Ellie Quin Book 2: The World According to Ellie Quin (10 page)

Ellie whipped out a bottle of Spectora, popped the seal and thrust it towards him. ‘With this first taste, I assure you, things will never be the same,’ she said, the foolish leer on her face beginning to cause her cheeks to ache. ‘You and me are gonna be business partners.’

She cringed inside. His eyebrows flickered hopefully, as once more his gaze ran up her legs to her face, in one evaluating sweep and then finally to the bottle of pop in front of him. He reached out for it.

‘Tell me what flavour you think it is, okay?’ she said.

He nodded. ‘Whatever,’ and then casually chugged a mouthful from the bottle. He swilled it around his mouth for a moment before his face locked into an expression of concentration.

‘That’s pretty good….what is that? A sort of ice-cream flavour?’

Ellie nodded. ‘Could be….what else?’

His eyes widened with surprise as inside his mouth micro-bacterial war raged and the casualties on both sides began mounting up. ‘Hey, the flavour just changed, now it’s sort of….what?…sort of, fruity I think.’

Oh God! I think I’ve got a customer!

Ellie laughed. ‘Great isn’t it? It just keeps changing from second to second.’

The man took a second mouthful and once more swilled it around his mouth. ‘Boy…there’s another flavour coming through. Its….woah…weird….sort of a savoury flavour?’

Savoury? That was odd, she thought. So far the various sensations she had heard people announcing on trying the drink had all been sweet and sugary. The one bottle from their start-up stock she had consumed last night with Jez had been a kaleidoscope of sugary, fruity, creamy flavours. No savoury ones though.

The man’s nose wrinkled slightly. ‘Euuch….sort of meaty….smokey, like flame-grilled proto-meat. That’s, just…are you sure that’s right?’ The man looked at her with an expression of bemusement, that quickly evolved into nascent disgust. ‘Ughh, this is turning…! It tastes like – like –’ he looked up at her. ‘Like shit!’

‘Oh come on. It’s not that bad, is it?’

‘No I mean it actually tastes like faeces, you know? Really, like shit.’

Ellie’s smile suddenly felt out of place as he spat the drink out onto the ground. ‘You’re kidding me right?’ He sputtered. ‘You’re earning a thousand creds a week selling this bottled arse cream?’

‘Um, yeah, it’s…uhh…it’s really popular,’ she muttered.

‘Achhh. I can still fregging taste it! Have you got any water so I can rinse my mouth out?’

‘Errr…no, sorry,’ she answered. ‘So you umm, you really
don’t
like it, I guess?’

‘Are you kidding?’ he said, and then retched. ‘Uhhh, this is disgusting. Really…oh man, I think I’m going to hewdle!’

The man pushed past Ellie and lurched to the side of the street. He bent over a pile of rubbish and splattered it with a hosing of vomit.

Ellie looked at Jez, who had frozen mid-sales pitch and watched the man bent double, heaving and retching painfully. Jez looked at her, eyes widened, as if to say
what did you just do to him?

The man finally took a moment to fight back the nausea and look up at Ellie. ‘You! You crazy stupid bitch! What the fregg is that stuff?’

Ellie looked back at Jez, wondering what the exit strategy was. A spasm caused the man to shudder and he vomited again. After he had finished jettisoning another load, he turned back and took a couple of menacing steps towards her.

‘I’m going to get a fregging marshal on to you girl! Somebody call a marshal!’ he shouted out dizzily, dropping to one knee and clutching his guts. ‘The bitch just poisoned me. Get a marshal!!’

She looked back at Jez again. This time Jez nodded and both girls turned on their heels and ran.

*

The news on the toob was not something Jez bothered with often, if at all. She preferred the shopping channels interspersed with a regular diet of sopa-drams and quizzies. But this evening Ellie had flipped the holo display to New Haven’s main news channel and Jez on this occasion was more than happy to scan the news along with her.

‘Nothing so far,’ said Ellie. ‘Maybe we’re okay.’

They sat on their jel couch in the darkness, lit only by the cyan glow of the toob. For some reason this evening they’d both decided to leave the light off in the main cube and cowered in the flickering blue light of the holo-display like a pair of convicts on the run.

‘Maybe he didn’t manage to call a marshal then,’ said Jez. ‘I mean you can never find one when you want one, can you?’

‘He looked pretty sick Jez. What if I…you know? Killed him?’

Jez looked at the three boxes of soft drink in the corner. ‘You didn’t kill him Ellie. If anything happened to him, like, well…say like he died, then it wasn’t
your
fault. He might have had some really weird, really rare allergy or something.’

‘Oh crud, Jez. I hope he’s okay.’

‘I’m sure it’s just…’

The news story that had been on, a demonstration by migrants from Celestion down by the southern gate that had turned nasty after some law marshals had arrived and exercised some zero-tolerance attitude, was replaced with a white and orange product logo that silenced Jez instantly

‘Today in the Service Sector a man was taken seriously ill after being sold a bottle of an unapproved soft drink known as ‘Spectora’. The drink, a product of un-licensed genetic engineering, possibly by a factory on Harpers Reach, or off-world, has been noted on several other worlds in this sector. The company behind the drink, Flexegen, has no registered headquarters on Harpers Reach, but is known to be operating here. Administration information on the company has revealed that it is believed to be a commercial money-laundering enterprise, to process and also raise funds for various terrorist groups…’

Ellie looked at Jez, ‘oh crud.’

‘
…The man is said to be in a serious but stable condition, but law marshals offered this warning to people today…
’ The image on the display changed to show a middle-aged, middle-ranking marshal speaking.
‘This drink is not approved by the Administration and, as we’ve seen today, contains potentially lethal and active genetically engineered ingredients. If you see a bottle of this stuff, or see someone selling it, you should contact the nearest marshal immediately. We will make every effort to find and arrest the organisers behind this illegal product, and the dealers who have been selling it on the street. Thank you.
’

Jez muted the toob. It was now showing flickering images of the teen singer Betsy Boomalackah visiting some venue over in Harvest City to promote her latest track. Jez pointed towards the boxes of drink, their Spectora uniforms, the business cards and sales materials. ‘Where’s the nearest rubbish incinerator?’

‘Up two floors.’

‘Let’s go.’

CHAPTER 15

Deacon studied the data files that had been compiled for him by Leonard. There were six planets the young lad had short-listed as the most likely places that Mason would have selected for the candidate. For each of these planets Leonard had noted all the paternity requests that Mason had personally checked out and had done something with to do with over the last twenty years. The list of names was long, over a thousand of them, and they were dispersed across five different worlds. And these five worlds were dotted right across Human Space.

He sat back in the leather chair and cursed. What he wouldn’t give to have five minutes alone with that madman Mason, and something sharp to prod him with. When he had started rooting through the old man’s things, he’d had high hopes that somewhere Mason would have slipped up and left a detail, a clue, a fragment of data that would, with a little lateral thinking, lead him directly to the candidate child.

But he hadn’t.

The late doctor had been very careful to ensure nothing that could lead him to the child was digitally stored. Deacon had to respect him for that. His preference for the antique pen and paper had, perhaps, been a far more effective security measure than any number of firewalls, passwords or data encryption algorithms.

Perhaps the secret is in this study somewhere?
A secret desk drawer? A fake book spine?

Deacon scanned the antique books along the shelves and the folders of data printouts stacked one atop the other. There was nothing for it; both he and Leonard were going to have to go through all of those to see whether Mason had hidden secret papers amongst them. He was beginning to get a feel for the old man, to get an idea of how his mind functioned. From interviews with the lab technicians that had worked closely with Mason, he had begun to discover many of the old man’s idiosyncrasies, habits. Deacon got up and approached the book shelves and ran his finger along the ancient spines.

Mason fondly loved all things antique; hated all things modern.
Technology
in general. Strange for a man who worked in the field of genetics. Mason passionately hated computers. He much preferred to think with a pen in his hand. The ink blotter on his desk was testament to that, covered as it was with scribbles and scrawls, many faded by the years.

Deacon could understand the appeal of a fountain pen in one hand, almost as if the intelligence, the wisdom, lay inside the thing itself and the hand teased it out one idea at a time by wafting it closely over paper.

He approached a star chart of Human Space framed on the wall between the book shelves. It was a print he was familiar with, a popular one done in the style of ancient Old Earth maps, looking as if it had had been crafted by some medieval cartographer on papyrus.

He could imagine Mason standing before it studying it intently as he decided where best to send his creation. He could imagine that the old man must have stood right here, looking carefully at the groupings of stars and worlds and the main commercial routes between them for many hours, tracing the routes with his fingers, using his faithful fountain pen as a pointer.

A thought occurred to Deacon.

It was something he had noticed, when looking though some of the data printouts that Mason had read and commented on with his pen. If you held the printouts at an angle to the light, the black ink from Mason’s fountain pen was a little glossier than the derma-jet print ink.

Deacon stood closer to the chart. He lent against the wall and looked obliquely across the star chart so that the glow of Pacifica’s reflected light cast a dull blue sheen across the printed chart.

Oh my.

Glistening on the chart were several faint pen strokes. And the small casual swirl of a loop. With his head still pressed against the wall, he placed his finger on the chart in the middle of the loop Mason’s pen had once upon a time inscribed and then pulled back to look squarely at it.

His finger obscured a world on the star chart. Hoping that it might have the same name as one of the five worlds Leonard had suggested, he pulled it away.

Harpers Reach.

It
was
one of them.

Mason, lost in deep concentration, must have run his pen casually across the dark printed surface of this chart, not aware that there was a discernible mark being left.

Deacon hurried back across to the desk and studied the list of requests that had come from Harpers Reach. Mason had checked out only sixty-three from this world over the last two decades.

Only sixty-three.

Not a horrendously large number. If he went there himself, with some additional manpower, it could be quickly done. Within a few weeks, he could easily locate each and every child and dispose of all of them. It would be much quicker and more discreet, and certainly more thorough, if he supervised this directly, rather than entrusting it to the local authorities on the world itself. They were bound to ask awkward questions and more than likely, they would screw the job up.

He stepped smartly out of Mason’s study into his lab. Leonard was busy studying the list of a thousand names on another holo terminal.

‘Leonard?’

‘Yes…Deacon.’

‘Harpers Reach. We need to make arrangements to head out there immediately.’