alex had come to believe that his family following him to Haraken was a fortunate event. Initially, he worried for their safety, living on an uninhabited and arid planet without infrastructure. But as the capital city developed, the population transferred planetside from the Libran city-ships, and the rains increased, his concerns melted away. That his sister and her friends would be kidnapped and spirited off Haraken, after all that had been done to develop a strong and stable society marked by encouraging individual pursuits and personal freedom, seemed tragically ironic.
* * *
Late in the evening, Julien left it to the other SADEs to search the records for Harakens who might have facilitated the comings and goings of unregistered visitors. After their Idona children were put to bed, Julien spoke with Cordelia about the facts uncovered in the past few days, few as they were. Within the home, Cordelia and Julien had adopted the habit of speaking to each other audibly to give the children a sense of human parenting.
That habit came with a drawback. Once a tunnel rat always a tunnel rat, and rats have keen ears. While Julien spoke of the search for the girls, the small puzzle pieces gleaned from Henry, and the Directorate record search, Edmas and Jodlyne listened fro
m around the corner.
The two Earther teenagers were a package deal of ten orphans, who had adopted the SADEs as parent figures. For Edmas and Jodlyne, their hero was Z, but they lived with Julien and Cordelia, where they could help with the care of the eight younger orphans. Nikki Fowler, the station’s director, had urged the SADEs to take them rather than have them lost to the United Earth (UE) massive and poorly administered orphanage system.
Edmas tapped Jodlyne on the shoulder when the conversation in the main room quieted, and he signaled her to retreat. In his room, they chatted about what they heard.
“You remember, two days ago, when that boy offered you a chance to go to what he called a sizzle place?” Edmas asked.
“Yeah, he said it was a place you could be free … you could let go. You think that’s the club Julien and Cordelia are trying to find?”
“Think so. Did you, by any chance, keep an image of that boy?”
“Got him up here,” Jodlyne replied, tapping her temple, proud of her implant prowess. “We could do this like in the old days aboard the station.” Under Edmas’ stern gaze, her excitement died as quickly as it had erupted. “Sorry,” she said meekly.
“We talk to Julien, Cordelia, and Z tomorrow and tell them what we think. Let’s see what they have to say. Now get to bed. We’ll have a tough enough time tomorrow explaining how we learned about the club.”
“Oh,” Jodlyne said, giggling and realizing she hadn’t even thought of that and would have been caught off guard like an amateur tunnel rat waylaid by militia in a station’s brightly lit corridor.
-4-
Four years ago and soon after returning from Sol, Cordelia, Julien, and Z sought to introduce the ten orphans from Idona Station to Teague and the Swei Swee. The homes of the Racines, Cordelia and Julien, and the Swei Swee, which were built into the cliff sides, bordered the same section of coastline.
