Chapter 14
The discussion about Ytla had been interesting.
Ethan turned it over in his mind as Ritter tied the blindfold over his eyes again.
Wren Thorakis, the new artifacts consultant in his Special Forces team, had found something on the Aponi-controlled moon, something she thought was an ancestral spaceship wreck.
Her discovery seemed to have been a catalyst for what was happening now—the sudden increase in pace of whatever plot was brewing against his planet.
If the woman Ritter called Linao had gone to Ytla just before Demeter had been attacked, he wondered if she had found what she’d been looking for.
Whether she had or not, she’d said she’d been arrested on her return to Demeter, which meant someone had noticed something was off where she was concerned.
He heard Ritter tying the blindfold on Velda, and steeled himself to endure more of Ritter’s experimentation.
Not that endure was quite the right word.
There was nothing painful about it. If he was honest, he felt better than he had since they’d crashed in the hover.
He heard Ritter go into the dispensary, then heard him wheeling the box in. The main door opened, and the trolley Ritter was pushing stopped with a squeak.
“What are you doing here, Linao?” Ritter sounded pissed.
“I have clearance. I want to see this. You wouldn’t even have known what to do with that box if I hadn’t endured that hellhole planet and worked out what it could be.” Linao’s voice was soft, as if she was mindful of the guards in the passage behind her and wanted to keep this information secret.
Except she was saying it in front of him and Velda.
Which was an indicator of something else. Something dark.
“Wait outside while I check your clearance.” Ritter passed him, Ethan could feel the air move as he strode out, and heard the door close.
He was about to speak to Velda when the door opened again, and someone slipped in.
Linao, he was guessing. She’d decided not to wait outside while Ritter checked her story.
“You obviously outrank him.” Velda spoke up, and Ethan sensed Linao stop in her tracks.
Linao breathed out. “Maybe I just like to push against authority,” she said.
“You probably do,” Velda agreed. “But you still outrank him, don’t you?”
“Maybe.” Linao laughed softly. “So, how many days have you been in Ritter’s clutches?”
“Two,” Velda said. “Apparently the first ‘experiment’ didn’t work, so we got a second dose.”
“And what does the experiment consist of?” Linao asked.
“Can you see the blindfolds?” Velda asked.
“Sure, I can see them. So you have no idea what’s going on?”
“Nope.” As Velda said it, Ritter came back in.
“I asked you to wait—”
“I know, but I outrank you, and you’ve had confirmation about my security level, haven’t you?” Linao’s voice held a laugh.
“I’ve been told you might have more information that could help me with my experiments,” Ritter conceded. “I didn’t know it was you who gave the report about the silver balls from that undiscovered planet.”
“Well, it’s not so much undiscovered, as undiscovered by us,” Linao said. “To be fair, a whole planet’s worth of people might take issue with your description.”
“Fine. Undiscovered by us. A lost Verdant String planet.” Ritter’s tone was irritated. “You’re sure they’re Verdant String?”
Ethan felt a shot of shock and adrenalin at what they were discussing, as casually as you please.
“As in, from the same ancestral convoy as us? Definitely. And somehow, even though they’ve had it far tougher than the rest of us, they seem to have a better record of their history than we do.
I don’t know if it’s because they had to more or less wall themselves in for centuries before they were able to expand, but they literally still have the mothership. They’ve made it into a museum.”
“You saw it?” Ritter asked.
“I saw it,” Linao said. “Saw what the balls did to their elite soldiers, too.”
Ethan shifted at that, because there was a layer of disgust in Linao’s voice and he had a feeling he and Velda had met the balls. Just this morning, in fact.
“Bulking out, you said in your report. What did it look like?” Ritter had forgotten he was resentful and annoyed, and sounded like he was lapping up every word out of Linao’s mouth.
So was Ethan. Given he had a suspicion the silver balls they were talking about had been dropped into the hollow of his throat twice, he very much wanted to know what bulking out looked like.
“I was attacked by them in that form once while we were collecting the ore we’d mined. Before one of my crew . . .” Linao stopped, and he heard her draw in a breath as if she was recalling something incredibly distressing.
“One of your crew?” Ritter asked.
“Never mind.” She sounded like she was still struggling with what had happened.
“Let’s just say it ended with our ship being totally destroyed and us becoming their prisoners for a week.
The whole planet is full of monsters. Everything there is out to kill you, and I don’t know if the nanotech in the balls adapted to that by allowing the designated protectors to grow bigger when needed, to take the monsters on, or whether that’s just how it works, but they grow maybe head and shoulders taller and they look . . . feral.”
“Well, that hasn’t happened yet, no matter how many times I’ve tried it.
I’ve given it a few days each time, and then taken the balls back out when it hasn’t worked.
There were a few incidents—people going a bit crazy when they understood the ball was coming back out—but nothing we couldn’t handle. ”
“Maybe they’ve been sitting dormant too long,” Liano said. “They call them gyra on the monster planet, and the inhabitants have been assigning them to their guards, called Gyr, since they landed there.”
“The same ones, over and over?” Ritter sounded shocked. “For two thousand years?”
“They’ve got a whole ceremony to take the balls out of the guards when they age out or want children, and then give them to a new recruit.
” Linao was right beside Ethan now, standing next to the box.
“The normal population keep tight control of the tech, I guess so the super soldiers don’t get the idea in their heads to take over. ”
“Well, maybe that’s the issue. I was involved in cataloguing the inventory from the ancestral ship on Garmen, but I only found out about the box since your report.
There’s no indication they were used at all, although they could have been, and then all returned to the box because they were defective, for all I know.
” Ritter walked over to join her. “Did anyone else experiment with them before me, do you know?”
“The ancestral ship these are from was how the Core Companies found Garmen to begin with,” Linao said.
“The signal from the mothership was picked up by one of the asteroid miners and it led them to where it was located on the planet. The scientists were sent out to inventory and move the tech as quickly as possible away from the signal, in case a Verdant String ship picked it up. I don’t think anyone did anything with the box until I got back from the monster planet. ”
“Was the Garmen ship broken up, or intact?” Ritter asked. He sounded enthralled.
Ethan couldn’t help but feel the same. That’s how the Cores had found Garmen? A signal had led them to it, and they’d never disclosed their find?
Of course not, he realized. The Verdant String would never have allowed them to claim Garmen as the first breakaway planet, unaffiliated to the VSC, if they’d known.
Now that the VSC had clawed Garmen back about a year ago, they would be surveying the whole planet. Would they find the ship?
He guessed they would, sooner or later. It had to be big.
“I didn’t see the Garmen mothership myself, but apparently it didn’t crash. It’s fully intact,” Linao said. “The people onboard obviously meant to land on Garmen, and they set up a small settlement around the ship initially.”
“So what happened to them?” Ritter asked. “Garmen was uninhabited when the Cores found it.”
“They died, and not long after they arrived, by the looks of things. So far, there’s no indication of how or why. A disease, maybe. One thing is for sure, if they used the nanotech they’d been given, it didn’t help them survive.”
“Well, there’s place for ten in here, and there’s a full set accounted for,” Ritter agreed. “So either they didn’t need it, or it didn’t work. Or someone was nervous about using it.”
“Hmm,” Linao agreed. “No one on the reclamation crew knew what the box was, and it didn’t look particularly interesting, so it was set aside in preference for some of the more obviously useful tech, until we got back from Fjern and worked out what it was.”
“Fjern?” Ritter asked.
“That’s what the locals call the monster planet,” Linao said. “And they have a lot more than a set of ten there. Maybe because Garmen is so close to the actual Verdant String, the Garmen group only got a single set.” She paused. “So what’s the plan now? Another dose for our two subjects?”
“Why not?” Ritter said. “If the balls have degraded over time, there’s no harm done, and maybe one or two will have some capability left.”
“You can definitely take them back out when you see a result?” Linao asked.
“Yes, the extraction machine was inside the box with the balls,” Ritter said. “You said in your report they use the same thing on the monster planet?”
“They call it a gyrna-na.” Linao made a sound of interest and Ethan guessed Ritter was opening the box. “I only heard about it, I never saw one.”
“It draws the nanotech back out, no problem. It’s pretty easy to operate,” Ritter said. “We can experiment as we like, and then the top bosses can decide who gets the ones that work.”
He stepped closer to Ethan, and he felt the smooth ball land in the hollow of his throat again. Heard Ritter walk to Velda and do the same.
“You’re probably hungry,” Ritter said after he put the box away and took their blindfolds off. He tested their vitals, marked them down on his handheld screen.
Linao was leaning against a wall, arms crossed, watching them with lazy interest.
“You probably don’t need the blindfolds,” she said to Ritter.
“I can’t have anyone talking—” He cut himself off. Shrugged. “I guess you’re right.”
She gave them both a bright smile and walked out, calling the guards to come in to take them to the mess.
She was a piece of work, that one.
She knew they’d understand what she meant. That it didn’t matter what they saw, what they heard, because they’d been marked for death.
The hover strike hadn’t succeeded, but when they stopped being useful to Ritter, they would be ended another way.
That won’t happen.
The words came from inside his head, but he had a strange feeling he hadn’t said them.
He walked like a good boy in restraints to get dinner, but he didn’t know which disturbed him more—Linao and her casual cruelty, or the possibility there was something inside him with opinions and a voice.