Ellie Quin Episode 5: A Girl Reborn Read Online Free PDF Page B

scuffed walls, the dog-eared posters warning about ‘Space Herpes’ and STDs, the scratches of graffiti and faint spots of lazily scrubbed-off blood.
    He was kept waiting for nearly half an hour before the door finally snapped open and Councillor Hayden stepped into the room, holding a cup and saucer in one hand. The door was closed behind her. She took small steps across the tiny room, set her cup and saucer down on the table, checked the chair, and brushed at the seat before easing herself slowly down onto it, not once making eye contact with him.
    ‘Councillor Hayden,’ started Deacon, ‘you really didn’t need to come all the way out to the Seventh Veil.’
    She ignored him as she picked her cup up daintily, her little finger extended like a radio antenna. She tested the heat of her tea with a cautious sip then set it back down again.
    She looked sternly at him. The very first indication that she was even aware he was sitting there right in front of her. ‘Oh, but I did. It appears you’ve gone and lost Mason’s little monster.’
    ‘She’s bottled up in this system. She’s as good as imprisoned.’
    ‘Imprisoned?’ Hayden almost managed a smile. Almost. ‘A pretty big prison cell don’t you think? A whole system? How many planets? How many people? How many ships? How many bolt holes? Lots of places to hide, I imagine.’
    ‘While she’s lying low, she’s not making matters any worse.’ Deacon winced inside; a pretty dumb thing for him to say and Hayden was going to jump right on that.
    ‘Deacon, we have a whole system
quarantined
. Apart from the detrimental affect that has on cross-system economic patterns, we’re having to divert a lot of military boots this way to enforce this lock down of yours.’
    ‘I understand.’
    ‘I wonder if you do. We’ve got a lot of other ‘hotspots’ to deal with right now.’
    ‘Yes, I appreciate manpower is stretched thin. But the Administration
did
authorise the quarantine.’
    ‘You gave us little choice in the matter.' She set her cup down and leant forward. 'So, I'm intrigued.'
    'Councillor?
    'How the hell did you manage to identify the
precise
person…I believe it’s a girl, nineteen years of age, correct?’
    ‘Correct.’
    ‘…identify this teenage girl then, and then….
lose her?
’
    ‘One of my hired guns was
bought
. I managed to zero in on her, dammit, we
had
her…but the duplicitous bastard let her escape.’
    ‘Yes, I read your report on the flight over. So you seem quite certain that it’s not just Mason but the Awoken who are behind this?’
    ‘Yes. Of course.’
    Councillor Hayden picked up her cup again. Deacon watched her full lips as she sipped her tea. Up close to her now, closer than he'd ever been, he could see the faintest of fine lines around her eyes, beneath her jaw. Her skin wasn't the porcelain smooth of genuine youth…but as close as damn, as close as money and gene-therapy could buy. An eighty-six year old woman (public domain data, that…although Deacon guessed she'd give anything to redact her birth date from it), she looked like a health-conscious twenty-nine year old.
    ‘I knew Edward Mason. I worked with him forty years ago on restructuring the DGA. He never struck me as the
religious
type.’
    ‘He isn’t. I suspect he’s using the Awoken to help him with whatever he's planning.’
    ‘His plan? Do you have any idea what his ‘plan’ is yet?’
    ‘The girl’s DNA contains some kind of a dormant pathogen. That much we’ve worked out from the tissue samples. But as to what it is supposed to do, who knows?’ He spread his hands and smiled. ‘Perhaps it’s some kind of believe-in-God virus.’
    He said that half jokingly. Hayden didn’t laugh though.
    ‘You say that, Deacon, but religion
is
like a damned virus. An ideological virus. And it’s spreading. The last thing we need right now is some psychological bio-weapon to make matters worse, that, or worse. In your report Deacon, you suggested that