Free Starbleached by Chelsea Gaither Page A

right.
She took a deep breath, reaching reflexively for a gun she didn’t have. She
dropped into the contaminated water instead, searching for something in the
murk she could use. Fingers closed over a slick palm sized rock. She pulled it
up, weighing it carefully, and then waited.
    Was it the Overseer? …no, she decided. The movement was too
light. But it had the purposeful sound of a two-leg stride. Someone from the
village sent to find her? Hair prickled on the back of her neck. She would
wait, she decided. Wait until the last possible moment. The footsteps came
nearer. She heard the unmistakable click of a round being chambered and turned,
rock raised high.
    And then her heart soared.
    The person behind her was not just human, he was someone she
knew. Cobbled together leathers and a flack-jacket about to give up the ghost
couldn’t hide the SF bearing. Haunted brown eyes like, and forever unlike, a
pair of lost blue ones looked into hers. The swamp muttered around them, and
she saw nothing but her rescue.
    It was Michel Landry.
    And it didn’t matter at all that he was pointing a gun at
her chest.
     
    *****
     
    Then:
    Bryan was gone.
    Not dead. Not buried. Erased. Eradicated. Removed from the
world and beyond reach and rescue. And now Adrienne sat in a room with four
other people: Bob Harris, Bryan’s best friend; Paige Jones, the base counselor;
General Miller, glaring at her as if she had done wrong; and a new security man
named Jason Mangle.
    I bet he gets teased a lot, she thought, without
enthusiasm. Because what they were telling her made her feel sick.
    “You’re telling me that he can remember? That…that we
could have put him back together? And I left him back there to die?
    Paige shook her head, gently taking Adry’s shaking hands in
her own. “Not exactly. The slave process doesn’t erase you, precisely. It..”
she sighed. “Memory is like a library. When you want to find a book, you access
a filing system that tells you where that book is. Words, sights, sounds,
smells are memory’s filing system. Its triggers.”
    Lately, Adry had been spraying Bryan’s cologne on his side
of her bed. For an instant on waking, she could imagine he was there. “I get
that.”
    “The slave process destroys the catalogue. The memories
still exist, but the slave can’t  find them. In a few cases the memories do return. It’s rare, but…” She trailed off.
    “So Bryan could remember.” Shawn Miller sighed. “And he
knows too much for that to be safe.”
    “It helps us that they start programming their victims
immediately. There won’t be anything familiar to trigger the catalogue, so to
speak, and the longer he goes without remembering, the worse his chances for
recovery get. They’re going to take him to Foster, or New Greenland, and they
don’t look anything at all like a human world anymore.”
    “What about our chances of finding him?” General Miller
asked Bob.
    “To rescue, or kill him?”
    “Either.”
    Bob Harris sighed. “Needle in a haystack.”
    They looked around their new base; a tent posted on Gaga’s
soil. Ships landed and took off with metronome precision. They’d made no move
towards a more permanent structure. Miller and the rest of the brass seemed
more interested in staying mobile. She supposed it made sense. If you’re
moving, they can’t find you. At least the green around here was real.
Maple-like trees grew all around them, intense purple flowers just starting to
open at the end of twigs. General Miller sniffed at the pollen. He switched the
chips out of his reader and sighed.
    “Well, to fill you in on our other problem child, Michel
Landry is officially AWOL from the local garrison. He left before we arrived.
Stuck around just long enough to get Bryan’s POW status notification. Then he
blew.” Shawn dropped the report chips he held hard enough to crack one.
    Bob cursed. “We should have arrested him the second he
touched down.”
    “Maybe he went to rescue his