In Enemy Hands (7 page)

“That success is assured, would be a good start.”

“All right.” She tilted her head at him. “Success is assured.”

“You’re just saying that.”

His words were light but even Moon could see to his underlying tension. Her expression sobered.

“If it wasn’t for Srin’s help, I couldn’t have got as far along in my work. I would have needed another month at least, just to get to this point.”

“Is he that good?” Was there a thread of jealousy in his voice? No, she must be mistaken. Or maybe it was professional jealousy, from one competent man to another, both of them superbly equipped for their work. Except one of those men was also mentally crippled.

“Yes, he’s that good.” She hesitated. “You know what they’ve done to him, don’t you?”

It was the first time she broached the subject of Srin’s drugging with the
Differential
’s captain, and she was a little afraid that he would be offended by her remark and stop their dinners. So she had held her tongue, but felt she couldn’t do so any longer.

Drue looked at her evenly. “Don’t you mean what
we’ve
done to him?”

“We?” She frowned. How could he accuse her of complicity in such a crime when she hadn’t even met Srin before? Hadn’t even imagined that someone like him existed?

“You’re part of the Republic, aren’t you, Moon?”

“Yes, but—”

“And, with the exception of your detention, weren’t you a happy member of the Republic?”

“Yes. I suppose.”

“Did you ever wonder about people like Srin? Or the shapeshifters we seem so bent on eradicating? Or the humans we leave on Bliss?”

“I….” She paused. Of course she had been deathly afraid that the Republic might send her to the notorious prison planet—a place full of hardened criminals and shapeshifters. The one place in the galaxy that no living being ever left. But she hadn’t thought beyond that, to what a lifelong incarceration on Bliss meant to its inhabitants. Or why a Space Fleet captain, of all people, should care? She searched his features but saw nothing beyond polite enquiry. If Drue Jeen had any skeletons in his closet, they weren’t about to make an appearance at this meal.

“As a scientist, I subscribe to a number of nets,” she began, conversationally. “Even when I was finally moved to the halfway house, I used to use whatever spare time I was given to catch up on what was happening in the science world, and what projects the Directorate was funding. And, every year, I’d get surprised. Not by the projects, but the breakthroughs. It would seem that an avenue of research was stagnant, and then it would suddenly get going again. The way mine has after Srin started working with me.”

“You hadn’t heard about him before this?”

She shook her head. “No, not a clue.” She paused. “I suppose what I’m trying to say, Drue, is that I understand what
you’re
trying to say, but we don’t have very much free will in any of this. Let’s take Srin as an example. I hate what’s being done to him, but what are the alternatives? Stop working? That hurts you as well as me.”

Moon didn’t need to see the grimace on Drue’s face to know that he had been following similar lines of thought.

“If neither of us has an answer, Moon,” he asked, “why mention Turk in the first place?”

Now that was a good question. There were certainly smarter things to discuss than a man who had been drugged for two decades and the minder who dogged his steps.

“Maybe it’s because I needed to know that it’s not bad to feel revulsion for what’s been done to him.” It hadn’t always been so, but the past year in particular had not been a comfortable time for her. She felt unbalanced, out of phase, as if she was seeing things through a different lens than the rest of the galaxy. As if everyone else could see some logic to actions that she considered distasteful. “Hen Savic seems to have things all sorted out in his mind.”

“Hen Savic has had twenty years to get used to the idea,” Drue countered soberly. He took a swallow of his wine. “You realise that our current topic of discussion could be considered grounds for treason?”

“Discussing Savic and Srin, you mean?”

“Savic. Bliss. Shapeshifters. Sympathy.” He shrugged.

Moon looked around the captain’s cosy dining room. “Does that mean we stand trial tomorrow?” She felt tired rather than alarmed. “I can’t say I’m surprised. I always thought these ships were extensively monitored.”

“Do you think there are hidden video and audio devices on the ship?”

She nodded.

“No need,” he told her with a tight smile. “We all police each other. A little over one hundred people on board an airtight vessel, each watching what the other one does. Who needs electronics?”

The wine in Moon’s glass was gone, but she drank from her water tumbler gratefully, using the time to give herself courage to ask the next, inevitable, question.

“Drue…” She paused. “You don’t seem the type.”

“The type for what?”

She waved a hand, taking in the room and everything beyond it. “This. The ship. I never thought Space Fleet captains were so philosophical.” She pinned a slight smile on her face. “What is someone like you doing here? It doesn’t look like you approve of much of what the Republic is doing, yet you’re in their Space Fleet, captain of one of the largest ships in the galaxy. Doesn’t that seem a little, strange, to you?”

“Where would I go?” he answered. “Beyond the Republic is a mass of warring factions whose size of territory differs with each war won and lost. They all have different languages, different technologies, different physiologies. At least within the Republic, I know I’ll mostly be amongst humans. We hold the balance of power in this part of the galaxy.”

His words were at odds with the thoughtful man she had shared many a meal with.

“And is that so important to you?”

“Yes,” he answered simply. “I may not like a lot of what the Republic does, but I like being a starship captain. It’s what I always wanted to be, ever since I was a child. Besides, after such specialised training, what else could I do?”

“So we’re all doomed.” There was a trace of a question in her statement.

He shrugged, unmoved. “Some more than others, certainly. I don’t know that there’s any hope for your friend, the Turk. As for you and I, well, if this experiment of yours succeeds, there’ll be enough glory to spread around. For you, I’m sure the Republic has the kinds of rewards appropriate for an eminent scientist. And, for me, a promotion. Maybe even a new ship.”

There was something else there, in the back of his eyes, but Moon was caught by another thought.

“For Hen Savic.” She added, “If I succeed, he gets even more pride and a continued sense of justification.” She didn’t like that idea, that someone like Savic would not only follow in the wake of her own reputation, but thrive by exploiting the abilities of a man he himself had crippled.

“There’s nothing we can do about that, Moon.”

The tragedy of it all was that Drue was right.

It was almost two weeks since Moon’s altercation with Savic, and the ship was locked down. The
Differential
had left the rendezvous system nine days ago and was already on its way to the Suzuki Mass. The Mass contained a dead star that just might live again, if her theories were correct. After double-checking the ship’s integrity and confirming supplies and orders for the journey ahead, the ship arced out of its outer orbit and then, with one last sigh, shot itself into another dimension.

With that last action, Moon felt well and truly alone. Besides her lab, there were few places on the
Differential
where she felt at peace. The canteens were either barren and lonely, or full and loud. She could, by now, not only state the number of panels in her quarters, but also identify the position of each by their subtle differences. The corridors were wide but often populated with grim-faced men that Moon had no desire to brush past, much less enter into conversation with.

The only other refuge she had—the small observation room she’d stumbled upon after that fateful meeting with Srin’s keeper—was denied to her, its transparent viewports shuttered. An identical thick metal plate also sealed the single port in her lab. More than the medium-security facility where she had been held, Moon felt like she was in a smooth, impermeable cage, unable to draw a clean breath or even envisage a way out. The only way she could keep her mind from baulking at the confinement, to keep herself distracted, was to spend most of her spare time working.

But there were moments of introspection she could not avoid. Like now, late afternoon ship time, when she had called a rare but well-deserved day off and Srin was away doing whatever he did in his spare time when he wasn’t helping her or flirting with her.

After her altercation with Savic, and her own cowardly musings, Moon made it a point to avoid any personal conversations with Srin, but the consequence of her decision was more painful than she could have imagined. Every two days he would greet her with friendly curiosity that soon segued into charming banter and, nine times out of ten, an invitation to dinner. Moon’s initial response was to get increasingly brusque with each rejection, until she realised that he had no idea he had already played this particular game several times over. It wasn’t his fault, yet she was punishing him for it. It made her feel terrible. The sooner she was through with her mission and divorced of him and his disturbing proximity, the better.

At the same time she dreaded the ship’s approach to the Suzuki Mass. What if she was wrong? What if all her research came to nothing? What if there was some basic flaw in her reasoning that she couldn’t see? Would the Republic accuse her of sabotage?

On the other hand, what if she was successful beyond her wildest imaginings? What if she could prove that she held the science to life, the secret to unlock and lay bare the field of stellar mechanics? That, too, held its own small terrors. She had fantasies of becoming the darling of the Science Directorate, of having teams of researchers working under her supervision. But during the meals she had with Drue, he had somehow intimated that success had its own problems, and that tempered her own enthusiasm.

He had also hinted at the potential for misuse of such a powerful technology. But he never actually discussed it. Still, his subtle remarks were enough to kick start Moon’s already hair-trigger paranoia, amplified by the otherwise crushing schedule she kept.

Surely the Republic saw that the benefits of successful stellar re-ignition greatly outweighed any other application? The Republic could be known throughout the galaxy as a midwife to life, rather than a harbinger of death. It could talk firmly about its more noble goals, rather than have its critics mutter darkly behind its back about shapeshifters, genocide and the hellhole planet of Bliss.

But her reasoning was not as comforting as she expected. Moon got to her feet abruptly, tamping down a feeling of claustrophobia and walking over to the display panel on the wall of her cabin. With impatient fingers, she toggled through the usual variety of images, but none of them included a real-time view of what was outside. That was because they were now traversing hyperspace, that nebulous dimension outside normal space that folded distance and cut travel time into a fraction of what it would have been in normal space. Looking directly upon the chaotic nonsense of hyperspace had been known to send humans into madness.

But that wasn’t the only danger. Although the Space Fleet vessels were the most technologically advanced in Republic space, there was still a slight chance the
Differential
could be damaged or disappear while entering or leaving hyperspace. That’s why the preparations for travel were so long and careful. That’s why it had taken so long to start the journey, lulling Moon into a shallow feeling of security.

Although the Republic used hyperspace extensively to oversee its vastness, its scientists still didn’t fully understand it. There were folds that could take a ship precisely from Point A to Point B almost instantaneously, while others provided exits light-years away from the desired destinations. While hyperspace could be entered anywhere, it appeared that the exits were at more or less predetermined points, like hitting and following a crease in an extra-dimensional coverlet.

As the Republic expanded from its human origins on the planet of Sol III, a rising number of explorers eagerly threw themselves and their primitive ships into the abyss to map the exits. They were more than willing to risk everything for riches. Where they successfully found an inhabited or compatible planet, soldiers followed, to either invade or colonise their discovery. In this way, like a game of random hopscotch, a significant fraction of the galaxy was subdued and placed under Republic rule. So it had been for the past three centuries.

The Suzuki Mass was near the edge of a Republic boundary. It took several hyperjumps to get there. There were a few systems near the end of the journey, but they were backward places, neglected by the Republic due to their isolation and lack of strategic importance. Beyond the Mass was the vacuum of the Fodox Stellar Barrens, an interstellar desert nobody had yet traversed in its entirety. For the first real-space experiment in stellar re-ignition, the Republic had chosen one of the least conspicuous sectors of the galaxy, where there were few inhabitants and no viable creases.

Moon could figure out some of the reasons for their choice of destination, but not all of it. She understood that the Republic might want some privacy while she tinkered with experimental stellar mechanics. But she wanted a bigger audience, a cadre of peers to analyse and offer criticism of her results. What she was trying to do had ramifications throughout the known galaxy and she was frustrated by the obviously high level of secrecy surrounding her experiments. Another nebula could have been chosen, one closer to the usual transport routes but, instead, the far-flung Mass was the cloud of choice.

And it was a barely eligible phenomenon at that. As Moon had told Srin, her type of stellar mechanics research involved re-ignition rather than stellar creation, and the Suzuki Mass was mostly composed of space dust, which made it a more likely candidate for accretion. But, near its core, it contained a small group of dead stars—an ancient Pleiades—and that was the
Differential
’s ultimate, disappointing, destination.

Stuck in the middle of space with few moments to herself, reconstructing the effort of years in a few short weeks and nursing a dose of self-pity, there seemed no place to which she could turn. And nobody she could turn to. So she spent every spare moment concentrating on her work, pushing away thoughts of the life she used to lead and the woman she used to be. The problem was, it didn’t really work. Not for long.

Three years ago, she had never guessed to ever be in the desperate situation that Kad had described in his calm, unhurried voice. Moving away from the panel after switching it off, she paced her cabin aimlessly, remembering words she may have been better off not recalling at all.

If you ever get to that stage, Moon, when you feel like the only choice left is to either jump off a cliff or be lasered, give me a call.

Never, not when she was first detained, not when her friends began dropping away from her with depressing speed, did she betray those last words Kad had gifted her. Not that she thought it meant anything, really.

But now, speeding her way to the Mass and possible notoriety she was finally beginning to understand the motivations that had driven Kad. Having come so close to permanent detention herself, she could appreciate his dangerous and principled stand, even if it was against the very body that had fed him, nurtured him and funded his ambition and research.

Give me a call.

Her mind skipped over the past three years, from start to end. Eventually, the Republic had grudgingly accepted what she told them. She had no idea Kad was a terrorist and she didn’t know where he had gone. In fact, she was still in awe that he even managed to escape the Phyllis Centre, with the trained wolves of the Security Force baying at his heels.

But just because she told them the truth about her ignorance of her research partner’s plans, that didn’t mean she was ignorant of a way open to contact him. In all honesty, she hadn’t even known about it herself until she was released, a little more than ten months ago, to restart her aborted research under their strict supervision.

Alone now in her cabin, reassured by Drue’s words that she was not being monitored, Moon walked to a cupboard, pulled out her satchel and rifled through its depths. Finally, after long frustrating minutes, her fingers closed on a small sliver of something. Silently, she drew it out, sat at the cabin’s small desk and laid it on the table in front of her.

It was a small badge or token of some sort, square in shape and slightly convex on both sides. She looked at it for a moment, then picked it up again, holding it delicately between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand and giving it a careless flick with her right fingernail. The token spun a couple times then stopped, caught by the friction of her fingers.

The Security Force soldiers had overlooked the small item each of the several times they rampaged through her lab, turning its contents upside down. Confronted by the secured carnage that kept her working area a frozen time capsule for years, Moon herself had been tempted to just throw everything out and begin again. Even silent, cold and untouched, her equipment and infobanks still seemed to retain some of the brutal stench of her interrogators.

It was the scientist in her—and the memory of a miserly, money-grubbing young researcher at the start of her postgraduate studies—who had stopped her from discarding everything wholesale, forcing her to spend weeks sifting through the detritus for anything she could salvage. She ploughed her way through discarded side-panels from equipment that remained offline since the day Kad fled, cracked clearboards that crunched underfoot and discarded documents that littered the floor. Methodically, like an archaeologist, she worked her way from one corner of the lab to the other, hesitating only when an out-of-place glint by the upturned legs of one of her worktables caught her attention.

At first she thought the small object was something one of Kad’s undergraduate students had dropped. But she knew the Centre’s cleaning bots were efficient and fastidious. If it had been dropped by a student, chances were it would have been cleaned up during the nightly run before that last day. And, according to the Security Force officers themselves, nobody—besides them—had entered the lab since the day they came to arrest Kad and drag him away.

Could it be Kad’s? It was unlike him to hold on to such a piece of triviality.

She idly held the square object up to the light and squinted. To her surprise, Moon could make out embedded circuitry, faintly visible as a geometric pattern through the red and green surfaces of each side. The straight and angled lines were difficult to distinguish from the hard-gel layers that sandwiched them.

Moon had been tempted to throw the bauble away, discarding it along with the broken pads and clearboards. But the novelty of finding such a colorful item in a place of hard research had stopped her.

And just as well. Although it had taken weeks, Moon divined the token’s purpose. Each side bore abstract-looking patterns of small and large coloured spheres. At first she struggled to see meaning in the pastel shapes that stood out against the primary color backgrounds. Then it came to her: these were molecular symbols. A basic chemistry reference table told her what they represented—the symbol for Potassium on one side, and Calcium Iodide on the other.

Potassium. Calcium Iodide.

It took time to think through to the next step. She remembered her fingers trembling when it finally fell into place.

K CaI
₂
…CaII…Call…Call K.

Call Kad
.

And with that thought, the rest of the solution clicked into place. The trinket was a camouflaged comms chip. It was one of several sorts that would function with the ubiquitous public communications terminals found on all Republic worlds. Somehow, despite his double life and the threat of constant exposure, Kad Minslok had found the time and cunning to fashion a way of contacting him. It was a risk. Moon wondered that he had enough confidence in her to leave open a channel of communication and trust her not to betray him to the Republic.

Her fingers closed over the small square in much the same way as it did when she first deciphered the code. She squeezed until the small rounded corners bit into her palm.

Call Kad.

She wondered if the situation would ever arise when she needed to use it.

She hoped not.

It was a relief to get back to research, to the point of the
Differential
’s mission in the first place.

Stellar re-ignition.

Despite the mountain of problems still in the way, Moon was happy to lose herself in the mire of complex equations and multi-dimensioned suppositions, even as she drove herself into collapsing straight into the arms of exhausted oblivion each night.