Balance of Terror (2 page)

“What’s it like out there?” Srin asked, jerking his head. His voice stuttered but Moon pretended not to hear. “I, I didn’t get a good look around when we landed.”

That was an understatement. Srin had been in the throes of spasms so bad she, and the reticent pirates who shuttled them down to the surface, had been afraid that he was going to die right there and then on the landing pad.

“It’s hot,” she said, her voice dry.

For her, losing Srin would have meant the loss of a soul-mate. For the pirates, it would have meant an added complication they didn’t need. They threw her luggage after her with insolent speed and took off while she was still trying to ask them for help.

He rasped out a laugh. “Tell me something I don’t know. I thought we landed in a super-heated swamp the moment we left the spaceport complex.”

She didn’t want to remember that day – the panicked search for a day room to park Srin while she went looking for accommodation, her worry the entire time she was away from him, the strange rituals and customs she ran up against while trying to negotiate her way through the city’s bustling population. But she had done it, and she was proud of what she had accomplished.

“You’re lucky you’re not the one doing our grocery shopping.” Her rebuke was gentle and had its intended effect. Srin’s craggy features lit with a brief smile before his teeth gritted. She knew he was trying his best to suppress the spasms that racked his body.

Turning away from him, she took a bottle out of the bag, checked its label, and cracked open the seal, emptying three capsules into her palm. She always made sure to keep a flask of water close by. Flicking open the spout, she poured out a glass of cool water.

“Here,” she said, offering him both the glass and the pills. “Take this. It might help.”

His hands jerked as he reached for the medication. With Moon’s help, he managed to swallow the capsules and sank back on the bed, his eyes closed.

Was it her imagination, or did he seem a little more at ease already? It must be wishful thinking because she doubted the drug worked that fast.

“I’ll go prepare something to eat,” she said softly, feeling useless, and slipped out of the room.

How the mighty have fallen, she thought to herself as she momentarily leant against the wall. As a stellar physicist at the Phyllis Science Centre, she only had to snap her fingers to get what she wanted – the latest Quantaflex computer, an expansive lab, meals sent up to her from the campus canteen. But now, she couldn’t even get common drugs without having to sweet talk several people and pay a mark-up that bordered on criminality.

And now here she was, back at the bottom of the roller-coaster ride that was Moon Thadin’s life. Her tired gaze swept the surroundings, falling on cheap walls, grey with ingrained dust and encroaching mould, before moving on to the flimsy furniture and outmoded systems in the small kitchenette. There wasn’t even a proper food programmer available, forcing her to walk to the markets every two days to buy food, dirt still clinging to the roots of vegetables, blood still dripping from limp cuts of meat.

“How can people live like this?” she asked herself, pulling open the chilled box where food was normally stored.

She had thought that the planet of Slater’s End – out near the ill-fated Suzuki Mass – was primitive, but it was nothing compared to the heated soup bowl that was Marentim. And, after immersing herself in several history vids, she now knew why. Marentim was originally an alien planet, colonised by powerful human cogs of the Republic machine. There were some tradeable resources on the planet, but not many. Certainly nothing to fight wars over. Not that that stopped anybody. If there was a case study of a planet where even the might of the Republic had miserably failed, it was Marentim. More than two centuries after human subjugation, the world was like a small boy’s fantasies run wild, the entire planet divided into territories of misery and avarice – depression and poverty at the bottom, greed and riches at the top.

When Kad Minslok, her one-time research partner turned anti-Republic rebel, had instructed her to get to Marentim after she and Srin escaped the dragnet on Slater’s End, Moon hadn’t been sure what to expect. Now, almost a month later, the reasoning behind Kad’s advice was obvious. The world was so busy trying not to fall apart that it couldn’t sustain the luxury of a strong planetary government. It was the perfect environment for galactic dissidents looking for quick camouflage.

“Quick camouflage,” she muttered, “but slow dinners.”

She pulled out a shallow tray of dark red meat, sticky blood lying in pools along the curved edges, and tipped it upside down into the sink to drain. She didn’t like it, but she was starting to get used to the look of blood, mixed in with what was going to become food. She salivated after vat-grown muscle, exquisitely programmed, meltingly tender, but the stores that sold such goods were in the more exclusive areas, heavily guarded by militias and closely watched. Neither she nor Srin needed that kind of attention.

The vegetables and grains were easier to prepare – scraping, measuring, boiling, steaming. If she had thought, even six months ago, that she’d be elbow-deep in butchered flesh and edible plants grown in
soil
, she would have laughed herself silly.

“Backward evolution at work,” she muttered. “Look at me, a born-again cave-woman.”

The meal took almost an hour to come together and she shook her head when she saw the haphazard look of what eventually crowded two plates. But it was hot, nutritious and cheap. Under the circumstances, she couldn’t ask for more.

After putting the plates on the table, she walked back to the bedroom. Dusk fell quickly on Marentim and the room was already dim, the outlines of furniture barely visible, but Moon was gratified to hear steady breathing coming from the bed. Maybe her last bout of shopping – Moon’s Benzodiazepine Mixture #14 – had done the trick. She certainly hoped so.

Walking across to Srin’s resting form, she put a hand on his forehead. His temperature felt normal, which was to be expected. He wouldn’t be needing his regular dose of hyperpyrexia-inhibitors for another two days.

He stirred against her hand, sought it out with his…and pulled it to his mouth, where he dropped a kiss into her palm.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“What for?” she asked, her voice equally low.

“For being so useless. We should have left here by now. We should be—”

“Ssh,” she interrupted. “I have dinner ready. Or at least something vaguely approximating a meal.”

He chuckled and slowly swung his legs out of bed while she kept her clenched fists behind her back. “You really have been improving with your cooking, you know.”

She snorted. “When I think of my first attempts, that’s not saying much.”

She didn’t help him to the dining table but she hovered close by and, by the tightening of his lips, she knew he knew it too. Silently, they took their seats.

“What kind of meat is this?” he asked, after taking a mouthful of food and chewing on it thoughtfully.

“I…it’s….” She shrugged and gave him a wry smile. “To be honest, I don’t know. It looked the freshest, so I bought some.”

“No doubt to the intense disappointment of the native population, it can’t be human.”

Moon frowned as she glanced down at her plate. “How do you know?”

He grinned. “It doesn’t taste like chicken.”

“Oh you!”

He was joking again and maybe that’s what made her laugh a little louder than she should have, considering the small size of the jest. Any small progress he made was like clawing out of an abyss and she felt so helpless watching him. To have a little of the old Srin back was more precious to her than a planet made of diamond.

“How do you feel?” she asked, in as casual a voice as she could muster, shoving the vegetables around with her cutlery.

His forehead furrowed as he groped for words. “I feel…exhausted, as if I’m smothering in a cloud of white fibre. It takes such an effort to concentrate on any one thing.”

“And your spasms?”

“Not one, since you gave me those tablets earlier on. Maybe they’re helping. I hope so.”

So did she.

She felt Srin’s heavy gaze on her, and knew what topic was coming up next.

“The chip,” he said. “From your old research partner. You haven’t played it yet, have you?”

“No,” she replied, pretending intense interest in how she cut some tubers.

“I don’t know why you’re waiting, Moon.”

She could have lied, but didn’t. Srin had suffered more than enough of that during his life.

“It’s you,” she admitted after a pause, looking up at him. “If I know Kad, once I play that chip, we’ll be off on some breakneck journey across the galaxy again. I can’t – I
won’t
– do that until I’m sure you can cope with whatever we have to face next.”

“I’m not a child, Moon.” But his voice lacked anger.

She shook her head and rose, carrying the now-empty plates to the cleaning unit.

“You’re weaker than you think, my love,” she said, her back to him. “The best thing for you right now is a top-flight Republic medical facility, one month’s enforced rest and an intense round of medical treatment.”

She turned and leant against the counter. “But all I can offer you is a few stolen weeks in a habitat that would have been condemned on any other civilised planet, and a guaranteed future of uncertainty.” She shrugged and smiled wryly at him. “Can you fault my hesitation?”

“Play the chip,” he said softly. “I know it’s a one-off, that’ll it destroy itself after running, but I don’t think staying here is any smarter a move. The Republic can’t catch us if it doesn’t get a tip-off on where we are. And it can’t get a tip-off as long as we keep moving.”

He stopped, swayed in his chair and blinked, as if clearing something from his vision. Moon’s hands tightened on the prefab ledge. “What’s the matter?”

“I…,” he paused and shook his head, taking a deep breath at the same time. “I suddenly feel as if I’ve been dropped into a 6
g
environment.”

“Your limbs feel heavy?” She had read about that side-effect on one of the medical labels she’d read but, compared to his convulsions, it seemed like a small price to pay.

“Limbs, body…brain.” He smiled weakly as his words became hesitant. “I think…I need to…lie down.”

Moon hurried to his side and, supporting him, helped him stagger back to bed. He collapsed onto the mattress and fell asleep in minutes.

Moon looked down tenderly at his face, too craggy to be called handsome, but compelling in its own way. She was reminded of the spark of attraction when she first saw him aboard the
Differential
, and how envious she had been of his openness and apparent lack of guile. Surrounded as she had been by people with their own agendas, how could she not fall in love with such an honest man?

Quietly, she left the room and walked back to the cubicle that masqueraded as a living room.

Kneeling down, her fingers ran over the rough upholstery on the bottom edge of the cheap, cramped sofa. When she withdrew her hand, she was holding a chip. It wasn’t as well disguised as the chip she’d found in her ravaged lab at the Phyllis Science Centre, but it didn’t have to be. It had been the doctor, Leen Vazueb, who had given her this second chip while they were still on Lunar Fifteen. Kad had provided accompanying instructions that she play it when she reached Marentim, but she didn’t think she was ready to take that next step.

She looked down into her hand, watching the mall token catch the light from the kitchenette. Should she take Srin’s advice and play it now? But what if he suffered another attack of convulsions? She turned the little disc over and over in her fingers. She’d give it one more day, she decided, just to make sure that the cocktail of drugs she had Srin on was stabilising his condition.

She knew they couldn’t wait forever. Srin was right. The longer they stayed on Marentim, the greater the chance of discovery.

“Tomorrow,” Moon told herself. “But only if Srin’s better.”

“Hello Moon.”

Kad looked out at her from the cheap monitor screen.

“If this chip is being played, it means that either Moon Thadin successfully reached Marentim, or the Fodox Rebels have killed her and appropriated the chip for themselves. I sincerely hope it’s the former.”

“Thanks,” Moon muttered to the image of her old partner.

She was at a public terminal almost half a kilometre from her and Srin’s rented rooms, in the quietest spot she could find. One street away, heavy traffic meandered past, bogged down by the sheer volume of vehicles and the many stops made by courier and transport speeders along their routes. No more than twenty metres beyond that, where she kept a wary eye out for undesirable characters while she absorbed Kad’s words, was an alley of barely legal shops and gambling dens. Moon knew from experience that the alley only became busy after dusk, but she wasn’t about to risk her luck. Once she found out her next set of instructions, she would be gone.

“Assuming you’re the one who’s playing this Moon, well done but, as you’ve probably concluded, this is only the first in a series of steps to bring you to me.” Kad flashed teeth, grinning at her. “I hope your memory’s as sharp as it was, because I have an account number for you.” He repeated a string of numbers that Moon was quick to enter into her personal assistant unit.