“Now tell me this, I had this impression that you had fallen out with your family, and now it turns out that you’re still working for them? What am I supposed to believe?”
He looked uneasy. “Once you’re a Kaspari, you’re always a Kaspari, my grandfather says. No, I don’t agree with many of the things they do, but they’re still my family.”
“And Dexter Freeman is my family, too, and he betrayed us all by selling top-secret information to the pirates.”
But while she said that she knew it wasn’t really the same. And he knew it, too. She wasn’t very good at finding appropriate metaphors. Besides, her family was neither famous nor rich.
Finn sighed. “All I wanted to say is that things aren’t usually as black and white as all that.”
“You’re finding very convoluted ways of saying it.”
He sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m not very good at this.”
“Is that why you’ve been grumpy?”
He shrugged and said nothing for a while.
Tina stared at the blinking lights on the controls. They were blue lights and blue lights were good.
Tina was about to push off to get back to her many tasks when Finn motioned for her to stay.
“I’m busy.”
“It’s important you understand what I’m going to say.”
Now he was going to talk, after months in space?
He continued, “I just want to let you know that there are many other interests in this particular case.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“The information we’re delivering to the Assembly. Other people would love to have it.”
“I’m sure that’s never entered my mind.” She made sure to say that as sarcastically as possible.
“No, you don’t understand. Bluntly speaking: when your husband sold his material to the pirates, you think no one else would have been interested in it?”
He now met Tina’s eyes and a deep chill went through her.
Olympus Pharmaceuticals was one of the most powerful companies in human settled space. They were very much into genetic modification, all in the name of medicine.
Who knew what levels of interest Dexter was trying to fend off when he went to that meeting where he passed samples of particles to people outside Project Charon? People who had later gone to the pirates, or turned out to be pirates, or become pirates because of their contact with the interdimensional particles?
Of course a pharmaceutical company would have been interested, too, because of the endless medicinal potential of this material.
Take this pill and you will live for a long time and become very smart, but oh, you’ll also end up looking like a warty toad.
But it was never like that, was it? Scientists would research, work at and take apart the material until they had separated its desired components from the undesirable ones.
The stage of the process she had witnessed was the very beginning, and the Federacy was going: whoa, we have this stuff coming out of another universe, it looks like it’s dangerous. Everyone keep their hands off it.
And that situation never lasted because people didn’t stick to those rules. The Federacy hadn’t done a particularly good job of protecting the secret that an interdimensional rift existed. It hadn’t done well in managing the rift material. They had downplayed the danger and attempted to stick the discovery away in some dusty research file.
Except the rumour had already gotten out.
People had become frustrated at the Project’s management of the data, not just the ones who wanted it kept away from other people, but those who advocated for making the dust available for research as well.
And so Dexter had passed it to other parties. His motive might have been money, but she thought that unlikely. Dexter was a lot of things, but greedy for cash wasn’t one of them. Greedy for power, now that was another matter. He might have been authorised to hand it out by the high command. The military might have realised they were out of their depth and might have been looking for a partner. They might have wanted to keep the meeting secret so as not to invite the naysayers.
Whatever. From that meeting, it ended up with the pirates.
Olympus Pharmaceuticals had missed out on it. They might not have been invited to the initial meeting with Dexter, or might have been there but made too many demands or bid too low.
Maybe Olympus Pharmaceuticals had sent Finn to find her, under the guise of being employed as a ship engineer, and he was just here to keep an eye on her so she arrived at Olympus safely. So the company could then exert pressure on her to hand over her data.
She felt cold. She had trusted him, and even liked him, but clearly trust was a fragile thing.
He was still looking at her.
She nodded to indicate that she understood. “So your family has sent you to chaperone us?”
“No, I swear they don’t know about us, about me being here.”
“But?” There clearly was a but.
“I’m not so sure anymore that it’s good idea to take your knowledge to Olympus.”
“What? You were all for it. The Federacy Assembly seems the logical place to take it. Besides, I don’t know that we have anything they don’t already know.”
“It’s about this.”
He moved the stand with his reader closer so that she could see the screen. It displayed a very unexciting document from the Space Settlers’ Health Commission. Tina blinked at it, since the article was a giant wall of text.
“Read it,” Finn said.
Tina had to make an effort to concentrate. Fuzziness on the brain was a well-known after-effect of the jump.
The headline read:
Notification of reward money worth two million credits
Leading to a treatment or vaccine to stop the spread of what has become popularly known as “pirate disease”, the malformation of skin and extremities, followed by malformation of internal structures, followed by de-humanisation of the body.
Tina looked up. “They’re looking for a cure. I could use two million credits.”
“Yes. So could many people. What do you think they’ll do for it?”
“When was this posted?”
“A month ago. If scientists find
