Beyond the Rim

We stepped into the lift on our way down to the eightieth floor. Stace had coaxed the transponder code and the code for the windows out of a bot and called a cab.

“It wasn’t hard,” she said, when I asked her. “Navarre’s not as good at security as she thinks she is, not near as good as Daddy. Plus I know my way around this place pretty well.” She’d also nabbed some clothes from Viam which fit me, a nondescript gray casual suit.

We climbed into a room where a cab was waiting for us, hovering just outside the window.

“This is too easy,” I said as we crept in the darkness toward it.

“Well, it wouldn’t be if Navarre wasn’t so distracted. And electronic things are too rigid in their thinking to get around what I did to them—it’s why Daddy doesn’t have bots.”

We stepped into the cab and Stace paid the fare by scanning her hand on a pad. Then the automated car flew us up, off into the night.

Stace opened a window. “Mm, doesn’t that smell good? City air at night! I love it!”

It did smell good, like pavement just after a rain.

I searched for Aron’s number on the cab’s pad and buzzed his comlink.

To my surprise, he answered, in audio mode.

“Devlin, you’re all right?”

“More or less. Listen, would I be able to meet you? Tonight?”

“I don’t know—”

“I have to get somewhere safe. This isn’t even a secure channel.”

“Okay. Well, why don’t we meet where I was going to take you before? That’s really the best place.”

“Good. Okay. I’ll see you there in about two hours?”

“Sure. Yes.”

I hoped we meant the same place. Where else would it be? I headed toward Madison, trying to figure out how to find the safehouse.

Stace eventually helped me find it. The cab landed out front of a low gray building. Stace and I walked up the steps to the door, and I asked the man at the front desk if Aron was available. He said he was, and we met him upstairs in a small room.

Aron sat down and gestured for us to do the same. Stace sat on the arm of one of the comfy chairs, facing me.

“I’ll be honest with you,” said Aron. “Now that we know that Navarre had agents among us, it’s going to be hard to protect you.”

“Wait a minute. You said—”

“I said we’d protect you. We will. There’s just no guarantee, since Navarre is a powerful force in the Senate. She’s snatched slaves out of our hands before, despite the highest possible security measures.”

“So there’s no way to be safe?”

“Not really. I’d discourage you from testifying, as well.”

“That’s the opposite of what you said before.”

“Well, things have changed.”

“Did Navarre get to you?” asked Stace.

“No, she didn’t. It’s just that things have changed since we last spoke.”

“Will you be able to help Rock?” I said.

“No, I’m afraid not.”

I got up. “You’ve been a big help. Maybe I’ll just go rescue Rock on my own, because I’m not letting him stay imprisoned. Come on, Stace.”

Stace grabbed my arm. “What about Dagan? He sounded cool. Why don’t you ask him to help?”

“I don’t have the first clue how to contact him—except maybe fly out to his house, and I don’t really know how to find that either.”

Aron rubbed his beard. “I think I may have a way to contact him.”

He led us to a com room. Inside, he punched in a complicated code which ended up buzzing Dagan.

After a few minutes, his holographic face loomed above us in the dark.

“Hi, Devlin. Hi, Aron.” He turned toward Stace. “And you are?”

“I’m Stace. So you’re Dagan, huh? You know, Devlin took a lot for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m sorry,” said Aron, “I should’ve told you sooner. After you left, Comet pulled a gun on us. Took Devlin back to Navarre.”

Dagan shook his head. “I should have listened to my intuition. It was warning me about that man, but I was preoccupied. How did you get out again?”

“It was all me,” said Stace. “Well, mostly. I was visiting my friend Kassia, who’s really not my friend anymore, and I went to see Devlin, and he was like all messed up.”

“She interrogated you?” said Dagan, a concerned expression on his face.

“She wanted to know about you,” I said. “Why you interrogated me, why you set me free, who you were working for.”

“I see. And what did you tell her?”

“I told her that you used the dreamcatcher on me. And that—” I struggled to remember what I’d said. “That you’d asked about my arrival on Zodiak Prime.”

“What else?”

“That’s it.”

“Three days with her and that’s all you gave up?”

“I think so.”

“It’s remarkable, if it’s true. Still, I’d like to get my hands on the interrogation holos.”

I shuddered. I did not want anyone to see what had happened in that room. “I doubt you can get them.”

“I have ways. When I want to, I can get anything.”

“Speaking of which,” I said, “will you be able to help me out? Aron says he can’t really protect me from Navarre. Will you be able to help me rescue Rock? Then I’ll have to take that first option after all and go to the Rim.”

“It looks that way. Unless—”

“Unless?”

“I may have an idea. Excuse me.” And his face blinked off into darkness.

“Well,” said Stace, spinning around on her chair, “that was weird.”

Aron had to leave, saying he had a call in his office. We sat there in the dark for a while, waiting to see when and if Dagan would call back.

“Devlin,” said Stace, spinning to a stop next to me, “I will help you, even if no one else will.” She touched my hair, twirling it into a curl.

I fought the urge to shift away. Her touch reminded me of Navarre’s. I began to panic in the dark.

Stace took my hand and held it, until Dagan reappeared a few moments later.

I slid my hand gently out of hers.

“So, Devlin and Stace. I’ve been talking to some of my superiors, and it looks like they approve of my idea. We’re going to kill two birds with one stone. Or, more accurately, kill one bird with the bird I already have in my hand.”

“What does that mean?”

He smiled enigmatically. “I can’t give away all my secrets over a channel of questionable security. But I will meet you there in a few days. In the meantime, an agent from Zodiak will contact you.”

“Zodiak?”

“Don’t be alarmed. She will tell you what to do. And Devlin, you won’t have to worry about Zodiak or Navarre anymore.”

He signed off, and I was left wondering what kind of person he was to have worked such miracles. I couldn’t believe he could have accomplished something so impossible, especially after what I had just escaped from. Just this morning I had been in Navarre’s torture chamber, and my most recent wounds were beginning to sting after the painkiller had worn away.

Aron took care of us, though. He took us to a suite with a real bath and I soaked in its healing waters for a long time. I then dressed in a bath robe, flopped down on the bed, and went to sleep.

I woke up with Stace nestled beside me, asleep, sunlight playing over her face. She was rather beautiful that way…I’d never really thought of her as beautiful before, just cute and wild and sometimes dangerous. But now that I was free to feel, as myself, not as someone bound to another, something stirred inside me for this girl—

I gently brushed her hair back from her face.

Her eyes opened sleepily. “Hey, Devlin. How are you feeling?”

“Lots better.”

She caught my wrist, brought my hand to her lips, and kissed it.

“If you don’t want me with you,” she said, “I’d understand.”

“Of course I want you with me.”

“Because if you don’t, I’ve gotta let you go. It’s not fair to you. Besides, there’s a whole universe out there, just waiting for me.”

“You don’t have to leave. But I do need some space after all that’s happened. I have to sort things out. And I don’t want you in harm’s way when I go to the Blue M.”

“You don’t think I could help you?”

“I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“It’s my life, you know. I think I will come with you. After that, I’ll let you have your space, so I can find some of my own for a while.” She got up and stood by the window, lit by sunrise.

Later that day, I got a memo from Dagan, telling me not to say I had been a slave of Zodiak, and not to reveal anyone else as a slave owner besides Navarre. I didn’t have much time to react before an agent from Zodiak contacted me, and we spoke in the safehouse com room. She was a press agent named Jovanna and she told me that I’d be leading an armada to the Blue M Group to break the slave ring there. As an ex-slave, I was the perfect face of Zodiak’s latest campaign against slavery. If she knew he had slaves himself, she did a good job of concealing it, and I did nothing to disillusion her, according to Dagan’s instructions.

“Me, the leader?” I said. “I’m not even military.”

“Relax, it’s just PR,” she said. “You don’t really have to do anything except smile for the holocams. The professionals will take care of the rest.”

She coached me on the press conference later that day, and after a whirlwind of activity, I answered questions in front of the Madison Capitol, one of the few former American state capitols that hadn’t been destroyed during World War IV.

Jovanna stood beside me and answered questions I wasn’t sure of. Then we retired to a private soiree in a marble room crawling with vines. I met the man who’d be commanding the armada, Commander Choy. Then Dagan appeared at my side, and, after handing me a glass of wine, introduced me to a tall, dignified woman with dark bronze skin and piercing green eyes. “Devlin,” said Dagan, “This is Senator Avabel Kinsy. She and Senator Zodiak have recently…come to an understanding.”

“That’s right,” said Kinsy. “We’ve linked arm in arm in the fight against slavery. Now, thanks to you, we’ll bring down one of the worst human trafficking rings in existence today.”

She asked me about my experience as a slave. She tried to be delicate about it, but I didn’t want to talk to some stranger about what I’d just been through, so I fled the party entirely. Upstairs, I discovered a small room that looked out on the roof and sat on a stone bench, watching the pigeons peck at little grooves in the tiles.

Dagan sat down beside me. “I don’t blame you for escaping. And if you think politicians are bad, the press can be brutal. Stay away from them as much as you can.”

“I’m still not sure how I got to be the poster boy for this thing. I’m no good at it.”

“Sorry about that, but it was for your own protection. We’ve got Zodiak on a short leash now, but he could still kill you. Making you a public personality will make it harder for him to do that; there’d be too many questions asked. And if you don’t reveal his transgressions, he’ll have even less of a motivation to kill you.”

“Thank you for what you’ve done for me,” I said. “I just wish there was another way besides letting Zodiak get away with everything.”

“We’ve got Navarre; that’s something. And I figured you’d rather get your friend Rock back and take down the Blue M, even if it means keeping Zodiak’s name clean.”

“So those things are mutually exclusive?” I was at a loss to know how exactly everything fitted together.

Dagan sat back against the green-veined white marble wall. “You’ve been caught up in one of the biggest power-plays of the decade, and you haven’t even been aware of it. Zodiak, previously a rather small fish, is on his way to the top. Navarre is a falling star, plummeting to the earth. A lot of that is your doing.”

“How?”

He shifted toward me, his blue-green eyes translucent in the light from the window. “Well, while the rest of us have been scrambling to try to put the pieces together, you’ve held a crucial piece of the puzzle that we needed in order to win the game. But you’ve had no idea of any of the other pieces.

“Basically, it’s this. We knew Navarre and Zodiak were planning something big, we just didn’t know when or how they were going to accomplish their goal. We—meaning the radicals under Senator Kinsy—were not able to penetrate either Navarre’s or Zodiak’s wall of security. Navarre would not even tell me, her trusted aide; I just knew they were planning something, and I was pretty sure she was going to double-cross Zodiak once she reached her desired position. Then, I learned that something called zodium, under Zodiak’s control, was the key to their plans, but I only knew that it was a mineral of some sort.

He looked out the window. A crow flew down, scattering the pigeons. “When I learned that Navarre was going to lease a slave from Zodiak, I saw a blind spot neither of them realized. I betrayed myself by freeing you and handing you over to the radicals, but that was immaterial by that point; our plan was already in motion.

“After Zodiak’s presentation to the Senate, I learned that zodium will not only be marketed as a miracle healing potion, but as the potential key to eternal life, the holy grail that people have been searching for since the beginning of history. It does have the potential to alter the human landscape, but the dubious fact that it will cause extreme longevity is what makes owning it the key to the next generation of power in the Senate. It is all about how the public will perceive the one who dispenses it: as a benefactor akin to a god.

He looked at me. “That’s where you came in. The radicals under Kinsy did not want Zodiak and Navarre, two of the most corrupt Senators, to reach a position of such power. With the information you provided me, I was able to hack into Zodiak’s planetary defenses, and a small force took Zodiak Prime hostage.

“When you called, I was on Zodiak Prime, and we’d discovered what we were looking for—evidence that zodium was not all it was cracked up to be. I also found proof tying him to the Blue M Ring; he was unable to erase all his information before we crashed down his front door, so to speak. We had to have more than just your word against his; you might be able to damage his image a little, but without evidence, it wouldn’t stick.

“When you called, I got the idea of how we could further one of our most important long term goals: abolishing the slave trade. The price would be letting Zodiak go pretty much unscathed, but it would be worth it in the long run. He’d be in power, but the radicals would always have the evidence to hold over him, so they would be the true power holders, free to act behind the scenes in Zodiak’s name.

“Zodiak would get the position he’d worked for, and we would obtain the power we’d wanted as his allies, to do real good, rather than constantly fighting the uphill battle against corruption in the highest echelons of the Senate. If he ever reneged on the bargain, we’d reveal that zodium is faulty. Now, he may be able to work the bugs out eventually, but that’s immaterial compared to the fact that it’s all about how the public perceives him and his brilliant new commodity.

“Now, Zodiak will sponsor the armada that will go to the Blue M to destroy it once and for all, which will make him even more of a hero than he already is, and you, the slave that Zodiak freed from the Blue M, will become a hero in your own right.

“I know what Zodiak did to you. It’s a sacrifice, I understand that. But in this game, we all have to make sacrifices.”

He looked at me, a somber glint in his eyes. “You’ll be able to find Rock, with the price of letting Zodiak go free. Will you be able to live with that?”

I nodded. It was a price I’d have to accept.

We sat in silence for a while, side by side, watching the birds whirl upwards into the waning sunlight.