The Ocean in the Sky, page 1





The Ocean in the Sky
Tandemstar: The Outcast Cycle, Book Three
Gene Doucette
Copyright © 2021 by Gene Doucette
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
* * *
Cover art by Jeff Brown at Jeff Brown Graphics
Map design by Cat Scully
Contents
Part I
Captain of the Vessel
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part II
House Secrets
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part III
Dark Sunrise
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
About the Author
Also by Gene Doucette
Part I
Captain of the Vessel
Chapter One
Growing up in the orphanage, the islands of Canos-Holo were always spoken of with reverence, at least among the other children. It was a “paradise”, with big beaches, perpetually temperate weather, beautiful people and so on.
The young Makk Stidgeon didn’t even know what a beach was at first, and could count on one hand the number of things he’d seen in his life to that point which would qualify as beautiful, so when told about the beaches he imagined a blue sky on a sunny day. Thus, for about five years his mental image of Canos-Holo was that of islands floating in the clouds.
Canos-Holo continued to fill the slot of “ideal vacation destination” in Makk’s mind even after he’d gotten clarification on what a beach actually looked like, yet every time the place came up in conversation he thought first of clouds.
Not that he didn’t get to see any clouds on this trip. They took a commercial flight on a wingplane to get to Canos-Holo (over Elicasta’s objections) and even though it was just a quick hop over the Deterrent Mountains to reach Aggo—the largest island in the chain—they did spend some time traveling through clouds. But when they did it, he didn’t have Canos-Holo on his mind at all; he was thinking back to the last time he’d gone over the Deterrents, as a soldier on his way to fight the Kindonese.
Elicasta wanted to take a null-grav vessel. There were null-gravity cruise ships that left Pulson Harbor once a week, skimmed along the southern edge of Geo and curled up to Canos-Holo, where they spent a day at each of the seven major islands before turning back again. Had they actually been vacationing, this probably would have been the way to go, but since they weren’t—since they were trying to get to the islands before Viselle Daska disappeared again—there was some need for haste, and the cruise ships weren’t known for their speed on the high seas; it would take them a week to reach Canos-Holo by ship, whereas the wingplane over the continent took less than one day.
Makk also wasn’t a big fan of null-grav travel, but thought he might be okay with it if they were hovering just above the water, rather than going up and down.
As soon as they touched down in Aggo (which was the only one in the chain with an airport) and secured lodging in one of the many available resort hotels, Makk began making inquiries as to where one might go to hire a boat. This wasn’t because he wanted to hire a boat—although he didn’t tell anyone that—but because he wanted to visit the part of the island where the people who did such a thing for-hire might congregate.
Makk was doing this based on a couple of assumptions. They happened to know that Viselle had quite recently been at rest in the middle of the Midpoint Ocean southwest of Canos-Holo. Unless she was a very good swimmer, she had to have been on the deck of a boat at that time. He was looking for the person who piloted the ship that took her out there. Maybe, if he was extremely lucky, Viselle was still around.
He wasn’t expecting this to work out because that wasn’t the kind of luck he usually had. But it was a start.
It wouldn’t be this hard if the tech that gave them Viselle’s location at that one point in time continued to give it to them, but for some reason that wasn’t possible. (Elicasta understood why, but every time she explained it to Makk the explanation made his head hurt.)
While he was busy trying to find the boat that took Viselle out to the middle of the ocean, Elicasta tried to enjoy doing actual vacation things while simultaneously undergoing some manner of withdrawal.
She’d decided to go dark, which in Veeser terms meant not streaming anything new. She had a large file of evergreen vids, about half of which had been streamed previously, to keep her subscribers…well, not happy, but not disappearing in massive numbers, until she worked out what she wanted to do.
Short-term, it was evident that she’d begun putting her own wellbeing ahead of her stream’s health. That meant not letting Calcut Linus know she and Makk were currently in Canos-Holo, which would be impossible if she started streaming from the islands. Long-term? Unclear. Makk pointed out that Calcut was perfectly capable of evading capture for the rest of his life, while she couldn’t stay in hiding for the rest of her life. She told him to shut up.
So, she did vacation-like things. She went swimming at the beach and she drank drinks that were too sweet and came with small umbrellas. She still wore her rig while doing most of this because she said she felt naked without it, and besides it was waterproof. Makk considered challenging her to go a day without keeping tabs on the news streams—or whatever she considered valid streaming news sources—but he was pretty positive not only would she be unable to do this, she would resent him for suggesting it. Also, he needed her to keep using the rig to check in on the tech Ba-Ugna Kev gave them, in case Viselle popped up on it again.
They had only discussed the potential scope of Kev’s tool a few times since their abrupt departure from Velon—could they use it, for instance, to hunt down Calcut? —mostly because at that time there was a sense that they were on the cusp of catching up with Viselle, after which they’d have some proper answers.
Two weeks later, they still hadn’t discussed their options if they failed to find her. Not that they were done searching but they were quickly running out of places to look.
They only spent four days on Aggo, which was long enough to rule out the boats for rent on the entire island. The problem was that none of them went out as far as the coordinates Makk provided them with, so the odds of Viselle employing one from there was pretty low.
Aggo was the third in the chain of seven (going from right to left) so there were three other islands closer to the coordinates to try out.
The next island down—Lopa-Oah—was more of the same. They spent another four days there, which was twice as long as they needed to because ‘Casta insisted they do a little vacationing for at least one night that turned into two. (Makk underestimated the potency of those too-sweet drinks with the tiny umbrellas, and found himself unable to ambulate properly the following day.)
“I think your problem is that your idea of a vacation is hunting down a fugitive,” Elicasta said at one point, while he sat on their veranda and drank water in small doses.
“You’re not wrong,” he said, “but I don’t understand why you think that’s a problem.”
“It’s not my idea of a vacation,” she said.
“But we’re not really vacationing. This is still a fugitive hunt.”
“An unsanctioned fugitive hunt you haven’t told your boss about, with no backup or local pollie engagement. What are you even going to do when we catch up to her?”
“Dunno yet,” he said. “I’ll figure it out when it happens.”
“If we find her at all.”
“Yes.”
He had a lot of questions for Viselle, and about three-quarters of them were questions he didn’t want someone other than Elicasta privy to, which was all the reason he needed not to involve local law enforcement.
As for not looping in Captain Llotho…Elicasta was working under the impression that Makk was currently taking sanctioned vacation time, but the truth was that he didn’t tell Llotho where he was going or that he was going. Makk was technically absent without leave.
In terms of his career, this was not an excellent strategy. But with the maelstrom that was about to touch down on the department following the streamed murder of Ba-Ugna Kev, Makk was pretty positive he would have been pinned down in Velon for weeks otherwise.
After Lopa-Oah, they headed to T’Patto, which was the least impressive. The hotel was basically a dive bar with beds. But, the charter boats there would take them to the coordinates, so they spent a day aboard one such boat and went out to the geo-location.
Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t anything there.
“You expecting an island city maybe,” the captain said, referring to one of the half-dozen floating cities known to roam the planet’s oceans. “You won’ find ‘em in these waters.”
“Don’t know what I expected,” Makk told him, “but it’s just water.”
“I could’a said as much from the dock,” the captain said.
“How do you know more than once?”
“Same way I know she wasn’t in an aero-car over this part of the world when the tech pinged her. She popped because she stopped moving, more than once, right about here.”
“But there’s nothing here,” he reiterated.
“I can see that.”
Another couple of days at T’Patto exhausted their possible avenues of inquiry. Then they skipped the next island—Hyjus May—altogether and headed straight to Midgie, the final island in the chain. This was on advice from the captain who took them out to the uneventful location.
“Barely a dock at Hyjus,” he said. “It’s not a place you live neither, getting a choice on it.”
“I’ve heard good things about the resort,” Elicasta said.
“Sure, miss. If you’re of a mind for that, it’s swell. But the fishers don’t pull out from Hyjus May, and that’s what you and the mister are for. After the resort, there’s nothing there.”
What they were talking about was the only five-star rated resort hotel in Canos-Holo. Elicasta didn’t even bother hiding her disappointment that they wouldn’t be going there.
Makk was pretty sure this vacation wasn’t working out as well as she’d hoped. Then again, she was going through Veeser withdrawal: Possibly, reality itself was disappointing her, and there wasn’t anything he could do about that.
They were only at Midgie for an afternoon before Makk decided this was where they should have headed first. Unlike the other islands, Midgie’s entire shoreline seemed dedicated to sport fishing and drinking. The hotel they settled on, while a step up from where they stayed in T’Patto, was a functional but no-frills affair meant for people who would be spending their day on the water.
“I already like the bar scene better here than on the other islands,” Makk said, after their second day.
“You would,” Elicasta said. “They all feel like the Lucky Twins.”
“Better food here.”
“You just say that because you can identify what you’re eating in this place.”
“Yes, that’s one of my fundamental requirements for food edibility,” he said.
They were sitting in the corner of a shack that looked like a stiff wind could take it out any minute, which was interesting because Canos-Holo was in the hurricane corridor; it had to be sturdier than it appeared. Makk decided the abundance of windows was a factor: open them all up and there’s hardly anything left to blow down.
It was the end of the day. The best times to question charter fishing boat captains was either early in the morning or at sunset, and they’d missed their chance at sunrise. The best place to question them was off the dock, in the bars dotting the shoreline. The best bars to question them in were the ones tourists didn’t spend a lot of time in.
Makk and Elicasta had already eaten their fill of fried seafood—this seemed to be the one thing every bar on every island did well—and were struggling to alternate between strong drink and water, so as to keep their wits about them.
This was another thing that made this less vacation-like. Makk wasn’t currently on duty—he could drink as much as he liked—but he wasn’t about to relax to the point where he missed a lead because he was insufficiently sober to notice it. Unfortunately, every bartender on Canos-Holo seemed exceptionally gifted when it came to rum drinks in particular, and he didn’t want to miss out on that either.
Elicasta both didn’t care how much she drank and didn’t seem affected by it in the same was Makk was. She drank enough rum that he wondered if she had an extra stomach hidden somewhere.
About halfway through the evening, a local stopped by their table. He had the look of a man who spent most of his time on the water: shorts, worn-out shirt, no shoes, a ball cap, and the kind of gait that indicated surprise that the floor wasn’t moving.
Makk had seen him when he first came in, just like he’d seen the last half dozen who looked just like him. The man had gone to the bar for a beer, got a quick talking-to from the bartender, and then looked over at Makk and Elicasta’s table.
This had been happening all evening because sometime around the second or third day Makk realized the best way to get the information he was looking for was to drop some coin on the person behind the bar, tell them he wanted to ask local charter boaters a few questions, and make it clear it would be worth their time to swing by his table.
“Itta say you looking to talk to a boater,” the fisherman said. “Say it’s worth a coin for my time. Izzat so?”
“It is,” Makk said. “You handle a lot of for-hire fishing?”
“Sure do. Where you lookin’ to go, and when you want to go? I got freedom later in the week, if you here for it.”
“We just want information,” Elicasta said with a smile. She was no better or worse than the next civilian when it came to eliciting information from people, but the smile had definitely proven to be an asset.
“What kinda?”
Makk opened his voicer and called up an image of Viselle Daska. It wasn’t her most flattering photo, but they had limited options. It was pulled from the vid that made her famous. He slid it across the table.
“We’re looking for this woman,” he said. “We understand she hired someone such as yourself, recently.”
“Izzat so?” the man said, without looking down. “She in some trouble, is she?”
“Not with us,” Elicasta said.
“We just want to talk to her,” Makk added.
The captain looked down at the image then. “Pretty lady,” he said. His gaze lingered for long enough that Makk thought that they’d finally found the right guy.
“Tell you what,” the man said. “I sit down, you buy me another beer an’ we talk. But not about the girl in the image.”
“All right,” Makk said. “What do you want to talk about?”
“One at a time. I’m Erry Gisador. Who might you two be?”
After introductions and new round, Captain Gisador leaned back, took one more look at the image on Makk’s voicer, and started talking.
“Here’s the mess, friends,” he said. “I been paid extra to not sit here at this table wit’ you nice folks and talk about that particular lady. Can’t tell you when she was here nor when she left, nor what she did in the middle. I can’t do that because I’m a man of my word. You appreciate this, I’m taking.”
“I do,” Makk said.
“But you have sat down,” Elicasta said.
“Oh, indeed. The company’s nice and the beer’s free, which is my favorite way to end a hard day a’ fishing. And maybe one o’ the reasons I’m sittin’ is you’re not what I was anticipating.”
“What were you expecting?” Makk asked.
“Like you, but about twenty more. Uniforms and such. The fare we ain’t talkin’ about seemed the type to attract that sort of attention, you get me? But as I said…”
“…you can’t talk about her,” Makk finished.
“Exactly. Now, in spite of that, I do have a mite problem the two of you seem like to take care of for me, and on account of that mite problem being the fault of the woman I never saw before in that image on your pocket screen…I’m saying maybe while I’m all busy not helping you at all we can still manage to help each other.”
“I need a lot more rum for this,” Elicasta muttered.
“I cut to the straight, detective man,” Gisador said. “I can’t say nothing about her. But I can take you to one who’d fill you right up with near everything you need to know with a lot more on top. I get to keep my word, you get your facts, we part as friends.”