Chapter Text
The feed message from Preservation Council member Asare arrived late in the cycle.
Professor Bharadwaj, I know it’s late, but can you come meet me? The ship from Port FreeCommerce arrived carrying news.
News, not people. Her head swam. Bharadwaj pushed back the impulse to pressure Asare for more info over the feed, and simply sent, I’m on my way.
Asare met her in an empty conference room. His face was tense.
“None of them came home. We received a package marked confidential with your name on it. I assume that means whoever sent it wanted you to see it first.”
Bharadwaj nodded. She didn’t want to open the package. What if someone was dead? What if this was a friend’s attempt at kindness, making sure she had someone with her when she found out?
Or maybe they need you, she told herself sternly.
Inside she found a feed message from Gurathin. Text only, as was his habit.
Mensah is gone. We all attended the memorial service for DeltFall. She stepped out just for a moment. Everything had been so heavy and she’d done so much to support the others. I guess she needed just a minute alone to breathe.
But that’s all it took. We’re all kicking ourselves now for losing sight of her. Probably it wouldn’t have mattered. GrayCris showed up with a group of five armed assailants posing as staff. They cut the feed, drugged her, and carried her out in plain sight. I’ve attached the video with analysis.
Pin-Lee is going to press the company to act but we don’t have much leverage, especially without SecUnit’s recordings as evidence. We’ve tried to keep its absence a secret but rumors are spreading.
Corporate wars are fought with credits. For the right price, we can pay the company to act, or we can ransom Mensah. I don’t know if Preservation has enough spare credits to shift the balance of power that way. But send what you can, please. We’ll need it for bribes, transport, even for staying at the kind of hotel which won’t sell our location.
Once you send the credits, we’ll go to TranRollinHyfa and try to cut a deal. It’ll be tricky. GrayCris will want us to drop the lawsuit in exchange for Mensah’s life, but they’re not likely to close that deal unless we also surrender SecUnit. We also can’t reveal Mensah’s kidnapping to the public, because that will complicate GrayCris’s legal situation.
Please don’t come. If Pin-Lee and I can’t pull this off with our combination of legal and technical skills, more people won’t help. I’d send Ratthi home but the risk of solo travel is too high right now.
Bharadwaj. Jui. None of us are coming home without Mensah. I wish I could promise a good outcome but I can’t. If things go wrong, I want you to know how grateful I am that Preservation took me in, how much I treasured the new life and home I found here, and how much your warmth and kindness has meant to me. I know this letter isn’t terribly well thought out but everything is so far away and there’s no time to revise. -G
Her stomach churned. TranRollinHyfa was a death trap, which was why they’d resolved not to go. Now GrayCris had taken Mensah there and the others would follow. But what choice did they have?
She should be with them. Her heart felt heavy with shame.
And then something inside her shifted and she felt coldly furious. How dare they? What right did anyone have to treat a fellow human this way? All so they could exploit and profit from alien remnants and never mind the risk to the rest of humanity.
Bharadwaj took a deep breath, the small ache in her chest grounding her. “Our Madame President has been kidnapped. We’ll need our best security personnel to analyze the contents of these messages, and we’ll need to organize ransom.”
Asare’s eyes went wide.
“Kidnapped? Are you certain? Perhaps she just got lost?”
Bharadwaj just met his eyes and let the weight of it be carried there. To his credit, Asare swallowed once, nodded, and started over.
“What happened? What do we know?”
“I’ll fill you in. There’s also a video. Contact security first but don’t mention the kidnapping over the feed. We’ll watch the video while we wait for their arrival.”
“But…” He looked at her face and trailed off in reaction to her resolve. His eyes went distant as he sent feed messages. “All right. I’ve sent them.”
She streamed the video to a shared feed channel.
Mensah stepped out of a room, walked two paces away from the door. She stopped, leaned her back against the corridor wall. The mask of Madame President dropped away and her brow wrinkled with anxiety.
Five people walked down the corridor, one pushing a cart and the others carrying supplies. Three women, two men. Mensah didn’t pay them any notice. They didn’t appear to pay her any notice either.
Then they reached her and everything happened very fast. Bharadwaj couldn’t tell who did what, only that they all moved in a blur and supplies spilled across the floor. Someone held a cloth over Mensah’s mouth. Drugs, or just stifling her voice? Mensah twisted ineffectually in the grasp of many hands. Bharadwaj caught one glimpse of Mensah’s eyes wide with fear. I’m going to dream about those eyes, she thought. Then they half carried, half walked her down the hallway, a shoulder under each arm while her head lolled to one side. She kicked her feet ineffectually. And then she was gone.
She opened the attached video analysis. Gurathin and Pin-Lee had gone through frame by frame. Their analysis identified a hand holding a syringe and tracked it through the chaos to the moment the hand stabbed Mensah’s shoulder. The cloth had been for noise abatement, then.
Gurathin and Pin-Lee believed the group had used a short-range feed disruptor. Once the drug took full effect, they would have turned it off to reduce odds of detection.
Asare looked nauseated. “It’s not that I didn’t believe you. But seeing it…”
“Seeing it is always different,” Bharadwaj agreed. “Security can review all this in detail. Our part of the job is to raise as many credits as possible, all without revealing Mensah’s kidnapping.”
“Without revealing it? But the public has a right—”
“They’ll kill her.”
“Surely that would be senseless. Even for…no, I’m sorry. You’ve already reported the earlier murders. It’s all just so absurd.”
“I know. But we have to deal with the situation as it is, no matter how much it feels like a bad media serial.”
He nodded. “Let’s start by deciding who can be trusted with the news…”
They worked late into the night cycle, planning how to gather enough credits to buy the life of their president and friend.