“How much farther?”
“You worry too much about distance, boy. Look around. We all end up in the same place.”
Fred assumed the old man was using Grim Tyrant Valley as a metaphor because no way Fred would wind up here. His mortal remains forever on Micovi? He’d rather wind up as Sklorno poop.
The grave digger went on reciting names. Fred’s count reached deeply into the hundreds as the day wore on. They had to walk for hours to find it. Fred lost all sense of direction, and he had to trust that the old man would be able to get them back to the sandrail.
Finally...
The old man stopped in front of a grave. He pointed to the headstone, which was just beginning to show the rounded effects of weathering.
“There she is,” he said. “Constance Carbonaro.”
Fred’s stomach hurt from the constant intake of stench.
Limestone. Not even the granite that he’d spent weeks chipping at while posing as a mine worker.
Large, strong hands had chiseled the inscription. Fred was almost a certain a man, probably an older man, had made the headstone. The script had the sophistication that comes with age or education. Considering the conditions on Micovi, Fred placed his bet on age.
In large lettering, the name Constance Carbonaro was pounded into the stone, across the top. Below that was another inscription.
It read: Beloved mother and wife of Cillian
“That’s her,” Fred said, almost mystified.
The old man looked triumphant. “Told ya.”
“Cillian. The husband. Is there one for him in this place?”
The digger shook his head. “He ain’t buried. Lessen he’s still on the pile, he ain’t here. Sometimes they turn to bone before we can properly get to ‘em, then if they don’t have an ident-chip, it’s hard to figure out who they were.”
Fred grimaced beneath the hand cloth. Based on that, he made the odds 50/50 on whether or not Quentin’s father was in Grim Tyrant Valley.
Fred looked around again, taking in the sprawling expanse of headstones. “Has anyone else been looking through here lately?”
“Ya mean like those insect-lookin’ fellows, tried to blow us up recently?”
“Yeah, exactly like that.”
“Haven’t heard nothin’.”
Fred nodded. He was quiet for a long time, considering, weighing, judging.
Finally, he said, “You remember them whether they’re marked or not, right?”
The digger tapped a withered fingertip against the deep, wrinkled lines of his temple.
“E’ery one.”
“Good. Then I need you to trust me on something.”
“What’s that?”
Without answering, Fred raised his booted foot and smashed it into the marker. It fell back, already broken in two. Fred stomped both of the pieces, hitting it again and again until the letters were shattered, and even then he used his heel to ground anything that resembled a letter into reddish powder.
The old grave digger said nothing. Neither did his eyes seem to judge Fred’s action. The headstones weren’t his business. His business was remembrance.
Still, it was a crappy thing to do, and it felt crappy. But, Fred decided, if Quentin wanted to return for his mother or mark her grave, he could. The old man would know where to find her.
Right now it was more important to Fred to keep any and all intel he could out of the enemy’s hands, whomever that enemy was.
He had gathered enough information that it was time to communicate with his employer. It was time to report to Quentin. But with Gredok the Splithead’s goons always watching, it wasn’t as easy as making the five-day trip from Micovi to Ionath and having lunch. Well, sometimes it was that easy, but odds were that the Quyth he’d dealt with in the old shipyard had worked for Gredok. Best to be cautious, get Quentin off of Ionath altogether, and also probably best not to contact the kid directly.
To make that happen, Fred had to call in a favor from one Rachel Guestford, commissioner of the Dinolition League.
Chapter 16: Carney
Fred had scheduled transport to Wilson 6. Dinolition was a crude thing, more barbarism than sport, but a certain type of person loved it. Dinolition was growing in popularity. Soon it might even spread beyond Wilson 6, but for now the only place to see it was in the area of that planet known as “the Wastes.”
It was popular enough that people traveled there regularly to see the genetically engineered monsters duke it out. Fred raised no suspicion when he booked travel to Wilson 6 under yet another assumed name. But before he departed Micovi, he had to see if Carney had found anything. And if that meant another round of food at Mister Sam’s, well, that was yet another expensable meal. Hopefully Quentin wouldn’t mind if Fred was a big tipper.
Sunset came and went. A good two hours after darkness fell, Fred sat at a table at Mister Sam’s, a half-eaten slab of ribs in front of him. After a while, nothing but bones remained, and still no sign of Carney. Mister Sam sat behind his counter, watching Fred eat. It should have felt uncomfortable, but Mister Sam watched people eat the way a master painter watched people admire his work.
Fred was ready to give up and head for the shuttle port when the door swung wide and Carney came rushing in like a man late for an important date. He spotted Fred, and relief seemed to wash over him. He headed for the table.
“What’ll you take, son?” Mister Sam asked automatically from behind the counter.
Carney was stopped dead by the question. Then he looked on the verge of panic.
“Uh,” he stammered. “I don’t... have any money.”
Fred came to his rescue. “Get him some brisket, will you, Mister Sam?”
The kindly proprietor nodded his bulbous chin. “Coming right up.”
Carney slipped into a chair across from Fred, smiling.
“I don’t need to eat,” he said.
“It’s the least I can do. It looks like you’ve been running around some.”
Fred let the kid get some food and drink in him before he pressed Carney about what, if any, information he’d been able to gather.
“I asked around,” Carney began around a mouthful of brisket. “The women at the replenishing stations love to talk, but it seemed like none of them had anything to say about the girl. I spent all day asking around. I was ready to give it up. Wasn’t even going to come here. Then I got lucky. I found an old friend of hers, from when they were kids.”
Fred’s synapses began to fire a little faster upon hearing that. His instinct was to dig into Carney and squeeze every relevant fact out of him, but he stayed silent and let the kid finish on his own.
“The woman’s name is Amanda,” Carney said. “Amanda Sparrow. She’s around the age you said. Anyway, Amanda said Jenny... Jeanine... ran away years ago.”
“Ran away where?”
“She said Jeanine talked about stowing away and making it to Quyth space. Said that was the last time anyone saw her.”
Fred frowned. That wasn’t a lead. It was a fairy tale. Jeanine could be anywhere. Anything might have happened to her in the intervening years.
“Thanks for trying, Carn—” Fred began, only to have his friend cut him off excitedly.
“She made it,” Carney said, keeping his voice low, but unable to hide the triumph he obviously felt.
It was Fred’s turn to be confused. “What are you talking about?”
“Jeanine. She made it out of Purist Nation space. Got all the way to the Quyth homeworld. She’s probably still there now.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
Carney reached inside his shirt, being very careful, as if he were concealing something alive in there. What he removed, however, was a plain-looking piece of folded paper.
“Jeanine got a letter back to her,” he said with something like awe.
Fred found he couldn’t even process that. Not an electronic message, something that traveled at the speed of light, but a physical piece of paper — moved, pre
sumably, from Quyth space to the outskirts of the Purist Nation. It wasn’t possible.
“How could she have sent a letter here?”
Carney took another bite of brisket. He talked with his mouth full, and Fred didn’t care.
“You know how it is,” Carney said. “Aliens aren’t supposed to step foot on Purist Nation soil and all that, but that doesn’t mean most of the black market goods around the colony don’t come from their ships. There are a lot of folks who’ll pay to get word to the people they had to leave behind.”
Fred detected sadness in those last words. Maybe Carney lamented having no people, or perhaps he did and was among those on Micovi still waiting for word. Fred couldn’t know, and he didn’t have time to ask.
Carney handed over the aged piece of paper.
“Amanda didn’t want to give it up at first,” he said. “I had to trade her all the store tokens I had on me. Plus... I gotta go on a date with one of the sisters.”
Any other time Fred might have laughed at that last bit, but right then his focus was like a laser pointed at that letter. He unfolded it. The handwriting was young and feminine. He flashed on that right away. Turning it over carefully in his hands, he noted that the wear seemed natural and authentic.
There was no last name, but it was signed “Jeanine.”
He read it. Jeanine spoke of bribing a freighter captain to smuggle her out of the colony, to Red Storm City in the Jupiter Net Colony. She didn’t specify what she’d bribed him with or how. Fred didn’t want to know that detail, and he was sure Quentin wouldn’t, either. Jeanine went on to write about finding a job as a waitress in a nightclub called Halftimers in Red Storm City’s manufacturing district.
And she spoke of a brother, one who’d been executed for stealing food. She wrote that she still thought about him at night.
It was enough — more than enough, in fact.
“Carney, this is... Fred found he genuinely didn’t have the words.
Except for two.
“Thank you,” he said.
“No problem, man. I’m happy I could deliver.”
Fred took out a handful of credits. “Let me pay you for your time and trouble—”
“I don’t want that,” Carney said immediately.
Fred placed the credits on the table in front of him.
“Take them,” he insisted. “You earned it.”
Carney didn’t protest further.
“You sure you gotta go?” he asked. “You could crash at my place tonight.”
Fred was already tucking the letter away and gathering his gear. “It’s still not the right time, Carn.”
Carney nodded. “I figured you’d say that.”
“You’ve been a big help,” Fred said, and he meant it. “I won’t forget that, or you.”
On the transport to Wilson 6, Fred read and reread that letter at least a few dozen times. It was the only detail he’d left out when talking with Quentin. There was nothing concrete about this lead yet, and the odds were still heavy on the side of what Fred told Quentin. The girl who wrote the letter might be a completely different Jeanine. For all Fred knew the entire underground postal service was a scam, and the letter was a fake.
Neither possibility accounted for the personal details contained in those handwritten words, of course.
Should he tell Quentin? No, not yet — you didn’t share something like an unknown sister who was still alive without confirming it. Hearing about the kid’s mother would be enough of a shock, and Fred didn’t need to toy with Quentin’s emotions until the facts were confirmed.
Once Fred finished on Wilson 6, he’d look into this lead. Alive or dead, real or a forgery, the right Jeanine or the wrong Jeanine, he was going to track that letter back to its source and close this case.
III: WILSON 4
Chapter 17: Quentin
The roar of a stadium crowd filtered into the empty bathroom, played off the tile walls. Fred had his hands deep in the nannite machine’s inner workings. He was trying to fix the fabricator. He’d put up the “out of order” signs to keep people out, then while he waited, he checked the machines and actually found a broken one. As long as he was here, he might as well fix the thing. It gave him something to do and added to the disguise’s effect.
He tilted his head, letting the long, fake beard fall out of the way of his hands. The beard was one of his favorite prosthetics — nothing could change the shape of a face faster than a mess of hair — but it did get in the way of close-in, delicate work.
In addition to the facial appliances, Fred had caked his face and neck heavily in flesh-colored makeup to hide the aftermath of his near-death experiences on Micovi. Quentin didn’t need to see just how deep this thing had gotten.
He heard someone enter, heard the tread of feet on the tile floor. Big feet.
“Excuse me,” Quentin said. “I need to use the facilities.”
Fred looked up from the machine. There stood the physical specimen that was Quentin Barnes, quarterback of the Ionath Krakens — all seven feet of him. There was no one with him — Fred had half expected to see Bobby Brobst, Gredok’s main bodyguard and hitter, or possibly some more Quyth Warriors, but Quentin was alone: the elaborate setup had apparently worked.
“You surprise me,” Quentin said. “I thought this Dinolition thing was legit, but you set up the tickets?”
Frederico shrugged. He had arranged to have the Dinolition commissioner send Quentin four VIP tickets, knowing that Quentin’s buddy John “Uncle Johnny the Awesome” Tweedy was crazy for the sport. That had proven to be incentive enough to bring Quentin, John and their dates from Ionath to Wilson 6 in the Planetary Union.
“Rachel Guestford owes me a favor or three,” Fred said. “I had to contact you while you were away from Ionath, make sure no one knew I was trying to reach you.”
Fred recognized the look on Quentin’s face — a look of hope. Quentin had hired Fred to find his family. Fred had succeeded, but the news wasn’t something any twenty-year-old orphan really wanted to hear.
The look of hope changed to one of concern, of trepidation.
“Fred, are you okay? I know how much you like to play dress-up and all, but is something wrong?”
Even through the beard and the other bits of the disguise that made Fred look like a fifty-year-old man weighed down by a lifetime of manual labor, Quentin had picked up on Fred’s emotions. That was spooky. The kid had a real knack for that, almost like he was a Human equivalent of a Quyth Leader.
Fred nodded. “Yeah. Someone doesn’t want me to find out about your family. I’ve spent the last few weeks ducking some pretty heavy hitters.”
“Who were they? Gredok’s gang?”
Fred shook his head. “I wish I knew. I can’t say for sure if they’re his goons. And they’re not the only ones. That little reporter piece of fluff was also on Micovi, digging away.”
“Piece of fluff? You mean Yolanda Davenport?”
Frederico nodded. “That’s the one. I was at Micovi Stadium, seeing if the Raiders had any info on your past. She was there.”
“Did she see you?”
A reporter spotting Fred working a case? That would be the day.
“Quentin, please. I’m a professional.”
“What was she doing on Micovi?”
“Digging into the history of Quentin Barnes, just like me. Just like the heavies I ran into.”
“She find anything?”
“I don’t know,” Fred said. “I don’t think she found much. She seemed to be looking for real specific stuff, stuff about your time with the Raiders, not about your childhood. The hitters, on the other hand? They wanted the same info I found. They always seemed to be just a step behind me.”
“So... you did find something?”
That look of hope returned, stronger this time. The kid was good at reading emotions and could hide his extremely well, but he was still so young — most times those emotions got the better of him and his face was an open
book to his soul.
“Well? Come on, Fred. Out with it.”
Fred couldn’t look into those eager eyes anymore, not with the information he had to deliver. He looked down. Fred hadn’t known his own mother, but at least he’d never held onto hope that she’d been alive, out there somewhere, looking for her baby boy.
“You sure you want this, Quentin? You sure you want to know?”
Quentin took in a long breath, then let it out slowly.
“Yes. I want to know. All of it.”
Fred thought of Quentin as a “kid,” but he was anything but. Barnes was so big he had to angle his shoulders a little to fit through some doors. He was the starting quarterback of a Tier One football team. Quentin was young, sure, but he was man enough to make his own decisions. He had hired Fred to find information, and if Quentin wanted that information, Fred couldn’t pretend the man was a child.
“Okay,” Fred said. “I managed to find a family record based on DNA. I used some of your blood.”
“You didn’t ask me for my blood.”
Fred shrugged. “You’re religious. Who knows what you superstitious primitives think is sacred?”
“I bleed all the time on the field, Fred. You really assume I would think blood is sacred?”
“There’s no logic in religion, Quentin. Anyway, if you said no, I would have been out an option, so I went with it.”
“And where, exactly, did you get my blood?”
“Nanocyte patch back in Ionath Stadium. Not hard to come by, Quentin. As you mentioned, you bleed a lot. You knew a guy on Micovi named Sam Sargsyan? Ran a barbecue restaurant?”
Quentin’s eyebrows rose. Clearly he hadn’t thought of Sam Sargsyan that much lately.
“Yeah,” Quentin said. “What’s he got to do with it?”
“Nothing,” Fred said. “I met him though. He said you liked to eat. A lot.”
Quentin smiled. “I weigh almost four hundred pounds, Fred. Of course I eat a lot. You’re just stalling. Come on, tell me.”
Fred sighed. The kid was right — Fred didn’t want to give this information and had unintentionally tried to change the subject.
“You’re right, I’m stalling,” he said. “The Purist Nation records are scattershot at best. Their technology is about four hundred years behind everyone else’s, but I found the death record for your older brother.”