The Jovian Run: Sol Space Book One (25 page)

She said it so casually that Charis almost missed the implication. “You put a tracker on them?” She gaped. There was no other way, save sneaking around behind them, that Dinah could have known where they were. “Do you know how the captain would feel about that?”

Dinah shrugged her muscular shoulders. “I consider it following orders.”

Charis’ face was a mix of awe, fear, and wonder. “Do you put trackers on all of us?”

“No.” The answer was as flat as her opening greeting.

“Some of us then? On Gwen?” She was trying to decide whether to be horrified or comforted.

“Do you trust me, Charis?”

The question surprised her. She considered it carefully before answering. “I suppose I do.”

“Then don’t worry about it,” she said dismissively.

An image came into Charis’ mind, like a small clip of a self-made film, of Gwen wandering lost and alone through the corridors of the ship, darkness and shadows threatening from every corner. Suddenly, a dark silhouette appeared behind her, wrapped her protectively up in its comforting arms, and spirited her away back home. It was an absurd image, dramatic and silly. Gwen knew the ship as well as any of them if not better; she had spent nearly a quarter of her life on it. Even so, she had decided how she felt.

“Good,” she nodded. “Keep it up.” As she turned and climbed back out of the room, the engineer turned back to her work.

              Staples couldn’t remember a time since she had bought her ship where people had come knocking on her door with such frequency. This time it was her guest, Evelyn Schilling, and that made her smile.

              “Evelyn, please come in.” It was late evening, and they were due to arrive at Cronos station the following afternoon. The captain was still dressed in her work clothes, but a book rested open on her desk and a hot cup of tea wafted fragrant steam into the air.

              “Thank you. Chamomile?” she inquired.

              Staples nodded. “Would you like a cup?”

              The freckled computer scientist shook her head. She had changed to a pleated skirt and a tight fitting blue top that elegantly showed her curvaceous figure. Her hair was down and loose.

              “Is there an occasion?” the captain asked, referring to her clothing.

              Evelyn closed the door behind her. “Not really. I spent a few minutes digging this out. I guess I wanted to look nice and come thank you for getting me to Cronos Station.”

              Staples sat and gestured for her visitor to do the same. “Evelyn, we’ve been over this. This has got to be the worst charter flight in the history of charter flights.”

              She sat and countered, “Actually, I think that list is topped by flights that crashed.”

              “Fair point,” the captain conceded.

              “You and your crew have done everything you could to make me safe. I am so sorry about Yegor.” Her face was the picture of sympathy.

              Staples nodded gravely. “I am too. He was a good man. And I must say, again, how sorry I am about Herc. I’m sorry we couldn’t save him.”

              Evelyn looked at the wooden tabletop for several seconds, and her eyes welled with tears, but then she looked up and smiled, blinked them away, and forced cheer back into her voice. “Me too. I didn’t know him that well, but he seemed like a great guy. I know you did everything that you could.”

              “I’m not sure your employers will see it that way. A whole lot of people would call this a bad job.”

              “Well they weren’t here,” Evelyn said defensively. “They’ll have my statement, and if they read it, they’ll know you did everything you could to save us, to save me.”

              “Apart from one of my long-time crew members betraying me and our choice to hire two would-be rapists, I’m inclined to agree with you.” She sighed.

              “That’s not your fault. Look, no one blames the boss of Libom Pangalactic if one of the Senior VPs gets caught insider trading.” She saw Staples start to object, and hastily added, “Or turns out to be a serial killer.”

              “I suppose they don’t, at least not publicly. Anyway, you don’t have to thank me. It’s my job.” She took a sip of her tea and smiled.

              “Mind if I ask how you ended up with this job?” Evelyn ventured.

              “Oh, that’s a long and rather sordid story,” she said dismissively, waving her hand.

              The other woman leaned forward, resting her chin in her cupped hands, and smiled. “Those are my
favorite
kind. If I let you make me a cup of tea, will you tell it to me?”

              Staples laughed. “You drive a hard bargain.” She considered the woman for a moment. There was no way around it; she was stunning. It was a warm, expressive beauty that made her want to share secrets and dreams with her. It was a loveliness that said she could be understood; all she had to do was speak. Staples found herself, to her own amusement and surprise, genuinely attracted to another woman for the first time since a particularly drunken night in college. She looked into those big brown eyes and thought
screw it, why not?
“If you agree to keep it to yourself. Chamomile okay?”

              Evelyn sat back, evidently happy. “I promise, and chamomile sounds great.”

              Staples took another sip of her cooling tea, then stood up and walked to the electric teapot on a small counter at the back of the room. As she fished out a second mug and a bag of tea, she began to speak. “I used to work in benefits and compensation at a major metals and textiles company. I’d rather not say which one, or where. I started in the job not long after getting my Masters in Industrial Psychology.” The water began to boil, and she poured it into the teacup.

              Evelyn looked at the containers of books around the room. “I would have pegged you for an English major, not psychology.”

              “I was both, actually. They’re both really the study of the same thing.” She handed the mug to the other woman and sat down again. “Several years later, I found myself in my mid-thirties doing quite well. I was a senior Vice President, still handling executive compensation, bonuses, that sort of thing. Then things began to get complicated. I noticed, much like you did in going over the coms and radar data I suppose, some irregularities in the company’s budget. The kind of things you only notice when you work in the field for a decade or so: subtle stuff. I like to run a tight ship, so to speak, so I did some investigating. I had the idea that one of the other VPs was embezzling, so I kept it secret and conducted my own investigation. My plan was to go to the board once I got enough evidence.

              “It turns out there was some money missing, and it was going into someone’s private bank account, but it wasn’t anyone who worked for the company. Further searching turned up more money transfers, rather large cash outlays to other non-company employees.” She took another sip of her tea. “Well, I knew payoffs when I saw them. The disturbing thing was that there was no way these payoffs could have happened without several VPs and the President knowing, even if there was no evidence they had signed off on it. I probably should have dropped it, pretended I never saw anything, but I’m not very good at that, so I hired someone to look into it.

              “I had the names of the people who received the funds. They were all government officials in China, most of them centered in a particular province, one that contained a manufacturing plant run by my employer. Again, you’ll forgive me for keeping the details to myself. It didn’t take too long for my private investigator to ferret out some information. It turns out that manufacturing plant was polluting the local ecosystem. Elevated cancer and seizure rates, radiation, poisoned drinking water, all of those horror stories you hear about from the 20
th
and the beginning of the 21
st
centuries. The payoffs were to keep the local officials quiet.

              “I suppose I shouldn’t have been that surprised, but I was. Of course what they were doing was illegal, and most of the abuses of that kind had ceased when we cleaned up our act around the mid-century, but it was more than that. The company I worked for had been very public about their aggressively environmentally safe manufacturing base. It was one of the reasons I chose to work for them. I had really believed in them, and the fact that they could do that, that my co-workers could do that to not only the planet, but their fellow human beings as well just disgusted me. I felt used, as if I had been helping this happen for years, albeit unawares. I had trouble hiding my feelings. I could barely walk down the hallway at work and smile at those people. Then my private investigator disappeared, and it went from disturbing to scary.

              “The company offered me a new position at a different branch. It was more pay for less responsibility, and the signing bonus was huge. I mean really obscene. About the same time, I received some pictures of my brother’s family. Just pictures emailed to me, nothing more, but the message was obvious. It was a payoff. I could shut up and take it, or walk and take my chances. They figured if I took the money and tried talking later, they could use the payoff to drag me down too. I suspected they’d use the same money and allocation strategies to cover my bonus as they did to pay off those government officials. I didn’t know what to do at first. I didn’t want to be complicit. Part of me wanted to walk away and never say a thing, to just leave the whole thing behind, but I didn’t think that they were offering an option C. So I took the money.”

              Evelyn, who had been rapt until this point, was aghast. “You didn’t!”

              Staples held up an index finger and smiled a bit. “Stick with me here. I took the bonus and the job, transferred to the new branch, and started working. I figured once a few months had passed, they’d stop watching me so closely, and that’s when I started moving. I didn’t feel safe going to the authorities. The government isn’t like Chicago in the 1920s, but it’s still vulnerable to corruption, and I figured my employer would anticipate that move. Instead, I contacted a rival manufacturing company.”

              “Nice,” the other woman said, finishing her tea.

              “Well, that didn’t go quite how I expected. Turns out, they really were a standup company, and they didn’t want to get their hands dirty. They told me they weren’t interested in corporate espionage, sabotage, or flinging mud. They told me to go to the police. That stymied me for a bit. When you get really disillusioned with the world, it can be rather baffling when someone takes the high road. But I guess they weren’t
that
squeaky clean, because about a week later, a woman contacted me and said that she could help me.”

              “Who did she work for?”

              Staples shook her head. “As far as I know, no one. We met, I gave her all of my evidence, and that was it. She didn’t want any money. Three weeks later, the facility in that prefecture in China burned to the ground. All of those VPs that were involved had bad things happen to them.”

              Evelyn looked shocked and somewhat appalled.

              “I don’t mean they were killed. They just suffered… terrible, life-altering setbacks. One invested all of his money in a company that went under. Another’s house burned down; no one was hurt. Another one’s spouse received photos of her infidelities, that sort of thing. I didn’t do a thing. After another month, I quit my job, and they didn’t put up a fight. Someone broke into my house not long after that and destroyed my computer files. All evidence that I had of what they had done is long gone now, which is fine. I tried to make it easy for them. I thought for a bit that they might come after me, but then I realized that there’s no point. The damage was done; there’s nothing I have or know that is actionable, and revenge isn’t something companies are often interested in. Revenge is expensive, so why bother? The woman, who said her name was Janae, helped me use a lot of my bonus money to relocate and help the families that had been affected by that factory. I used most of the rest to buy this ship.” She cast her eyes about the room as if she could see the entirety of the ship around her.

              Evelyn’s eyes were bigger than ever. “So this woman, she’s what, some kind of eco-terrorist, scale-balancer?”

              “You know, I’m not entirely sure what she is, besides a good reminder that we should all do the right thing because someone is watching. She’s also a good friend to have, though sometimes I do have to pay her.”

              Evelyn snapped her fingers and pointed at Staples. “Jordan, right?”

              The captain just smiled a little bit, shook her head, and put a finger to her lips.

              The evening was winding down, but there was still some conversation to be had, and both women seemed to be glad of it. It was approaching twenty-three, and Staples was thinking it was time to call an end to the visit when there was another knock at the door. As she stood up to answer it, she half-whispered conspiratorially to her guest, “I wonder if it will be good news or bad this time.”

              When she opened the door, Templeton stood in front of her, breathing hard despite the low gravity. “Parsells hanged himself.”