Greenshift (19 page)

“I’ll go straighten things
out in that cell,” Carlos said, rapping on the blank monitor with his
knuckles.

If Dale wasn’t going to give him
the order, he’d be happy to volunteer to handle this situation in his own way.
No camera, no mic, no way for Dale to see Carlos having a little fun. He could
take his time with her. Then he’d dose her so she wouldn’t rat him out. He’d
explain that he thought it would be easier to hand her over that way, and
they’d be gone before Dale knew he had damaged Stavros’ merchandise…again.

“Don’t bother.” Dale
stopped Carlos in his tracks. “So what if she destroyed the camera. She’s
not getting out of that cell unless we open the door for her.”

Perturbed, Carlos pushed the
issue. “And if she hurts herself? Will Stavros still pay?”

Dale paused the Media screen
where news about the Embassy’s new Ambasadora project had been breaking.

“Point taken. Guess that’s
why you’re the security guy.” Dale’s tone hinted at derision. “Check
on her. Put her in another cell if you have to.”

“I’ll take care of
her,” Carlos said. This trip was proving to be one of the better ones.

About time.

David put Ben’s transmission
through on the bridge. “Tell me you found them.”

“Yeah, closer than
expected. The freighter looks to be heading toward Tampa Deux’s orbit, not
Deleine like their official route says.”

“Which dock on Tampa
Deux?”

“Don’t know that yet. We
probably won’t know until just before they land. I have my team keeping tabs on
the chatter from the larger docks, but there are thousands of smaller municipal
docks that we don’t have the resources to cover. And, if you throw in the
private ones, well, we might not know until the last minute where they’re going
to touch down, even with eyes on them non-stop.”

David’s hope gave way to this
newest concern. They would be able to catch the
Thrall
now, but once
Dale made it on-planet with Mari, he could make her disappear and there would
be no evidence that she was ever even with him.

“I’m adjusting course toward
Tampa Deux. Keep feeding me the
Thrall
‘s coordinates. As soon as you get
an LZ for them, contact the local contractors’ guild. But….” David glanced
at Sean. “Best to leave my name out of this. I had another run-in with
Killian and his group. It ended pretty badly.”

“Understood.”
Ben’s
voice betrayed nothing, but the little pause said volumes.
“Are you
going to need some help with that?”

“Not sure there’s much
you’ll be able to do for me there.” Especially if Ward’s need for
vengeance trumped whatever dirt Killian had on the young man. But David would worry
about that once he made sure Mari was safe.

“I’ll be in touch. Until
then, I’ve sent the latest coordinates and a couple of projected routes.”

“Thanks.” David ended
the transmission.

“What do you mean by another
run-in, David?” Soli’s voice relayed her concern.

He felt badly for having assumed
she was interested in this incident only for the gossip it would feed.

“Nothing to worry
about,” Sean spoke up. “It will blow over.”

“Since when did you become
the optimist?” David asked.

“Since things got this
bad.”

That’s what I figured
.

“Get me out of here.”
Mari channeled all of her pent up fear and frustration into a battle cry.
“Get. Me. Out.”

She pounded on the door as she
screamed. That’s how she had spent the last fifteen minutes, and her vocal
cords could hold out a lot longer than that.

Boots clomped on the other side
of the door. She fell silent in anticipation, listening to the gush of water
still streaming out of the broken spigot and inundating the tile floor. She
grabbed the chair and held it up so she could swing it like a club. Her body
was so tense, her muscles felt like they could snap her bones if this lasted
any longer.

The door slid open.

Mari swung the chair, twisting
her body with the effort.

The chair crashed along the side
of Carlos’ shoulder and head. But the cast metal frame didn’t appear to do more
than knock him off balance and draw a blossoming crimson stain in his cropped
blonde hair.

He stumbled away from her,
grabbing his head. “I’m going to cut you open myself.”

Mari glanced down to be sure she
hadn’t strayed from the rubber flooring, then flicked the little battery at
Carlos’ feet…right into the pooling water. The battery exploded as soon as it
hit the liquid, unleashing electrical arcs into Carlos. His body convulsed from
the current. Those compact batteries might be small, but like Mari, they held a
lot of energy.

Mari jumped through the cell door,
slamming it closed before running down the commonway.

“Okay, next step.”

She chattered to herself as she criss-crossed
the commonways, searching for the hydroponics lab, not caring that the slapping
of her bare feet on the rubber floor covering sounded like the cadence of
Armadan troopers.

“Where is it?” She
chanced a peek at the ceiling, not quite able to see into the darkness above
with only the runner lights on the floor for illumination. Was that another
surveillance box? She couldn’t be sure, but thought she’d also seen one in the previous
commonway. If so, all the cameras out here were up and functioning so Dale
could track her movements with ease.

She wandered from one long
commonway into another, looking for a conduit and vents. The thick blue hose
vented excess carbon dioxide into space, the green banded tube carried liquid
fertilizer through the ship’s refuse system to be recycled. The yellow banded
tube carried sugars—monosaccharides and polysaccharides—to the kitchen. Mari
just needed to figure out in which direction the liquid was flowing. She ran,
watching the tube until she felt heat increasing.

“Wrong way.” She’d
only run into oven exhaust if she kept in this direction, so she backtracked
and followed the little yellow bands the other way. Soon this tube was joined
by a small grey and white banded tube—liquid condensate from the ship’s
respiratory system. This was the very water the plants in the hydroponics bay needed
to survive.

The next left rewarded her with
the subtle sound of a humming condenser and lengths of chubby orange filtration
pipes running along the wall. Their familiar structures were her guide. She
picked up her pace, already winded, but determined.

As soon as she hit the door to
the hydroponics bay, she pulled out the spigot handle she’d tucked inside her bra.
Hopefully it was stronger than the metal cover hiding the control panel for the
lock. And just thin enough to jam under the cover as a lever. It was a tight
fit and the smooth, rounded edges of the handle kept slipping off the cover as
she tried to use the piece as a mini pry bar.

“Concentrate!”

She took a deep breath and began once
more, willing herself not to look over her shoulder. If they caught her this
time, it was over. She manipulated the handle under a corner of the cover. Not
giving up any ground, but being careful not to let the little metal handle slip
again. It had become the greatest multi-tool the system had ever seen. She wiggled
the handle back and forth. Centimeter by centimeter she worked it under the
cover. This was taking longer than she expected.

Pop.

The seal broke. She let the cover
fall away and studied the blue glowing wires in front of her. Relief passed
through her to see the wiring was standard, just like on the
Bard
. She
searched her mind, trying to remember how Sean had hot-wired the
Bard
‘s bridge door when their old pilot had passed out at the controls and
accidentally
changed the lock codes. That had only been six weeks ago. She should be able to
remember Sean’s steps exactly. She certainly remembered him beating the piss out
of the pilot once he got inside.

Closing her eyes, she recalled
Sean’s nimble fingers flying through the steps. She’d always taken her
photographic memory and knack for mnemonic devices for granted—the only thing
they seemed to be good for was school—but they might actually save her. Mari touched
a rainbow of plastic insulators at the nexus of the wires, finally choosing the
red one. Red she had associated with clay, no good for growing plants. And this
wire was no good for opening doors.

Next. Orange. Like her eyes. An
unexpected outcome. Avoid the orange insulator. She moved onto yellow, but couldn’t
remember there being a yellow insulator in the
Bard
‘s panel. Or was
there? In her panic to recreate the memory, the images started coming to her
too quickly. Forcing her memory to slow down, Mari worked each step as Sean had,
removing insulators and crimping some of the remaining wires, regardless of
color. She re-clamped each insulator back to its wire at the crimp and watched
the blue glow blink out. It was like cutting off the circulation to a limb with
a tourniquet.

When she removed the black
insulator, the wire beneath it flashed green. That hadn’t happened with any of
the other wires.

“And that didn’t happen to
Sean.”

Or maybe he had severed the wire’s
connection before it could flash a warning. What’s the worst that could happen
if she did that now? A shipload of electricity would fry her where she stood.
Thinking about being tortured to death and having her eyes cut out made the risk
of electrocution worth it. Using the plastic insulator, she crimped the wire and
secured it.

The door hissed open. She leaped
inside and punched the emergency lock by the door frame to seal her in the hydroponics
bay. Someone with enough tech knowledge or brute force would probably be able
to break in, but that would take a while.

She took a breath. Organic
smells, reminiscent of wet leaves on concrete, floated on the humidity inside
the huge bay. Unlike the rest of the ship, bright lights shined from the
ceiling, blasting the plants with UV rays. This artificial sunlight gave her
hope, an oasis from the dreary commonways and her cell. She had always taken
refuge in plants and flowers when her spirits were low back on Deleine, but
this was taking it to a whole new level.

The area must have covered a
space that was twenty times the size of that pitiful cell they’d locked her in.
She moved among the beautiful bounty—tomato
trees
, their vines trussed to
form a canopy where perfect red fruit hung underneath, their smell not quite as
robust as those which came from the soil back home. But the dwarf orange and
lemon trees forming the other side of this space orchard scented the air with
their citrus aroma. This was how she remembered her scentbots smelling, when
she could still catch a whiff of their fragrance from her skin.

Rows of soy beans and
high-yielding wheat sprouted from a sea of brilliant white containers at the
end of the tree-lined tunnel. In the next section white pillars as broad as David’s
chest reached from floor to ceiling. Feathery leaf lettuce and greens in
several varieties dotted the pillars’ smooth surfaces. Several hanging gardens
with exposed roots brushed against Mari’s arm as she admired their bounty of
edible and fruit-producing plants in vivid reds and purples.

An oasis of dwarf palms, heavy
with dates, rounded out one end of the bay, reminding Mari of Dale’s
conservatory, but too clean, too sterile. The only hint of imperfection was an
array of white storage and mixing containers strewn along the wall behind the
brown, shedding trunks, as though someone had been working with them then found
something better to do.

The foliage crammed into this
impressive space represented years of genetic science and research, tweaking
and modification of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of species.

Resentment at Dale’s earlier
comment about Mari’s genetic pollution burned at her. Society had no problem
manipulating the genes of vegetation, but had lawful taboos about enhancing or
changing animals and humans. Yet it was this same science, honed and fostered
on the worldships so long ago, which aided in the beautification of the Upper
Caste in the first place. Selective breeding was still gene manipulation no
matter if you covered it with the euphemism of marriage.

“And defects are still
defects.”

As if in response to her voice
breaking the silence, the aeration system kicked on, spraying its automatic
mist of nutrient-rich water over the roots and scaring her out of her skin. A
good reminder that she wasn’t out of danger. For her plan to succeed, she
needed to get to the bridge. In order for that to happen, she needed a big
distraction—nothing was bigger than venting part of the ship.

The layout of this bay should be
rudimentary, yet the condensers weren’t where she expected them to be. The only
other place left was the area near the nutrient mixers, beyond a copse of dwarf
evergreen and deciduous trees. But even someone with her limited experience in
hydroponics design knew that placing the condensers too close to the mixers was
a bad idea. They both ran hot and one could cause the other to overheat. This
was either a poor design or a tactic to cut costs. Either way it made Mari’s
job easier.

A purple glow emanating from the angled
lower branches of an avocado tree caught her attention. The dim light came from
some hot pink and white bromeliads clumped in the fork of the small tree. She’d
only seen this species of bromeliad in vids from her botany classes. They were
extremely rare, found only in the embargoed Archenzon rain forest on Tampa One.
These were most likely contraband. It didn’t surprise Mari that Dale was into
cultivating illegal plants—that infringement paled in comparison to human trafficking.

The aerators kicked off, leaving
behind the tinkling drips from exposed roots as the leftover liquid was
funneled into a reclamation filter. The sound helped to soothe her as she surveyed
the bank of condensers and mixers.