Blood of the Cosmos (64 page)

Tom Rom hunted down the last of the technicians and one remaining doctor to prevent any distractions. That would give Zoe the moment she so anticipated. He didn't intend to leave anyone alive when they were done anyway.

Zoe went to the first factory womb: a drug-addled, comatose woman with dark, greasy skin and half-shut eyes. Zoe gazed into her face, looked at the chart, and shook her head. “Not my mother.”

Tom Rom had let her take a projectile weapon for her own defense. Now Zoe withdrew the weapon and shot the woman in the head. “We will not let any part of this operation continue.” She and Tom Rom had made a pact. “Every one of these women chose to do this,
knowing
that their babies would be butchered.”

Tom Rom approved of her ruthlessness.
There are no innocents in this place.

The twelve women were hooked up to nutrient solutions, linked to numerous monitors, implanted with one embryo after another, like an assembly line. One woman was bloated with at least six simultaneously gestating fetuses, like a litter of humans at different stages. All of the babies were destined to be stripped down for the organ supply tanks. Some fetal tissue had already been extracted from the unborn infants.

He did not allow himself to feel guilt for what they had to do to these monsters.

Two women shrieked and flailed but could not get off their beds; after verifying that neither one was Muriel, he killed them both. He and Zoe would leave nothing intact here. Nothing at all. Those unborn babies did not deserve their fates, but he was no rescuer and neither was Zoe. Those offspring had been doomed from the moment of their unnatural conception.

“I found her,” Zoe called. She leaned over an enormous woman sprawled on a gestation bed.

As he strode over, Tom Rom barely recognized Muriel. Her skin was a sickly tarpaulin over a framework of bones, her legs fat and atrophied, her pudgy arms waving ineffectually. Her eyes were wide with alarm and fury, but dulled with drugs.

Tom Rom wanted to vomit. It took his greatest imagination to filter through this bloated, disgusting wreck of a woman to remember the much younger, much prettier person who had tempted him more than a quarter century earlier. “I used to think you were beautiful, Muriel. You fooled me.”

In the years since, he had thought about her, tried to recapture the brief happiness from their affair. But not even the most extreme fantasy pleasure could atone for knowing what she had done to their daughter, who had been offered up for sacrifice; after which, Muriel had sold herself again and again.

Tom Rom stepped up to the gestation bed, looking down at the woman without pity. Muriel looked at him. “I know you. I remember.…”

He was surprised she recognized him. “And I know what you've done. All those children. My child.”

Muriel lashed out, “
My
children. All of them.
Mine
. Produced
by me
. I can do what I want with them.”

“Except for me,” Zoe said. “Hello, Mother.”

The woman thrashed on the bed, looked at Zoe. Her expression had a manic edge. “My daughter came back to me?” She laughed. “Which one? Ah, you're the one I sold—the pretty one.”

“I'm the one who survived. I'm the one who's come back.”

“
My
babies,” Muriel snapped, struggling to get up off the bed, but her stomach was bloated, her arms and legs too weak.

“I am not yours,” Zoe said.

“None of them are yours, Muriel.” Tom Rom trembled with the thought of his real daughter, who would never be real to him now, only imaginary, only possibilities. “You have nothing. You
deserve
nothing. Every comfort you bought with the deaths of those babies? We're taking it all away from you.”

“No!” Muriel shrieked.

Two of the other factory wombs nearby groaned and tried to escape; one made if off her bed, but collapsed to the floor.

Muriel cried, “Give me endorphins. I want my endorphins.” She clutched at the tubes and yelled for the doctors, all of whom lay dead around the room.

“I have only one gift to give you, Mother,” Zoe said, and placed a detonator on her mounded stomach, beyond the reach of her flailing, weak hands. As she did it, Zoe looked oddly wistful, and her expression sent a chill through him. “How many children do you think she had, Tom Rom? How many babies lost?”

He gave her the cold, terrible answer. “She had only one child. You.”

He placed other detonators around the medical facility, paused to consider whether he should kill the last surviving factory wombs first, but decided to let the explosions take care of the loose ends.
There are no innocents in this place.

Muriel was still shouting, but Zoe did not look back at her. The detonator timers were already set.

The two of them left, wrapped in their own thoughts, but with no regrets. They walked past the dead guards, the dead receptionist, dead techs, and dead doctors, climbed aboard the flatboat transport, and accelerated down the weedy canal with thirty seconds to spare before eruptions blossomed into the swampy night.

They reached the ship and flew away before Rakkem's haphazard security forces thought to shut down the spaceport.

Zoe said, “Those prisdiamonds on Vaconda—we have a lot of them, right?”

“More than you can imagine. More than you could ever spend.”

“Then I can build my own medical facility. Make it bigger, more thorough, and more important than anything here on Rakkem.”

Tom Rom hesitated. “That would be ambitious … but, yes, it's possible.”

“I want to do it.” She thought for a long time. “I want all the cures, all the diseases. Everything that curesellers and biomerchants have—and I want it for myself.” Her voice carried an odd echo of her mother's.

“If that is what you want.”

*   *   *

Once the transport skimmer picked him up at the transportal outcropping, Tom Rom arrived at the docking platform outside Kuivahr's main sanctuary dome. Frothy green water lapped against the curved submerged surface, and he could smell the rich mixture of plankton and kelp all around him. He waited as a lift rose up inside the dome, and Tamo'l herself stood there to receive him. “Was my research data useful to your employer?”

He nodded. “It proved interesting indeed, and this time I've come to share something of our own regarding Prince Reynald's disease. King Peter and Queen Estarra dispatched me here to bring it to you.”

She brightened. “Then we will receive it gladly. We already have some promising treatments.” Tamo'l gestured toward the lift. “Join us—unless the misbreeds will disturb you?”

He gave her a small smile. “No need to worry. I have seen far worse.”

 

CHAPTER

109

TASIA TAMBLYN

The emergency alarms in the
Voracious Curiosity
's cockpit didn't matter, and Tasia didn't care about the red lines as she hauled ass away from the Iswander extraction yards. The ship had been damaged, and Tasia lost a lot of maneuverability, but she ran anyway—full speed, evasive maneuvers, high acceleration, abrupt and impossible course changes. She used every trick she had learned during the Elemental War.

Even when they were far from the bloater cluster, she kept going. If she stopped for a minute to make emergency repairs, the
Curiosity
would be wiped out in no time. Elisa Enturi didn't seem to be in the mood for discussion.

When Tasia finally managed to activate the Ildiran stardrive, the sudden acceleration slammed them back with enough force to pull skin tight against muscles and press down on bones like a giant invisible foot. DD tumbled sideways and skittered across the deck. Orli Covitz let out an involuntary grunt of pain and fear. Robb couldn't breathe, but Tasia did not relent.

“Come on!” she said through gritted teeth.

The cockpit alarms reached a crescendo. Several secondary systems finally gave up, and the screens went dark. Gambling, Tasia kept flying for another ten seconds, then decided she couldn't risk it any longer. They were as safe as they were going to be, and if the engines failed completely, the
Curiosity
would be stranded, unable to get home. In that case, they might as well have let Elisa blast them to bits—at least the end would have been quicker.

The ship had gone the better part of a parsec in only a few minutes, and no Iswander pursuers would be able to find them. Tasia shut everything down and let the
Curiosity
drift. The system alarms remained loud and scolding, but emergency levels slowly diminished. It seemed to her that the ship was sulking, licking its wounds.

Tasia let out a long exhale and realized she was shaking. “Well, that was fun.”

DD picked himself up from the deck and stood beside Orli. “Perhaps I no longer understand the human concept of fun. I thought I grasped it before. Can you please explain, Orli Covitz?”

Orli wiped her brow. “She's being sarcastic, DD.”

Robb unbuckled his restraints in the copilot seat. “That wasn't what we expected to find, but we did discover where Iswander gets his ekti-X.”

“When Garrison and I flew away from Ikbir, we saw countless bloaters drifting in strings, like breadcrumbs in space.” Orli turned to look at Tasia and Robb. “They're not hard to find.”

“It's not the bloaters Iswander is trying to hide,” Tasia said. “He doesn't want anybody to know what they're made of. After the Duquesne massacre and what just happened to us, there's no doubt they're willing to kill to protect the secret.”

“At least Elisa is,” Orli said. “When I met him, Lee Iswander seemed a rational man.”

“She's operating under his orders, whether they're explicit or implied,” Tasia said. “Elisa needs to face the music for what she's done, and so does Iswander.”

Robb headed toward the back of the
Curiosity
to access the engine compartment. He ran a diagnostic check, studied the automated damage report. “I may need to go outside and do some external fixes.”

DD marched up beside him, bright and helpful. “I can assist. I have a programming module of starship engine specs and repair instructions. Orli Covitz had me help her run the
Proud Mary
.”

“Then let's have the compy go outside and do the hard work,” Tasia said.

“I would be happy to.”

Robb removed an environment suit from the equipment locker. “We'll work out there together. We've got spare components for the most critical systems.”

Tasia said, “Meanwhile, Orli and I will compile the evidence and see what we've got. There's enough to make a lot of waves.”

Robb and DD cycled through the airlock, clipped themselves onto the outer hull, and began to replace damaged hull plates. While they swapped out failing stardrive components, Tasia called up the images their forward recorders had captured of the extraction field, the large arrays of ekti-X tanks. Next came the chaotic records from when they were being chased by the security ships and fired upon by Elisa Enturi.

Orli had already cleaned up the log record retrieved from the wrecked Duquesne tanker, which would have been damning enough, but the encounter at the Iswander extraction yards sealed the deal.

Tasia was sickened to remember that Lee Iswander had wanted to become the next clan Speaker, but the Sheol debacle had destroyed his political ambitions. Now Iswander was rebuilding his fortune and his reputation with ekti-X, and her own Kett Shipping had helped him in that. Tasia wanted nothing more than to expose Iswander, and she knew Rlinda Kett was going to approve, even if it cost them a lot of profits.

Shizz, the company could also have continued to make money selling horrific “boutique medical treatments” from Aldo Cerf, but after Xander and Terry's experience on Dremen, they had put an immediate end to that.

When Orli reviewed the images of the industrial yard, she described what she remembered from the first bloater cluster. Tasia studied the ship configurations at the site, identified a hodgepodge of makes and models. “Looks to me like Iswander bought up all kinds of functional Roamer ships and equipment and modified them to the work here.” She shook her head and knew the best way to bring about Iswander's downfall, where to hit him that would hurt most.

The
Curiosity
's cockpit screens lit up, and the warning lamps switched from amber to green. She called up a report grid, saw that Robb and the compy had even repaired several noncritical systems. “Well, aren't you two ambitious?”

Over the comm, Robb said, “DD doesn't like to leave a job incomplete, and it only took a few extra minutes. Besides, Rlinda will be happy to have the
Curiosity
back in reasonable condition.”

“Now come inside, so we can get out of here.” Tasia was anxious to sound the alarm about Iswander.

By the time Robb and DD cycled back into the
Curiosity
's main cabin, Tasia was ready to depart. Robb removed his helmet and stripped off the environment suit. The compy seemed quite pleased with the work they had done.

“Good job, DD,” Orli said.

“The
Curiosity
will take us where we need to go,” Robb said, then raised his eyebrows. “Which is where exactly?”

“Theroc?” Orli suggested. “Report to the King and Queen? The Confederation can bring down the hammer on Iswander Industries.”

Tasia shook her head. “Considering who he is, and what we saw, there's a more effective way to shut him down completely.” She felt her face grow hot. “We'll go to Newstation and address the clan convocation. The Roamers will deal with their own.”

 

CHAPTER

110

XANDER BRINDLE

At the Earth headquarters of Kett Shipping, Xander and Terry oversaw the repairs to the
Verne
so closely that they got in the way. When the company mechanics finally complained, Rlinda Kett pulled the two and their compy aside.