4: Deva
1505 Words
4: Deva
Deva
The door to Chiron’s office was already open, so Deva looked in.
Chiron sat at his desk, terminal in one hand, half-empty glass in the other. His jacket lay over the small sofa to the right. His cuffs were rolled up, his shirt unfastened at the neck.
Deva coughed. “You got a moment?” she asked.
He looked up. He hadn’t shaved yet, and stubble coated his chin—a look Deva was becoming familiar with. It seemed he only shaved every few days now, and she reckoned the look suited him.
He smiled. “For you, always.”
“I’m not disturbing you, am I?”
“Yes, but in a good way. There’s only so much admin I can take.”
“Can’t you delegate?”
“You sound like Lise. I delegate what I can, and endure the rest myself. Breaks are always welcome. Please, sit. You want a drink?”
“I’m fine.” Deva sat. The chair creaked when she nudged it closer to the desk.
“So, what’s on your mind?”
She laughed. “Wrench asked the same thing. Snapped at him. Didn’t mean to, but, yeah, there’s something bothering me.” She took a breath and leaned in. “I’m worried.”
“About the leaks.”
Deva frowned. “What?”
“You’re worried that the company always seem to know what we’re doing, aren’t you?”
“But…”
“You’ve mentioned it before. More than once.” He leaned forward. “I pay attention. I know we have…issues. And I’m doing all I can to rectify them. But there’s no easy solution. I need to find the leaks—moles, hacks, whatever’s behind them—without alerting anyone. I can’t afford to act rashly, can I?”
“But nothing’s changing! It feels like every mission goes wrong. It feels like the company’s laughing in our faces.”
“I know.”
She opened her mouth, but he held up a hand to silence her.
“I know,” he repeated. “And I know how frustrating it is when it appears that nothing is happening. But, as I said, I have to be careful. It’s a delicate matter, and it requires subtlety and patience.” He sighed. “And we have more pressing concerns.”
And that was it. Dismissal. He’d listened, he was doing what he could, so there was nothing more Deva could say.
“Fine.” The chair creaked again as she stood. “Guess you want us to fail.”
Chiron slapped his hand on the table, sharp, sudden. Deva froze.
“Don’t be a fool!” His words were as sharp as the slap. “Sit down. This is important.”
“More important than a company spy?”
“Yes.” He said that through gritted teeth, and then his shoulders rounded. “Please sit down, Deva. Let me explain.”
She hesitated. Still had one hand on the back of the chair, and the plastic was chipped and rough. She looked at the rest of the furniture in the room. All old, all in need of repair. The room was small, with stains on the walls.
Not the office of a great leader. But that was the point, wasn’t it? Chiron was ‘one of them’. He led the Heralds, but he wasn’t above anyone else. He hung out in the common rec room. He used the communal shower-room. Might have his own sleeping quarters, but Deva had seen it—once, in passing—and it was small, little more than a bunk and a tatty storage unit.
He looked up at her, and there were bags under his eyes.
“It involves your past,” he said. “It involves Haven.”
Later, she couldn’t recall sitting, but she was in the chair as he explained about the message Kaiahive had intercepted, and how they’d traced a tail, how they believed the Ancients were already here.
How they believed the Ancients were in Haven.
“Haven’s Deep, they’re calling the area now,” he said. “They’ve rebuilt the settlement from the ground up. Tightened security around the basin’s rim, too. I doubt you’d recognise the place now.”
Deva opened her mouth, closed it again. The name—Haven, not Haven’s Deep—flared in her mind, bringing with it all those dark memories.
“How do you know I was there? I never told you, did I?”
Chiron shook his head. “Not in so many words. But I know what happened there, with the precursors to the NeoGens…”
“I wasn’t involved in that.”
“No. But there was that dead zone, wasn’t there?”
“Dead zone?”
“Where they pitted those beasts against supposed criminals.”
Deva forced her fists to unclench, forced herself to remain calm.
“Not that the dead zone exists any more. Once that little experiment failed, they destroyed all evidence. I’ve seen drone images—a huge area scorched, nothing living at all. Just to cover up their crimes.”
Crimes. The word flew around Deva’s mind as she remembered that time—falling in with that psycho woman’s g**g, doing whatever she could to survive, avoiding the monsters—human and otherwise. And it was all because of the company.
What they did went beyond crimes. They…they committed atrocities.
“You want to talk about it?” Chiron leaned forward.
Did she? Her head shook of its own accord. “It’s all in the past. I’m done with Haven.”
“Are you?”
She nodded. “Don’t ever want to see a b****y forest again.”
Chiron watched her with those heavy eyes, and his cheeks sagged, the corners of his mouth turning down. He looked so old. No, so beaten.
“We need to be there,” he said. “If the Ancients are truly in Haven’s Deep, we need to do all we can to stop Kaiahive attacking them.”
“Haven?”
“I’m already making plans. It’ll be hard getting close, but we have to try.”
One word stuck out in Deva’s mind. “We?”
He nodded. “I need people I can trust. If they know first-hand what the company’s like, that’s even better.”
His eyes were wide, almost pleading.
She laughed. “Not a chance.”
“I won’t pretend it isn’t going to be dangerous—more so than anything else we’ve done. Which is why I’d like those on the ground to know what they’re up against.”
“Yeah—Kaiahive. We all know that.”
“But so few know it through experience.”
“Then this’ll be a learning opportunity for them, won’t it?”
“That won’t help them when they’re dead.” He shook his head. “Sorry. That sounded callous, didn’t it? I’m trying to make this easy, but I guess that’s not going to work.”
“It is easy. I’m not going back.”
Chiron tilted his head. His expression was…not serene, but something similar. Resigned. That was it. He knew this would most likely be a suicide mission.
“We can’t let them win, Deva. We can’t let them manipulate us any longer.”
Because that was what the company did best, wasn’t it? They played everyone—their enemies, their friends, their employees. They’d played Deva, from the moment she was born. Sure, they came over all altruistic—looked after the poor parentless child, raised her, gave her a job in Metis’ deck, even though her lattice never took.
They used her. And they used all those poor sods in the proving ground. They were nothing but fodder for the company’s experiments.
But they hadn’t got Deva, had they? Or the rest of the crew. Keelin had flown them out—Keelin, a NeoGen, one of the company’s living weapons. But she’d turned on her creators, shown them that she wouldn’t let them manipulate her any more.
And nor would Deva.
She swallowed. Chiron’s head tilted in the opposite direction.
“I don’t want to go back there,” she said, her voice breaking.
“I know.”
“There’s too much blood in the memories.”
“Yes.”
Her eyes started to close, but she forced them to remain open. If she shut them, she’d see the blood, and the bodies.
This wasn’t over. Even if she turned her back on Haven, it wouldn’t let her go.
“Don’t want to go, but I…I need to.”
She straightened her back, met Chiron’s gaze.
“I won’t let those bastards win,” she said.
- Writer
