by David Coy
Until now.
These things were different. They were carbon-based all right, but physiologically they were off the scale. If she was right, and if she could classify these creatures as a new and unique order and a Class A Bio-Hazard—the planet would belong to science. That was the law.
If the discovery placed the organism on its own evolutionary branch, every ecological system on the planet would be studied to see how each one supported it. The planet would become the property of the government until they gave it back. End of discussion.
There was something else. The last piece of the puzzle fell into place and a musical note sounded in her head.
Smith knows. He knows they’re here, and these may not be the only ones—there may be other organisms on the planet just as divergent and dangerous as these—maybe more so.
He hadn't been miserly or tight-fisted; he’d been hiding the fact of their existence. If she hadn’t stumbled on them through John Soledad, Smith would have gotten his write-offs, and with those in hand, he’d have carte blanche to begin his mining operations. It was clear to her now that he’d been stalling, waiting, figuring a way to get those certifications.
The entire project hinged on the surveys—and on the verifiable signatures of herself and a nurse named Applegate.
The stakes were enormous.
Now with some of the pieces fitting together so well, a less obvious fact materialized. It formed like a crystal, clean and clear with edges sharp and deadly.
Sonofabitch. He’s killed her. He’ll kill me, too, if I don’t bend.
She doubled over and buried her face in her hands. She was stuck. She was cut off, without resources; stuck on a planet tens of billions of kilometers from home where every communication could be monitored and tracked.
“What is it?” he asked.
The communicator was easy enough to operate. She turned it on and scrolled down the list until she found Security. Her finger was in motion to connect when she stopped short.
There was no doubt Smith had his eyes and ears everywhere, and if they came for them there, on the plant, they’d know she knew.
She stared out past the rivulets running down the front window and into the green beyond. The rain made the jungle even greener.
She had to think about this. She turned to John.
“We should talk,” she said.
20
The clouds rolled in and cast a cooling shadow over her. It was almost time to go. It was a good thing; she couldn’t bear sitting still any longer.
She trudged out into the plain, heading straight for the shelters on the other side.
Walking on the spongy plant stuff started out easy enough, but grew in difficulty with each step. Months earlier, the huge defoliators, drifting hundreds of meters above the surface, had chopped everything under them into pieces. Grass, bushes, vines, even trees were whipped and flailed into chips no bigger than her finger. She’s seen pictures of them and read about them in school, but she’d never seen an actual defoliated forest before. The sound the machines made was said to be like that of a tornado only louder and the cables vibrated with such intensity that the earth itself shook.
The ground was already sprouting new growth, and she wondered what they’d do about that. Did they let it get just so high and whack it back down? Did they poison it at some point? She climbed up a gentle grade, and at the crest of it, looked out to see the vast and flattened strip the bulldozer had made. It was nearly level and looked at least a kilometer wide. It stretched as far to the south as she could see. It was hard to believe machines existed that could flatten so much terrain. She started across it at an angle, relieved to get onto footing that wasn’t spongy and unsure, if only for a little while. Once again she saw that the plant life was reclaiming the oldest of the scraped ground, sending up shoots green and vital in great numbers through the rich, dark soil.
Before she knew it, she was back on the spongy surface of the plain, having traversed just a corner of the graded section.
From time to time, she saw the rotted and dried remains of pieces of animals—tails, legs, and an odd jawbone. There were many desiccated insect parts as well; shiny wings and pieces of carapace, heads and legs as light and dry as wisps; just more ingredients in the defoliator’s destructive blending process. The number of non-insectoid parts mixed in surprised her. Having traversed many kilometers of jungle she’d seen relatively few species that weren’t insects and wondered at the stealth the forest’s creatures must have developed over the millennia to remain so hidden. She picked up a cramped and shrunken leg of a small thing, looked at it, and for the first time, really saw it.
There one minute—pureed the next.
The storm had missed her, but the massive clouds kept her in the shade for the rest of the afternoon. She trudged and stumbled on, thankful for the clear and vineless air in front of her face.
By the time the hot sun peeked from behind the clouds, she could see the installation. Still distant, the buildings shimmered in the plain’s heat. She watched the speck of a shuttle descend from above and land, casting one brief and tiny glint of reddish light from its flat side.
She was ahead of schedule. It wouldn’t bother her to camp some distance from the buildings until darkness. As long as her shelter was in view, she was whole, complete, filled with its promise of cleanliness, hot water and a bed. The thought of lying in a clean bed after a cleansing shower made her giddy.
She stopped about two kilometers out just as the sun sank red into the jungle. The terrain was rolling in this part of the clearing and she found a depression and parked herself in it. By crawling up just a few yards, she could see the installation quite well.
Dusk came quickly, filling the air with green light. A few small bugs whizzed past, and she tightened her torn collar as much as she could.
The lights came on around the loading dock, creating a halo of white around it. Soon after that she saw lights coming on in the shelters, making little squares of warmth against their dark silhouettes.
The clinic was about halfway between the dock’s bright lights and the last shelter in the cluster to the north. When the larger bugs clattered past, she got up and started walking, fairly certain the darkness was hiding her.
When she could see her faint shadow cast by the dock’s lights, she headed north to get out of it and swung around in a wide arc. As she got closer, her heart began to pound in her ears. She wanted desperately to get inside. She was anticipating that the clinic would be empty, but not necessarily so. She didn’t know what she’d do if it weren't. She finally picked it out of the cluster and was relieved to see that its windows were still dark. Standing just a few hundred yards out, the dark sanctuary of the clinic pulled at her. Her heart was pounding so strongly that her pulse modulated her breath as if someone was thumping her back.
The night drove people on Verde inside and kept them there until dawn. Few would venture into the darkness with its flying hordes without good reason. That was a plus. The moons wouldn’t be up for another two hours. Now was the time.
Keeping her eyes on the bright little windows of the shelters, she moved toward the installation. From time to time, a head moved by a window with private purpose. She covered the distance in just minutes, but in her mind it was taking hours; each step taking her just a centimeter closer.
Finally, she was at the clinic steps and moving stiffly up them, one hand gripping tight to the railing. She made a little noise like a squeak, deep in her throat with each step. She tried the latch once or twice, knowing it would be locked. With trembling fingers, she fumbled with the zipper on her upper pocket and pulled out her key. She had to use both hands to manage the precision required, then pressed it to the lock. When the latch released, she practically fell through the door. The lights came on and bathed her in clean, artificial brilliance.
Still squeaking and whining, she closed and locked the door, then turned on the lock to prevent all but emergency entry. She walked around
the clinic, sliding the shutters closed. The stiff, strong walls seemed to embrace her and the clean, antiseptic scent of the clinic bathed her olfactory senses, heightened by several days in the fecund organic milieu of the jungle.
One foot at a time, she unlaced her boots and kicked them off. Her feet were white, filthy, prune-skinned and so wet they almost slipped on the floor. She peeled herself out of the torn and rotted cottons as she walked. By the time she got to the hallway in the attached residence, she was completely naked. She walked like a robot into the bedroom and toward the bath. When the light came on, she was standing naked in front of the full-length mirror attached to the bathroom door.
“Oh, my God . . . ”
Her face, neck and forearms were covered with scratches, scrapes and dirt. Her entire body was peppered with leaves and debris that had worked its way down and up into her clothing. Long rivulets of grime ran down her neck and over her chest. Her knees and shins looked as if they’d been whipped and were smeared with dirt and green stains. Her hair was a mass of tangles.
She turned on the shower and got in, hoping there was enough water in the world to wash her clean.
Turning slowly in the spray, she watched the dirt and grime flow off, swirl around her feet and disappear down the drain. She started with a shampooing, feeling carefully through her hair and on her scalp for things stuck and tangled in it, alive or not. Then she lathered her entire body and rinsed in a fine spray that stung her and burned against the scrapes on her face and arms. She didn’t mind. She repeated the lather-rinse cycle three times.
She blotted herself off with the most luxurious towel in the world, then took a good look at the cuts, scrapes and holes on her legs and arms. One or two looked like they might need attention, but the rest were just minor lacerations. She found a can of topical antiseptic in the medicine cabinet and sprayed it on them.
She brushed her teeth for ten minutes.
She walked naked back into the clinic, prepared a syringe with a broad spectrum antibiotic and injected it into her thigh. She followed it up with another one in the form of a two-thousand milligram tablet poked from a bubble pack and swallowed dry. Lastly, she searched through the drawers and cabinets until she found a partial tube of wormer. Disregarding the dosage, she squeezed the remaining paste into her mouth and swallowed with a scowl.
The kitchen was next. She pulled one fish and one meat dinner from the freezer and cooked them both in the microwave. The scent as they cooked almost drove her mad. She wolfed them standing against the counter, then washed it all down with a liter of synthetic milk. She left the plastic trays on the counter.
She brushed her teeth for another ten minutes.
When she got into bed and wrapped the covers around her, the moons that had guided her home were drifting over her just as they had for the last four nights. This time, though, their job was done; their ward was safe and secure. She smiled at them and rubbed her feet rhythmically against the clean sheets. A large beetle drummed once against the impenetrable screen next to her bed.
“You can’t come in,” she told it.
She slept the dreamless sleep of the dead.
* * *
She awoke refreshed and alert—and wary. She’d been so glad to get inside she’d forgotten until that moment she was still in danger from Smith and his minions. While she was getting dressed, she thought about what to do next. There wasn’t a lot of thought involved in the solution to her problem.
What she needed was allies. She just didn’t know how to find them.
An ally could operate secretly, without causing suspicion. The ally could ask questions discreetly; could feel and probe here and there without danger—provided he or she knew what not to step in.
She’d met a good number of the project’s personnel in the process of doctoring them, but she hadn’t formed any close relationships with any of them. There hadn’t been any time for that.
She scrolled the phone directory to see if any of the names might inspire confidence. She got no warm and fuzzy vibrations from any of them. In her hyper-vigilant state, all the moving list of names did was inspire more paranoia. Any of them could be working for Smith for all she knew. They could all be in on it.
She was pacing over by the door when the buzzer sounded. Her first reaction was to find a place to hide, but reason calmed her. Whoever was there couldn’t know she was supposed to be dead or they wouldn’t be ringing. She crept up on the door and flicked on the viewer. A man and woman were standing outside, facing one another. The woman reached over and pressed the buzzer again.
“This is crazy,” the man said, barely audibly. “I thought you said she was dead already.”
“Maybe not,” the woman said in a low voice. “There’s always a chance she’s still alive.”
Bastards.
The urge to hide filled her from the bladder upwards.
It was a bigger conspiracy than she thought. Here were two collaborators on her very door step. Sent, no doubt, just to make sure she was dead.
“We have to go to security about this,” the woman said.
“We discussed that,” the man said, not looking at her. “We don’t know who’s working for Smith.”
Oh, thank God!
Donna had the door open and was pulling them through almost before they had time to react.
“Donna Applegate?” Rachel said.
“I think so,” Donna said.
“You’re alive!” Rachel said.
“You bet I am. This . . . this entire project is bullshit.”
“I know,” Rachel added in the same voice. “This is bullshit.”
“They tried to kill me . . . ”
“I figured they’d try that. Wouldn’t play ball, right?”
“Exactly.”
“I told you,” Rachel said to John. “Didn’t I tell you?” She turned to Donna. “We have to talk."
* * *
They’d gathered around the large lab bench in the clinic. Sitting up on the bench, legs and arms crossed, Rachel told Donna about the problem with the inventories and the life forms she had discovered—and in particular the singularly unique one John had stumbled upon and was almost killed by. She outlined why the organism was so important and her suspicion that Smith knew about its presence.
Donna listened, then, arms propped mechanically on the bench and her head barely moving, started in with the details of her adventure in the green, courtesy of Smith and his boys. John could feel the hostility and resentment about what they’d done to her coming from Donna like heat from an overworked motor. As she spoke, John paced back and forth, hands on his hips, listening to her every word. From time to time, Donna would stop and stare up into space or at the bench top, grim-faced and angry, before starting up again. John swore that in those pauses the bright blue half of her half-blue, half-brown eye glowed with a light if its own as if fueled by her hatred from within.
When Donna finished telling her story, Rachel was staring at her sympathetically, not quite sure what to say, or how to console her. “They threw you right out of the shuttle?” she finally said.
Donna lowered her head, her eyes closed tight as if trying to shut the memory out. “They did,” she replied flatly.
“So they think you’re dead,” Rachel surmised.
“That’s a logical but stupid fucking conclusion,” Donna said, head coming up and eye flaring defiantly. “I’m not dead yet.”
Donna’s anger had rubbed off on John. He rubbed his hands together carelessly as if the anger was right there on his palms. “What now?” he asked. He’d heard enough and was ready to move on to a strategy for survival.
“The first thing,” Rachel said, “is to get a message to Health and Safety—tell them what’s going on.”
“Fuck that,” Donna said. “I say we go right to the police first, then the franchise board. Richthaus has to know about this. The bastards tried to kill me. Ed Smith should die and lose his franchise, too.”
“It doesn’
t matter who we send it to,” John said angrily. “You can bet he’s filtering every goddamned message that's sent. I’d do the same. The orbiter is the link to the Commonwealth. All communications, food, medicine, law enforcement—what there is of it—comes through the orbiter. And Smith controls the orbiter.”
“Right,” Donna said. “So how do we do it?”
“Code a text-only message,” Rachel said. “And send it to someone we trust.”
“In what? Pig Latin?” John quipped.
“No, not Pig Latin,” Rachel said impatiently. “But we can think of something, like an embedded code—I don’t know— something.”
“We can encrypt the message—scramble it,” Donna suggested.
“No we can’t,” John said. “It’s illegal.”
“But I’ve heard of those things that can do it.”
“Outlawed,” he said. “It’s a serious offense to encrypt a message. Besides, they’d come down on the sender like a hammer as soon as they detected it.”
“We can send it anonymously,” Donna said.
“That’s impossible,” John said.
They thought it over in silence, each buried in their own thoughts. John had moved a dozen feet away and studied the ceiling in thought, trying to pull all the pieces together. Rachel fiddled with piece of scrap paper.
“I know how,” Rachel said finally.
“How?”
“I’ll send a bogus message to my friend Vic. I’ll talk about things we never did and things we never said.”
