Prodigal (17 page)

“You’re both overlooking the obvious.”

Nathan silenced the argument between them, while Farina looked on in approval. Pitch throttled back, while Kellean turned away in embarrassment.

“The question you
should
be asking,” Nathan chided, “is why they went into stasis in the first place.”

The room fell into another uneasy silence. Farina, however, maintained an easy calm, content to allow Nathan to make the attack—and observing him closely. Nathan couldn’t help but think she was sizing him up like an adversary, listening to his arguments to map out weakness.

“Perhaps it is as Pitch says,” Masir offered. “With no food and no water, stasis offered the only hope for eventual escape.”

Kellean cleared her throat softly, seeking permission to speak. When no one objected, she continued with more restraint. “Respectfully, Doctor—that approach would leave everything to chance. With nobody left to revive them, stasis would have been the same as suicide. If all they wanted to do was die, why go to all the trouble?”

“To save themselves from the Mons virus,” the doctor said. “Use stasis as a way to halt progress of the disease.”

A grave concern spread among the others—except for the captain, who seemed to regard this development as merely another glitch. She turned to Nathan.

“What’s your take, Commander?”

“I agree,” Nathan said. “Thanis might have seen it as their best shot. After everything else they did to survive, it’s not much of a stretch.” He looked down at the table, weary from his own speculation. “Maybe he had a plan for some trusted officer to come back for them later. Maybe that officer was killed before he could complete his mission. Who knows? Any way you cut it, those people were looking at a death sentence. They had nothing to lose by going under.”

Nathan aimed his final comment directly at Farina. He tried to sound reasonable, but the edge in his voice was obvious.

“It does make sense, Captain,” Pitch added. “So far, it’s the only theory that fully explains what we found.”

The captain thought about it for a few moments, then released a pensive breath.

“A theory without a lot of facts to back it up,” she pronounced. “I don’t like making guesses instead of decisions, even when they’re educated guesses. But given the limited amount of information we have, I’m forced to fall back on regulations—and those are quite clear.” She turned to Masir. “I have no choice but to declare them spacers in distress.”

Masir nodded in somber agreement. “Then protocol dictates that we bring them aboard for immediate medical treatment.”

Pitch appeared stunned but said nothing. Kellean showed a brief flash of vindication but suppressed it just as quickly. Nathan simply couldn’t believe they were even talking about this—especially with Masir, who knew the dangers better than anyone.

“You’re actually conferring
survivor
status,” he blurted. “Do you have any idea what that
means
?”

“It means things have changed,” the captain said—making clear that she would tolerate no dissent on the matter. “The Directorate has standing orders for every merchant vessel regarding spacers in distress. Any and all commercial activity must cease until such time as a full measure of assistance has been rendered.”

“You can’t be serious, Skipper,” Nathan protested. “A
rescue
operation? For six people who may well be carriers of a fatal disease? For Christ’s sake—they could be
brain-dead
for all we know.”

“As long as they’re alive, the book says we don’t have a choice.”

“Does the book say anything about war criminals? These are SEF renegades, Lauren! Even if by some miracle they could be resuscitated, they’d be tried and executed the minute we got back home.”

“The regs don’t differentiate between good guys and bad guys,
Commander,
” Farina said. “And they exist for a specific reason—to make sure captains are accountable for the lives and property of
all
Directorate ventures, not just their own. We don’t follow those rules, our license gets revoked. No license means no salvage rights, no matter
what
we find down there.”

“Is
that
what this is all about?” Nathan asked. “We need to get it straight, Captain—any salvage rights we have are worthless if we bring that virus on board. To risk this ship and crew when we don’t even know what
happened
down there,” he finished, shaking his head in exasperation. “There’s no way you can justify that kind of gamble.”

Only then did Nathan realize how quiet the room had become. Masir, Pitch, Kellean—all of them refused to meet his eyes, instead focusing their attentions at various inert points across the wardroom. Only the captain met him head-on, fixing him with the coldest stare he had ever seen.

“Thank you for your input,” she told the others, never raising her voice. “You may resume your duty stations for now. Further instructions will follow.”

Three of them stood up to leave. One by one, they shuffled through the wardroom door. Nathan didn’t move. He knew the order didn’t include him—just as he knew that he had disgraced himself with his behavior. When the hatch closed, and the two of them were alone, he had time to realize just how much.

Farina, for her part, just strolled over to the window and waited for Nathan to speak.

“I was out of line,” he finally admitted. “I’m sorry, Lauren.”

She remained as she was, her back turned to him as she looked out at the stars.

“You still believe you’re right,” Farina asked, “don’t you?”

Nathan considered various evasions, for all the good it would do. He couldn’t see past his own anger and fear, but she had seen through him the entire time.

“Yes,” he admitted.

“Then we have a problem,” the captain said, and turned around. There was no heat in her expression, no recrimination—nothing that Nathan felt he deserved. Somehow that seemed an even worse punishment. “I need you on board with the plan, Nathan. Nothing works without your full commitment.”

“I can assure you, Skipper—I’m prepared to give you just that.”

“
Are
you?” Farina strolled over to the table and sat down on the edge next to him. “The captain is in command—but the XO sets the tone. The crew look at
you
when they want to know what’s going on, Nathan. If there’s a rift there, they’ll know about it.”

Nathan swallowed hard. Farina was correct, of course. Even now, he had trouble facing her. Nathan tried to get past it, but kept coming to the same conclusion over and over again.

This is a mistake, Lauren. You have to understand that.

“I’m in no position to demand anything from you,” Nathan said, keeping most of those reservations to himself, “but a few assurances would go a long way.”

Farina folded her arms together. “I’m listening.”

“We observe the strictest quarantine. I’m talking total vacuum transport—evacuation of all corridors leading to sickbay. Then we scrub everything from top to bottom before we even
think
of letting the atmosphere back in.”

“Go on.”

“Level 5 containment at all times while they’re on board. Engineering can put together a double-wall chamber to reinforce the isolation ward, with a radiological barrier in between. Nobody gets in or out without a biohazard suit and extensive decontamination.”

“Of course,” Farina said, nodding. “Anything else?”

“Yes,” Nathan drew out, standing so he was at eye level with the captain. “If we find out those people
are
infected with the Mons virus, we blow them out into space—no questions.”

He didn’t phrase those last words as a request. Short of mutiny, there wasn’t much he could do about it if Farina said no—but he wanted her to understand that he could go only as far as she was willing to meet him.

“How long until you can have things ready?”

“If we start now,” Nathan guessed, “forty-eight hours.”

“Very well, Commander. You have forty-eight hours.”

Nathan gave her a brief nod, then headed for the hatch. He opened it and was halfway out when the sound of her voice stopped him.

“And Nathan?”

He leaned back in, and found her gathering the briefing materials up from the table. She took the time to finish before looking up at him again, assuming a cool detachment.

“Just because we’re friends,” she said, “that doesn’t mean you can question my decisions in front of the crew. You do that again, I’ll have you up on charges. Are we clear?”

“Aye, sir,” he said, and left.

Rain vaporized against the overflight grid, spitting electrons into a liquid shimmer—air and pollution rendering metastatic beauty from tendrils of laserlight. Lea’s pulser pierced that barrier as it entered the Incorporated Territories, a wash of charged particles parting in flurries ahead of the ship. She stared down the line of the transmission beam, losing herself in the multitude of vortices that formed along her path—a dizzying array of slipstream physics that made her feel weightless. It allowed her, at least momentarily, to forget about the world outside.

Inevitably, however, that world intruded. At first it was at the periphery, a nebulous suggestion of shape and substance that peeked out from the gray mists drifting in from the North Atlantic Ocean. Symmetrical lines of concrete and glass gradually emerged, forming a familiar skyline of thin spires and stratotowers. All at once Lea found herself among them, stray glints of tainted sunlight reflecting off windows in disturbingly close proximity. Then the buildings would disappear again, swallowed by a swirling storm mass that buffeted the pulser as it traversed a bullet trajectory. Her first daylight entrance to New York in ages, and Lea couldn’t see a damned thing.

Instead, she followed the approach on her inflight monitor, allowing the Port Authority computers to steer the pulser into Midtown Manhattan. Free-flight traffic was light because of the weather conditions—just an NYPD hovercraft and the occasional executive shuttle making franchise runs into the Zone—but even those gave Lea a wide berth when she crossed their paths. As a matter of law, all her transits were designated Special Air Missions, which gave her priority clearance wherever she went.
One of the fringe benefits of being a spook.
As the other ships spiraled away, she smiled bitterly. When she was a hammerjack, she had never imagined having that kind of power—a harsh irony, powerless as she felt now.

Lea closed her eyes. Time and again, she kept drifting back to Avalon—and how the woman had thrashed her almost as an afterthought. Lea’s people were T-Branch, the Collective’s best-trained and best-equipped fighting force. Avalon shouldn’t have taken them down so easily, yet it had happened. That Lea had started to believe her reputation as an
Inru
terror only made the fall harder.

But even
that
was all beside the point.

The truth is you’re too scared to work alone. Even when you were jacking, you always had some heat behind you, whether it was a corporate trick or some partisan front. After that, it was Zoe and Funky—and look how they ended up. Everybody pays the price for you, Lea. What made you think this time would be any different?

“No more,” Lea whispered, though she knew it was a lie the moment she said it. Her destination betrayed that already, as it loomed off in the hazy distance. An alert chime on her navigation panel beeped as the pulser approached, drawing Lea’s attention away from her self-recriminations and toward the obelisk directly below her flight path.

A single column topped by a pyramid apex, the building was nestled among others more than twice its height, but offset to such a degree that it seemed as if the whole of Manhattan radiated around it. The pulser slowed as it neared the airspace that surrounded the structure, a restricted zone marked by a circle of hunter drones crawling like tiny spiders along the lines of the grid. Their sensor apertures opened when they detected Lea’s presence, pocking the leaden sky with a constellation of tiny red stars, pinging her with waves of active energy. They brought back memories from a lifetime ago, when she had first visited the Works—except then she had been an enemy, on a mission to destroy the Collective’s blackest project.

So what does that make you now? Its guardian?