Fractured Families, Chapter 08 (Patreon)

Finding Mary proved to be tougher than Alex expected. He remembered Tristan mentioning a six-month travel period to the location where she and Baran would be picked up by whoever Dalia sent. Their own trip back had taken eight objective months, and a few extra weeks had been added to that by his sojourn in the medical clinic, so Mary had been given ample time to settle into her new identity.

Only, she hadn’t shown up anywhere. He had programs looking for her image and her name; he’d even recreated some of the chemical formulas he’d seen in her implant while he was erasing Salvation from it, and had a search going for that too.

And gotten nothing.

She had good reasons to want to hide. She might not know everything about Tristan, but she’d experienced his anger. Unfortunately, Alex wasn’t deterred by not finding anything. She’d been picked up by someone from the Prian’s World, so he’d start there.

Which also proved tougher than he expected. The first time he’d been into their system, the ship had been in front of him, and it had initiated the contact. Riding the connection back had been simple, but he hadn’t had to look at how the ship handled contacting the rest of the universe. And he should have.

Ships—every ship, no matter how large—funneled their communication through a few ports, then nodes. Those ships tagged each communication as being theirs so the reply would come back to the proper address then, within that address, would be any extra information about the specific person who’d sent the message.

Every ship except, it seemed, Prian’s World.

Dalia, who ran the ship—or maybe it had been someone else, Alex hadn’t cared enough about the information to pay too much attention—had referred to the ship as a city. It certainly was large enough, being physically larger than many of the cities he’d traveled to, without counting all the levels. And the top third of the ship was open space, covered by a transparent dome and built like a city with buildings, roads, alleys, and whatever else a city would have.

And they’d taken the idea of a city to the next level by giving every citizen an individual node, never tagging it as belonging to the ship.

Which meant, that as far as the network was concerned, the ship simply didn’t exist. Just like Bramolian Six’s capital city wasn’t an entity on the net, Prian’s World wasn’t there. He could find references to both of them. They had a node with information about them, but just like the government of that city didn’t conduct official business on the open net, neither did Prian’s World.

He could get on the closed network. He could coerce his way onto it, if he had to, but there was a reason it was closed. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. There was always an easier way on a ship, it was just a question of finding it.

And in this case, the easier way was to use the name of someone who was on the ship. He knew a few names—Dalia, Olirian, and Baran—but they were all Prians, and he was certain any attempt to track their identities would trigger alarms. The wealthy tended to take the kinds of precautions to protect themselves that most people never considered.

Alex wasn’t afraid of killer programs—programs designed to kill the coercionist and not the system he was using—but again, there were easier ways. All he needed was a normal person on Prian’s world, someone who wasn’t rich, someone who wouldn’t go any further to protect themselves than a handful of trigger programs.

What had been his name? He initiated a search through his implant’s memory. It had been years ago, objectively, but subjectively only a few months. Of course he’d never bothered creating a filing system for anything other than his programs, so he had to look through the hundreds of names he’d looked into during that time, then order them chronologically and figure out when he’d used it, whittling the list until he had the name.

Esteban Gregor.

He smiled. What were you up to, Mister Gregor? More importantly, which one of the millions of Esteban Gregors in the universe was the correct one? Why, he was the one who’d had his face redone.

His search program took one minute to return the result. Esteban Gregor lived in the Mailstorm building at Apartment 213-65, in the Copper District. Of course Prian’s World wasn’t mentioned anywhere there, but Alex recognized the cosmetic work, since it had been done to his own face and then transferred to Esteban to hide the fact Alex had been on the ship.

That he could trace back to the man’s system. He was careful not to send his usual volley of programs ahead of him to keep from being noticed by the Prian’s system. The thing still felt as vast as the first time he’d been in it, and while after his discussion with the Golly he wasn’t scared of what this system could do, he still had a healthy respect for the delays it could cause.

He was pleased to note he could still find some of the code he’d left in the system that first time. Most were degraded to the point it wouldn’t do much, but it gave him a timeframe for how the antibodies worked.

Alex looked around Esteban’s message center. He had a dozen messages waiting from women. Curious, he peeked in them. Marriage requests. Okay, things were done differently on this ship than what he remembered. His mother had asked his father in person to marry her.

He sent a handful of probes to map the ship as well as discreetly look for the dispatching system. In its history he’d find who had been sent to pick up Baran and Mary, and from there he’d work out where she’d gone.

Sheathed in a camouflage program he wrote to mimic the ship’s code, he slipped into the dispatching system and began looking. A lot of ships were dispatched. They didn’t let anyone come here; they sent someone to retrieve any supplies they needed. Fortunately for him, why they were sent out was indicated.

Unfortunately, none of them said they’d been sent out to pick up Baran. They could have hidden what the ship would be doing, in which case Alex was fucked, or…

Baran was a Prian. Would Dalia stand to have her brother picked up by just any ship, when she could be the one to go pick him up? This city could move, after all.

Without knowing where the pickup had happened, he couldn’t use that to pinpoint when. Though, the hangar did have cameras.

A lot of them, he found out once he made his way into the security system. He let his programs handle this. And in a few minutes, one of them flagged a feed, just over three months old.

He watched as an escape pod was maneuvered into the hangar and technicians cut the door open. Two ragged-looking people were escorted out of them. A man and a woman. Dalia was there, and she took Baran in her arms, only to have him push her away and try to run. A medical team caught him and sedated him.

Alex was distracted by that and almost missed the guards escorting Mary away. Why was she under guard? She’d kept Baran alive, and considering the state the man had been in when he’d gone into the pod, Mary could have said she’d saved him and no one would have contradicted her.

He followed her through the corridors to a security office where she was processed, and he was able to find her information, finally. Mary Holiander, Prisoner 5326.

Prisoner? Why would they take her prisoner? A quick search told him there were no warrants on her, and he didn’t bother with the bounty hunters’ boards. He couldn’t imagine a place like Prian’s World looking at them, or caring how much money someone else wanted for her. If they were holding her prisoner, it was an internal decision.

Had Mary somehow crossed the Prians before?

He looked for her in the prison, but she wasn’t there. He had to do a search through the general population to find Prisoner 5326 had an apartment, and a job.

Alex rolled his eyes and couldn’t believe Dalia was that manipulative. No, he actually could, now that he thought about how she’d tried to get Tristan to work for her exclusively, just so he’d sleep in her bed.

Dalia had pulled a corporate rescue on Mary. She’d looked at the skill she had, the trouble she was in, and offered her a choice between indentured servitude or being released into the wild for those who were after her to find. With Tristan after her, Alex expected the choice had been easy.

At least now he knew where to find her, and it hadn’t taken more searching. She had a lab—and a well-equipped one at that. She was bent over the counter working on something the camera couldn’t see.

He pinged the room’s comm. Did it again when she didn’t answer.

“I told you before,” she snapped, “I’m working on it and it’s going to be ready when it’s ready.”

“Hi,” he said.

She sighed. “What can I do for you?” She sounded like she was holding back her anger.

“It’s Alex.”

She rolled her eyes. “Alright, Alex. What can I do for you?”

That wasn’t going to be as simple as he’d thought. He placed sentry programs around him.

“Mary, it’s Alex. We met on Baran’s ship. You made the cure for me and Tristan.”

He accessed the camera on the terminal she was sitting in front of, and she looked pissed. “You son of a bitch. You said I’d be free to go.”

“Hey, I had nothing to do with what’s going on.”

“Oh sure, you really expect me to believe you didn’t tell them to chain me to a lab and use me until I’m all dried up? They’d really come up with something like this on their own?”

“Clearly you don’t know Dalia.”

“No, I don’t. If you’re just here to rub my nose in this, leave me alone.”

“That’s not why I’m here.”

“Then get on with it.”

Alex almost told her to forget it. He didn’t have to deal with her attitude. But he needed a medic, and this meant he had a way to entice her to work for him.

“Do you want out?”

She looked at the screen, at the camera on it, as if she knew he was looking at her from it. “No, you have no idea how happy I am here, being forced to live in two rooms, not being able to talk to anyone other than the people ordering their drugs from me. Why Alex, didn’t you know this is what I always imagined paradise to be like?” Her face darkened. “What the fuck do you think?”

He ignored the sarcasm and the anger. “Then I think you’ll want to listen to the proposition I have for you.” A sentry warned him of an approaching sniffer. Alex quickly rewrote the surrounding code and connected the space to a different communications node inside the ship. The transition was so smooth he hardly felt it.

“—and if you think I’m going to trust you after what you pulled on me, think again.”

He did lose some time; he’d have to find a way to fix that for the next time he had to pull this in the middle of a conversation. Still, he could figure out the gist of what he’d missed.

“I see, so you aren’t that interested in leaving?”

She grumbled. “What do you want?”

“I need a medic.”

“And you thought of me?” She scoffed. “What happened? You and your abus—”

“Mary,” Alex warned.

“Boyfriend, sorry.” She didn’t sound it. “You two have pissed off all the medical mercs out there?”

“I didn’t ask any of them.”

“Why not?” She almost sounded curious.

“Because I thought of you first.”

“Really? You thought of an imprisoned biochemist with barely any medical training before a merc who actually knows what she’d be doing? Why would you do that?”

“Because I know you better than I do them.” It was true, if not the whole reason for his decision.

“I doubt we spoke more than twenty minutes.”

“Which is more than any merc medic I’ve ever bothered talking with. And all things considered, by helping me, you’d be helping yourself.”

She leaned back in her chair. “You set this up, I know it. You told them to hold me here, just so you’d know where to find me when the time came.”

“Hey, I didn’t know this was going to happen, any of it.” He’d wanted to stay calm. The advantage was always to the one who didn’t care about how the negotiation turned out, or who could let the other believe he didn’t, but getting accused of causing that to her was getting annoying. “As for knowing where to find you? I’ve been at this for hours. When Tristan put you in the pod, you vanished and never resurfaced. Took a lot of work to get to you. And I certainly didn’t know my home would be destroyed and Tristan kidnapped. Are you interested or not? Like you said, there are plenty of mercs out there who can do the job, and I’m starting to think getting one of them is going to be easier.”

“I’m interested, but what happens when it’s over? Are you putting me in another cage like this until you need me again?”

“I told you, I had nothing to do with that. Take it up with Dalia.”

She leaned in. “What do I get out of it?”

“You get to leave that ship.”

“I need more.”

“When it’s done, I’ll arrange to have you dropped anywhere you want. I’ll even make sure I’m not part of the loop so you won’t have to worry about me arranging anything.”

She considered it. “I want a new identity. A clean one.”

“Okay.”

She straightened. “Really?” She narrowed her eyes. “Just like that?”

“I need your help,” he answered, thinking of the implications and the possibilities the payment presented. “I’m not going to argue about things I can easily give you.”

A sentry warned him of an approaching program. Another one noticed it too— No, this was a different program coming his way. Alex cursed and extended the range on his sentries.

“Mary, I have to disconnect. Someone’s realized I’m here. It’ll take a few months to reach you, but I’ll be coming. Sit tight.”

He rerouted himself to a different node within the ship before Mary could reply, and set about erasing any traces of his presence. Only once he did a full check of Tristan’s ship’s computer did he start breathing again. Nothing had made it onto it.

Now that he had his full team, all he had to do was get them to talk before meeting, so any explosions could be contained before they blew up a ship.