Approaching Oblivion (Jezebel's Ladder Book 4)

by Scott Rhine

  Toby wouldn’t yield. “Zinc is too rare and requires four different processes to extract, including electricity. It’s also borderline on the 1200 rule. This much effort would cause the natives to abandon the idea because they’re too lazy.”

  Risa surrendered when Yuki brokered a compromise that allowed her to add separate bronze alloys for tin, arsenic, and silicon. “Each tribe can succeed with one of those types. We’ve seen tin in the eight-sided nodes and arsenic in fruit pits. In the desert, we have plenty of copper and silicon.”

  In retaliation, Risa attacked Toby’s proposal for latrines. His was the only idea to resist veto because of the list of local parasites that pandas could pick up by walking through feces up to a week old. “None of these vectors can travel more than two meters before dying. This is the same solution that Rockefeller used to revitalize the American south. If we reduce the parasites infecting the pandas, they’ll have more energy and live longer.”

  The group gave her a replacement veto, which she employed to sink jewelry, both obsidian and metal. “Sorry, Sojiro. Art is fine for trade and philosophy, but they’ll discover that themselves when they’re ready. For now, jewelry would only give the slave owners who hide in caves another way to mark their status. Hell, they’ll need more slaves to make it for them.”

  The last idea to die was pi. The concept was deemed too complex. They were left with eighty-five gifts to rank, an average of five per astronaut.

  Three broad categories emerged: heated materials, agriculture, and literacy. Half of the suggestions had been Toby’s, or ideas from his extended list that Yvette had liked enough to claim. After several votes, the top contenders included: crop rotation for nitrogen fixation, crop fertilization, alphabet, numerals, addition, multiplication, abolition, linen fabric and paper, ink, latrines, boiling water before drinking, bathing in clean water (which included hand-washing before meals and wound sterilization), kiln-fired clay, bread, salting food for preservation, caffeinated tea, glassblowing, doping the glass to make cookware, alcohol/vinegar, bark as a fever reducer, herbal antibiotics, cheese, tin, bronze, hardwood ax handles, the plow, sling, saw, chisel, triangular bracing for construction, and clay plumbing.

  Mercy included a picture of the current prototype alphabet at the top of the ranked results. Yvette printed the list from her wrist computer and posted it proudly inside the utility-room door.

  After Zeiss and Red left on the shuttle, Yvette said, “You’re going to be remembered as the greatest benefactor in their race’s history.”

  Toby shrugged. “This list is by no means final. It just gives us a starting point for our ongoing dialogue. For example, now that I see the groupings, I feel stupid for not suggesting schools. That will help them much more than slings.”

  “See, you care about the pandas,” Yvette insisted. It showed progress integrating his empathy.

  “I care more about you,” he insisted. “I know what you’re planning. Let me go instead.”

  “I need you here to shadow me with the rover from the high desert. If I get in trouble with anything, you should be able to talk me through it.”

  “But your cover mission will only take you as far as the birthing village.”

  “I’ll stay there . . . until they warn me about the impending flare, and then I’ll head downstream as fast as I can.”

  “Tha-that’s insubordination. Everyone will see the signal on the satellite. This is against regulations, and I can’t lie.”

  “Z practically ordered us to investigate this as Plato. I wanted to pass him some sort of note at the conference, but we have nothing new to report after all this time.”

  “When they ask me, I’ll have to confess.”

  Yvette grabbed him by the front of his shirt and waited until he was mesmerized by her eyes. In a bedroom voice, she whispered, “By law, a husband doesn’t have to testify against his wife. I’ll sign civil union papers today. If you cover for me creatively, I’ll move into your quarters when I get back to Elysium.”

  A shudder passed through Toby’s body. Blinking a few times, he promised, “No one will track you.”

  “Don’t tell me how,” she insisted, because she couldn’t lie to others if they questioned her. Sometimes one needed a monster to help catch monsters.

  Chapter 32 – The Journey of a Thousand Kilometers

  Practice didn’t go well for Yvette. The morning started with Toby warning her that the river was the least-studied ecosystem on the planet. He sounded like an old woman when he said, “Make your first practice swim a short one. There could be piranhas for all we know.”

  Risa agreed. “I still need to calibrate the sled controls and test out a few features, the most important of which is the auto-shutoff. If you release for three seconds, it triggers the motor kill switch. If the craft gets more than three meters from you, it will drop anchor to wait.”

  “Put your radio headset on,” Toby insisted. “We have to be able to communicate at all times.”

  Herk carried the aqua sled under one arm and remained conspicuously silent.

  “The river is faster in this area, three to five kilometers per hour,” Toby lectured. “With your weight the trolling motor maxes out at 11 kph, so we want to practice somewhere calmer.” Toby made her pick a deep, slow-moving fishing hole for testing and only stopped complaining when she stripped down to her underwear to swim. Compared to the sweltering day, the river felt like tepid bathwater. Learning to start the motor took so long she was afraid her skin was going to wrinkle.

  Sliding an arm in each end of the horseshoe shape, she squeezed the throttle like a motorcycle and rammed into a mangrove root. “Gently,” Risa admonished with a wince.

  Floating in the water, Yvette was too light for the weight sensor, as it had been calibrated for Risa in the workroom. Even after adjustment, the vehicle shut off at inopportune moments. Once Yvette finally mastered the basics, she took the sled on a wide curve onto the river proper. Sideways, the river slowly carried her toward the rocky shallows. When she attempted to turn into the current, the sled stalled. As she was trying to restart the engine, she tumbled beneath the white water. This accident revealed the second flaw—the translation headset microphone wasn’t waterproof.

  Toby and Risa hovered like old women and wanted to correct the problems before continuing; however, Yvette spit out the river water and said, “Later. I need to learn to ride this thing during daylight.”

  Herk reeled in the anchor and lugged the sled back to the baby pool.

  When Yvette limped out of the water, Toby paled. “You’re bleeding.” She had a shallow gash across her right hip.

  “And bruised. You can kiss it later. Right now, I’m going to ride that water beast if it kills me.”

  Mutely, the others watched her slog back to the fishing hole. The sled took her a moment to find in the shade because the clear plastic really did blend in with the water. After a few more tweaks to the hardware, she was puttering handily around the pond. Reefing the sled on a rock stalled her again. Since the vehicle was too heavy for her to lift alone, Herk came over to assist.

  “There are actually rollers that attach underneath for this,” Herk explained.

  When she climbed out to help lift, Toby’s eyes were glued to her hips.

  Toby splashed through the shallows toward her. “Yvette, don’t look down. Herk, get her out of the water, now.”

  “What?” Yvette asked.

  “This may sting.”

  She made the mistake of glancing toward her feet as Herk scooped her up. Her formerly bloody hip was rimmed in black spaghetti, with half a dozen strands that bulged in the center.

  When Toby tossed white powder at them, she could swear she heard a hiss like a lobster being tossed into a pot of boiling water. “Herk, don’t yank them off like that or the teeth with stay in. I’ll have to remove what’s left with tweezers. Use the electric match,” he said handing Herk a glowing coil with a small handle. “Risa, put this parasite in a tube from my b
elt. We need to find out what they injected her with.”

  While the others freed her legs from the rubbery creatures soaked with her blood, she turned her head and vomited into the burbling waters.

  An hour later, Yvette was in bed with her knee propped up. She was light-headed but otherwise unharmed as Toby explained, “Blood attracts them. Yours eventually killed the one. I was able to counteract the anticoagulant they secrete. The chromium in them shouldn’t affect us unless we try to eat them.”

  “Relax, this could have happened on Earth,” Yvette said.

  “I’ve already commissioned the thickest neoprene suit we can manufacture to protect you against rocks and xeno-lampreys.”

  “I’ll have the shimmer armor on next time.”

  “It has chinks. You don’t go back into the water until we have this extra layer. Risa is placing a neck ring at the top so we can attach your helmet. I don’t want to be out of touch with you again.” He was pacing, and she could feel the waves of fear radiating from him.

  “That sounds expensive. Won’t that break the scouting budget?”

  “It did, but I added my bonuses. Risa donated the locking ring.”

  “You just want to see me in a skin-tight catsuit, admit it,” she teased.

  Toby stopped in his tracks as the image flitted through his imagination. “Wow.”

  Patting the bed beside her, she said, “Sit here.”

  He obeyed.

  When she placed a hand on his, he closed his eyes to savor the contact. She said, “We’re not a normal, healthy couple. You violated my deepest trust and tortured me in ways I’ll never forget, but since then . . . with treatment, you’ve proven that I can rely on you in many ways. I’ve always respected you as a scientist, and you’re growing to become a man I could admire.” She licked her lips. “If you were any other man, the mix of emotions I just felt from you would have caused me to seduce you.” His eyes were huge, and she could feel his pulse race. “Unfortunately, the sight of you and the sound of your voice can still cause me to cringe.”

  Toby made a face like he’d just swallowed the lampreys.

  “I’m going to need you to turn off the light and not say a word. We probably won’t go all the way, and we proceed at my pace. My hip still hurts. We’ll probably end up just holding, understood?”

  He nodded fervently.

  “Now, why is that light still on?”

  ****

  The next week, Risa and the women on the scouting team held a dress rehearsal by the river.

  “Where’s everyone else?” Yvette asked.

  Risa said, “Rachael and the others are busy making dependency diagrams of possible gifts on a whiteboard. You know: tea requires boiling which needs metal pots, but metal can only be produced by smelting at high temperature—similar to the glass furnace. Most progressions required charcoal in the early stages, which in turn needed hardwood supplies and low-oxygen ovens. Her biggest challenge will be the shift from renewable resources to limited ones without leaving the planet looking like Easter Island.”

  Having the others ignore her scouting mission wasn’t a bad thing in Yvette’s mind. She donned the skin suit and then the shimmer armor. The backup throat microphone had been scavenged from Herk’s combat armor. As the first pleasant surprise of the experiment, the underwater portion of the armor took almost no power to maintain. Only whitewater challenged its processors.

  “Each suit battery should last a good ten hours at this rate, longer if you stick to deep water,” Risa predicted.

  “The helmet feels top heavy, and it restricts my field of view,” Yvette complained.

  “Our image projection doesn’t cover the facemask well, either, so keep the mirror visor down,” Risa advised.

  “I’m cleared for tomorrow?”

  “Roger,” the engineer replied.

  Meanwhile, Herk and Toby readied everything in the rover storage cave.

  That evening, Toby fell asleep at his desk double-checking everything for her mission.

  Yvette showered, put on a robe, and then kissed him awake. “We’re alone. How’s it going? I missed you today.”

  He whispered, “The rover’s in place on the east wall of the canyon. Herk and I climbed all day. We hammered in a spike and had the rover winch itself up. I’ll shadow you from the wall with Cerberus your entire trip. Everyone else will watch from the satellite as you approach the birthing village. You can abort at any time. If you do decide to go through with the second phase, refer to your trip to Vienna over the open channel, and I’ll trigger the distraction. I’ll still be able to hear you on the rover band after that, but no one else will.”

  “I’m nervous,” she admitted.

  “This is natural. You are doing great things on new frontiers. Girls in grade school will hear your story and want to grow up to be you.”

  “That is sweet, but if I succeed, we may never leave this planet. If I fail, I may never return to base. I’m so wired I’ll never sleep.”

  Toby shrugged. “I could prescribe something.”

  At a tug, her robe fell open. “Are chemicals your answer to everything?”

  Without prompting, he shut off the light.

  ****

  In the predawn light, Yvette could use her helmet’s night vision. Everyone had to check off on their monitoring system before she could climb into the water via the fishing hole. “Here goes nothing,” she proclaimed, engaging the ignition by punching in the proper code.

  The river gods smiled, and she sailed away at full steam. Between her and the river’s push, they made 15 kph. She relaxed into a groove, swerving only to avoid big rocks. Past the merge point, the lush green of the jungle passed in a blur. She sipped electrolytes while admiring the great trees and the canopy they spread over the canyon. She expected the glare of twin suns to be overwhelming, but only a small amount of light filtered through the clouds and layers of leaves. The trip felt like inner-tubing on vacation.

  She passed another bamboo plantation, but this time, instead of a cave, the guards had a stone hut. The wall ringed around the base of a large tree and had no windows. The sloped roof was covered by sod or lichen mats. Though she was transmitting everything at low resolution from her helmet feed, she wanted to snap a few shots with the high-resolution still camera. Soon after Yvette triggered the shutter, the hut was hidden by the foliage again. “Wow. If we didn’t know this place was here, we’d never find it from the air. The stones they used to construct it looked long and thin, like slate or flagstone. The builders tried to stagger the gaps each layer, but the sizes weren’t consistent.”

  Toby broadcast an image, and she said, “Close. Ours were a little thinner. Where’d you get those, the mining village?”

  “Cotswold, England: sheep fences near Stonehenge.”

  The scout shivered. “Do you think the same people showed us this technique?”

  “Coincidence,” Toby insisted.

  After four hours, Toby said, “Your sled battery is low. You should pull over, eat, and swap cells—maybe even recharge.”

  “I can make it another hour, easy,” Yvette said, looking forward to rubbing the cramp in her left hand. “I’ve only traveled sixty kilometers, and the suit is going strong.”

  “Your reaction time has degraded. Please. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

  Several minutes later, she heard the low rushing.

  Toby came over the radio. “Falls coming up.”

  “How high is the drop?”

  “Um . . . a meter max. Most of the drops are smaller. There’s an easy path on the shore to your right.”

  Reluctantly, she steered for the calmer waters. “It’ll cost me time.” When she reached the south bank, she waded onto the beach and grabbed the front bumper as Herk had. The sled was so heavy that she could only lift it a few centimeters. Grit wedged into the tiny rollers, and the vehicle refused to budge. She didn’t have enough strength to drag the sled through the sand like the large security guard with adrena
line-override strength. Panting, she announced, “New rule: the pilot has to be able to move this thing after being packed for the mission and doing fifty pushups.”

  Opening her helmet, Yvette chewed off a chunk of nutrient bar, something impossible to do with the helmet or gas mask on. She clicked the facemask back into place as she pondered. The whorls and eddies on the stream had a soothing beauty, even though they might drag her under.

  “Charge up while you rest,” Toby encouraged.

  “Too public,” she objected. “I can tell rafts use this route all the time.” She chewed the rest of the food bar in three big bites as she switched out the low battery.

  “The other bank has a safer clearing fifty meters back, about ten meters from the shore.”

  “I’m not backtracking.”

  “Blast. Why did you just turn off your helmet cam?”

  “I’m peeing behind a bush, and I don’t want everyone to see. Keep watch from the rover thermals.”

  “Have you ever been white-water rafting?” asked Risa.

  “In a canoe.”

  Risa said, “If you wait an hour for the satellite flyover, I can plot a course through without drops and plot it on your helmet screen.”

  Zipping up, Yvette said, “Just tell me right or left from the rover eye in the sky.”

  “There are a few trees in the way, girl.”

  “As Z would say, we’re burning daylight.”

  Yvette headed toward the rapids before she lost her nerve.

  “Move to the middle in forty meters,” Risa announced.

  The nurse-turned-scout raced over to the center of the stream. Craning her neck, she could see the desired path. “Check.”

  They navigated like this for some distance until Yvette asked, “Right or left around this big rock?”

  “I can’t see,” Risa wailed.

  “Guess!”

  Toby interrupted. “The river turns slightly to the right here, which means the right side should be slower moving.”

  She swung the sled right. Seconds later, she spotted the mistake—a full meter drop. “Merde!”