The Saffron Malformation (38 page)

             
“Started to go bad?” he balked.  “So, what?  You just ran off in time to avoid that princess?”

             
“Hey,” Dusty protested, “back off a bit, alright.”

             
Rachel laid her hand on his and gave it a squeeze before she spoke again.  “Look, when he started it was just about evening the playing ground—I didn’t know what he was planning.”

             
“What did you do then?  What’s all this about any-fuckin’-how?”

             
Rachel sighed and took a moment.  Her left hand touched her head and her eyes squeezed closed for a moment.  “What it’s about is that I need a brain scan and I can’t go into a hospital because Blue Moon has a file on me.  I check in anywhere and I trigger it.”

             
Reggie was steaming in his chair, unable to sit still, on the edge of snapping.  Quey made a note but he needed more information.  “What kind of warrant are we talking about here?” he asked.

             
Rachel looked at him.

             
“I mean, do they just want to talk to you or what?  What did you actually do?”

             
“Blackout wasn’t actually a terrorist organization, and when it started it was never meant to do what it did.  We just wanted Blue Moon to listen.”

             
“What did you do?” Quey repeated softly, encouraging her to tell him.

             
Rachel sighed slightly and shrugged before finally blurting, “I wrote a program.  My brother took it, changed it a bit and used it to disrupt the signal for a bit.  It mostly affected targeting and imaging.  He didn’t think they’d react as harshly as they did.  He was convinced they’d disrupt things long enough to get a message off planet.”  She looked at Quey, “I didn’t know what he was doing,” tears trembled along the lids of her eyes.

             
Quey nodded.

             
“I wrote the program, along with three other people and he used it to take out the satellite feeds,” she finished.

             
“Why?” Reggie asked a bit less aggressively.  He looked at Rachel.

             
“The wastes on south continent are worse than they are here, and the ground is dying faster.  It’s harder to get food, but when Blue Moon shut down the rain catchers, that’s when the people knew they had to get out.  They applied for relocation but they were being stalled.”

             
“Why would Blue Moon do that?” Natalie asked.

             
“We didn’t know for sure, but there were rumors that some of the militias had banded together and taken a Blue Moon science station that had been built in the wastes.  They’d learned something the company didn’t want people to know.”

             
“That the planet was dying, and fast,” Quey offered.

             
Reggie was staring at the coffee table, though Quey doubted the big man saw it at all.

             
“Things being as they are,” Rachel said, “I don’t doubt it was something along those lines.”

             
“What was the program supposed to do?” Reggie asked and Rachel looked at him.  “You said your brother took it and changed it and used it in a way you didn’t intend, so what was it supposed to do?”

             
“It was supposed to disrupt the Blue Moon filters and allow unchecked uploading.  It was meant so people could post the truth, if they so chose, and it was also meant to break the lockout of the universal network.”  There was a long moment of silence.  Rachel looked at Reggie and a few tears fell and rolled down her cheeks.  “I’m sorry,” she told him.  “I really don’t believe he thought they’d send soldiers that quickly.”  Her eyes darted back to Quey.  “The people down there just wanted to get a message out.  Later they wanted to get ships off the ground.”  She looked down in her lap.

             
“You got one thing right.  You didn’t think, none of you.  What did you expect to happen?” Reggie asked.

             
“Reggie,” Quey said firmly and the big man looked at him with confrontation in his eyes.  He was ready for a fight and when a man that big looks at you like that you feel it in your guts.  Quey felt his balls tighten a touch but he stayed the man’s gaze with his own.

             
“I know you’re angry but are you really angry at Rachel?  C’mon man, look at her.  You know her better than that.  Hell can you even really blame her brother.  I mean what he did was stupid, sure, but we’re the only grounded colony there is and now we know why.  It’s not Anti-Corp, you said so yourself.  It’s Blue Moon.  We’re grounded because they don’t want the state of things getting known, and they started a war over it.  It was going to happen no matter what, you know that.”

             
Rachel looked at Reggie and mouthed the words ‘I’m sorry,’ before falling against Dusty and letting him hold her.

             
Reggie nodded slowly and finally said, “You’re right.  I got anger but pointing it her way would be a lie.  It doesn’t belong there and it doesn’t belong on her brother any more than it did on the people who got killed down there.”

             
Quey nodded once and said, “I take it we’re hearing about this now because the test didn’t go so well.”  He looked to Natalie who was rocking on her heels with her back pressed against the wall.  She nodded slightly.  “And you need to figure a way to get a better peek at her eggs so you can see just how scrambled they are?”

             
“That’s about right,” Natalie said, tonelessly.  She stopped rocking and stepped closer to the group.  “There’s a three dimensional imager at the hospital.  It’ll give us a clear view of her entire brain, and if something is awry it’ll show us what that is.”

             
“But if we take her in for even a routine,” Quey said thoughtfully, “They’ll scan her in and pop goes the weasel.  Bout right?”

             
“Yup.”  Natalie popped her lips on the last letter and sighed.

             
There was a brief silence.  Finally Reggie asked, “Say there is something wrong with her.  What then?”  Glances passed between everyone in the room.  Reggie only looked at Rachel and then continued, “I mean, what can we do about it?”

             
“It’s an interesting point,” Quey nodded thoughtfully.

             
“So what,” Dusty started to snap but Natalie interrupted him.

             
“Depending on if anything is wrong and what that anything is decides where we go from there.  If it’s something minor, a bit of swelling or a fragment of skull, something along those lines, the tools they use are simple enough a smart monkey could work them.  Hell they practically do the work themselves.”

             
“If it’s something worse?” Quey asked without inflection, looking at Dusty, not Rachel.  His friend was gently rubbing the woman’s shoulder and keeping her pressed against him.  She looked like a little girl in his arms, and he looked like a scared little boy.

             
“If it’s worse then,” Natalie shrugged, “At least you know.  I have to say though,” she continued and Quey’s eyes went to her.  “If it was something terribly serious, something needing a specially skilled hand, I don’t think she’d still be walking around.”

             
Quey looked over at Rachel and said, “Just a little rust in her tin can?”

             
For some reason the room as a whole found that funny and one after another they chuckled a bit.  Quey thought maybe it was because they needed to laugh in order to clear the tension.

             
When it subsided Quey asked, “So what’s the plan then,” and Natalie smirked at him.

             
“You’re going to love it,” Dusty said and when Quey looked over at him he looked like he had when they were kids planning a con or caper.  “It’s so simple,” he added with a touch of slyness and a smirk.

              “Alright then,” Quey finally said after a long thoughtful pause.

             
Natalie’s idea would set their schedule back a little more than a week, but aside from that Quey thought it was solid.  Dusty had been right, it was simple and that was a good thing because it’d been his experience that every part of a plan was susceptible to a dozen or so complications you’d never be able to spot coming.  That being the case the less of it there was the better.

             
Dusty gave Rachel a little squeeze around her shoulder and kissed her temple.  He could tell she had a headache but wouldn’t mention it.

             
“I’ll go call Maddy, see if I can get everything set,” Natalie said, then went into the other room to get her sheet computer.

             
After that came the most tedious part of any plan.  It was the space between the planning and the execution, when you’re waiting for all the pieces to fall into place.

             
Reggie did his waiting at the Evening Lilly Inn’s bar.  He was hoping to forget what the conversation with Rachel had dredged up and maybe see the girls Quey had pulled him away from, but it seemed they’d moved on.  After finishing off his second round and ordering up a third a set of ladies walked in and took a table near the corner.  From the corner of his eye he saw one of them glance in his direction, a short tan girl with long dark hair and big brown eyes.  He smiled as he raised his glass to her and took a sip.  She smiled back and within twenty minutes Reggie was at their table laughing with them.

             
Dusty and Rachel spent time together in their room, lounging on the bed, trying not to worry.  The effort was futile.  Any time they managed to forget for a while Rachel would feel a sharp pain behind her right eye and touch the side of her head briefly.  Dusty would notice and the couple would go silent.

             
Quey sat outside and kept tabs on Geo with his sheet computer.  He watched the data, an incomprehensible (to him) stream of numbers that poured in by the hundreds every second.  Watching the numbers scroll along soothed him and lulled him into a trance and he thought about what they were planning.  Though Quey liked the simplicity of Natalie’s’ plan it also scared him because anytime he saw a snag in it the outcome was catastrophic.  If at any time Rachel and Natalie were discovered all it would take was a single scan to send up flags, not just at the security center in town but also at Blue Moon headquarters.  Eric Hoss was still a wanted man.  If they found Rachel they would pursue her with ceaseless vigor and he feared, unlike the situation with the Angels of the Brood, there would be no negotiating a peaceful resolve.

             
The idea of being on a radar of that magnitude churned Quey’s guts and he knew it was nothing compared to what Rachel and Dusty must be going through.

             
On the screen in his hand the numbers stopped and the words, ‘cycle complete,’ flashed across the screen.  Quey stood and went to the truck where he planned to meet Geo and load him in.  Afterward he would call Ryla and inform her of their delay.  He hoped this time she would answer because even though she didn’t really need the update he liked seeing what she was up to and enjoyed their conversations, strange as they often were.

             
Back in his room he watched the words “Calling Ryla” shimmer across his screen, then smiled when she appeared.

             
“Hello,” she said.

             
“Ryla?  Is that you?” he joked.  “It’s been so long, you look so different.  I’d almost given up hope that I’d ever lay eyes on you again.”

             
She smiled slightly.  “I’ve been busy.”

             
“What with?”

             
She took a long breath.  “A project.  It’s complicated.”

             
He nodded.  “We’re going to be here longer than expected,” he began, then told her about Rachel and the plan to get her into the hospital.  After that they talked.  Twice during the conversation she began to explain things unnecessarily but she stopped herself both times.  “That’s not what you meant is it?”

             
He shook his head.

             
“It was supposed to be ‘just for fun.’”

             
This time he nodded and they moved on.

             
Natalie was able to get a hold of Maddy and put everything in place within three days, which was about what she thought it would take.  The ‘field trip’ was going to be on a weekend because to interrupt class would have required months of notice.  This way she could just put a signup sheet in her classroom and tell the students it was for extra credit.  Most wouldn’t give up a Saturday afternoon to go tour a hospital under the guise of learning more about the science of the body but enough would out of genuine interest or the desperate need for extra points to make it look good.