The Passenger Ch. 06

"Anne, would you have a look in the medikit?" I asked. "Let's see if we can stop him from bleeding out before he has a chance to talk."

"No problem."

She removed the large, bright yellow medikit from the bulkhead. It dropped on the floor as soon as it came off.

"That thing's heavy!" she said.

"Military grade," Layne commented. "Just like everything else on this tub, from the looks of it. Which brings up a point. Raz, that explanation you mentioned..."

He didn't finish the sentence, and I couldn't blame him. Anne had bent down to open the medikit, which pulled the fabric of her flight suit tautly across her glorious butt, and the thin, taut fabric did nothing to hide the curves and shapes underneath. Never did a ship sport a fuselage with more beautiful lines. It was quite a sight.

"See anything you like, Layne?" Anne asked without looking up.

Layne smiled, his eyes still on Anne's lovely buns.

"That's a pair of fearsome weapons you're packing in there, Anne," he commented dryly.

"But I'm not unpacking them for you, so don't get any ideas," she told him firmly, but then she looked back over her shoulder and smiled at him to take the sting our of her words.

She wiped the worst of the blood off Pete's face, none too gently, and she sprayed some wound sealer into the cuts. Pete managed to open his eyes and gave her a rather blurry look. But her face spoke volumes: if Pete had hoped for any sympathy from her, he was going to be sorely disappointed. Layne saw it, too.

"Before we get take this any further," he began, "I'd really like to know what this is all about."

I nodded.

"Yes," I said. "We've dragged you into this, so at the very least we owe you an explanation. It's a long story, but let me see if I can abbreviate it."

I thought for a few moments. He was entitled to know the truth. But how much of it? But then Anne caught my eyes.

"Tell him, Harvey," she said. "It's alright."

I looked at her for a long moment. She smiled and nodded. Alright. It was her decision to make. I turned back to Layne.

"Alright, I said. "Long story short: I took a contract to move a shipment of environmental control units to Ursa, care of a company named Vergence Sigma. Or so I thought. Anne came along as my passenger, because she was an employee of Vergence. Or so she thought."

"And you were both wrong, I take it?" Layne said.

"Yes. Both of us. On both counts. The cargo turned out to be proscribed AI technology. And Anne..."

I hesitated, then plowed on.

"Anne turned out to be her prototype. She's an emergent AI. Thing is, she didn't know. Vergence had implanted a set of human memories into her brain."

Layne opened his mouth as if to say something, then changed his mind and closed it again.

"Anne remembers growing up, living her life, accepting a job at Vergence and everything else," I continued. "In reality, what Vergence did to her..."

"What Vergence did," Anne said calmly, "is to take an AI brain, a droid body and human set of memories, and here I am."

"And... You never knew?" Layne said, softly.

"No," she said. "And I won't lie: finding out was quite a shock. But now it doesn't matter anymore. I just don't think I'd have managed to get through it if it hadn't been for Harvey."

Layne glanced at her, at me, then back at her.

"You love him," he said.

Anne nodded.

"Yes," she said simply. "I do."

Layne gave me long, thoughtful look and slowly nodded.

"I think I see," he said.

"Strangely enough, I believe you do," I replied. "Vergence thought they had built a better droid. What they really did was to create a full-fledged person with her own free will, her own self-awareness and her own emotions. And her own rights."

"Except," Layne said slowly, "Vergence will want their technology back. Technology that is illegal in most parts of the galaxy. I'm beginning to see your problem."

Then he turned to look at Pete.

"And this man?" he asked.

"This man is a Vergence technician," I said. "His superior is a man named Brax. As far as I understand it, Brax is one of the higher-ups in Vergence. Maybe the highest; I don't know. At any rate, he's deeply involved in this little project of theirs."

"Brax is dead," Pete mumbled.

Raz gave him his bad smile and showed him a set of claws, close up.

"Rrrr. Explain."

"Please don't hurt me. They made me do it..."

"How verrry orrriginal."

The claws moved closer.

"Say morrre."

Pete shuddered and looked as if he was about to cry.

"Brax is dead," he repeated. "He was executed. For incompetence, they said. They let me live. It was his responsibility, they said. So they shot him and not me."

Interesting. It had been my impression, or maybe just my naive assumption, that Brax was the one we should worry about. Instead...

"So who is his boss?" I asked.

Pete shrugged feebly.

"I don't know, exactly. He's not on Ursa, from what I've heard. Some guy named Rida or Rider or something like that."

I'd felt like I'd been kicked in the stomach. When I looked up, I saw Raz smiling his bad smile as he loomed over Pete, his claws very much in evidence.

"Rrryderrr? Deke'Rrryderrr?"

Pete shied away from the mountain of sentient carnivore that loomed over him, looking too terrified to speak.

"Deke. Son of a..."

That was all I could say. I felt... I don't know what I felt.

When you've been in the business as long as I have, you will get taken for a ride sooner or later. And I've been on the wrong end of my fair share of cons. It's part of the business: you take your losses, you write it off to experience, you kick yourself a couple of times for having been so gullible, and you move on. You've got to trust somebody sometimes, or you end up doing no business at all. The trick, of course, is to walk that fine line between being paranoid and being a sucker. But eventually, as the years go by and you pay the price for your hard-won experience, you learn to recognize a con, and even if you don't, you still do what you can to minimize the risk.

I thought that by now I'd become fairly good at knowing when I was being conned. But as it turned out, I had been wrong. I was still a sucker, even after all these years. And the look Raz on Raz' face clearly told me that he had come to the same conclusion.

"Harrrvey, how many times have I warrrned you not to trrrust that piece of excrrrement?"

"Not enough, Raz. Not nearly enough, it seems."

Layne cleared his throat.

"Who is this Deke Ryder, exactly?" he inquired politely.

"He is, or he was, or rather I thought he was, my cargo broker on Radix," I explained. "I've worked with him for years. Guess who gave me the contract to move cargo and a passenger for Vergence Sigma?"

"I see."

"You do. I didn't," I said, rather bitterly. "Raz never trusted him, but Deke had always been dealing with me fair and square, so..."

I shrugged.

"But I was wrong. He suckered me. Completely."

"Don't take it too hard," Layne said calmly. "Some people wear false personalities like you and I wear our clothing. Their dark sides remain dormant until they need them, and there's no indication of what lies beneath the surface. They can even fool someone who's trained to recognize the symptoms. Statistically the percentage of people like that is tiny, which says something good for the human race, I suppose, but in a galaxy this big, that still means there's a gazillion of them around."

I gave Layne a long, hard look. And I knew I was right. The way he spoke, the way he carried himself, the way he'd taken me in when I first met him... Yes.

"Someone trained to recognize the telltales, you say?" I mused. "Like a trained operative such as yourself, in other words?"

He smiled.

"I'm retired," he said pleasantly. "Other than that... Let's just say I have a certain amount of expertise in that area."

"And in other areas as well?"

"Possibly."

It was a simple word, but he managed to say it in a way that discouraged any further questions. I asked him one anyway.

"So what are you doing here on this dustball?"

"Lying low," he said. "I would have thought that was evident. This is a good place for it. In fact, it's a shame Vergence already knows you're here. Otherwise you could have avoided a lot of difficulty by simply staying here."

"Yourrr point is well taken, Layne," Raz said, turning back to Pete, smiling his bad smile. "Ourrr trrrail has to end herrre. Therrreforrre..."

"Hold on a moment, Raz," Layne said. "There may be a better way to make this work."

"Rrrr. Perrrhaps. Anne, what would you prrreferrr I do with ourrr guest herrre?"

Anne looked at Pete, her face very much unsmiling. But then she sighed.

"I have no love for him," she admitted. "Not after what he's done to me. But killing him in cold blood... No. That's not us. But I do have one more question for him, and I don't care what you have to do to him to make in answer it."

"With pleasurrre."

She turned to Pete.

"How many others are there?" she asked him directly. "Others like me. I don't believe for a moment that I'm the only one. So. How many?"

Pete glanced at Raz, shivered, then looked back at Anne.

"Twelve," he said. "There were twelve prototypes."

"And where are they now?"

"I don't know."

Raz took a step forward, his bad smile widening, his claws at the ready. Pete shied back from the doom that approached him.

"I tell you I don't know, I really don't!" he cried. "They've been deployed for field testing, that's all I've been told! Two developed problems and were destroyed, and one was returned to the lab for log file analysis. I haven't heard anything about the others."

"Eight morrre," Raz rumbled. "That incrrreases the rrrisks of detection."

"Unless Vergence manages to get their hands on them," Anne said. "And I don't know what's worse."

Layne nodded.

"I see your point," he said. "But as far as priorities are concerned, I think you should focus on your own safety for now. Which means that Raz is right: the trail has to end here. So tell me, Pete, did you by any chance drop a surveillance buoy on your way in?"

Pete looked puzzled.

"If this were my operation," Layne continued, "I would drop a surveillance buoy in case the mission failed and my target made a run for it. A properly placed surveillance buoy to relay the target's exit vector and all that to HQ would be a sensible precaution. Any mission leader worth his salt would know that."

"Answerrr the question, Pete," Raz said. "Orrr am I going to have to purrrsuade you to be morrre cooperrrative?"

"I..." Pete stammered. "I don't know. We did jettison something on the way in. I could hear it. They never told me what it was. I don't think they trusted me."

"I wonderrr why," Raz rumbled. "So. Layne?"

Layne stepped into the cockpit area and looked thoughtfully at the computer console.

"We should be able to determine its approximate position from the navigation logs," he said. "Unless it is under autonomous propulsion, but that's rare. So let's see..."

He tapped the console, scrolled through a series of readouts.

"There," he said with some satisfaction a few moments later. "Just as I thought. On the way in, they made a course deviation right through the sunward Lagrange point. So that's where we'll find it."

"Lagrange point?" Anne asked.

I nodded.

"There are several points around every planet where the gravitational pull of the planet and its primary cancel each other out," I explained. "Those are stable points, so anything that ends up there stays right where it is. Dust, asteroids, moons, probes, space stations... Anything. Including surveillance buoys, apparently."

"Yes," Layne said. "The L1 point is far enough away so that a watcher buoy will easily spot any ship that lifts off, and because the buoy will be looking away from the sun it can easily plot the speed and course of any ship jumping out-system. It's the logical place for it."

"So what now?" Anne asked.

Layne shrugged.

"Simple. We use this ship to retrieve the buoy and deactivate it. That would be normal procedure upon successful completion of the mission. Once that's done, we can all come and go as we like. Or rather," and he looked at Pete, "almost all of us."

"What do you prrropose?" Raz rumbled.

"Well," Layne said slowly, "We obviously can't let him walk away. So either we kill him, or he stays here. Indefinitely. Pete, what shall we do with you?"

Pete shuddered.

"Please don't kill me," he mumbled.

Layne gave him his broadest winning smile.

"Kill you? Of course not! In fact, my boy, this is your lucky day. From now on you are going to work for a living. With free on-the-job training and all. And, if you work hard enough, even room and board! I'm sure we can find something useful for you to do. In fact, I've got just the job for you. How good are you at shoveling manure?"

* * *

It was with a great sense of relief that I closed the Slowboat's outer airlock door for the night. It had been a long and stressful day, and I was glad to be back home and finally alone with Anne.

"Do you think it's going to work?" she asked.

"No reason why it shouldn't. Tomorrow we'll use Vergence' starfighter to retrieve the surveillance buoy, and then the whole thing will quietly disappear off their radar, including you and me. I'm pretty sure Layne can arrange things so that the fighter will never be found, if and when Vergence comes to see what happened to it. You and I will have departed for parts unknown by then."

"That's not what I meant," she said. "I mean Pete. What's going to happen with him?"

I chuckled.

"Before long he'll will wish Raz had killed him. Layne is going to immerse him into the most basic aspects of Manakan agriculture. He'll be getting up at dawn, work his ass off in some field or on a farm somewhere until sunset, then eat, sleep, and do it all over again the following morning. Layne says that the harder he works him, the sooner he can pass him off as a local, so I suspect Pete may be in for a bit of a crash course. Starting with shoveling manure for a week or to. After that, the rest won't seem so bad, I suppose."

She thought for a moment, then smiled.

"Good," she said. "I didn't want him dead, but he should pay for what he's done."

"Oh, he'll pay," I said, "He'll be paying for the rest of his miserable life. No technology to speak of, no luxuries, and, most importantly, no way off this godsforsaken dustball. Nothing but day after day filled with backbreaking work."

"Do you think Raz is alright?"

I nodded.

"Sure. Why?"

"He seemed in a hurry to get back to the 'Pride just now."

I laughed.

"I suspect Raz is eager to test the potency of his new cargo, in the privacy of his own quarters."

"You mean..."

"Uh-huh," I nodded.

"Do Gawrrans masturbate?"

"I'm not sure, but it wouldn't surprise me. Pretty much all sentient species do it if they are physically capable of it. So if you're curious about what he's carrying around in those bulging shorts of his... Come on, admit it, you are curious, right?"

She smiled, shrugged.

"Maybe,a little," she admitted. "But it's intellectual curiosity. Well, mostly, anyway. From the looks of it, he's far too big to be compatible with humans."

"Probably. So for the moment you've got to make do with me."

"Worse things could happen," she said softly.

She stood close to me and put her arms around me. I returned her embrace and kissed her. I could taste the dust on her face. She must have noticed it, too.

"We need to clean up," she said. "I'm missing the Pride's shower already."

"Yep. Me too. Ours is to small to have much fun in. But we'll do some refits as soon as we can. I need my wife to be happy here."

She looked at me.

"Wife?" she whispered.

"I mean crew member," I corrected myself. "It pays a lot better than the other position."

"Oh no, captain," she said. "I much prefer the other position."

"Which position?" I asked innocently. "We've tried so many already. You mean the one where I'm behind you on the bed and you pull up your knees until..."

That got me a half playful, half serious punch in the shoulder. And I knew the time for fooling around was over.

"Stop messing around," I said to myself. "Tell her."

Myself kept quiet for a change, but instead there was another voice, a voice I had heard only a few times since I had lost her.

"You really should tell her," Lisa said in the back of my mind. "You know you have my blessings."

"Anne, I..."

Suddenly I was at a loss for words.

"Being with you feels so right," I fumbled, after a few long moments. "And that's not just because we've got a mind-blowing sex life together. Don't get me wrong, I love the sex. It's awesome and I can't get enough of you. But..."

"I know," she whispered. "It's more than that."

"Yes. Much more. I don't think I ever want to live without you anymore. I don't think I can."

She pulled me closer, her arms still around me.

"Me neither. And I don't want to, either," she said. "I don't want to lose you. Ever."

But when I bent down to kiss her, there was something in her eyes.

"So why are you looking so scared, Anne?"

Her arms suddenly gripped me tightly.

"Harvey... I... Finding out who I really am... What I really am..."

She looked up at me, her eyes holding mine.

"You saw them, those Vergence droids," she continued "You saw what they're like, inside... I mean..."

I gently stroked her golden curls, noting how they had lost their usual shine in the Manakan dust. I had expected that seeing those droids would be a shock for her, and I'd been right. She just hadn't shown it. Until now.

"And this has what to do with us?" I asked calmly.

She bit her lip.

"I don't know... I mean, seeing them... Seeing what I am..."

"No, Anne. That's where you're wrong. What your skeleton is made of, or how your organs work, has nothing to do with who you are. I know who you are and I love you."

She put her head against my shoulder.

"And I love you, Harvey. And I want to be with you, never doubt that. Maybe I just need a little more time to get used to all this."

"All this?"

"Who I am... What you mean to me... And how much you love me."

I held her head gently against my shoulder and kissed her hair. It smelled dusty.

"We'll have plenty of time, Anne. You and me, we'll have as much time as we need. We'll have all the time in the universe."

She looked up at me. Her smile was wan and tired, but trusting. Trusting me to care for her, to help her, to be there for her. I wasn't quite sure how I was going to live up to all that trust, but I did know that her trust in me would be broken only over my dead body.

I kissed her again. She still tasted dusty.

"I think it's time for that shower," I said.

I'm sure we both missed showering together. I know I did. But until we had the time and money to do some proper refitting, we'd have to use what we had, me in my old cabin, Anne in what used to be the passenger quarters. The sooner we got that refit underway, the better, I decided. This wouldn't do at all.

I showered quickly. It felt good to be free of dust again. On my way back I stopped by the autokitchen. It took some fiddling with the programming and a few tries, but I got it to produce what I wanted.

I entered what used to be the passenger's cabin before Anne and I had begun to share it. I had just folded the bedding and put it aside when Anne stepped out of the shower, her skin still warm and slightly damp. Good. She smiled when she saw my preparations, but it was a tired and rather wan smile.

"You look exhausted," I said, as I spread a large, fluffy towel across the bed.

She nodded.

"Yes. It's been quite a day."

"That it has, my love. So lie down. You need some serious relaxing."