Chapter Forty

 

The engine is making noises, just like the first time I was aboard the Sunshine. At which point, Tyson had had to stop then for repairs. My heart sinks.

We wind up stuck at a tradepost, and there goes our day of leeway. Tyson won’t even let us get out, in case we might be spotted on the security feeds.

Chestla calls me on my handheld, and I sneak up to Tyson’s loft to talk. I’m fairly certain Tawny hasn’t bugged me again.

“I’ve been doing a little research. Leron bought that I didn’t know anything, and I took the opportunity to lift his password.” Chestla pops up stat-sheets onto my phone of three Evevrons, two guys and a girl, somber-eyed and stuck-up looking. I can still hear her talking, even though I can’t see her any more. “These are the three researchers who created what they called the Sympathetic Mindhuggers.”

“Sí, chica. We’ve met your planet’s take on supersoldiers in the flesh.”

“Supersoldiers?” Chestla blinks, confused. “No. I was wrong about that.”

I am confused también. “Isn’t that what this mind plague was supposed to be?”

“No. The Evevrons were trying to find a way to halt prison overcrowding. They wanted to create a biological system for positive reinforcement. They thought they could end the need for prisons altogether by having the Mindhuggers more or less program people to be kind to each other.”

That’s chilling. What gave these scientists the right to take away a person’s free will – even a criminal’s?

This is why mindhacking’s illegal.

Even if you think you’re doing the galaxy a favor.

“If it was supposed to be a force for good, chica, then why did it influence Kaliel to kill people?”

“Something went terribly wrong. Like with most monsters, what they created isn’t what they intended. They didn’t expect it to become sentient. And they certainly didn’t expect it to cause a telepathic hive mind. Check this out.” The stillholo dissolves to a gritcast, where these same people are sitting in chairs, and there’s a group of five other Evevrons sitting opposite them. The difference is that the group of five – they’re each cuffed wrist and ankle to their seats.

The most stuck-up looking of the trio reads off a tablet. Chestla’s provided auto-generated subtitles for my benefit. “Do you now regret your attempts to blow up the dam?”

“I regret getting caught.” The guy closest to the camera rattles his cuffs. His face is narrow, his cheeks sunken in. The others make noises of agreement, and all start rattling. The caption cites him as Chevros.

“Yeah,” agrees the prisoner the captions label Des Sah.

“I can’t say I’m sad to hear you say that, because if you had shown any signs of remorse or rehabilitation, you would not have been considered acceptable candidates for our pilot program.” He points towards the camera. “This is a historic day, recorded for posterity. This is the day that we eliminate the need for prisons on this planet.”

The five – three guys and two girls – look nervously at the camera. The lady on the researcher’s side opens a case and removes a silver injection gun.

“What’s that?” one prisoner squeaks. The caption labels her Awn. She has a round face and a pert nose and cascades of curly black hair, though she’s as thin as the rest of the prisoners.

“This,” the muchacha says, “is the future. Each of these cartridges contains the dormant form of one Sympathetic Mindhugger. It will attach to the appropriate parts of your brain, where it will reinforce positive, socially acceptable thoughts, and discourage anti-social behavior. After your observation and testing period has ended, you will be able to leave this prison to become productive members of society.”

“I didn’t volunteer for no pilot program! Neither did my wife,” Chevros protests, even as the lady approaches him and presses the silver gun against his neck. He whips his head around and bites her.

“Agh!” She pulls her hand away, bleeding, and checks to make sure all her fingers still work. “You see? This is exactly what got you here.”

The bumpclip ends, and Chestla’s face reappears. “Those cryostasis pods Kaliel saw? That’s those five.”

“They froze patient zero?”

Chestla nods. “Someone did. The original three researchers didn’t survive when their research escaped. They underestimated what they’d done. When the parasites became telepathic, it allowed their hosts to anticipate each other’s movements. And then a separate consciousness started to emerge that helped them coordinate their efforts to spread across the region. But the core of that consciousness was imprinted by what it learned from five criminals.”

“So how come the whole planet’s not infected?”

“These creatures weren’t engineered to be able to reproduce. If you want another one, you clone it. It’s not a quick process, and the clones have to be kept in a super-cooled solution that keeps them dormant until they can be introduced into the bloodstream of the would-be host. That tends to make the hive mind selective about who it infects.” She hesitates. “But if they ever found a place where they could set up reproduction laboratories, the population could start increasing exponentially.”

Chestla looks worried.

“What are you not telling me, chica?”

“It’s just – Leron’s involved somehow. How could my friends have done this? The five you call Patient Zero were desperate people, on the opposite side from mine in the river dispute. They hurt my city, but they only did it because they were dying from lack of water. You can see the malnutrition, just looking at them. Two of those five were married to each other, and had a son. You saw Awn and Chevros. He really cared about her. It was a truly tragic love story. I– I’m too close to all of this. Had it happened on the other side of the river, that could have been me and Ekrin and Ball being kept on ice.”

 

Five days in, Brill’s sitting against the wall watching the guy in the cell work his puzzle, and I’m leaning on him, checking the news.

When I move away from his shoulder, he pats my hand. Then he asks Tyson, “What did this su even do?”

“Transporting stolen goods. By te time I found him, he’d turned te stuff over to anoter pilot and was counting his cash. We know the cargo originated on Eart, but we haven’t verified what it is, or where it was headed.”

“Zant,” Dashtin says, dropping another piece into his puzzle.

“What did you say?” Brill asks.

“I was supposed to take it all the way to Zant. But I stopped, and someone who wanted to buy a box of it came on board. My passenger didn’t like that.” He lapses back into silence.

“Who hires a mentally defective pilot?” Kaliel asks.

“Somebody who doesn’t want anyone curious about what they’re flying,” Brill replies. “He’s probably good with spatial things. If it’s a gretis run, you’re not likely to need sharp reasoning skills.”

The whole thing’s still odd. If a whole transport worth of something’s stolen, someone’s missing it. So why doesn’t Tyson know what it is? Unless… Eugene had said the people who broke into his lab had taken the boxes of poisoned chocolate that had been laced with Pure275. That wouldn’t have been reported to the cops.

We’d assumed it had been HGB moving around their own stuff, pero what if it wasn’t them?

It’s a huge logic leap. Still, I approach Dashtin and ask, “A box of what?”

He shrugs.

I pull up HGB’s main site and show him their logo. “Did it look like this?”

He nods. “But marked out.”

“Oi! No.” I turn back to Tyson. “There’s a whole transport out there full of Pure Chocolate. And it’s headed for Zant. That can’t be a coincidence.”

Tyson tilts his blade-like head. “If it’s pure, ten what’s te problem?”

The problem is that I’m not supposed to know about it.

Pero, this is one secret I have to share.

“Pure275 is the herbicide HGB uses to keep cacao contained inside the plantations. There was an entire storehouse worth of chocolate that had been contaminated with it.”

Tawny’s staring at me from her spot on the floor. She already thought I knew too much. I can practically feel her filling out a requisition form for Frank’s assassination services on my behalf.

Pero, mi mamá is in danger, and no matter what happens to me, I have to save her. I continue, “Hector Valencia was in that room. If he was already infected, the mindworms knew the poisoned chocolate was there.”

“It’d fit what Dashtin said about irony,” Brill says. “Everyone is trying to kill off these mindworms using chocolate, so they kill off some of us using the same method. Plus, it makes half the galaxy afraid to eat anything with the HGB logo on it.”

Tawny makes a tiny noise. I glance at her. She looks about to pop. There has to be a way I can talk her into leaving Brill out of her report. He wouldn’t say anything, nunca.

I shake my head. “Pure275 is considered safe on Earth because you have to eat a ton of it, or breathe the weaponized version to wind up muerto.”

Tawny lets out a louder noise. She didn’t realize we knew about the weaponized Pure, either. Oh well, they can only execute you once.

“Maybe they added something to it?” Brill suggests. “There’s nothing else that makes sense.”

“We have to warn them that a couple tons of choco-poison are headed their way.” I step far enough away from Tawny to avoid crosstalk with her sublingual – though not her glare – and open the channel. I call Frank’s phone, pero I get a polite, clipped message. We are sorry, but this user does not exist.

Ice crashes inside my stomach. I try Mamá, who has a different service. Lo siento mucho! Este usuario ya no está disponible. Translation: So sorry! This user is no longer available.

I try Minda’s set. There’s a blanket out of service message for that entire section of Zant. I fumble for my handheld. It isn’t hard to find the news.

A Zantite reporter, reading off a tablet he isn’t holding all of the way out of the capture field, is speaking mid-feed when I pick it up live. “…and Minda’s show will go on as scheduled, despite the numerous sabotages in the area. They’re planning to string some old school communications tech together to force the signal out, so stay tuned for an early morning broadcast. We expect restored phone service by the end of day tomorrow.”

I appeal straight to Tawny. “If they’re using the same foodieholo Mamá showed me, it’s going to be a choco-stravaganza.”

Brill looks at Tyson’s charts. “We’re going to be cutting it close, but we should still make it.”

 

A little later, Tawny’s coming back from using the bathroom in Tyson’s loft, and I’m on my way up. We cross paths at the top of the ladder. She’s been quiet, ever since she found out we knew about the Pure Chocolate. She gives me one of those plastic smiles.

I can’t take it any more. “Can we be honest for a minute, muchacha?”

She lets the smile fall away. “Are you sure you want that? Most people think they’re ready for brutal honesty, but once they have it, they want the candy-coated ignorance back.”

I finish climbing the ladder. “You know me. I’ve never been one to leave the veneers alone.”

“I know that, Bo. And that’s the pity. You have to know the truth about everything, even the secrets that are keeping everyone safe. You feel so deeply, want so much – and that’s exactly what’s going to get Brill killed.”

My heart clenches. “Brill? I thought the threat was against me.”

Tawny pulls out her tube of lotion, smoothing on the soothing fragrance. “It’s too late for threats. It’s bad enough that you hold so many secrets in that pretty little head of yours, but to have someone so mercenary as a Krom privy to our weaknesses – how are we supposed to trust where his loyalties lie?”

“He’s loyal to me,” I say fiercely.

“For now,” she shrugs. “But his loyalties haven’t always been consistent in the past.” She tries to put the plastic smile back on, pero it doesn’t quite fit.

It’s hard to tell if she’s supposing what might happen, or if she’s telling me Brill’s execution’s been signed off on. Whichever way, it’s clear she holds me responsible. My heart’s pounding in panic. There has to be a way to change her mind.

“You should have just been happy Kaliel escaped the shave. He was. We put a tracking anklet on him, and practically slid his neck under the blade. And even he knew better than to push to know why.”

So Tawny knew that HGB had baited Kaliel into blowing up that vessel. She’d known he’d been tricked into believing he was under attack by space pirates, and could still smile at him back in Rio, when he was under the same roof at the HGB processing plant, awaiting trial – and execution. She’d been going to just let him die.

How could she do that, when she knew he was innocent? And if she could do that, then there’s no way to convince her to spare Brill now.

I force myself to look her in the eye. “Are you still going to help us save Kaliel?”

For a second, I imagine there’s a glimmer of shift, just around the edges of her irises. Pero, eso es imposible. She’s HGB. She is Earth. Only, now that I’ve found out Kayla’s not, I’m seeing aliens everywhere.

“Kaliel’s still important to preserving peace. I’m going to do what I can to save him, but I won’t deny my own loyalties to do it. HGB has asked we honor the Evevrons’ wishes not to disclose information about the parasite.”

In other words, she’s not going to show the feed of the mindworms because if someone digs deep enough, they’re bound to find out Earth helped the Evevrons with the cover-up. And everything will come out about Serum Green. Which I hope she still doesn’t know I know about.

I move past her, trying to ignore the way she’s watching my hands quiver from the IH shakes. “Maybe you should try being loyal to the truth, mija.”

“Not all secrets are bad, Bo.” The ice blue of Tawny’s eyes is intense. “Look at your friend Kayla. Her secret’s kept her alive these past twenty-odd years. She’s never going to know how much her family sacrificed for her and her twin, even though she’s not theirs by blood. And she doesn’t need to.”

I stop. “What do you know about it?”

She fiddles with the headphones draped around her neck. “Me? I’m not old enough for all that ancient history. But if you ask Frank about ecological disasters involving a planet’s core, he might tell you. Or it might push him far enough to finally shoot you. You’re not going to be happy anyway until it comes to that.”

I blink in confusion. “Frank caused an ecological disaster?”

“No! Why do you assume we’re the bad guys in everything?”

“Because you usually are?”

“You can’t afford to still be that naïve.” Tawny takes my hand in hers. “I know you. You’re going to want to shout out the truth about these parasites to any Zantite who will listen. But if you don’t – if you show a modicum of restraint for once – then just maybe no one has to find out how many of Earth’s secrets Brill knows.”