Chapter Twenty-One

 

A few hours later, Chestla says, “Kaliel’s ship number just pinged in a landing request on Aspeld. That’s close.”

“I’ll call Gavin,” Brill says. “He knows everybody. Or somebody who knows everybody. See if he can bribe someone to stall the landing request.”

I only half-hear him. Aspeld sounds familiar. I’m trying to place it. Didn’t Mamá do a cooking special there once?

I take out my phone to look it up.

One new app is a newswire service that keeps sending notifications on stories Brill’s following. It pops up a headline Attack on New Cacao Plantation.

The FeedCaster is a frowning Krom in a black sweater. He speaks without intonation, lacking the usual popjoy for his subject. “This morning, a trade vessel was granted opportunity to land at Catha, site of the Nilka’s new colony, set up for the singular purpose of growing cacao. There was one soul on board not listed on the manifest, one angry, displaced Earthling. This is what security feeds captured when the Earthling then snuck from the ship to the cacao plantation.”

The holo gritcasts a woman dressed in black approaching the edge of a walled area. She’s carrying a pair of garden shears. She makes it over the wall, pero the holofield splits, showing she’s set off a silent alarm, which sends half a dozen armed guards running through the building, popping open the door to get outside. Nilka are deceptively fragile-looking, built like humanoid butterflies with both a proboscis and a mouth. They’re actually one of the most feartastic species in the galaxy. And they can fly.

Their gossamer wings, silver and yellow and white, float them like kites towards the woman, who is kneeling in the dirt, closing her clippers around the base of one of the cacao saplings, which is maybe a foot and a half tall. The sapling topples into the dirt just as a Nilka drops out of the sky, bowling her backwards. There’s an interrogation. It only takes a few minutes, and afterwards, that same Nilka picks up the garden clippers. His body blocks the camera, pero when he steps away, the woman is muerta, the clippers sticking out of her chest.

The Kromarazzi reappears. “The woman claimed to have been working alone, but early reports suggest the Nilka suspect Earth Corporation HGB to have had a hand in this sabotage, in an attempt to regain their monopoly on chocolate. Without proof though, the Nilka will likely refrain from retaliation.”

The other new cacao plantation is on Krom. Thinking about what could happen between my people and Brill’s if HGB sent someone to Krom to try to destroy those cacao plants makes mi cabeza ache. Claro está, the Krom always manage to return invaders unharmed. It’s kind of their thing.

Then the numbers three – two – one poofbang into the holofield, and the whole thing vanishes, including the link to get back to it.

What kind of news service is this? I doubt this story will appear on the regular newscasts.

Chestla comes close and I get an echo of the prey response. She says, “I hate that service. You never get to watch the good stuff twice.”

“I usually don’t watch this kind of stuff once, chica,” I tell her.

“That’s right.” She drops her voice to a whisper, her teeth coming close to my ear to avoid Tawny’s eavesdropping, pero she still sounds a bit miffed. “You told me you weren’t looking into Kaliel being setup anymore. He didn’t care who tried to have him killed to cover up whatever was going on with that Senior cruiser. So you wanted to just let it go. Only now he’s important again, so maybe that information’s not completely irrelevant.”

I whisper back, “I thought we decided the attack was against HGB. That someone must have been trying to break public opinion about the megacorp’s right to control chocolate, if they can’t control their own pilots.”

“Let me show you something somewhere a little quieter.” Chestla casts a meaningful look at Tawny’s door, then pulls me into her cabin and takes out a device to scan for bugs. She plucks a nearly invisible camera off the wall and squashes it. Then she pulls up a holo. “I’ve almost cracked who hired the mercenaries who killed Kayla’s grandparents.”

My eyes go wide. Was this about Kayla? Had we been completely wrong about it being an attack on HGB? That makes absolutely no sense. Kayla’s a nobody. And so were her grandparents. And yet, she had disappeared. Could Kayla have been in some kind of trouble that we didn’t know about?

I can’t help remember what Frank said, about the possibility that Kaliel might have been working with these guys. I consider fitting him into this holo, a subsidiary part of the bad-guy crew. Pero, I can’t. That’s just not the Kaliel I had gotten to know.

Besides, he’d come close to getting shaved for his part in the SeniorLeisure incident. He wouldn’t have taken a suicide mission. He’s not the type of person to just throw his life away.

Which makes what he’s doing now just that much harder to understand.

Brill had told me to get Chestla to stop looking into this. I should stop her right here. Pero, I can’t look away from the holo of the interior of a crowded bar. “Which one of these guys tricked Kaliel into taking that shot?”

Chestla points at the gritcast. “This guy. Here he’s walking into a bar on Plektar and accepting a check from someone whose face never appears on camera, four days before the SeniorLeisure incident.” Plektar’s the planet where Earth first applied for membership in the Galactic Court, and the bartender’s a twelve-tentacled native, with beer mugs in four of her “hands.”

One customer is paying for his drink with a bar of HGB dark, which still trades at a more valuable rate than Earth cash. Yet another reason not to mention it’s been infused with Serum Green.

Pero, that customer’s not the feedclip’s focus. It’s a guy with a face that looks rough and rocky, patched black and gray. Like he’s half-made of countertop material. He’s wearing a buttery matt-gray leather jacket and black pants with tailored lace-up dress shoes. Chestla says, “The ship is called the Onyx Shadow, and that guy there with the granite skin condition is Grundt.” The camera image shifts, panning towards the door. “The girl in the green – that’s Junk. I’m pretty sure that’s not her real name. The tough guy in black is Flip.”

My chest goes frío. This information is dangerous. Those people are dangerous.

What if Tawny still has a way to overhear us? Knowing too much is a great way to get on HGB’s most wanted dead list.

I force myself to breathe. Would HGB even care that Chestla’s unraveling who hired a bunch of thugs to frame one of their pilots? Their reputation was hurt by everything that happened, and it dropped their public opinion in the media polls to the point where the revolutionaries who oppose their concentrated power are more openly calling for war. Surely, HGB is trying to figure out who framed Kaliel too.

Pero, they don’t like people digging into their business. Mi papá died for doing just that. And now Brill wants me to stop, so that I’ll be safe.

Pero, I’m pretty sure I’m already past that point. HGB knows I’ve uncovered some of their secrets. Like he said, I’m only alive because I’m useful to them on this tour. I need to find a way to change the status quo – before we get to the capital.

I might uncover something useful enough to keep me alive. If not, they can only execute you once, no?

After making damn sure there’s not another bug on my clothes, I tell Chestla, “Frank has admitted he killed Papá and took back vials of Serum Green, and what I’m calling Serum Yellow. Pero, we still know nada about the tainted chocolate that Papá was looking for.”

“Serum Yellow?”

“Ni idea. Frank didn’t know what it was either. Pero that chocolate has to be the same as what we found in the warehouse. All those tons of it, all laced with Pure275. Why would anyone put such a selective herbicide in food? A human would have to eat a lot of it, over a period of time, to die from poisoning. Pero, if it got into the batch by mistake, why not just destroy it?”

“It was all marked like it was supposed to be destroyed.” Chestla shrugs. “Maybe it wasn’t meant to target humans. Maybe it was meant for some other species who’s more susceptible. And whoever was going to use it chickened out, because it’s the kind of thing that can get you sanctioned by the Galactic Court.”

“You mean there’s a planet with people who are genetically similar to cacao trees?”

Chestla scrunches up her nose. “Not like that. Not necessarily. But was there anyone who was a threat to Earth before this invasion fleet showed up?”

“Not that I know of, chica. Pero, who’d tell me?”

She gestures towards my phone. “Frank, maybe? He showed up in HGB’s tax payrolls in 2093. That was thirty-two years ago. He’s got to be what, early fifties? He’s been with them for more than half his life.”

“Which is why he’s not going to tell me anything. Pero, we do know that several boxes of the tainted chocolate got shipped to the SeniorLeisure vessel CaptureVista – the same ship Kaliel later got tricked into blowing up.”

I believe that the herbicide and Serum Green were created by two different groups of people, even though we’d found them both in the same lab. One contained a poison, while the other had been carefully engineered to be non-toxic. One had been a completed product (the boxes of tainted chocolate marked for destruction, like they might have been an accident or a mistake), the other an additive (the vials of serum and their box completely unlabeled).

Which means they both can’t have been created by HGB. Right?

My phone dings, with a headline from the regular news channel: “Undocumented Earthling Lands on Krom. Misunderstanding Leads to Cultural Exchange.”

Did the Krom news network alert them to what had happened with the Nilka, so they could diffuse the situation? Or is the way they handle things in general just that much different?

Before I can discuss that with Brill, my sublingual rings. It’s Mamá.

“Mija! Can Brill get us an interview with the Krom who just hit the newsfeeds?”

I blink. “Mamá! It’s not like all Krom know each other.”

“Pero Brill is famous now.” She says it like that means people should give him anything he wants. “He has fans. If you cannot get the cultural exchange Krom, tal vez Brill will holo onto the show? We need to push this forward while we can. Minda is fighting so hard to bring peace.”

I doubt Brill will go for that. He’s not going to be happy that Tawny’s been FeedCasting enough holo of him for him to even be famous.

“Cultural Exchange Krom, Mamá. What’s the su’s name?”