Approaching Oblivion (Jezebel's Ladder Book 4)

by Scott Rhine

  Once the alien was well clear and Toby’s breathing wasn’t as ragged, he waited another ten minutes to be sure. Then Toby whispered a report on the incident into his mask, grateful for the muffling effect. “Stray L panda adult male encountered on the path. Note: always have cover ready to dive into and a distraction to throw. Food works best. Normal microphones are fine for capturing panda chatter, but we need to switch our personal communication to subvocal throat pickups. Otherwise, the whole invisible thing is wasted.”

  His elevated heart rate spurred him to move faster, and Toby arrived at the new Green camp early. The foragers were moving west toward Elysium. He climbed into the crook of a tree and focused the parabolic ear at the group, waiting for someone to speak. The hunched women dug up some sort of yams with mindless efficiency. Forty minutes passed before one of the worker women shrieked. Pointing at the ground, she leapt backward. Toby took a series of photos because the satellite wasn’t in position yet. However, swiveling the microphone and composing a decent picture at the same time proved difficult.

  One of the male guards grunted and ambled over with his club ready. Bending over, he brought up a thin, green snake. Then the guard cuffed the woman. Pointing, he gave her a brief order, and she resumed her labor as he waddled back to the shade.

  ****

  Most of the photos turned out off-center or blurred, but the blow to the agricultural worker’s face turned out as crisp and clean as the cover of Life magazine. Toby could see the attacker’s fangs bared and ears laid back as he cuffed the cringing female. Even the male’s eyes glared with arrogant wrath. This matched Toby’s observations of dominance behavior in simians. In his report before the entire crew late that night, Toby said, “The Greens don’t talk much. As you can see, the protectors frown on it.”

  “They’re cruel,” Yvette said.

  “Maybe sound attracts predators, and they want everyone to be safe,” Toby suggested. He didn’t believe that, but the suggestion gave him a chance to talk with Yvette face-to-face.

  On the computer screen, Lou complained, “We only gleaned ninety-seven words, and they were mostly the same ones. We’ll need a lot more for analysis.”

  “I almost fell asleep getting that much. All I really did successfully today was collect samples of scat from the workers. When I tried to eat my own lunch, the L pandas almost caught me. If the males hadn’t been on siesta, I’d be toast. We need a better mechanism,” Toby announced.

  Yuki said, “If you could plant a bug on one of the males . . .”

  Toby snorted. “And pour honey in his ear while he’s sleeping? No thanks.”

  Zeiss surprised everyone by offering, “What if you hid the bug in a really nice spear, like the obsidian one we saw at the gravesite?”

  “We could track the whole tribe with a radio locator from one of our suits,” Red added. “Then we could find the bug and download data whenever we want.”

  “It would work for the bamboo-plantation crew, too,” Lou agreed, “and I’d get a wider vocabulary sample. Maybe those guards shoot the breeze about bamboo, babes, and brontosaurus burgers.”

  Toby nodded. “These guys seem to pick up anything as a gift. It wouldn’t be hard to drop a Trojan spear near one of their camps.”

  Lou added, “Visual context will still be important for deducing dialogue.”

  “I’ll try to set up a blind by the plantation and use a telephoto lens whenever we hear activity. Does anyone know why that rogue male walked by me this morning?”

  “No,” Red admitted. “Since we have photos, we can do comparisons against other sites and look for patterns.”

  “Why do so many different males come through the tribe?”

  “Most males departing the group leave on a raft. Eventually, someone new arrives to replace them,” Red replied.

  “Keep an eye out. Tomorrow, Oleander and I scout the avalanche site,” Toby announced. “It’s within a kilometer of the north outpost, and we haven’t seen an aborigine in that region yet. It should be a quiet little hike by comparison.”

  “Can I come along?” Yvette asked.

  Everyone paused. Red asked, “Uh . . . why?”

  “We need more experts in xenobiology. I’m a nurse, and Toby can train me. With only eight hours of daylight, we need as many hands at the dig as possible.”

  “Too dangerous without the armor,” Oleander decreed.

  “You walk around without it,” Toby countered.

  Oleander said, “To reach a safety shell, and I don’t go past the secure perimeter.”

  “So I’ll build a tent at the site, camouflage, and add sensors.”

  “Sounds like a lot of effort,” Oleander grumbled.

  “This could tell us a lot about their technology, diet, biochemistry, and culture,” Yvette said.

  Stunned by Yvette siding with Toby, Zeiss said, “We’ll give it a trial run. Set up a safety shell first and then the tent. Oleander, take the rifle. The north shell is fairly high up the canyon wall. You should have a clear shot at any predators that wander by, but don’t shoot the aborigines. Yvette, take the Taser.”

  “Until we up the power, that’s just going to make the pandas mad,” Toby said.

  “It isn’t for the pandas,” Red explained.

  Chapter 29 – Plato and the Secrets of the Lost Pandas

  Out-of-body, Oleander spent the first morning at the avalanche site looking for natural cover. Once she located a suitable crevasse, Toby hauled native-looking materials there in a wheelbarrow to construct a shelter. He finished the framing of a three-person bolt-hole by midday and recharged the shimmer suit’s batteries while he ate lunch in the coolness.

  “Herk used your helmet-camera shots to design a custom door,” Oleander told him over the radio. “He should have it down to me in another two hours.”

  “Roger. I’ll grid off the site and prepare it for digging. I can bring back the skeleton and spear in the wheelbarrow.”

  “What will you do if you run into Blutarsky and the Beastie Boys?”

  “The carrier is ceramic. I’ll detach the wheel and blow the rest.”

  “Stone Age Mission Impossible,” Oleander joked.

  “The show or the movies?”

  “The old series with Leonard Nimoy. I loved the master of disguises. That was before computer graphics did everything. Barbara Bain even looked a bit like my gran. When I was ten, my brother and I used to sneak everywhere on covert missions.”

  “Who knew you were really training for Labyrinth?”

  “Damn it, Baatjies, sometimes you’re almost human,” Oleander muttered.

  Late that afternoon, he discovered that the frame he’d installed was crooked because the pieces of wood hadn’t been exactly the same length. While he tried to wrestle and pound the door into place, Oleander called him again. “We sighted Blutarsky!”

  “Here?” Toby asked, crouching.

  “No, he’s poling down the river on one of those rafts,” Oleander replied.

  “Somehow he walked for a day and found a raft on the banks?”

  “He has a sack of food, too.”

  “Now that sounds like Blutarsky, but I didn’t see a tool belt on that boy. Do you have live satellite feeds on him?”

  “For a few more minutes.”

  “Backtrack upriver for the next . . . thirty klicks and see if you see a corner store.”

  She relayed the request while Toby brushed the bones of a ribcage clean. The dead panda had been pinned by the legs and either bled out or starved. Most of this corpse was under shallow ground cover. He dictated notes with zeal. “This isn’t a shirt like I first surmised; rather, it appears to be the remains of a leather backpack. The hide has been cured. I’ll take samples to detect the method they used to treat the animal skin and which animal it might have been. This is a stone adz, used for shaving wood or scraping hides. Any food has been rendered unrecognizable from decay. However, soil samples should turn up the DNA of the grains or meats enclosed. Here is a set of
small ivory darts. They appear similar to the toothpicks I always see the males with. Perhaps this is a sign of wealth or status.”

  In the middle of Toby’s inventory, Herk interrupted. “Toby, you were right. We found another bamboo plantation about twenty-six klicks from the first.”

  “So the male walks upstream a day to the nearest plantation, obtains or builds a raft, and then rides back downstream to the tribe. We’ll call this male Huck Finn. The workers load whatever crop they just harvested onto the raft. Then Huck and a buddy pole downstream for an L week or so till they get to Meteoropolis,” Toby deduced.

  “Yeah, for Huck to walk a thousand kilometers back to his tribe would take a lot longer.”

  “With seven hours of ambling each day and an hour for siesta, Huck would take about four L weeks to hump back. No wonder they have such a high male turnover in camp. I’m thinking the female pickers might have the better end of the deal,” Toby mused.

  “Sexist pig,” Oleander objected.

  Herk laughed. “Any other revelations?”

  “Just that I examined the source of the avalanche. The aborigines know how to use wedges and levers.”

  “Meaning?”

  “These pandas were buried alive on purpose. Yvette shouldn’t be allowed near this site.”

  “Now you want to protect her?” Herk asked sarcastically.

  Oleander intervened. “Actually, chief, my ex-roomie is a little sensitive about these things, especially if any of the bodies Toby finds are toddlers or infants.”

  “Roger. Base out.”

  Persisting at the dig until the sunlight was gone, Toby collected one complete skeleton, minus ankles.

  ****

  When Toby returned to the mesa, he stripped out of the dusty, sweat-drenched armor. Risa hosed the armor off outside while he sealed himself into the utility room of the distillery. There he picked up a pile of clean clothes that Oleander had left for him. The one perk of this job was someone else doing his laundry. They provided fresh camos every day so his smell wouldn’t give him away.

  First Toby labeled and stacked the day’s samples in airtight lockers, and then he stuffed his clothes into the decontamination bin. He was scrubbing in the chemical-hazard shower when someone slammed the inner door shut behind him. Expecting a blanket party, he let go of the pull handle, and the room fell silent except for the odd drip of soap foam coming off his body.

  Then he saw Yvette, her face contorted in rage. Ripping off her breathing mask, she said, “How dare you cut me out of scout duty?”

  Okay, having a blanket thrown over him and being pummeled by marines would have been preferable. Her anger hit him like a lash, but God she was gorgeous in those tight hiking shorts. Her cheeks were pink from emotion, and her dirty-blonde hair was braided like a sixteen-year-old. He had to close his eyes. “Oleander agreed.”

  “Am I able to hammer out tin panels for that solar boiler Risa, Nadia, Rachael, and Herk are working on? No! In fact, other than gardening, I have nothing to do around here until someone does something stupid and hurts themselves, which at this rate is going to be you.”

  He crouched on the floor, hugging his knees. “Sorry.”

  Realizing his discomfort, she blinked. “Why won’t you teach me to wear the sneak suit so I can become a xenobiologist like you? I want to be useful,” she said more softly.

  “You’re not strong enough.”

  “I’ve been doing exercises. You want me to wait until I pass the high-g physical? Fine. But then you have no excuses.”

  “I mean mentally. Oleander and I have to be prepared to kill things or watch them be killed every day. You couldn’t do that.”

  Yvette narrowed her eyes. “You didn’t lie, but that wasn’t the whole truth.”

  “If anything happened to you, it would be the death of me—literally—within months. We’re pair-bonded.”

  “What do you think happens to me if you head off Lone Ranger style and die? Of all the people at Elysium, you should be grounded here. You need to design the plant defenses and analyze things other people bring back. Your expertise is wasted out there.”

  The French accent, worse when she was mad, tickled the hairs at the back of his neck, and her smell gave him an erection. If she touched him, he might pass out. In a strained voice, he said, “Stop flattering me. Why are you here on Labyrinth? I know it wasn’t for me.” He remained on the floor. Her voice stirred him, even with his eyes closed.

  She must have sensed his arousal because she pulled the handle to finish rinsing him with the water, which was only a few degrees cooler than body temperature. “Finish up and get dressed. It’s a long story.”

  Still dripping, Toby put on clothes while Yvette waited on the bench. When he sat beside her, she related the whole sordid tale about the Magi exiling her.

  He responded, “So it wasn’t you that sent me the Plato note?”

  “What note?” she asked.

  He whispered, “Someone using the alias Plato told me that the Magi have not only bugged Mercy and Yuki, but are hiding secrets in Meteoropolis. I thought you were Plato, so I started investigating.”

  Her eyes lit with excitement. “What did you find?”

  She was turning to him for help again. There was hope. “From what you’ve told me, we can’t trust Sojiro either.”

  “He’s never done anything wrong.”

  “Really? Why did he change from painting the ceiling to the walls of the barn? How could he put a brush to that material and not know it was shimmer ceramic? When I saw Yuki in the medical bay, she was splattered with paint. The last time she touched paint was to take Sojiro’s to the barn. He never completed his Mount Fuji mural, yet he never complained about the missing airbrush. We never found splatter anywhere. Who cleaned it up?”

  Her mouth fell open and looked so kissable. “You’re good at this criminal deduction. I never suspected.”

  “I’ve had practice covering up, while you haven’t,” Toby admitted. Yvette turned away, remembering her captivity. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why would Sojiro betray us?”

  “He might not see it that way. He may view it as helping us pass the test. Red’s friend spends a lot of time merged with the ship. It may be skewing his point of view.”

  “Are you working for the Magi?” she asked.

  “No. God, no. I know how much you hate them.”

  “Then you’re the only one apart from Z that I can trust, and he can’t act.”

  “I think we can rely on your roommate Oleander as long as we keep it need-to-know.”

  “Right. I’ll have to ease her into that. What else have you discovered?” Her voice was intimate and full of promise.

  “I have to bar the door so no one else sees. Is that okay?”

  Obviously tensing, she nodded.

  Shoving a wooden wedge under the door to block it shut, he dragged the set of lockers to the side. Behind them, on the wall, he had layered dozens of close-up pictures of the lake area in a circle. “I had to be indirect. I requested over two hundred photos zooming in on suspected plant life in the desert and deep water that can survive the flares. Every photo in this region came back with no gravity-sensor data. Without those readings, it’s just white clouds or blue water.” Pointing to the empty center, he said, “Snowflake doesn’t want us to know what’s there.”

  When she stood on tiptoes, he could see the very bottom of her perfect ass. The physical exertion of Labyrinth had made her legs more toned than they’d ever been in her life. It was torture.

  “But we could never get there,” she complained.

  We. It was we now. He trembled. Planning a crime had been fun. Plotting one with Yvette was erotic. He stood behind her and pointed at the river. “Actually, someone could stow away on a raft and get there in a week.” She was listening to him, rapt. He could feel her attention soak in like the Everclear Lou had once described.

  She leaned back against him idly as she said, “The hard part is finding a win
dow where the Magi won’t be watching the lake.”

  Panting, he replied, “It has to be when Sanctuary closes the radiation shutters. Whenever Daedalus flares, the ship will be completely out of contact for several days. Yuki said we should have a few weeks’ warning by watching the planet’s magnetic shift. As long as I take a spacesuit, the deep water should protect me.”

  Turning and planting a kiss on his cheek, Yvette shouted, “You’re a genius!”

  He bit his lip, trying to hold back his reaction. This was what he’d been waiting for, but he’d given his word not to touch her.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Could I hold you?” Toby begged.

  “You’ll help me find out what those monsters are hiding?”

  He nodded, unable to speak.

  “Just a hug,” she allowed.

  Tears pouring down his cheeks, he clung so tightly to her back that her shirt came untucked. When his breathing calmed to the normal range, he didn’t let go of her. “I love you,” he sobbed.

  “People are going to think that I beat you,” Yvette said, flushed from sharing the experience.

  “Can we do this again some time?” he asked. “Touching?”

  “Maybe when we find a way to get back from the lake without being seen by the natives.”

  Some part of him knew he was being used as a weapon, but she wasn’t so revolted anymore. Yvette needed him. That was close enough to love for now.

  Chapter 30 – The Language of Patience

  After Toby planted his three bugged spears, Yvette transitioned into scouting support for Oleander. The women built several new recon bases one to two days walk away and expanded the range of scouting projects. For his part, Toby threw himself into the base defenses. He met with Yvette regularly when she brought in new samples, with pictures of potential plants on the wall: tangle vines, poisonous fruit, stinking fungi, flowers that attracted stinging insects, and leaves that secreted enough acid to cause blisters. During visits, Oleander accompanied Yvette to make sure her friend was safe. Yvette confined the visits to the desk in the utility room where he stored his microscope and notebooks.