Offspring (51 page)

“So what is the next step?” Harenn asked.

“I have to access Sufur’s computer,” Ben said. The nursery smelled like milk and baby powder.

“At two o’clock in the morning?” Harenn said.

“Best time for it. The Vajhurs report that Sufur’s lights always go out between eleven and midnight, so he’ll be asleep. Lucia and I’ll break in, and I’ll swipe the logarithm generator and the coordinates for both the ship and the satellite. Kendi will get into the Dream and send a fake message to S” Station telling them to halt the Corridor program and we’ll sic the Guardians on the ship. “ll very simple.”

“All Kendi’s plans sound simple,” Harenn said. “But they have a way of getting out of hand. Do you think Gretchen is all right?”

“Our informant says Sufur is keeping her and the others alive for the moment,” Ben said, grimacing beneath a stab of worry. “But we have to move fast.”

“At least tell me Lucia has a spare suit for you.”

“Right here,” Lucia said from the doorway. Her tone was bright and Ben shot a worried glance at the babies. Both of them, however, had just had their second night feeding and a thunderclap wouldn’t have woken them.

“Ready to go?” Lucia asked. She was wearing her own camouflage outfit and holding a second one out to Ben. He accepted it and pulled the suit on over his regular clothes.

“How’s the loser party doing downstairs?” he asked.

“Winding down,” Lucia said. “Ched-Mulaar left a couple hours ago, and Salman went to bed not long after that. Everyone else is getting maudlin over single-malt.”

“It isn’t fair,” Ben said, fastening the front of the suit. “Grandma should have won.
Would
have won, if Sufur hadn’t interfered.” A bubble of anger burst over him and suddenly he was seething. “I
hate
him, Lucia. Maybe we’d be better off if we just—”

“Don’t,” Lucia said, pressing a finger to his lips. “I would love to see him dead, too, but I would hate to see you in prison. Ara and Evan need their father. We’re taking a big enough risk as it is.”

Ben set his jaw, tried to swallow his anger. “I know. I’ll keep myself under control.”

He and Lucia slipped out of the makeshift nursery and crept down the hallway toward the rear of Salman’s house. Up here the house was quiet, the lights mostly off. They passed Salman’s room, and for a moment Ben felt like a teenager sneaking out after his mother had gone to bed. They reached a rarely-used guest bathroom and set the lights to a dim glow. Lucia pulled a rope ladder from the towel cabinet.

“A little low-tech, isn’t it?” Ben said.

“No-tangle static rope, ultra-light polymer rungs, gravity hooks to hold it in place,” Lucia said, opening the window and flinging the object in question over the sill. “Seems fairly high-tech to me. Put up your hood and shift your suit to shadow.”

Ben obeyed. His camou-suit swirled into a non-pattern of gray and black. Cool spring air wafted through the open window from the darkness beyond as Lucia boosted herself feet-first through the window.

“It feels wonderful to move normally again,” she said, and vanished out the window.

Ben counted to ten, then swung his legs over the sill. His feet, clad in soft-soled shoes, found the rungs by touch, and he quickly climbed past the first story to the platform below, where Lucia waited. Night animals chirped and peeped in the tree around them, and a dinosaur grunted in the forest far below. The platform ran all the way around Salman’s house and only yesterday would have been patrolled by bodyguards. Salman, however, had decreed that ex-candidates didn’t need much in the way of special protection and had given most of her guards the night off. Kendi was supposed to keep Lars and Tan busy. Exactly how, Ben didn’t know, but he trusted Kendi to come up with something.

Lucia jerked the ladder, and it dropped silently into her arms. They trotted to the corner of the house, where a mid-sized talltree branch stretched away into the night above them. Lucia flung the top of the ladder upward while keeping hold of the bottom. It rushed upward like a finger stabbing the dark and thumped softly against the branch. Lucia yanked hard, but the ladder stayed put. With a nod to Ben, she scurried upward. Ben followed, and a moment later he was standing on the talltree branch. Balancing carefully on the rough bark, they made their way to the trunk and used the ladder again to clamber down to the bridge that connected Salman’s house to the other talltrees in the neighborhood. Ben kept a nervous eye out. The guards weren’t exactly their enemies, but they’d definitely try to keep Ben and Lucia from going out alone, and this wasn’t a mission either of them felt they could share. Everyone seemed to be inside the house, though, and Ben felt a little foolish at the elaborate precautions they had taken to avoid notice.

Once they were far enough away from the house, the couple changed their suits into a drab green (Ben) and a boring brown (Lucia). They dashed down to the monorail station, boarded a deserted train, and rode in silence to a stop not far from Padric Sufur’s house. By now it was almost four-thirty. A quick run brought them to Sufur’s house. The entire neighborhood remained dark and quiet as they crept up the stairs leading to his platform. Lucia halted and took out a small scanner before they reached the top. Ben stared at the house and felt a sudden urge to charge into it and beat Sufur bloody. No more shattered statues—this time he could take the real man apart, bone by bone. The power of the emotion rocked him and he trembled like a tree in an earthquake.

He tried to focus on Ara and Evan, on how much they needed their father. Kendi had been right—it wasn’t up to Ben to meet justice out to Sufur.

The hell it isn’t,
he thought.
He killed Mom. My kids will never know her because of him.

Ben stood there, caught between conflicting impulses. Lucia’s scanner beeped.

“No external security measures that I can find,” Lucia whispered, jarring him back . “In fact...” She crept to the top stair, edged close to the house, and ran the scanner over one of the windows next to the front door. “We’re lucky. The alarm system doesn’t seem to be active. He must have forgotten to set it before he went to bed.”

“Yeah,” Ben said warily. “Lucky. You know what my mom used to say? ‘Luck means you get to choose your own casket.’ “

“Do you want to leave?”

Ben thought about it. “No. We need his computer.”

Lucia took Ben around to the house’s back door, where she pulled a lead from the data pad clipped to her belt and plugged it into a flat rubber square the size of a postage stamp. She pressed the rubber square over the thumb plate by the front door. Lights flickered busily on her data pad.

“What’s that for?” Ben whispered.

“Lockpick. It picks up latent prints left by the last person to thumb the plate and uses to recreate an acceptable print. The lock should open in—” There was a click, and Lucia cautiously pushed the door open. A whiff of cooked sausage drifted out. The darkness gaped like a pit. Ben stared into it. A monster lived in there. A monster who ate sausages for supper and slept in a fine bed.

“Mask,” Lucia said, pulling hers up over her face. Ben copied her. He didn’t like the suit. It seemed like he could feel his skin flakes gathering beneath the fabric and skittering around like dust mites trying to escape. Lucia moved to enter the house, but Ben made a snap decision. He grabbed her wrist.

“You stay out here and keep watch,” Ben said.

“But—”

“Stay out here, Lucia,” Ben said in a low, icy voice. “If I make a mistake, there’s no reason for both of us to get caught.”

Lucia looked at him for a moment, then nodded. Ben took a deep breath and entered the house.

Lucia dePaolo watched Ben go, not at all certain she had made the right decision. It was hard for her to refuse Ben anything. He was the son of Irfan, and although constant contact with him had proved to her that he was an ordinary man, she still felt the occasional thrill of awe. And she had born his child. Irfan’s child. Vik’s child.

Lucia’s hand went to her neck, automatically feeling for the figurine of Irfan she had worn as long as she could remember. It was no longer there. She had removed it the day she had learned about the lawsuit. Lucia no longer prayed to Irfan twice each day, had disabled the timer that reminded her to do so. But she hadn’t gotten rid of her personal altar to Irfan either. Irfan was still a serene, wise, and powerful woman, still an incarnation of the divine. But her Church...her Church had tried to take Lucia’s child away. That she could not forgive.

Lucia hadn’t spoken to her mother since Ara’s birth. They hadn’t exactly argued when they parted. Mother had simply kissed the top of baby Ara’s head, touched Lucia’s cheek as she done since Lucia was a child, and left the hospital. The family hadn’t tried to visit Lucia, hadn’t even called. True, the birth had only been a few days ago and they knew Lucia had plenty of help with Ara. But there seemed to be a chill in their silence.

Maybe Lucia was reading too much into it. The Church had been absent from her life for only a few months, and she was long used to her family’s loud, near-constant presence. The lack of both boomed through the silent days like a thunderstorm. Once it swept through, things would go back to normal, except that Lucia would never set foot in a Church building again. That made her sad.

The house in front of her remained silent. Night lizards chittered in the trees and a few early insects buzzed about. Lucia kept a watchful eye out, but the neighborhood slept, completely oblivious to the presence of Padric Sufur and to the people breaking into his house. In the darkness it seemed like Lucia could see the faces of Finn and Leona Day. She started to say a prayer to Irfan about their souls, stopped herself, then finished it anyway. The Days, whatever their crimes, should have their path to the afterlife cleared. Lucia doubted she would say anything if Padric Sufur were to die.

“n alarm whooped inside the dark house. Lucia jumped as sirens sounded in the distance as if in answer. Ben burst out the door, data pad in his hand. The sirens grew louder.

“Run!” Ben snapped, and Lucia obeyed. They fled down the stairs and along the walkway. Lucia’s mouth was dry and her heart was pounding. What had gone wrong? Ahead of them, Lucia saw a police scooter zipping toward them on the walkway, lights whirling like angry whirlwinds. Ben leaped over the railing, and Lucia dove after him. They both landed on the safety net underneath. It stretched like a spiderweb but didn’t break. The scooter zipped past them overhead. Ben and Lucia skittered along the stretchy strands until they came to a walkway intersection. Ben reached up and grabbed the edge of the walkway, hauling himself back onto the boards by sheer strength. A moment later, he reached down and hauled Lucia up like she weighed nothing at all. Lucia felt the power in his arms and upper body. For a moment she felt a little flushed and she fully understood the attraction Kendi had for Ben. Then they were running down the dark walkways again. Behind them, police lights converged on Sufur’s house like wasps dive-bombing an invader.

They found a shadowy stairwell, and ducked into it to catch their breaths. Lucia pulled off her mask and changed her suit from swirls of gray and black into its simple, nondescript brown. Ben’s suit shifted into drab green as he removed his own mask. Lucia took Ben’s hand and leaned her head against his shoulder as they moved unhurriedly away, a couple out for a very late stroll. Lucia’s heart beat like a triphammer.

Serene must you ever remain
, she told herself.
Serene, serene, serene.

Her heart slowed, and the police lights and noises faded in the distance. Lucia released Ben’s hand. They passed under a rare streetlight and Lucia saw his face. It was set in a grim mask.

“What happened in the house?” she demanded.

“Not here,” he said. “Home.” And he refused to say anything more.

The darkness was freezing. Gretchen Beyer shivered and tried to reach for the covers. Her hands wouldn’t respond. She tried again and managed a twitch. The cold was so bad, it felt as if her bones would shatter like brittle icicles. With a small groan, she wrenched her eyes open. A translucent barrier curved just above her nose.  Disorientation made her head swim and her teeth began to chatter. Where the hell was she? The last thing she remembered was ...

Her apartment. The man and the woman. The fight. The dermospray. A spurt of adrenaline cleared her head and gave her energy enough to press her hands against the plastic. It came to her that she was lying in a cryo-unit, a coffin-sized tube designed to put the inhabitant into frozen hibernation. By all rights, she should be asleep. So why—?

She pushed, and the lid opened, giving her the answer. The unit hadn’t been closed completely and therefore hadn’t activated properly. The bone-cracking cold made her entire body shiver like a spring leaf in a blizzard. Gretchen gathered herself and forced her shuddering muscles to half-roll, half-heave her out of the tube. She flopped unceremoniously onto hard ceramic. The floor was probably cool, but to Gretchen’s half-frozen body, it felt deliciously warm. She pushed herself to hands and knees and managed a look at her surroundings.

She was in some kind of cargo hold. Plain gray walls stretched up to an equally plain ceiling. Five other coffin-like cryo-units were lined up on the floor, taking up most of the space. Gretchen was kneeling next to one of them, and it exuded a wonderful warmth. Gretchen clung to it, a baby huddled against a mother’s breast, until she stopped shivering. She stood up and noticed for the first time she was barefoot and dressed in a white jumpsuit she had never seen before. Clearly the dark-haired woman and the blond man had brought her here, but why? And where was “here”?