Aaron stared silently at him.
'In some small way, I can understand them. At least they believe in something. For them life has more purpose, more substance, more value than for the rest of the mindless sheep out there. And yet they'll sacrifice those lives of theirs' for what they believe in.' He sighed. 'Maybe there's some nobility in that. It's just a pity that what they believe in is a delusion. A dangerous one.'
'Ellie's no terrorist,' said Aaron.
Deacon nodded thoughtfully. 'You might be right.' He rubbed his brow wearily. 'I suspect she's….something else entirely.'
He looked around the cargo hold again, once more admiring this cleverly transformed interior and decided to take the conversation in a different direction. ‘How was it working out for you? Being a tour operator? You were taking people up to see the north polar ice I believe?’
The pilot nodded. ‘Most people in New Haven don’t even know this planet has an arctic zone. They assume it’s all mud and rocks outside the dome.’
‘No sense of adventure, hmm?’
Aaron shrugged. ‘I don’t understand why they’d all want to live their entire lives within a ten mile diameter plastic bubble.’
‘It’s simple, I suppose. They’re no better than what people on old earth used to call battery chickens. You live all your life in a small cage….I imagine you’re going to become wary of exceedingly open spaces.’
‘Seems about right.’
Deacon heard the approaching clank of footsteps and turned as the small hatch to the shuttle’s flight cabin opened. One of Deacon’s hired guns stuck his head into the cargo-hold.
‘Nothing up here. Just food wrappers, dirty socks and a bad smell.’
‘Nine weeks hiding out here in the wilderness in your shuttle. I bet you’d kill for a nice hot shower, eh, Mr Goodman?’
‘A shower would be nice.’
Deacon nodded, stroking his chin thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Well, now, as I’m sure you’re aware, I have one or two pressing questions I want to ask you about Ellie.’
No response from Aaron Goodman. The shuttle pilot stared back at him with a poker face, giving nothing away.
‘I think you got to know her quite well.’
Deacon looked for a flicker of response on the pilot’s face. Nothing.
‘Oh, come on, let’s not play that game Mr Goodman. You know her. You know her very well.’
Still nothing.
‘I suspect she’s a rather feisty thing, is she not? Quite a resilient young lady? A survivor? A fighter?'
Aaron smiled faintly. Fond memories of her that he couldn’t keep from his lips.
Deacon saw that. 'You liked her?'
He snorted dryly. 'Stubborn.'
‘Indeed.’ Deacon shared his smile. He laughed, not unkindly. ‘My goodness, she does seem to be a packet of trouble for the both of us.’
‘No different to any other girl her age…I suppose.’
‘Girls!' Deacon shook his head and laughed like they were two weary fathers bemoaning their errant children. 'They are so very difficult at that age, aren't they? Prickly. Moody. Self-obsessed.’
Aaron shrugged.
‘She is something more than a typical teenage girl though, Mr Goodman. She's a very special girl.’ Deacon fussed with his cuffs. ‘I think it would be quite something to meet her.’
Aaron stiffened. ‘Oh, but you’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
‘To talk with her, Mr Goodman, that’s all. To talk with her.’
‘Just like you ‘talked’ to her family?’
Deacon’s genial smile faded. ‘We really do need to find her.’
‘Why? What’s she done to anyone?’
‘It’s what she could do, Mr Goodman.’
Aaron laughed bitterly. ‘One young girl?’
‘If one looks closely enough…many of the greatest turning points in history end up being the actions of just one person. For the sake of a nail, the shoe was lost. For the sake of the shoe, the horse was delayed. For the delay of the horse, the message was delayed…’ Deacon leant forward. ‘Are you familiar with that Old Earth proverb?’
‘No. Sounds pretty stupid.’
‘Big things come from small beginnings.’ He sat back. ‘If you must know, she’s a danger. She’s carrying a deadly virus.’
Aaron sneered. ‘Bullshit.’
‘Oh, but it's true. Quite deadly. She’s immune to it of course. She's a carrier. Which means she shows no symptoms.’
‘If she was carrying a virus….then I’d have it. You’d have it too.’ Aaron looked around. ‘But, you and your men aren’t wearing bio-protection suits.’
‘It’s not communicable, yet. It’s dormant for the moment. But mark my words, it will…activate…and when it does we’ll have a disaster upon us every bit as apocryphal as a medieval plague.’
Aaron’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. ‘Plague? That’s a bullshit cover story. This whole system-wide quarantine thing…it’s all bull-‘
‘I assure you Mr Goodman, it’s very real. Ellie is a weapon. A weapon engineered by terrorists who despise our society. Who despise our culture, for what it is. They want nothing more than to annihilate all of humanity.' Deacon cocked his head. 'I suppose I can sympathise with some of their sentiments. But I do draw the line at genocide.'
Deacon looked up and set his gaze back on Aaron. 'I do need to find her. I will find her. She won't be able to leave this system now. I’ll track her down eventually and-’
‘Kill her.’
‘We’ll treat her.’
Aaron stared back at Deacon. Locked eyes with him, searching for the truth behind that cool and genial smile. He wasn’t seeing any of it, though. ‘Yeah, right…'treat' her.’
Deacon sighed sadly. ‘I have a horrible suspicion that whatever I tell you, you're not going to help us, are you?’
‘What do you think?’
Deacon looked down at his hands. Truly saddened. ‘That is something of a shame. Under different circumstances, perhaps you and I might have been good friends. We’re alike in many ways. Outsiders. Not like those brain-dead plebeians.’
‘I’m not a fregging murderer.’
‘Nor am I…I’m just here to fix things. To put matters right. That is all.’
He stood up slowly, a little wearily. ‘Well, I suppose we’re done here.’ He turned towards the rear door of the cargo hold. He nodded at one of his men and headed towards the palm-switch beside the exit.
‘Goodbye Mr Goodman.’
Deacon pulled a rubber oxygen mask from one of the hooks and placed it over his mouth and nose and then hit the switch. As noisy hydraulic pistons worked the ramp door slowly open, a single shot rang out behind him.
Pity, that.
He’d rather liked that scruffy man.
CHAPTER 3
It was cold, damp and dark in the barge’s hold. Ellie shivered and blew a frosty curl of breath out of her mouth and onto the one and only window; a small round, foot-in-diameter porthole that at the moment was showing nothing more interesting than the ink-black universe. They might as well be looking into the window of a spin-washer.
‘Great, you just fogged it up,’ sighed Jez. ‘Now we can’t see anything.’
‘Well, there’s not exactly a great deal to see right now.’
‘Even less with your breath fogging it up.’ Jez wiped the window with the cuff of her jacket. ‘Crud! How much longer are we gonna be stuck in this boring tin can?’
‘I don’t know. They said it was going to take a while to load up the barges and line them up for a delivery.’
The ship’s captain had told Ellie that today’s port of call was where he’d been instructed to drop them off. Apparently ‘The old man' who’d collared him back on Harpers Reach had pressed a rather sizeable payment of creds into his hands and been quite explicit about what he wanted.
‘Not any of the other panhandle planets in this system. I need you to take my girl to Gateway, understand? She needs to
be well and truly out of this system. Do you understand? Away from here, as quickly as possible.’
‘Why can’t we see it?’ sighed Jez pressing her nose up against the cold glass. 'Isn't Gateway huge or something?'
‘Possibly because we’re facing the wrong way?’ sighed Ellie..
But Jez wasn’t listening.‘Gateway, it’s meant to be enormous and we’re supposed to be right next to it? So where the crud is it?’ She leant to one side to get a more oblique view out of their small window.
‘Can’t see diddly.’ She huffed impatiently and decided she’d had enough of looking for something interesting to see outside. Instead she turned her attention to what was inside the barge. She snapped on a pencil-light and panned it around the small hold. ‘I wonder what goodies are in here with us?’ She grinned at Ellie. ‘Shall we play treasure hunt?’
‘What?’
She gestured at the crates stacked all around them. ‘Shall we open some up and take a look-see?’
‘No, that’s wrong! That's-’
Jez was already panning her torch up and down the outside of the crates reading their contents stickers. ‘Pharma-Supplies. Boring. Synthi-Vit Supplements. Boring. Ah-hah! What’s this?’ She stepped closer to one of the crates. ‘System Mail.’ She turned to Ellie and grinned like a naughty child. ‘Mail. People’s you know…personal stuff. Double-drool!’
‘No, Jez…you can’t just open-’
Jez had started to open a crate. She slipped aside the locking latches and the lid popped off with a hiss of stale air. ‘We’re just snooping Ellie girl, not stealing anything. Just snooping.’
'That is so-o-o-o wrong!'
'But fun! C'mon Ellie, don't be such a limp-gimp. Get your buns over here before I stamp my feet.'
Ellie reluctantly joined her and looked down inside the crate. It contained an array of parcels of different sizes, most of them swathed in transit-wrap; sheets of green plastic with triangular air blisters that squished and popped satisfyingly like boils. One of the parcels was wrapped in colourful patterned paper. Ellie could imagine it being a child’s birthday present from an auntie on another planet.
‘This feels so wrong.’
‘Yeah, yeah, blah-blah-wrong-blah-blah-blah,’ Jez said absently as she pulled another package out. She peeled the transit-wrap away and pulled out a small plain brown box with a label on the side. ‘Oh, deary, dear!’ she giggled. ‘Alien Sex Vids. Somebody’s a very naughty boy.’
Jez delved in again, like a child rooting for presents beneath a Christmas tree. She pulled out another and removed the mail-wrap. ‘Ohmygod! It's Soyko Chocco! Do you know how expensive this stuff is?’
Ellie remembered in one of the sopa-drams some character buying a box of Soyko for a woman he wanted to bed; a week of his janitor’s wages for just a tiny little box of the stuff. The candy was potent, loaded with dopamine hyper- stimulants specifically designed to arouse women. To men it was just sickly sweet pink stuff. To woman it was cat-nip, a guaranteed headspin in handy candy form.
Jez ripped the package open and broke off a square of the pink chocco bar and popped it in her mouth. Her eyes closed blissfully.
‘Jez? See, now, we ARE stealing!’
‘No we’re not,’ she said dreamily her eyes still closed. ‘It’s all to be recycled anyway you big gumbo.’
‘Uh?’ Ellie took the pen-torch from Jez’s limp hand and flashed it over the crate’s label. She was right. The crate contained system mail that had insufficient credit-stamping to reach its intended recipient. This lot, all of it – birthday presents, sex vids, pervy chocolate - was headed to the System Mail depot on Gateway to be trashed and recycled.
Jez was rubbing herself up against the crate, like a cat against a scratching post, almost dry humping the thing. ‘Ohhh, this is totally drool!’
Oh, puh-lease….
If it was all going to be junked, then Ellie felt a shade less guilty about dipping into the crate herself. So she did, her fingers eeny-meeny-ed their way across the various parcels, turning them over, squeezing them. She wanted to open one that had come from afar. From beyond this system. A parcel that had actually gate-jumped.
She found one. It was plastered with several holographic system stickers. It had clearly gate-jumped a number of times before arriving here.
The cost of sending this modest sized parcel would have been prohibitive to someone. And now, unfortunately, whoever it had been intended for was never going to get it. Carefully she peeled open one end of the wrap and shone the torch inside.
She could see a loose bundle of shiny cards. She recognised them for what they were, cellu-film images. What oldies sometimes called photographs. Older people seemed to like their memories preserved in these solid-state images, as opposed to storing them on datapads and skipping through them on a holo-display or a toob.
Somebody’s holiday snaps?
She pulled one of them out, expecting to see a grainy image of happy holiday makers standing proudly before some glorious multi-starred sunset. Instead what she held was a stark image of a grotesque. A human face, but barely recognisable as such. It was twisted and mangled, in places clusters of lurid purple coloured tumours bulged and dangled from the flesh.
‘Oh, that’s just gross!’ she muttered.
‘Uh?’ Jez mumbled dreamily.
Ellie pulled out another grainy image. This one seemed to show what looked like a large ditch filled with sacks full of something. Food perhaps? Synthi-grain? She looked more closely. On one side of the ditch, she could just about make out what looked like a disheveled stack of lumber.
But not lumber. No. She looked more closely and thought she recognised limbs. Human limbs.
Bodies.
They were bodies. Stacked like pieces of firewood. Dead people.
Just then a klaxon sounded inside the hold. The ground beneath their feet vibrated and juddered.
Jez stirred from her chocolate-induced reverie. Her eyes opened wide. ‘Shizola! What’s happening?’
Ellie glanced at the small porthole and saw the stars were panning to the right. ‘I think we’re turning.’
Jez pocketed the rest of the Soyko bar and rushed to the porthole to get a look outside. ‘You’re right! I think our convoy is finally getting ready to move!’
Ellie tucked the horrific images back into the parcel and sealed the mail-wrap back up. She had no idea what she'd glimpsed, why someone would want to send such horrific images to someone else. She tossed the parcel back into the mail crate just as Jez let out a squeal of delight.
‘LOOK! ELLIE! COME HERE AND LOO-O-O-O-K!
‘What is it?’
Jez turned to look back at her. ‘Duh! Have a guess you dittohead! Get over here and check it out!’
She hurried over and jostled for space alongside Jez to get a look out of the small round window; cheek rubbing cheek, their noses both pressed against the glass, their breath making foggy patches, they caught a first sight of their destination.
‘Uh…’ Ellie frowned. Confused.
‘Whuh?’ Jez turned to her friend. Confused. ‘Gateway? I thought it was way-y-y bigger than that.’
Ellie shook her head slowly. ‘Umm…I don't think that's Gateway.’
OMNIPEDIA:
[Human Universe open source digital encyclopaedia]
Article: The Legend of Ellie Quin > Gateways: the system link network
The thirteen hundred worlds of Human Space at the time of Ellie Quin were linked together by a network of system gateways. These were the old Hawking-Voltram fold-space fields loops; circular energy irises that contained a singularity tuned to an exit iris in another system. Most colonised solar systems had at least one gateway that linked them into Human Space. Solar systems not linked in this way, were those that had yet to be developed and populated enough to make it cost effective for The Administration to do so at great cost.
Gateways were thus run by The Administration as a way of collecting entry/exit tax revenue, but also as way
of policing and controlling the movement of citizens. The threat of 'locking down' a Gateway was often more than enough to dissuade any local planetary or system authorities from notions of insurrection or independence.
While the Gateway itself was run by The Administration, often the ring-like structure with its artificial gravity attracted a 'bolted on' conurbation of businesses and corporate interests. Built around the ring, in many cases these eventually became whole free-floating cities in space.
User Comment > DarkSpaceGobbler
I herd the rings was named after some Old Earth scy-ence dude from like the 23rd century or sumting. He invented stuff.
User Comment > Girl495889
DarkSpaceGobbler, your simple minded 'tardo comment is wrong. The ring technology was based on theoretical work by a scientist from the 21st century, called Stefan Hawking. And FYI he was a she. Get your facts straight before posting.
User Comment > BungerHungerLolz
Helloooo gentlemens! Is your sex drive failing you? Do you wish you could make love all night long like a true God!? Then try CosmoRod Stim-Shakers. Three strokes and your partner will be in seventh heaven!
User Comment > AngerMouse
Does anyone actually bother policing the comments on Omnipedia? These porno spams keep popping up everywhere. My sex drive is FINE thankyou. Don't need stims.
User Comment > XXX-come-buy-XXX
AngerMouse, want to buy black market alien sex tapes?
CHAPTER 4
The door to the automated barge cranked slowly downwards and clanged noisily against the metal floor. The echo boomed out into the darkness beyond.
It was pitch black outside, lit only by the rotating orange hazard lights on the roof of the barge.
Ellie stepped down the ramp, the heels of her platform boots echoed hollowly, ominously. Jez joined her at the bottom of the ramp and panned her pencil torch around.
Their beams of light picked out grimy metal walls, a cluster of packing crates in one corner, loops of cable and a stack of carbo-ply building panels, all covered in dust.