The Very Best of Kate Elliott (37 page)

“Imbécil! Que estabas pensando? Esta niña, de semejante familia! Por supuesto que lleva implantada la pantalla de simulación. Ahora ya ha entendido cada palabra que has dicho, tu y los otros brutos!”

Without effort, she turned her anger off, as with a switch, and presented a kindly face to Rose, speaking Standard. “Por favor, no use the seem . . . What it is you call this thing?”

“Sim-screen.”

“Si. Gracias.”

The señora looked up at the commander and let loose such a stream of invective that he shrank back against the curtain momentarily, but only to gather strength before he began arguing with her. Their voices filled the chamber; Rose covered her ears with her hands. Mercifully, the itching had subsided completely. She dared not blink the screen back on, so she cowered between them as they argued fiercely over her head. One of the young toughs stuck his head in but retreated as the señora turned her scolding on him.

Through it all, her father watched, half amused, half ready to take action, but frozen. It was only his image, and his image could not help her.

In the church, the screaming had subsided and now Rose heard whimpering and weeping as orders were given.

“Go! Go!”

“But where—!” The slap of a gun against flesh was followed by a bruised yelp, a gasp, a sob, a curse—four different voices.

“Go!”

Shuffling, sobs, a crack of laughter from one of the guards; these noises receded until they were lost to her ears. The Sunseekers had been taken away.

“Are you going to kill them?” she whispered.

They broke off their argument, the commander frowning at her, the señora sighing.

“We no kill—we do not kill.” The señora spoke deliberately, careful over her choice of words. “They bring us better money if the parents buy them from us.”

“But kidnappers always get caught in the end.”

The commander laughed. “Fatalism is the only rational worldview,” he agreed.

“In the stories, it may be so, that these ones are always caught,” continued the señora. “We take a lesson, a borrowing, from our own history, but this thing called ransom we use for a different purpose than the ones who stole the children.”

“What purpose?” Rose demanded. She had gone beyond worrying about clichés. “I see the poverty you live in. Are you revolting against the inequality of League economics? Is this a protest? Will you use the array to help poor people?”

The commander’s sarcastic laugh humiliated her, but the señora smiled in such a gentle, world-weary way that Rose suddenly felt lower than a worm.

“Hija, I am the inventor of one of the protocols used in this solar array that powers the ship you children voyage on. These protocols were stolen from me and my company by operatives of Surbrent-Xia. In much this same way as we steal it back, but perhaps not with such drama.” She gestured toward the poster and the stunningly handsome blond man who stared out at them, promising dreams, justice, excitement, violence, and fulfillment. “No beautiful hero comes to save me. The law listens not to my protests. Surbrent-Xia falsifies their trail. They lay certain traps for me, and so the corporation and patent laws convict me, and I am dropped into the prison. There I sit many years while they profit from what I helped create. All these years I plot my revenge, just like in this story,
The Count of Monte Cristo,
no? Was not your father starring in this role a few years ago? So now we have the array in our hands. I leave—have left—markers in my work. Like this stain upon your cheek, those markers identify what is mine. With these markers, no one can mistake it otherwise. With this proof—”

“And the children to draw attention to us,” added Marcos.

“—we will get attention to this matter.”

“But you’ll be prosecuted for kidnapping!”

“Perhaps. If we get publicity, if a light is shined onto these criminal actions made by Surbrent-Xia ten years ago, then we are protected by exposing them. Do you see? Surbrent-Xia ‘got away with it’—they say this in the telenovelas and the acties, do they not?—they got away with it last time because it was hushed.”

“They kept it quiet,” said Marcos.“No one knew what they had done.”

“But why did you have everyone beat up? What did Akvir and Zenobia and Eun-soo and the others have to do with anything or what anyone did ten years ago?”

The old woman nodded, taking the question without defensiveness. She seemed a logical soul, not an emotional revolutionary at all. “We have not harmed them, only bruised them. It is in answer to—it is in—”

“—retaliation—” said Marcos.

“That is right. Excuse my speech. I have been many years in isolation on these false charges. The world, and my enemies, did not play nice with my relatives in the old days. We are not the only ones who play hardball. An eye for an eye.”

“But they’re innocent!”

“They are all the children of shareholders. That is why they come to ride on the beautiful ship, to be made much of. You do not know this?”

“I just thought—” She faltered, knowing how unbelievably stupid anything she said now would sound.

I didn’t know
.

Hadn’t her father talked and talked and talked about the Sunseekers, how very sunny and fashionable they were? Hadn’t she run away to get his attention, so he would be surprised she had gotten into some group so very jet, so very now, even with her disfigurement?

“They are lucky you came to them,” continued the señora. “Of what interest are the children of shareholders, except to themselves and their parents and their rivals? But you are the child of El Sol. When you came aboard, everyone is watching.”

“Good publicity is good advertising,” added Marcos sardonically. “This is what we all want.”

Right now, she just wanted her daddy.

“It still doesn’t seem right.” They hadn’t bitten her yet. They hadn’t bruised her, not more than incidentally.“To hurt them. They aren’t bad, just—”
Just pointless.
“And what about Eleanor? I mean, the other ones.”

“The other ones?” asked Señora Maria.

“The competition,” said Marcos. “We don’t have a positive ID on them yet, but I presume they are working for Horn Enterprises. Horn wants the array, too.”

“Horn filed a wrongful use claim against Surbrent-Xia for theft of their cell transduction protocol.”

“Which came to nothing. But they had a grievance, too, and plenty of markets out-system who won’t ask too many questions about whether they have patent rights. This is so much useless speculation, now. We got the array. They did not.”

How could they analyze the day’s nasty work so dispassionately, as though it were the script of an actie in development?

“You killed two men! Eleanor was really nice to me!” Another second and she would be blubbering, but she held it in, sniffing hard, choking down the lump in her throat.

“We killed no one,” said Marcos angrily.“Just two hurt, in the Zona, but they are only stunned.”

“There was blood.”

“There is always blood. This other, this Eleanor—no se. There was a hover that flew off once they saw they had lost.”

“What about me?”

Señora Maria gestured.

Rose eased up to her feet, wincing with pain as her knees unbent. “Ow.”

“We should let this pauvre go home. She can use the call-up in Anselmo’s house.”

“The Constabulary will come,” said Rose.

“Not soon,” said Marcos. “Your flight plan registers a stop at San Lorenzo to visit the museum. They do not know otherwise. They will not be expecting you to leave for some hours. We have time.”

“Ándale,” said Señora Maria.

Marcos shrugged, sighed, and motioned with his gun for Rose to follow him. Perhaps he wasn’t the commander after all, or perhaps he was just behaving as men ought—as her mother used to say: respectful toward the grandmother of his tribe.

The house belonging to Anselmo sat riverside, one door facing the road and a second overlooking the bank. A small receiver dish tilted precariously on the roof, fastened to the topmost beam. They had to walk up two steps made of stacked concrete blocks to get onto the elevated wood floor inside. Like the entire village, the little one-room hut was untenanted, except for a burlap cot without bedding, a table, and a bright yellow molded plastic bench pitted with pinprick holes. An old-fashioned all-in-one sat closed up on the table. Looking out through the other door, Rose watched as a loose branch drifted past on the water and snagged on a tree, while Marcos powered up the box and tilted up its view screen.

“Where did you take the others?” she asked. The driftwood tugged loose from its trap and spun away down the river.

He mulled over the controls, not looking up at her, although a hand remained cupped over the scatter gun’s readouts.“They will be safe.” He spoke to the box in his own language. Lights winked on the console. “Here. You may enter a number. Use the keypad.”

She had a priority imavision code, of course, that identified her immediately to her father’s secretary since her father never ever took incoming calls personally.

A whir. A beep.

“One moment, Miss Rose. Putting you through.”

The secretary did not turn on his own imavision. Although the screen remained blank, Marcos stepped away and turned sideways to give her privacy and to keep an eye out the door. But even so he started when that famous golden voice spoke across the net in a tone richly affectionate and so precisely intimate, using the pet name for her that no other dared speak.

“Mouse?”

“D—d—daddy.”

“I didn’t expect you to call.” He hadn’t turned on the imavision. Maybe he was getting dressed or entertaining visitors. Maybe today he just didn’t want to see her face. “It’s been so long since we talked. I’ve missed your voice so much, here at home. All your little quiet noises in the background. It seems so empty here without you puttering around. How are you? Are you having fun up there in the eternal sunshine?”

“N—n—no, Daddy. I’m just—” She faltered, glancing toward Marcos, who still stared out the door at the sluggish river.

“You should be in—” A pause. A voice murmured in the background. “San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán. Some kind of a museum there, I see. Olmec civilization. Pride of the collection is a large stone head! What will you children think of next!”

“D—daddy.” She wiped away a tear with the back of her hand.

“Are you crying, little mouse?”

“Daddy, I’m in trouble.”

A pause.

A silence.

“Rosie, you
have
a contraceptive implant—”

“No, Daddy. No. I’m in
trouble.
Please come get me.”

“Come get you?”

The screen flashed, a nova of light that spread, swirled with color, coalesced, and formed into an image of his face. The most famous face in the universe, so people said.

He looked put out.

“Come get you?” he repeated, as though she just told him he had turned purple.“I have three interviews today to support the opening of
Judge Not.
The ratings aren’t as strong as they need to be. After this a meeting with the Fodera-Euler Consortium to sign the contract for the Alpha Trek 3-D.”

He glanced back over his shoulder, speaking to a person not within the imavision’s range.“What’s the time frame?”

“Ten days,” said his secretary, off screen.

“And the Consortium wants to begin recording—?”

“Fourteen days.”

He turned his brilliant smile on her. He had the most glorious blue eyes, warming as he stared intently at her through the imavision, as though he were really right by her side, comforting her infant sobs on a stormy night. “Listen, Rosie. You hang in there for ten more days and I’ll come get you. We’ll make the most of it, father and daughter reunited, that kind of thing. Let Joseph know when your first landfall comes once the ten days are up. I’ll be there to meet you. No need to mention you called now and arranged it in advance. Pretend you’re surprised to see me.”

“But, Daddy—”

“Are you in danger of being killed?”

Marcos had not shifted position, nor his grip on the scatter gun.“No. I don’t think so, but—”

“Rosie. Mouse.” His tone softened, lowered. “You know I will never let you down. But as long as your life or health isn’t in danger, it can’t be done for ten days. I made an arrangement with Surbrent-Xia that you would stick with the Sunseekers for three months. You weren’t to know, but I trust you can see how important it is that I fulfill my contracts. You know how tight money is these days—”

“You ‘made an arrangement’ with Surbrent-Xia! I thought I ran away!”

“You did. You did. Fortunately, you picked the right place to run away to.”

“But I want to come home, Daddy. Now. I need to. You don’t understand—”

“It can’t be done. If I break the contract, we get nothing. Just ten more days.”

She hated that tone. “But, Daddy, the—the—” What was Marcos going to do? Shoot her with a nonlethal weapon while her father could see and hear? “I
am
in danger. An awful thing happened. We landed at San Lorenzo and then we were attacked by corporate raiders who wanted the solar array. And then we were caught in the crossfire when another group who had their technology stolen stole it back. I thought they were bandits, first, but it’s all some kind of corporate espionage that goes back for years and years, like they’re always stealing things, bits or patents from each other and stealing them back and selling them out-system—”

“Joseph! Joseph!” He turned away from her, showing his profile. Always aware of the camera’s eye, he never lifted his chin because it distorted the angle of his nose. “Did you get that down? We need more information! This could be a gold mine if we get it into development first. I see it as a serial. A family saga about ruthless technology pirates!” His beautiful face loomed again, grinning at her. “What a good girl, Rosie! I knew I could count on you! Is there someone there I can talk to, who would be interested in a contract? Who has inside information?”

“A contract!” She recoiled from the table, sure she hadn’t heard him right.