Song of Scarabaeus by Sara Creasy

Author:Sara Creasy
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

“Isn’t this illegal?” Finn’s dry tone emphasized the irony of his question. Was anything these rovers did legal?

“Completely illegal. The primary use for nanofinds is to scrub a crime scene.”

“But you’ve done it before?”

Edie shrugged. “It’s biocyph. I figured out how to make them when I was a kid.” They were in the infirmary, where she drew blood samples from them both and dropped them into the DNA sequencer. “Never made them before to wipe out all traces of my own existence.”

Their med records had already been wiped. It was a strange feeling to scroll through the ship’s logs and find herself erased. Even Haller’s memo vanished as soon as she closed it. She scanned the system to find that he’d put a rather clumsy precoded worm into action an hour ago, presumably when the danger of being boarded had become too great to ignore.

Finn watched her working but fell silent again. He was hardly the most talkative person she knew, but today he’d seemed preoccupied with his thoughts.

“Are you thinking about that serf?” she said.

“I’m thinking about CIP.”

“The ship out there?”

“Ever thought about turning yourself in?”

Her hand froze over the sequencer. “You can’t be serious. Go back to the Crib? I’ve told you why I can’t do that. Natesa, Project Ardra—”

“What about me?”

He was right. She had to consider what was best for him, too. But that was never going to be the Crib.

“After what Haller did—murdering that serf,” he went on, “I believe you now. I believe he’ll find a reason to kill me.”

“Cat thinks otherwise. Listen, what Haller wants is to get through the mission with maximum profit. We’re doing this for the creds. Our goal and his are the same. The Crib isn’t the answer.”

“It might be the only answer to deactivating the leash. Crib tecks are the best.”

She couldn’t argue that point, and they’d agreed from the start that the leash was their first priority. But the situation had changed. After witnessing the Fringers’ misery firsthand, she’d lost any remaining faith in the Crib’s integrity. They’d discard Finn even quicker than Haller would.

“What about afterward?” she said. “Even if they do cut the leash, you’ll still be their slave and I’ll still be Natesa’s pawn. The Crib has nothing to offer us.”

He inclined his head in a gesture of withdrawal from the discussion, but not exactly agreement with her argument. Edie didn’t pursue it, didn’t want to hear him come up with more reasons. He was simply wrong if he believed either of them had a chance of freedom in the hands of the Crib. His peculiar mood singed the air.

Using a standard wet-teck generator, she imprinted their DNA codes onto a matrix. A few minutes later she held between her fingers a vial of genetically engineered nanofinds to be distributed through the aircon. They would multiply rapidly, spread through the ship, and selectively target only the DNA for which they were primed—hers and Finn’s. They would break down all traces of hair and dead

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.