gaian consortium 05 - the titan trap Read Online Free Page A

Cloud’s victims had been piled up like so much cordwood was just…wrong.
    “I know,” he said grimly. “Neither of us could believe it. So we waited until the convoy passed, then followed them. I don’t think they paid us any attention because, after all, we were driving a vehicle with clear GEC markings. They probably thought we were with them.”
    “So where were they going?”
    “Some sort of processing facility. We didn’t stick around long enough to get the particulars. It was enough that it existed. Anyway, Karras said he’d investigate on his end, that it would be a lot more efficient for him to do some discreet hacking and find out what was going on that way, rather than trying to sneak around and play detective, and probably get caught.”
    But you got caught anyway, she thought, although she didn’t bother to say the words out loud. “So I’m guessing he found something.”
    “You could say that.” Derek Tagawa slumped back in his seat, shoulders drooping. “What they were processing in that facility was the corpses.”
    “Wait…what?” That couldn’t be right. This Theo Karras person must have made some mistake.
    He gave her a mirthless smile. “That was my first reaction. That is, we knew the government was performing salvage operations, collecting valuables as it remediated the area. Payment for the work being done, and not that many people have ever protested because, after all, in general there aren’t a lot of relatives left around to protest. But this was something else. What Theo found was that anything of value in the bodies was being extracted — gold teeth, titanium joint replacements, that sort of thing. And then the corpses were being ground down to nothing. You know all those new terrace farms the government’s been touting, saying they’ve upped production on a massive scale?”
    Cassidy could only tilt her head slightly. She didn’t want to say anything, because a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach told her what was coming next.
    “Well, guess where they’re getting all the phosphorous for their fertilizer?”
    “That can’t be true,” she said. Actually, it came out more as a whisper.
    “I’m afraid it is.”
    Her stomach lurched, and she gripped the edge of her seat and told herself that she was not going to throw up. She just wasn’t. The roiling settled down somewhat, but she still felt like someone had just punched her in the gut.
    “So…what happened?” In a way, she hated herself for asking the question. At the beginning of this, hadn’t she vowed that she wouldn’t believe a word he said? For some reason, it was hard to not believe him. She wouldn’t call herself an expert on human nature or anything, but something in the way he told the story seemed to ring true. If he were really a criminal, wouldn’t he have come up with a far less elaborate lie to prove his innocence? Her father had always said, “If you’re going to lie, make it a simple one, or you’ll end up losing track of the facts.”
    Maybe not the sort of thing that parenting experts would advise a father to tell his daughter, but she couldn’t deny that Owen Evans had been right about that one thing at least.
    Derek Tagawa sighed. It wasn’t an exaggerated thing, heaved to garner pity, but a quiet exhalation of his breath, as if he needed clean air in his lungs to tell her what was coming next. “We got caught. Or rather, someone noticed Karras poking around. He figured it out, too, realized things were getting hot and that he needed to get out of there. His husband Liam was on the team as well, and I think they were both planning to leave, although I’m pretty sure Liam didn’t know exactly why Theo wanted to get out of there. Not that it got that far. A GDF security detail showed up, and they shot Theo.”
    “Just like that?” she asked, appalled.
    “Basically. I was standing there in shock, waiting for them to kill me next, and then the commander shoved the gun in my