“Thank you,” I answered. I stepped back, set the mini to V, and shot him in the chest. He jerked once and slumped, unconscious.
“That was really subtle, Thinker,” Coolhand said.
We moved up the stairs, minis up. Nothing stirred. We crept past doors, all closed, some with numbers, some without. We found 2010, and took up positions silently.
Most people knock, but not the Legion. We blow away the freaking door, even when we’re invited. It’s an old Legion tradition. We didn’t have our E’s and it looked like a substantial door, so Warhound used a V charge, squeezing it onto the center of the door. Then he triggered it and it flared briefly and the door exploded inwards with a shattering roar and a white flash, and we barreled in all together, guns up, Snow Leopard, Thinker, Warhound and Priestess, the Legion hello.
A young lady with a baby sat cross-legged on the floor by a hissing heating element, a young man rose up suddenly from a pile of blankets.
“Don’t move!” Coolhand shouted the warning. Coolhand and I covered the man, Warhound and Priestess had the lady and the baby. They froze. It was dark and cold, the floor littered with clothing and blankets, filthy walls, the heater spitting and glowing red. A single room, two closets for the kitchen and toilet. The baby stared at us, mouth open. The lady had been feeding it, and she had dropped the food. They were Outworlders, not Coldmarkers. I frisked the man and his immediate surroundings. No weapons. Priestess frisked the lady and the baby. No weapons. Warhound waited by the door and scanned the corridor. Priestess stayed by the lady. Coolhand and I squatted by the man. We had him sit on the floor.
“Are you Brandon Terrio, Defcom 80147-41?” Coolhand asked.
The man hung his head, sighed deeply, and answered wearily. “It knows perfectly well who we are.” The lady gasped, and tears suddenly began to trickle down her cheeks. The baby looked up at her curiously.
“I haven’t the slightest idea who you are,” Coolhand insisted. “Did you send us this note?” He dropped it before the man, a crumpled scrap of paper with a few lines of handwriting.
The man stared at it briefly, then his head rose and he looked at each of us in turn. The light of understanding slowly began to glow in his eyes.
“It’s not with USICOM!” he declared.
“No, we’re not,” Coolhand replied. “We’re with the Legion.”
“The Legion!” He gasped it. “The Legion! It got my message! My God, we never thought it would work, we thought it was with the System, we thought they had intercepted the message. The Legion! My God! Tinlan, our guests. Make some tea for our guests!” He trembled with emotion and excitement. He was a young man, but he appeared ill, stricken with some terrible, primitive disease.
“Thank you, but we don’t have time for tea,” Coolhand said. “We don’t have much time at all, you see, and if they trace us here, you will have plenty of questions to answer. Now, what does this list mean, who are you, and what did you want to tell us?” Coolhand held up the handwritten message. It read simply:
Brandon Terrio Defcom 80147-41
Aeria
Preference
Galleon
Consensus
Tranquility
Old Town, 78 Cargo D, Apt 2010. Nights.
The list had piqued our interest. The five ships listed had all hard-launched from Andrion 2 in the teeth of our attack.
“We wrote it,” the man explained. “Brandon Terrio was our friend, a Sector Starfleet records officer with Coldmark Port. Our name is Tharos Cyprio, but that’s not important. We just want to give Cit what Brandon gave us.”
Cit-a Systie term for citizen.
He paused briefly, short of breath. His wife had dried her eyes and was feeding the baby again. It was a beautiful, bright-eyed baby, smiling at everything it saw, opening a mouth full of mashed food and cooing. Priestess appeared fascinated by the baby, her gloved fingers still hesitating to touch it.
“Brandon discovered something it was not supposed to know. It was an accident. It was into some highly classified fleet programs, and there was a screw-up in the access, and its work got it into an area where it should not have gone. It should have backed out immediately, of course. But Brandon was always curious. It went into it further, and got itself in trouble. It copied the data.”
The man looked up, and examined Coolhand and me in turn. “We served together since Basic. From the same world. It was like family to me. They killed it when they came after it. It must have tried to resist. Brandon was a hothead. They killed its wife and kids too. Just blew them away, and tore the place apart looking for the data. Probably the SIS. But they didn’t find it, because it wasn’t there. That was two days ago. Brandon wanted to give it to the Legion. We stopped believing long ago.” The girl held the baby close to her, moaning sadly.
“Tinlan knew its wife, of course. We were very close. The only reason we’re not dead is the System doesn’t know where we are. But they’ll get us, we imagine, in a day or so. We deserted the same day they killed Brandon. Deserters don’t last long here, not even in Old Town.”
The baby gurgled, giving Priestess a big smile, waving his hands. His mother was quiet, her eyes closed. It was all over for them.
“We don’t have much time,” Coolhand repeated. “What is it you wanted to give us?”
Tharos Cyprio got up and rooted around in a pile of junk. He came back with a minicard, and handed it to Coolhand. “That’s done,” he said. “Done. It’s what Brandon wanted. It’s our death, and Tinlan is against it, but we have to do it. We have to. Does it understand?”
“I understand,” Coolhand said. “What’s in the card?”
“It’s a list of ships,” Tharos replied. “Over seventy of them, mostly star carriers. They all called at Coldmark, and they all left on classified missions. That’s what ‘CM’ means. Cit will see it on the readout. Over seventy of them, with full crews. And Cit will see the dates. The earliest are dated right after the Outvac Wars, long before we were born. The mission has been running for close to a hundred stellar years. Many of the ships never come back. But some of them do, from time to time. They leave with full crews, but they return with minimum hands, and stay in distant orbit, and nobody ever goes downside, and all commo is down. Then they take on new crew, and leave again. Ghost ships. A ghost fleet! That’s what Brandon wanted to tell the Legion. A ghost mission, for a hundred years. Generations of officers and men, disappearing into the vac. Countless ships and men, swallowed up by this endless, ghost mission. It’s something important, it said, and something evil. Those were Brandon’s words-’something evil’. We think it knew more than it told us. It wanted to tell the Legion itself, but it can’t. So that’s it, the list it gave us, and that’s all it is, a list of ship’s names, and we hope it helps Cit. Now Cit had better leave.”
He sat down wearily, drained. “We’re sorry, Tinlan,” he said to his wife. “We’re sorry.” She did not reply. She cried again, quietly, holding the baby to her bosom.
Coolhand slipped the card into a pocket. “Thank you,” he said. “The Legion thanks you.” He handed something to the man. Tharos Cyprio looked at the credmark in his hand. It was Legion gold, a flaming Legion cross on one side and the Goddess of Liberty on the other, and after the credits were exhausted, it could be sold for the gold. It would change their lives forever, in that rat world. It would buy them years of comfort and security.
Tharos Cyprio slapped the credmark back into Coolhand’s hand. “We don’t want its money! We did this for Brandon! We did this for ourself! We’re doomed, and Legion money isn’t going to change anything! Go! Go in peace. And use the information to bring down the System. Bring it down, does it hear us? Bring it down!” He was losing control.
“Movement,” Warhound said, guarding the door, looking down the corridor. His jaw muscles clenched. Warhound was as solid as a rock. I knew we didn’t have to worry about the corridor.