Scouts (31 page)

“If they learn that I came out here to talk to you, I’m dead anyway. Tell me.”

She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I can’t. I can’t be part of it again.”

“I need to know what happened to her. I’m going to find her. Did Joco ever tell you?”

“You won’t be able to get to her.” She sighed and covered her face with her hands. “I can’t believe he’s dead.”

“If you want to fight back against the people who killed him, you have to tell me what you know.”

“All right, all right.” She took a deep breath. “He was always something of a loose crate, always bucking the rules and making trouble. It eventually came down that he had to do something to raise his prestige, or get forced out. Well, he couldn’t count on finding a new metallic belt, or charting any distant stars, so he went on a recruiting run and found Cassandra and Masters. She turned out to have a real talent with the gentank. When she submitted her first research project, on the possibility of editing templates to alter or improve the final product, command went berserk. They had never seen anyone with a mind for gentank science like hers. They took her away. When Joco started looking into it, they forcibly retired him.”

“Did he find out where they took her?”

“Yes. There’s a research station in Globular Cluster X-42. It’s orbiting a type-A supergiant on the side closest to the galactic disk.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me?”

“A ship goes out there once a month to bring supplies and personnel. It’s the most secure place anywhere, even more so than here.”

“What’s it called?”

“Everest Station. Are you really going to try to go there?”

“Originally, I was just trying to reunite Masters with Cassandra, but it’s more than that now. The Scouts are corrupt. I can’t work for them anymore, and if I can crash their system a little by getting Cassandra out of their hands, then I’m going to do that. This is personal.”

“Good luck, Challers. I don’t know where you get the courage for this. Try not to get killed, okay?”

I chuckled. “I’ll make it as hard as I can. Have you got somewhere safe you can go?”

“I can stay here. They’ve been asking for people to stay on full time, and I’m actually pretty happy doing this.” She rubbed her stomach. “I don’t think the Scouts will bother me. It’s supposed to be a retreat from all that.”

“Good.” I gave her a hug and a peck on the lips. We had, after all, been lovers once and I felt better knowing that she’d be safe. “Do you know of any way we can slip out, right now?”

“Nothing is locked. Anyone who wants to leave can just leave. It’s not that kind of place.”

I started to tell her about the man in the other room and what he’d tried to do, but I decided she didn’t need to know. If I could just walk out, I would just walk out

“Take care of yourself.”

“Goodbye, Challers.” She lay back on the bed and I pulled the sheet back up over her.

I filled Valka in on everything I had learned on the way back to the academy.

When I was done, she frowned.

“Doesn’t something strike you as odd about what happened there, Challers, especially given how easy it was to leave?”

“No, not really.”

“Your research paper said that Ovors can choose whether their eggs will become fertilized.”

“Yes, that’s true. There’s a gland that secretes a spermicide in the vagina unless the Ovor specifically empties it before sex. That was in the report.”

“And the guy who tried to rape you was clearly trying to fertilize you.”

“I see what you mean.” I pondered a moment. “Maybe he assumed that since I was there, I had already taken care of that?”

“Maybe. I’ve been trying to find out where that gland is, and I can’t feel it. There doesn’t seem to be a muscle or anything to empty the gland. Isn’t it supposed to be under conscious control?”

“Yes, but maybe that’s just because we got made this way in the gentank. We just don’t have the right memories or something. That doesn’t make any sense, though. The gentank is supposed to wire up the nerves to handle the new body shape—otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to walk when you get out.”

“Right. Something else has crossed my mind and if it’s true, things are worse than we thought. First of all, that ‘maternity school’ hasn’t been there long, or the Ovors would be overrunning the station. From what I could see, they should be producing eggs by the hundreds every month, and you don’t see thousands of Ovors around the station. Just a few hundred.”

“Okay, so it hasn’t been around long.”

“Second, Cassandra is this incredible genius with templates and the gentank, and she’s been working at this Everest Station for what, six years now?”

“Right.”

“What if the first modification she did was to take away that gland from the Ovor template.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Look around. This station was clearly built for a much larger population. What happened to them? Where did they go? Not only that, look at the way the Scouts will take just about anyone who fits their psychological profiles. Look at how they tolerate all kinds of bizarre behavior in what’s supposed to be a military service. They need people desperately and that’s the one thing they can’t just manufacture.”

“Unless you’ve got a race of Ovors that have lots of eggs.”

“Exactly.”

“So if they created the maternity school when they got the altered Ovor template, and they’re using it to repopulate the station. So what?”

“That comes around to my third consideration. What do the Scouts and all the other services need the stations for?”

“Oh, raw materials, manufacturing . . . no, wait, that’s not true. They told us so many times I just accepted it, but there’s all the manufacturing and resources they need right here.”

“What they need them for is people. People raised in the right kind of poverty, raised in the right kind of repressed, twisted culture that when the Fleet or the Merchants or the Scouts come along, they don’t make too much of a fuss about having their children carted away. Do you know what my mother said when Palla Rossing got taken by the Merchants? She said, ‘At least she’ll have enough to eat every day.’”

I thought back to the day I said goodbye to my own mother. She hadn’t made even the slightest protest to me leaving the station. She saw it as a way to a better life.

“Oh, vack.”

“Vack is right, Challers. If this experiment works, they won’t need the stations anymore.”

“They need the stations. They need them to be separate, so if there’s a revolt, they’re easily isolated, easily purged.”

“Fine. They can bring in the gentanks and force everyone through them. Then it won’t be ten or twenty overpop in a year, it’ll be a hundred, two hundred. The ships could stop by every month and pick up another load. “

“Okay, it sounds to me like you’ve got something, but one thing still doesn’t add up. Why are there so few Scouts? If they’re getting a couple Scouts a year from every station, that’d be, what, a few hundred at a time. They could fill up the academy right now.”

“They’re competing with the Fleet and the Merchants, remember, and they need people too.”

“But why? There must be something . . . of course. Pirates.”

It was my turn to leave her puzzled. “Hmm?”

“Okay, we’ve got a lot of assumptions strung along with only a few facts, but so far, everything lines up . . . especially if the Pirates aren’t just scattered raiders, but a full military force that’s fighting against them. You’ve seen the histories; there have been wars across the galaxy that left it with a quarter or even half of its population dead. Doesn’t it look like that’s what’s been happening here? They have to be desperate for manpower.”

“And these hyper-fertile Ovors are the perfect answer to that problem. Challers, we have to go get Cassandra. It’s not just for Masters, not just for revenge. We can’t risk this going any further. She’s the key to it all; without her, they can’t make the changes to the templates.”

“But they already have them.”

“You know as well as I do that an initial design never goes completely perfect. They’re going to need to adjust things for this project to work. Taking Cassandra away from them is going to be the best way to keep them from doing that.”

“So what do we do?”

“When we get back, we need to convince Masters and Shirley to go along with us. Once we graduate, we’ll have two ships; we can go looking for Everest Station.”

“And then what? Four people aren’t going to be able to just walk onto the station and take her.”

“We can figure that out when the time comes. For now, our job is to lay low, stay out of trouble, and graduate.”

“Right. I just hope I can keep up the charade that long.”

“What charade? You’ve seen the cadets. How many of them look happy?”

I thought of Trace. It wouldn’t take much acting after all.

“You’re right.”

I steeled myself. I could do it. My path was clear. While the future didn’t look rosy, I could see the way that might lead to making things right.

We talked some more, making plans on how to stay in touch so the Scouts wouldn’t be able to hear us, plans on how to approach getting Shirley and Masters to help us.

Then the car arrived at the academy transit hub and the doors opened.

Shirley stood on the dock, a pistol on her hip, flanked by two similarly armed Scouts—all three with grim expressions.

My mentor’s voice creaked under the strain of speaking. “Cadet Challers Dizen, Cadet Valka Parl, you are under arrest.”

“NO!” screamed Valka, rushing out of the car. “You can’t help them! Shirley, don’t you understand? They will never let you be with Robert! It’s a lie. The prestige ladder, the lotteries—they’re all lies. Shirley, I’ve seen it. You know it’s true.”

Shirley set her jaw and drew her pistol. “Are you going to come quietly? Or are you going to keep spouting the lies your Pirate friends told you to say?”

The betrayal ripped through my guts.

“How could you?” I screamed and she backhanded me with her pistol, knocking me against the side of the transit car. I tasted blood, but it was sweet compared to the bile of betrayal. Shirley had told me she would stay out of it, that she wouldn’t go to Command.
She lied.

Shirley and her escort put us in restraints, both wrists and ankles, and marched us back into the transit car.

“How could you do this to me?” I asked.

“Stay quiet,” she said. “You’re already in enough trouble. Don’t try to drag me into it; you’ll only make it worse for yourself.”

Shirley wouldn’t look at me. Valka stared down at her feet. The two guards just glared.

When we arrived at our destination, about a half hour later, they escorted us through an unmarked set or doors. Inside, a couple of muscular guards in white Scout uniforms stood with pistols at their hips in front of another pair of unmarked doors.

“Prisoners Challers Dizen and Valka Parl,” said Shirley.

The guard nodded and stepped out of the way. The doors slid sideways as we passed through.

My heart felt like it was sliding into my belly. I was ready to cry, ready to scream, ready to jump on Shirley and beat her senseless, but I knew that would only get me shot.

We continued into a maze of convoluted passages. Shirley turned at one intersection and when Valka tried to follow us, the guards got in her way. “Your cell is this way, prisoner.”

“No!” cried Valka. Tears fell from her face and I found myself stifling sobs, as well.

I turned to Shirley, who had stopped to look back at us. “At least let us say goodbye.”

She gave a curt nod. “One minute. No more.”

The cuffs on our wrists wouldn’t let us hug each other, so we just laid our heads on each other’s shoulders and cried. I wanted to say something hopeful, but the words wouldn’t come. It would be a lie to admit that our outlook was anything but void-black, and there had been enough lies.

“I love you,” I said, my voice cracking. It was the only thing that would still have meaning.