The Lost Ship of the Tucker Rebellion - Marie Sexton Page 0,14

half an ear. Part of him was overjoyed, almost bowled over by the prospect of such an incredible find. That part he pushed away, shoved down so he could think rationally. This wasn’t the sort of stuff that would be easy to move, even on the black market. Jewelry, music, antique machines, vids—those were way easier to place. Biologicals required careful control and oversight or they’d be fucked up and wasted. Poppy might not be the right person for those. But Denver needed to be on Poppy’s good side, and if he went to someone else with any of this she’d find out. He needed something hard to trade with her.

There was another object in the pod, a little silver box that looked like it had been ripped out of a larger machine. It was surprisingly heavy in Denver’s hand. He passed it to OPAL. “What do you make of this?”

OPAL’s wires settled on the severed ends of the box’s electronics. Her eyeport flared. “It appears to be the complete system logs for a ship named Renegade, licensed to Tucker House Exports in 2278.”

“Tucker House?” Denver shared a glance with Laramie, who had pulled back from the pod. “You sure of that?”

“Indeed.”

“Can you access the system itself?”

“Not yet. There are numerous file types, some of which I am unfamiliar with. I will attempt to access them.”

“Tucker.” Laramie looked ready to burst from excitement, his mental touch bright within Denver’s mind. “This pod is from a Tucker ship!”

“Seems like it.”

“There’s only one reason a Tucker ship would come this far out beyond the asteroid belt. Denver—”

“Even when you’re talking out loud, I can barely understand you.” Marit straightened up and folded her arms. “What are you talking about?”

Laramie patted the pod’s fleet insignia. “I think the ship that jettisoned this pod was part of the Tucker Rebellion.”

Denver’d been thinking along the same lines but hadn’t wanted to say it out loud. Especially since—

“Are you crazy?” Marit demanded. “The Tucker Rebellion is nothing but a fairy tale. Just another conspiracy theory with no facts to back it up.”

Yeah. Especially since Marit was bound to be the voice of reason. Or, more accurately, the voice of the official Mars party line.

And of course Laramie was ready to take her bait.

“Which part of it don’t you believe?” he asked her. “That William Tucker was in touch with a Li’Vin turncoat, or that the turncoat had a ship waiting for him?”

“I’m not sure I believe any of it, to be honest. I mean, we know the guy didn’t trust the Li’Vin. We know he had a bit of a cult following. We know he claimed to have a contact inside the Li’Vin who confirmed his doubts as to their intentions. But then he and all his followers turned up dead. Just another cult-driven mass suicide.”

“And you don’t find that suspicious?” Laramie asked. “Even now, when we know Tucker was right about the Li’Vin all along?”

Marit groaned, rubbing her forehead. “The suicide did seem odd, especially given that Tucker had followers all over the world. Coordinating a mass suicide on multiple continents is crazy even by cult standards. So yeah, I suppose maybe the government shut him up. But I think it’s just as likely that he never had a Li’Vin informant at all, and he had no way to make good on his promises of a new world. But either way, this idea of a whole fleet of ships being destroyed? No. I don’t buy it. There’d have to be evidence somewhere.”

Laramie waved his arms in exasperation toward the pod. “Yeah! And here it is!”

Marit shook her head and turned to Denver. “What do you think?”

Denver sank down onto a crate and scrubbed his hands through his hair, trying to collect his thoughts. “Look. I know the official story. And being a good little Martian girl, of course that’s what you would have heard. But Laramie and I, we’ve done a lot of research on the Tucker Rebellion—”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“The thing is, the government and the Li’Vin worked awfully hard to paint Tucker as some kind of fringe radical nutcase. But if he really was a fringe radical nutcase, why would they bother? I mean, we know for a fact that the government was controlling the media by that point.”

“And had been since the 1980s,” Laramie interrupted.

Marit rolled her eyes, and Denver held up a hand toward Laramie, stopping him before he could counter and drag them too far off track. “Forget the