NOVEL NEXT 5.39 Aligned Interests
Aligned Interests
(Starspeak)
“Turoi Ray created the corpses,” Cadrune said, still pretending they couldn’t speak Starspeak. “They personally commissioned them. I know because I was the first customer.”
“Why?” Ingrid asked.
I bit off my impulse to pile on. Keep your cool Caleb…they’re technically cooperating.
The longer this went on, the more I became aware that I couldn’t put what I despised about Cadrune into words. That lack of self-awareness put me on edge even more than the rak themselves.
“I understood Miss Ingrid was dying due to problems with her organs. I thought another Human’s corpse might yield a way to save her,” Cadrune said simply.
At that I did interject.
“Swill,” I called—the Tarassin equivalent of ‘bullshit’.
“It’s true,” Cadrune promised. “I realize there’s little in way of proof, but if you found the backup for Douric’s medical notes, then you can corroborate this.”
I nudged Ingrid, implicitly asking her to translate a sentence more complex than I was prepared to speak.
“Where is Douric?” she asked. “They’re not at their home, they’re not at your estate, and they aren’t in this tower. So where are they?”
“Harpe Douric has…been terminated from my employ,” Cadrune admitted. “I hired them specifically because of their expertise in alien organs, but their medical abilities were, shall we say, ‘falsely inflated’ in the interview process.”
“That only answers where they aren’t,” Mashoj observed. “You should understand that the city will be pursuing legal action against you. Cooperating is your only chance to avoid what I can only hope will be catastrophic legal consequences.”
“…Hope?” Cadrune asked. “Oh no…you’re an agent? Formally appointed? And you think…? That’s almost sweet.”
I raised my eyebrow. That was…just about as close to an admission of corruption as I thought Cadrune might give.
Wouldn’t Ingrid react poorly to that?
Indeed she would.
Cadrune picked up on that too, immediately ready to dial back.
“The legitimacy of any legal proceedings not withstanding…I do know where Douric is. Or, I think I do,” Cadrune said.
I rolled my eyes. I could see where this was about to go.
“I suppose it wouldn’t be accurate to say I fired them either,” Cadrune admitted. “After all, failing to report and joining my enemies would likely constitute resignation, no?”
“Douric got a new job with Turoi?” Mashoj confirmed. “How do you know?”
“Feels right,” Cadrune said. “I was compensating them well, but I knew they weren’t spending their wages. At least not conventionally. Knowing what proprietary secrets they likely had access to while I had them seeking a cure for Ingrid? It’s an intelligent move to elicit a better offer from my rival.”
What went unsaid by Cadrune, and unnoticed by the only person in the room naïve enough to have a soft spot for them, was that Douric was dead if they ever came anywhere within Cadrune’s sphere of influence.
No wonder Tasser and I found their home empty and abandoned.
“Or they got mugged in a canal somewhere, and your loyal in house physician is totally innocent,” Mashoj proposed.
Cadrune and I both snorted at that prospect.
Doing anything in common with the rak only worsened my glower.
“If Turoi made the corpses, then we’re going to find them,” Ingrid said, once again translating for me. “Where are they?”
“Why’s that a question? It’s Turoi Ray. The Zashiton Corporation? Is it not obvious?” Cadrune snorted. “The corpses are the same place they keep all their nabbed eggs: the Diving Bell.”
It was Mashoj’s turn to snort derisively, even turning to leave on the spot.
“I’m not kidding, Agent,” Cadrune said. “You can’t possibly be naïve enough to think it doesn’t exist…”
“You can’t possibly be naïve enough to think my patience doesn’t have limits,” Mashoj growled back.
“What’s the…‘Diving Bell’?” I asked.
“Local urban legend,” Ingrid explained. “It’s supposed to be this super fancy underwater casino somewhere off the coast. Oh—[you ever played Bioshock?]”
“[Yeah?]”
“[Think Rapture, but with a lot of blackjack and hookers.]”
“It’s reputation is overblown,” Mashoj said. “The construction project was a total sham. Only two modules ever got built—they leaked, and the entire project lost funding.”
“What are the odds someone could have quietly revived it?” I asked.
“What would be the point? It was supposed to be a casino. Who’s going to go to a casino that no one knows exists?”
“You’re a cop,” I pointed out. “Most people don’t know that underground gambling exists, but surely you do.”
“Why are you so sure the Bell is real?” Ingrid asked Cadrune.
“I’ve been,” they shrugged. “Took Pothi there for her tenth birthday.”
What? A ten year old? To an illicit underground—no, underwater casino?
“…I regret that now,” Cadrune admitted. “I wonder if I pushed too much…”
“The casino,” Ingrid said. “Why do you think Turoi has the corpses there.”
“Because the site is no mere casino. It would be much more accurately described as a bank, luxury resort hospital, stock market, and casino combined. It’s the world’s most prestigious destination for those elite and powerful enough to still able to exercise some anonymity,” Cadrune explained. “Turoi invested in the technology that made the original site’s refurbishment possible. They carved out a niche catering to only the wealthiest of clientele, promising them all sorts of benefits and protections in exchange for patronage. Most notably? The Diving Bell sits atop a magma vent situated comfortably beyond national waters. You, Agent Mashoj, wouldn’t have a lick of jurisdiction. Just the process of securing a warrant to search the place would give anyone there more than enough time to move whatever contraband might be sought.”
I gave Mashoj a knowing look.
They were an agent of Pudiligsto law enforcement, but the rak we knew in common was Agent Avi, who traveled in decidedly more international circles.
“Still waiting on proof we wouldn’t be wasting our time,” Mashoj said. “Corpses. Turoi. Why the Diving Bell, specifically?”
“I…was considering stealing the corpse,” Cadrune confessed. “When I learned the one I bought was fake—and the organs in it useless for study, I deduced Turoi must have based the work on something. Presumably there was a real corpse somewhere, and while my fake was of no use, perhaps the genuine article would provide more helpful information about Harpe May’s condition.”
“How far did you get in the planning process?” Mashoj asked.
“My dear constable, you wound me,” Cadrune said. “I merely considered the idea. Nothing was ever planned, no crime was ever truly intended.”
Mashoj and I traded another look.
They’d come to the same conclusion I had: their badge was officially holding us back now. Cadrune was speaking freely about the corpse because nothing they said provided any new information that might shape the legal case against them.
Just the opposite, in fact. I could already see the legal argument to be made: that Cadrune bought the highly illicit corpse with noble intentions, to save Ingrid’s life.
There were a million holes in that story, but couldn’t lawyers spin gold out of straw?
No, Cadrune was angling for a deal, and the Jack had spent too much time here already. We might not have been on Turoi’s radar when we first arrived in town, but after the hurricane?
The corpse might get moved just to be safe.
She frowned.
I resisted the urge to gape at her naivete.
I said.
She repeated my question in Tarassin, and Cadrune got a funny look on their face.
“That’s simple,” Cadrune said. “There is no where to move it. The Diving Bell vaults are the most secure place on the planet—for contraband, anyway. There’s nowhere safer.”
“Agent Mashoj,” I said. “Could you escort Ingrid back down the lobby? I think the next part of this conversation needs to between Cadrune and me.”
“Caleb, come on,” Ingrid complained. “[What the hell is this?]”
“I’m sure Harpe Cadrune will be more than willing to share the conversation afterwards,” I said. “Please, just trust me on this.”
She grumbled, but did start her way toward the elevator.
“[How are you even going to talk? You don’t know Tarassin…]” she muttered.
The elevator doors closed on the two of them, and I stared down Cadrune.
“So whelp, still going to pretend you don’t know Starspeak?”
I even used the Starspeak translation for the classic Vorak insult, just to reiterate the point.
“…What gave it away?” they asked, almost trying to sound friendly.
“You never asked for clarification,” I said. “I’m used to switching languages, rapidly. But people who aren’t show more confusion than you do. Plus I know you own one of the companies that tried to lease some of our computer manufacturing licenses: you don’t do interstellar business without knowing the interstellar language. Why bother hiding it?”
“It’s useful,” they shrugged. “You never know how handy it is to understand people who think you can’t…So, do you believe me?”
“Don’t really have to,” I said. “I’ve lived it myself.”
“Not about hiding the language,” Cadrune scoffed. “About the Diving Bell? The corpse?”
“I do,” I admitted. “Because somehow, despite all the abominable things I’m sure you’ve done, I think you care about Ingrid for some reason. But I honestly can’t figure out why.”
“…Do you really think I’ll tell you?” they asked, still amused.
This rak, I decided, was just too far outside my walk of life. They were too used to getting what they wanted, only having to consider the chess moves of other ‘power players’ as rich as they were.
Some of us lived with much more concrete concerns.
I materialized the pistol in my lap, lazily palming it in my hand, keeping it pointed at nothing in particular…for now.
“You seem to have badly misjudged my dislike of you,” I explained. “I don’t care about the Org’s legal case against you. I don’t even care if you really did murder your own children. What I care about is whether or not you’re exploiting one of my people.”
My grip on the pistol tightened involuntarily as I spoke, anger creeping into my voice.
Breathe…I forced myself to relax a smidge. Getting mad wouldn’t help me.
“I’d like to know why you’re so fixated on Ingrid,” I said. “If I don’t like your answer, I might just shoot you.”
“Why bother waiting for my answer if you’re already willing?”
“I get nightmares,” I explained. “I got abducted. And then I killed people. It’s not how I imagined my life going. So I’d prefer to not kill you, but if you’re going to sink your fangs into a human who I’m responsible for?”
I hummed ambiguously, letting Cadrune’s attention fall to the gun I still wasn’t quite brandishing.
“Okay…last question before I give you a proper answer, I promise,” they said. “Why are you so sure I have any sinister intentions?”
“Because I know that you or Douric falsified the medical files you sent to the Org when we got her scanned,” I said. “You showed ‘not applicable’ on scans of her body for exotic material. Either you or your stupid doctor marked that Ingrid couldn’t be imaged for exotic augmentations.”
“That was me,” Cadrune nodded. “I did so to prevent Harpe May from learning the truth.”
“That she’s been wasting her time?” I scoffed. “That she’s been wasting herself? That she’s not dying?”
No one survived this long on a donor heart without anti-rejection meds. No one. It hadn’t taken more than a pearl-boosted phone call to consult Dyn, Nerin, and the other medical minds in the Flotilla. It hadn’t taken them long.
Anti-rejection meds stopped graft-vs-host disease.
Ingrid didn’t have those meds. But she also didn’t have graft-vs-host disease.
Ergo, something was keeping her immune system from attacking her own transplanted heart, and it would have been doing so as soon as she first ran out of meds. Those pills had to be taken daily or symptoms would explode in a flash. It had been protecting her long before she came to this planet, long before the psionics wave even went out.
She and every other abductee had survived almost a year, floating quietly aboard the A-ships. She should have been dead the first week her pills ran out.
There were a number of possibilities. Most of them involved subconcious, involuntary Adept augmentations. Like my hands and feet, Nai’s musculature, Ingrid’s body might have responded to the not quite ‘auto’-autoimmune problem.
It could be as simple as a thin lining around the cells of the donor heart, to isolate them from the antibodies and various kinds of white blood cells that would ordinarily attack the heart’s foreign cells. If the immune system didn’t know the heart was foreign, it could keep pumping blood just fine.
Or it could be her body was constantly producing some kind of neutralizing antibody, regulating her immune response if her body’s defenses tried to get overeager.
Or it could be something even crazier! Like Knox’s cell-replacement technique where her Adeptry had subconsciously just built her a new heart, overtaking the donor cell by cell until it was all her own heart again.
Who knows? The point was, her powers had created something and it’d saved her life. Exotic ‘somethings’ were detectable, and Cadrune had arranged the medical paperwork to prevent such detection.
“…Technically you can’t know that she’ll be okay,” Cadrune pointed out.
“Shut up,” I scowled. “Did you convince her she was dying, or did you just resolve to do nothing to correct her assumption?”
“I only found out in the last three months,” they admitted. “Douric reached the same conclusion you did fairly quickly: something must be combatting her graft-vs-host disease, but we didn’t figure out it was her augmentations until recently. After that point…well, we clearly share the same concern, don’t we?”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“You had Ingrid leave the room,” Cadrune said. “You too are unsure how she’ll react to finding out she has to live.”
I wanted to correct them.
Gets. ‘Gets’ to live.
But Cadrune did have a point.
“You know her better than me,” I conceded, “why is she so resigned? She can live! She’ll probably live as long as any of us. She can make it home!”
“She’s resigned…because hope is a burden,” Cadrune said. “It can be a reassurance, a source of strength, yes. But hope also carries with it an obligation to see it through. You are thinking like an abductee, but Ingrid’s relationship with death and resignation predates her abduction. She’s resigned because hope can be a scary thing to have.”
God, there was just something I hated about Cadrune. The fact that their insight to Ingrid’s heart rang true was all the more infuriating.
How was I supposed to handle an abductee that didn’t want to go home? Maybe that wasn’t Ingrid exactly, but it might be. And there were surely other abductees out there facing similarly difficult prospects.
I could almost imagine it.
Some A-ship was discovered by less than reputable aliens, coerced into helping them, maybe even rewarded…some the Flotilla’s own crew had come close to that fate.
Just the prospect of it was enough to cool some of my anger into dread.
Future Caleb would have to handle that, so for now, all I could do was sigh.
”…So then what were you doing?” I asked. “Being kind? Sparing her having to confront an unpleasant blessing?”
“Something like that,” Cadrune said. “She might not see it as a blessing.”
“She’s wrong,” I said simply. “And so were you to keep her in the dark for so long. I won’t pretend I don’t understand why you did it at first. But just how many more years were you going to let her think she was days away from death? Five? Ten?”
“It’s been an ongoing dilemma,” they said. “Are you going to shoot me for struggling to know what’s in her best interest?”
“Hospice is not in her best interest,” I insisted. “And I just might shoot you if you keep acting like it is.”
“Frankly, I was initially concerned she might self-destruct,” Cadrune spoke slowly. “It’s half the reason why I nudged her toward getting her pilot’s license. She enjoyed it, and it gave her something to work toward. When she goes with you…let her keep flying. She was always happiest in the sky.”
I noticed Cadrune’s word choice.
‘When’ she goes with…not ‘if’.
“Did you really kill your kids?” I asked, annoyed. “Because I’m having a really hard time meshing this ‘you’ with what I’ve heard from other people.”
The otter got a somber look on their face, unwilling to meet my gaze.
“…I have mellowed with age,” they said. “I believe, in Ingrid, I saw an opportunity to preserve something precious. An…endangered species, somewhat. It wasn’t much more than a whim at first, but…it felt…worthwhile. She was worthwhile. It’s entirely possible my legal defense crumples and I will be convicted of countless crimes because she came into my life…but I do not think I will regret it, even then.”
I glowered, dematerializing my gun.
“I think I liked things better when I thought you were just a [supervillain].”
This time, Cadrune didn’t bother pretending like they didn’t have a Starspeak-English dictionary in their head.
“[Super…] hah. That’s funny,” they chuckled.
“No it’s not. We’re not friends. You aren’t a good person, and you didn’t make good choices here. The only reason I’m not shooting you is because it would be bad for me, not because you don’t deserve it.”
“Then you are still in my office for a reason,” they observed. “You still have something to gain from talking to me.”
I leaned close.
“Don’t pretend like you don’t know; you made it well past the planning stages for your little corpse heist. So if you’re serious about wanting to help Ingrid, prove it by helping me get that corpse,” I said.
“The talent I was eying aren’t available any time soon,” Cadrune said, tacitly admitting I was right. “But given the caliber of Adept company you keep…I suspect the Diving Bell might be facing 'lighting at dawn'…”
“Get me every document, blueprint, and photo you can,” I said, ignoring the idiom I didn't recognize.
“Like I said when we first met,” Cadrune smiled, “I am at your disposal.”
I rolled my eyes and left.
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<…If lawful channels fail, yes, I will at least consider it.>
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<…Are you telling me we should rob this place?>