ADEM

Seven days from Nov Tero

Adem had never been able to read his mother’s moods as well as he could his father’s. Her face betrayed little, and her body, long disciplined by her martial arts, always looked at peace. If he’d had to guess now, though, he’d say she was furious.

“We never should have let him back on the Hajj.”

“He’s family,” Dooley said. “Sometimes you make allowances.”

The captain’s poker face broke, and she stared incredulously at her husband. “Allowances? I grew up with that man, Abdul. You give him a centimeter, and he’ll–!”

Adem watched them spar for a few more minutes before clearing his throat. “What do we do about this?”

“What does your sister know?” Dooley asked.

“Most of it. I talked to her last night. She’d be here if she weren’t on watch.” Adem held his hand up to forestall the next question. “She’s already keeping track of outgoing transmissions. If Uncle Rakin tries to send anything out, we’ll know about it.”

The captain rounded on Hisako. “We had a deal. You said you’d make sure I heard everything first. Now, I find out you’ve been hiding things from me and conspiring with my brother.”

“You got what you paid for, Maneera. Anything else I gave you was a gift.” Hisako turned to Vee. “Remember, coming here was your idea.”

“What is she even doing here?” The captain glared daggers at Hisako. “This is a family meeting!”

“She’s the one who convinced me to talk to you!”

“You shouldn’t have needed convincing! The biggest piece of salvage in a thousand years, and you tried to keep it for yourself.” She threw up her hands. “Breach of contract. I wrote the damned thing, I should know.”

“That’s not why I kept the files! You come into my life with–!”

Adem took a deep breath. “Pipe down!”

Silence fell, and shock appeared on the faces of all present. Adem speaking up was rare enough, yelling…

He paled. “Mother, forgive me. He turned to Vee. “Do you have anything else to add to this?”

She shook her head.

“Head down to the medical center or back to bed or whatever, and please don’t talk to anyone about this. I’ll make sure Hisako isn’t hounded, I promise. Thank you.”

Adem waited until she’d gone through the door.

“Now it’s just family,” he said. “Enough with the breach of contract shit, and no more pointing fingers. Hisako didn’t give Rakin what he wanted.”

“He said he had a backup,” Hisako said. “He said he came to me first because my expertise in UA tech would make his plan easier to sell.”

“So, who’s the backup?” Dooley said. “It could be anyone working on the worm-drive. Who has access to the files?”

Hisako knuckled the sides of her head. “I had Odessa put a lock on them. No one should have been able to see them but me.”

“She could have put in a backdoor,” Dooley said.

The captain frowned. “Or made a copy before she locked them.”

“I don’t think it’s Odessa,” Adem said. “She’s been on the ship for years, and she has no love for the syndicates.”

“Who then?” Hisako said. “Mateo? Tobey? Could either of them hack through Odessa’s security?”

“It may not be anyone.” The captain sighed. “Rakin was an information broker on Nov Tero. A spy. He may have bugged and hacked the whole ship for all we know. I was a fool to let him back.”

Dooley took her hand. “We let him back. We took a vote, remember, just like always. The question is what to do about it. Once we’re in range of the Nov Tero worldnet there’s no controlling what gets out.”

“That’s less than four days from now. If Mom accuses him of trying to steal from the shareholders and can’t prove it…”

“He can file suit and take my shares,” she finished. “I know TU law better than you do.”

“It’s worse than that.” Dooley sucked his teeth. “We have valuable salvage on board that we haven’t told the other shareholders about. Rakin could make the case that we were the ones stealing it, and he was just trying to stop us.”

Hisako blanched.

“Didn’t think about that, did you? Neither did I.” The captain massaged the bridge of her nose with two fingers. “So, at worst, he’s stealing undeclared shareholder assets, and he hasn’t even done that, yet.”

“He’ll do something, though,” Adem said.

“Of course he’ll do something!” The frustration was back in her voice. “We’re talking about Rakin. I’ve known him longer than both of you. He’s always doing something. That’s why my mother chose me as captain.” She got up and paced the small stretch of carpet on her side of the table.

“What if we take it to a vote? We can’t keep the information from the Hadfield to ourselves anyway,” Dooley said. “Tell the shareholders we just found the mother lode of tech files and let them decide what to do with it. Once we declare it as an asset, we can keep Rakin from selling it off.”

“He might do it anyway,” Adem said. “He knows a lot of people on Nov Tero.”

“A lot of them want to kill him.” The captain sat back down and tented her fingers on the table. “Declaring the files as assets means we need a plan for them. Dooley, I suppose it’s too much to assume that you’ll agree with me about what to do with the information. I can already see the waves of populism running through your head.”

Dooley smiled. “We could make a few rich people richer or we could help a lot of people by giving the information away for free. I know what I’d prefer.”

“What do you think we should do with it, Adem?”

Adem had been trying to make up his mind about that since he’d peeked into Hisako’s directory. The food assembler alone could change life on any of the worlds. “I don’t know. I feel like there are pitfalls everywhere.”

“Hisako?”

“We should destroy anything in there about the squeezer. The UA discovered it by accident en route to the worm-drive. Someone will rediscover it eventually, but we shouldn’t help them out.”

Adem and Dooley nodded in agreement.

“If you destroy the files, I don’t want to know about it. Check with Lucy, and see what she thinks. If we’re not on the same page by the time we go to the shareholders, I want to at least make sure we’re all reading from the same book.” The captain gripped the edge of the table like she was trying to bend it to her will. “I’ll call a meeting in two days.”

The team’s workspace was empty when Adem returned to it later that night. He’d filled in Lucy and Vee. Hisako was to talk with Odessa.

Adem worked with the nearsmart to locate all the fabrication and maintenance files for squeezer tech. The search also turned up a batch of video messages, readied but never sent. Adem played one. A member of the weapons crew, a young woman – the name on the message was Maria Alvarez – smiled and joked for her two daughters, Cissy and Raquel. She signed off with, “I’ll be home soon. I love you.” The two girls most likely had died with the United Americas settlement on Freedom. Adem put the cache of messages in a separate directory and searched on. A broader search turned up a few more tech files, nothing important, nothing that hadn’t already been reverse-engineered or replaced by modern inventions, along with a roster of the Hadfield’s crew at the time of the Two-Day War. He searched out the captain, Neleh Martin, and found her logbook. He played the final entry. The recorded voice was weary. “The mission was… successful. The Constitution scored a direct hit on the planet with the mass-compression field. Makkah compressed by approximately fifteen percent and rebounded into rubble. No survivors are expected. The Constitution was also lost. The war is won.” The recording ran in silence for fifteen seconds before the captain cleared her throat. “Our weapons are fully functional, however, we’ve sustained severe damage to our engines and heavy casualties. I’ve activated the distress beacon, but there is likely no one left to answer. The war is won, but the United Americas has fallen.”

The salvage crew from the Hajj had found Martin’s body on the bridge of her ship. She appeared to have died of a single gunshot wound to the head, presumably self-inflicted. Adem scanned the first log entry of the war and skipped ahead to the third. This time Martin’s voice was crisp and professional. “The Queensland settlement on Freedom reported that a single scout ship, presumably manned, slammed into New Washington at 0930 this morning. Destruction was total. The ship’s trajectory has been traced back to Makkah. My senior officer, Captain Mark O’Neill of the Constitution, has ordered us to counter strike with all possible force. We are en route to Makkah at fastest possible speed. ETA is six months relative.”

That recording alone was probably worth the trip out to the derelict. Historians and politicians had debated the cause of the war for years afterward, using it as a scare tactic to push policy and manipulate the citizenry. Adem’s great-grandmother had been forced to rename her ship and spend as much time as possible at near c.

A Caliphate survivor had started the war. It was possible he’d been some kind of religious radical, but the distance between the settled planets had put an end to most of that tension. More likely it had been personal. The freezer pods assigned to the Caliphate had been shoddily made, with far higher death rates than the ones the UA fashioned for its friends. Maybe the pilot of the attack ship, after spending months alone at near light speed, had arrived at his new home to learn that a loved one, maybe all of his loved ones, had died on the way. The settlement on Makkah would have been ignorant of the attack, with no idea why the UA warships suddenly appeared in orbit.

Adem looked over his work. The squeezer index was complete. Uncle Rakin was right about one thing, certain people would love to get their hands on the information. A resolution to any debate, not to mention a quick fix to the growing refugee crisis. The Hajj shareholders – including the crew – could make a killing on top of the bonanza already headed their way. He rubbed his face. Destroying the files was theft, taking money out of the pockets of people he worked with every day. He ordered the nearsmart to overwrite the lot.