TOM ROM
On his previous trips, the most efficient way to reach Kuivahr was to travel through the Klikiss transportal wall. Tom Rom had visited the ocean planet twice before: once to purchase specimens of potent kelp and plankton extracts from the Kellum distillery, once to meet with the Ildiran medical researcher to obtain all her data on the misbreeds. Now, he would return there per the agreement negotiated by Zoe, to present Tamo’l with the Pergamus research relevant to Prince Reynald’s disease.
First, though, he returned Zoe to her sterile protective chamber. Too many variables, too many risks, and he would not expose her unnecessarily. Since she had reached a successful bargain with King Peter and Queen Estarra, Pergamus was safe for the moment, although Tom Rom was still not comfortable knowing that their location had been revealed to the Confederation government. He would have to go back to Vaconda, harvest yet another fortune of prisdiamonds, and use the money to double their defensive force. He hoped he would have enough time.
He flew his ship from Pergamus to Auridia, the planet beneath the Roamer capital of Newstation, paid a fee to leave it there, and used the transportal services for a dimensional passage to Kuivahr. He emerged through the Klikiss transportal onto the rock outcropping, surrounded by the calm sea. Behind him, the stone trapezoid shimmered and solidified, and he stood inhaling the salty air. He called for a skimmer to take him out to the sanctuary domes, claiming important business.
Zoe had been forced to share knowledge that she considered her personal private property, and he knew how much it had pained her to surrender it. But the exchange for the Onthos plague records, as well as an assurance that Pergamus would be left alone, was undeniably worthwhile.
And a Confederation crackdown on the vile activities on Rakkem! That was more than Tom Rom had hoped for. He hadn’t been able to hide his grim smile when Zoe included that surprise demand. He was proud of her. That was pure genius.
He knew the scars and painful memories that Rakkem held for Zoe—and for himself. He understood why she had made that bargain. Bringing Rakkem down was worth any sacrifice.
* * *
Once they had learned that Zoe’s biological mother still lived on Rakkem, Zoe could not let the knowledge go. And neither could Tom Rom. Especially after he learned what Muriel had become: a factory womb—continuously inseminated and producing baby after baby for sale on the black market.
Tom Rom had hardened his heart long ago, but at times he thought about what had happened to Muriel, who had been his lover before she became this inhuman thing … and to his innocent daughter, whom Muriel had sold for parts. He grieved for what might have been. If only he had been able to intercept her mother before it was too late, to rescue that little girl. Once, he even caught himself weeping for the unnamed baby in private, but forced the tears away and replaced them with determination. Only by a miracle had Zoe avoided the same fate from that awful woman.
After tending Adam Alakis during his long decline from Heidegger’s Syndrome, Zoe was wise and grim beyond her years. Once she learned the details about her biological mother and Tom Rom, and her sacrificed half-sister, she had looked at Tom Rom, her dark eyes boiling with anger. “We have to do something about this. We will find my mother—and we will take care of her.”
“Yes,” Tom Rom said. “Yes, we will.”
Since Rakkem held confidentiality in such high regard, keeping no records and asking no questions of those who came to buy and sell biologicals, Tom Rom had to use subtle tactics as he made inquiries. He told Zoe to remain safe and unseen aboard the ship, but she insisted on accompanying him—except on his darkest investigations, when he absolutely refused to let her get her hands bloody.
It took him two weeks to find the information he needed.
He didn’t waste time making threats or giving warnings. What would the point have been? Instead, he armed himself with enough weapons to take out half a city. He didn’t consider it overkill; he thought of it as a safety factor. He needed to be absolutely certain, because Zoe wanted to be part of the operation, and with this personal vendetta, he could not deny her request. She had as much reason to want revenge as he did.
Under Rakkem’s cloudy nighttime skies and spitting rain, they moved out together to the fortress facility where her mother and other factory wombs produced infants as biological commodities.
If Adam and Evelyn Alakis had not decided to adopt a daughter exactly when they did, and if they had not paid the exorbitant fee for the baby, Zoe would also have been sliced up and sold piecemeal for her organs, fluids, and cells.
“We have to do this, Tom Rom,” Zoe said.
“I know. You just stay safe.” He adjusted the projectile-proof armor he had placed over her chest.
Her expression was hard. “I will deal with my mother myself.”
“No, that woman was also the mother of my daughter. And she was once my lover. We’ll do it together.”
Zoe agreed.
They made their way to the large lowland facility guarded by swampy moats, security fences, and bored guards. Tom Rom guided a small flatbed transport with no running lights along a weed-clogged transportation canal.
Tom Rom removed his silent projectile weapons, and as they broke into the high-security facility in the dead of night, he opened fire on anything that moved: three armed guards, a receptionist, and a medical doctor who strolled out from the back laboratory chambers to see what the commotion was about.
There were no innocents in this place.
Two more guards came running in response to the intruder, and Tom Rom shot both of them, then kicked open the door. “Inside, Zoe.” Muriel would be in the big gestation dormitory with lines of beds and monitoring apparatus.
They entered side by side, startling three more doctors and five technicians who were tending a row of twelve women sprawled flat on gestation beds. Tom Rom killed the nearest two doctors, while technicians began to yell and run. Some of the women in the beds were drugged and dozing, but three were awake. They struggled and screamed, but could not lift themselves from the medical apparatus, the tubes, the monitors.
“Find your mother, Zoe. The IDs will be on the beds,” Tom Rom said while he stalked after the fleeing technicians, shooting each of them in the back. One sprawled on top of an obscenely pregnant woman who clawed at the dead body, but could barely move with all the IV tubes stuck in her arms. Though he had prepared himself for what he expected to see, he was still sickened.
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.”