Ammonite

by Nicola Griffith

  “Ah.” Danner had hoped this would not happen, but there were always those to whom reason meant nothing, who would not believe what they did not want to be true. “How many?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Seventeen? That’ll strain Estrade’s life‑support systems to the limit.”

  “They understand that.”

  Danner sighed. If they did not want to stay, she did not want to keep them. “Very well. But only one gig goes, the other stays here. If they can stand the overcrowding once they’re up there, they can sit on top of each other on the way up. If they don’t like those arrangements, then tough. We keep one gig here. You never know.” Why did she insist on hanging onto these hopes? When Company went, the gig would be useless. Still… “Who wants to leave? Anyone we can’t afford to lose?”

  “Here’s a list.”

  Danner took the flimsy. It was in alphabetical order in Teng’s usual methodical style. A name, second from the end, leapt out at her as if it were in thicker, darker print than the rest. “ Vincio? Vincio–you’re sure?” She felt as though she had been jabbed lightly in the stomach with stiff fingers. She could not believe that Vincio–her loyal assistant, the one who brought her tea every day, who never seemed to sleep, who always knew when Danner could be disturbed and when she needed to be left alone–was leaving. Abandoning her.

  She took a deep breath. If Vincio wanted to go, she would not stop her. She rubbed the bridge of her nose, looked at the list again, frowned. “Relman’s not on it.”

  “No.”

  Danner sighed. Life never worked out the way it should. “Recommendations?”

  “Let them go. Let Relman stay. She’s a good officer. She’ll be especially eager to please, now.”

  But we’re not officers anymore, not any of us, Danner wanted to say. But she did not, because if they were not officers, then what, who, were they? She knew she was not yet ready to face that question; none of them were. They would live the fiction a little while longer: in confused times, people, especially militarily‑trained people, liked orders, firm leadership. If she could provide it.

  “Give them ten days to think it over. Meanwhile I’ll talk to Sigrid and Nyo about making the platform’s functions tamper‑proof, accessible only from our uplink station. We’ll need those facilities, especially the satellites, as long as we can get them. I don’t want a bunch of disaffecteds screwing with the programs. If we can lock those systems in, then let’s let them go.”

  After she dismissed Teng, Danner read the geologists’ reports on Dentro de un Rato. Her thoughts kept wandering. Why did Vincio want to leave? Why did she think she had anything to gain by going up to an orbital station where she had a good chance of dying, either immediately, courtesy of the Kurst, or later, due to failed life support? And if–a big if–Company did take them all off, where did Vincio expect to spend the rest of her hopelessly contaminated life?

  Danner contemplated calling Vincio into her office and asking her why straight out, but in the end decided not to; she was not sure she could face the answer.

  Danner walked slowly across the grass from Rec, her face still red from Kahn’s fencing workout. She wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. It came away sticky with pollen. Damn this planet. It just kept getting hotter–thirty‑eight degrees Celsius according to her wristcom.

  Her mod was blessedly cool. She had a fast shower, resisting the temptation to stand under the revitalizing water for longer, and pulled on summer‑weight fatigues. Her stomach growled, and she glanced at her wristcom. She would have to eat while she talked to Gautier, the ceramicist, about her report. There were not enough hours in the day.

  She had just stepped back out into the muggy heat when her wristcom bleeped.

  “Danner,” she answered, walking toward the cafeteria.

  “Vincio, ma’am. Another message from SEC rep Taishan. Do you wish to follow code‑five procedure?”

  Banner was already changing direction, angling toward her office. “Yes. I’ll pick it up personally.”

  Day and T’orre Na were sitting on the bench along the far wall of the outer office when Danner got there. She nodded to them both. The viajera was running a knotted cord through her fingers; bright threads flickered through her tanned hands. “It came on a herd bird,” she said.

  “My office.”

  They sat. Danner felt a vast irritation. She did not have time for this. “What does it say this time?”

  “ From Marghe Amun to Commander Danner, greetings. Hannah, you must,”–Thenike looked at Danner–“there’s great emphasis on that word, you must accede to Cassil’s trata demands. Even if you only send half‑a‑dozen officers. You must be seen to do something. Please review my report. I’m on my way to talk to you personally.”

  “But she’s pregnant!”

  T’orre Na looked at Danner blankly, and Day grinned.

  “I mean… Oh, curse the woman! This is the last thing I need! A pregnant SEC rep who’s gone native, swanning in here stomach‑first and telling me what I must and must not do! Well, I can’t stop her, she can come and she can say what she likes. But I’m just too damn busy.” Danner felt foolish at her outburst, then angry at feeling foolish. Damn it, the day was just too hot for this. “I have an appointment.” Then she remembered she needed to talk to the viajera. “If you two could meet with me for dinner? Good.”

  She got out of the office and took four strides across the grass toward her appointment with Gautier and her lunch before her wristcom beeped again.

  What the hell was it now? “Danner!”

  “Dogias here. We’ve got trouble. The northern relay has just gone from the grid.”

  “Gone? What do you mean, gone?”

  “Gone. Phht. Kaput.”

  Danner felt like strangling the woman. “Explain,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “The northern relay is no longer accessible. Diagnostics show it does not exist.”

  “Theories?”

  “None. What I need is a satellite scan, or to go up there personally and take a look.”

  It took Nyo two hours to send signals through the Port Central uplink to Estradeordering a satellite to scan the right area and send down a data squirt. Sigrid took another half an hour to collate the information. The delay did nothing to soothe Danner’s irritation.

  The room was crowded: Dogias, Danner, T’orre Na, Sara Hiam, Lu Wai, Day, Nyo; Sigrid at the screen.

  “It’s a bit fuzzy, but the best I could do with the cloud cover. This is the Holme Valley. Here and here”–she circled areas to the north–“are native dwellings. Here”–further to the north–“is the area where the relay is.” She magnified. And again. “Or was.”

  “Sweet god.” Danner stared at the tangled structure that had once been the northern relay.

  “Someone trashed it,” Dogias said. “They must have fired it first. Only way to bend those plastics. Can you enlarge it once more?” Nyo did. Dogias studied it intently. “Looks like they’ve even smashed the dish. See? Those shards there. I can’t put that back together. Build another, maybe, but that one’s history.”

  “How the hell did this happen?” Danner turned to T’orre Na. “Is this how Cassil responds when I refuse to help?”

  There was a sudden thick silence; Danner had ample time to wish she had not said anything.

  “No,” T’orre Na said, mildly enough, but Danner knew the viajera was angry.

  She did not have the patience to apologize now. “The weather, maybe?”

  Dogias shook her head. “A big enough storm with lightning hitting it square on might damage it, but, no, this kind of destruction is deliberate.”

  They all looked silently at the screen.

  “There’s something else you might want to see,” Sigrid said. The picture changed.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “Watch.” The dark patch that filled a quarter of the screen shifted. “This one was taken one minute later. Let me enlarge.�
��

  Horses. It was a hundred or more riders. “It’s those damn tribes,” Danner said wonderingly.

  “It looks that way,” Day agreed.

  “Assuming they’ve kept a straight line, extrapolate their origin.

  It took less than a minute. The screen showed a purple line running directly from the wrecked relay to the riders.

  No one, no one could be allowed to get away with that. “Lu Wai, assemble four sleds. Sixty officers, with full field armor and rations for…” she calculated in her head, “thirty days. Field hospital and shelters. And make sure we include the crossbow squad.” It would be interesting to see how they performed in a real situation. “I’ll command. Other personnel: Dogias and Neuyen and whoever else we need to build another relay. When can you have your gear together, Dogias?”

  “Three hours.”

  “Then we’ll leave in four. That gives us two hours’ daylight.” She turned to Nyo. “I want that satellite moved north. I need communications.”

  “I can do that. And keep you updated on the weather. There’s an unusual weather system building up there. Severe storms.”

  “Very well. Dr. Hiam, we might need a physician.”

  “I’d be happy to come along.”

  “And T’orre Na, and Day. I’ll need you to liaise at Holme Valley.” She remembered they were guests. “If you’re willing.”

  Danner strode out of her offices, the adrenaline of rage singing light and hot through her veins. Rage that soon became a kind of exhilaration.

  She was going to get to do her job. At last.

  The breeze blowing cool through the Yelland hills eased off as Marghe and Thenike made their way down the foothills and onto the plain toward Holme Valley. The heat made Marghe feel tired and tense. The air was humid, so thick with moisture that she felt it like spiderwebs across her face, and kept wanting to brush it away, wipe it from her skin.

  They stopped at midafternoon. Marghe felt a kind of tension in the air, a tension she might not have been aware of before the virus became part of her.

  “I don’t like this,” Thenike said, standing still and sniffing at the heavy air like a pointer. “There’s more than one storm on its way. We need to find shelter.”

  Marghe remembered the mad ride on the sled, bucking over rocks as Lu Wai raced for shelter. Remembered the wind building, then the awful, fabulous lightning; Letitia Dogias laughing like a madwoman; the sheer excitement of so much raw power.

  But the image that kept recurring was not Letitia throwing back her head and laughing with the storm, but Uaithne. Uaithne with her knife and her horse and her pale eyes, holding up hands stained with blood, laughing and laughing and riding into the storm looking for blood.

  “We have to go on as long as we can,” Marghe said. “Uaithne’s going to do something terrible in this storm. We’ve got to keep going.”

  They plodded on, on and on, until they felt as though they were wading through heat, alert for the first rising of wind.

  Marghe told herself there was nothing Uaithne could do against Danner; no way the tribeswoman could hurt Lu Wai and Letitia. It was not possible for Uaithne with her wooden spears and her sharp stones to get past the sleds and slick armor and firepower of the Mirrors. Not possible. But the image of Uaithne with her knife would not go away.

  Marghe walked faster. Last time, Aoife had been there to take the knife from Uaithne’s hand. Where was she now? Where was Aoife in all this?

  Holme Valley looked like a refugee camp, Danner thought as she stepped out of the field hospital. Women everywhere, talking angrily or sitting apathetically, rocking children, and everywhere dust: dust kicked up by the Singing Pasture horse herds which were skittish and nervous, by the sleds pulling hawsers tight to further secure the field hospital, by Mirrors erecting temporary quarters and technicians hanging solar panels and stringing cable. The dust hung in the still air like particles suspended in a liquid.

  The heat, and the way every woman she tried to talk to kept looking nervously at the sky, made Danner irritable.

  “Later.” Cassil had said when they arrived, “we’ll talk later. There’s a storm on its way. There’s much to do.” Danner, expecting gratitude, had been annoyed. Now, after a mere six hours in the valley, she was sick of the sight of the place.

  Sara Hiam, with Day interpreting, had been talking to the women who had been hurt by the tribes as they swept over the pastureland weeks ago. As Danner passed by, she overheard some of the notes the doctor was making into her wristcom. “Evidence of higher than Earth‑normal recuperative powers. Compound fracture of tibia and fibula sustained sixteen days ago already exhibits evidence of–”

  Danner walked briskly. She did not want to hear how goddamn healthy these people were. She wanted the entrenchment phase to be over so she could start planning the native containment.

  They were waiting for her in her tent: Captain White Moon, Lu Wai, Letitia, and T’orre Na. Danner was brusque.

  “My immediate priority, until that satellite moves overhead and gives us communications with Port Central, has to be the reinstatement of the northern relay. Captain White Moon, I want you to take twelve officers to escort Dogias and Neuyen to the damaged site. Take Leap and a handful of her crossbow squad along.”

  “With the commander’s permission–” Lu Wai began.

  “No, Lu Wai. I need you here. A dozen officers are more than enough. It’s only preliminary reconnaissance by the communications team; there should be no danger.” Lu Wai looked like she was struggling with that, obviously unwilling to let Dogias go without her.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Danner wondered what she would have done if Lu Wai had refused.

  “Do that now, Captain. Take two sleds.”

  “We’ll take the gear,” Dogias said, “just in case. We could at least begin to rebuild while we’re there.”

  “No. Examination of the site only. I don’t want my forces split for too long. This is reconnaissance only. Both sleds and all personnel to be back here, with a comprehensive report, this time tomorrow.”

  Though the sun sank toward the horizon in bloody reds and oranges, the evening did not cool. Danner tried to ignore the feeling she had done the wrong thing when she saw the drawn look on Lu Wai’s face as the sleds headed north.

  She went to find Hiam. The doctor was in the field hospital, sitting on one of the beds, absently tossing something from hand to hand. It was small and, whatever it was, it claimed all the doctor’s attention. Danner cleared her throat. Hiam spun around. “Oh. It’s you.” She dropped the object into the pocket of her white coat.

  “You haven’t eaten yet, have you? Cassil wants us to dine with her and her kith this evening.”

  “And is this the kind of place where we’re supposed to dress for dinner and overwhelm the natives with our aplomb?” Her voice was high and sharp.

  “Are you all right?”

  “No.” She fiddled absently with the thing in her pocket. “I’m supposed to be a doctor, but Lu Wai probably knows more about practical treatment than I do. I’m a researcher.” She pulled out the thing she had been playing with. A softgel. “Take a good look at it. FN‑17. My only claim to fame. Except it doesn’t work for the whole six months. I still don’t know why. I still don’t understand why it–” She shook herself. “I decided not to take any before I left Estrade” she said, “and on my recommendation neither did Nyo or Sigrid. It’s too late now, of course.” She dropped the softgel back in her pocket and stood up. “Statistically speaking, one of us is likely to die in a month or two. And that takes away my appetite for dinner.”

  Danner did not know what to say. “Marghe lived. I lived. Everyone here lived. You should, too. With proper care. We’ve learned a lot about the virus since it first struck. Talk to Lu Wai about it.”

  “I already have.”

  “Then you know that we have a better idea than we did of how to care for its sufferers. The mortality rate dropped as we got more experience
.”

  “But it’s still high.”

  “Yes, it’s still high. There’s nothing we can do about that. But if you want to talk about statistics, think of it this way: you’re much more likely to live than to die.”

  “I know, I know. But I keep thinking: what will I do if Nyo dies, or Sigrid? I miss them already. The last five or six years, we’ve lived on top of one another day in, day out. There were times when I came close to killing them both, times when I think I would have given anything to see them make a mistake and explode into a cloud of fatty tissues and globules of blood as they EVAed to some satellite or other. But now that I’ve not seen them for three days, I miss them. I keep looking around, wondering where they are, why I can’t hear them or smell them. I feel lost.”

  Lost, Danner thought to herself later as she dressed in her best uniform for the evening; we all feel lost. But we won’t always be. We’ll make this our home. Somehow.

  To her surprise, Danner found that many of the foods Cassil’s kith served them at the tables and benches set up outside a house made of a bent‑over skelter tree were already familiar. The Port Central cafeteria had been growing and serving native vegetables for years. She sat between Sara and T’orre Na, at the same table as Cassil and Lu Wai and Day, three other valley women, and a woman from the pastures, Holle, who still wore a bandage around her head. She enjoyed showing Sara how to eat the tricky goura with its big seeds, and how to pour from the huge pitchers of water without drowning their small goblets.

  “No one seems to be talking much,” Sara said as she piled her plate with meat.

  “Now is for eating,” T’orre Na said, “while the food’s hot and the water cold. We’ll talk when the food is finished.”

  “Just one of many sensible arrangements you’ll find here,” added Day.

  Danner’s wristcom bleeped. “Please excuse me,” she murmured to Cassil, and eased back a little from the table before taking the call.

  “Teng here.” There was some interference, a thin whine weaving in and out of Teng’s words. “The gig’s ready to go.”

  “Good.” She was glad they had communication again with Port Central, but wondered why her deputy had bothered her with this. “Is there something else?”