Chris nodded. “National Aeronautics and Space Administration. One of a whole bunch of different space agencies that formed Earth’s Starfleet in the twenty-second century. But you called them ‘creatures.’”
“Not much gets by you, does it?” Charlie marveled. “In a sense, they are creatures as much as plants. NASA scientists combined the genetic codes of certain algae with those of certain species of luminescent jellyfish. What you get is plants that change color under certain chemical conditions. They can tell you if there isn’t enough oxygen in the air you’re breathing, or if there’s too much of another gas that might harm you. In the past two hundred years, scientists have used those same jellyfish codes to create many different kinds of plants that can do many different things.”
“What do these guys do?” Chris wondered. Except for the color changes, this particular species of jellyplant looked like asparagus ferns, soft and feathery and inviting to the touch. He wondered if they’d feel anything if he petted them.
“These guys,” Charlie said, “can not only read atmospheric gases, but they can predict earthquakes as well.”
The information eased Chris’s mind somewhat after recent events.
“Just like the Gizmo?” he asked.
“Maybe even better than the Gizmo. Of course, if Heston found out, it might hurt his feelings…”
Chris had been reading spy stories lately, and he grinned. “This tape will self-destruct in ten seconds.”
Now every morning, even before he ran to the barn to visit Maia, he stopped to check the jellyplants.
Petula went into foal just before dawn on a Monday morning. Chris heard Heston answer what must have been a comm call from Charlie, then rush down the stairs still clambering into his jeans. He saw the lights on in the barn and, still in his pajamas, tore across the yard. Willa was the last to arrive, tying the belt on her robe, twisting her hair up out of the way. She fished in the pockets of the robe and handed Chris his slippers without a word.
The mare leaned against the side of the box stall, panting. Charlie stood beside her, his touch calming her. Heston was attaching various devices that would monitor her blood pressure and heart rate, as well as the foal’s. The other horses had their heads over the sides of their stalls, watching silently.
“Can I stay, Mom?” Chris whispered after a few moments. But before Willa could speak, Heston did.
“Too many humans around will make her skittish…”
“Hes…” Willa started to say, but Charlie intervened.
“Could take all day, Chris,” he said, looking at the boy under his eyebrows with an expression that said: Don’t fight this one. “We’ll keep the comm open. You can watch from the house if you keep the sound off at your end.”
That advice seemed to satisfy everyone. Chris and his mother went back to the house. By midafternoon Jenna, the second mare, had also started to labor. By nightfall Petula had delivered a sturdy bay colt, and somewhere around dawn Jenna’s chestnut filly arrived.
For once Heston had enough to do to keep him from obsessing about the Gizmo, the fault lines, even the Neworlders, though the last were never far from his mind.
“Wrong climate for horses, eh?” were his final words as he wiped his brow, clapped Charlie on the back, and watched the filly stagger to her feet and start to nurse. “We’ll see about that!”
Sometime the next afternoon, after both men had caught up on much-needed sleep, Heston ordered Charlie to implant the remaining mares, Starfleet evacuation plans be damned.
5
Talos IV
“I sense something ominous about to happen,” Vina said quietly beside him.
“Are you reading my mind?” Pike asked, bemused. He’d wondered if she could from the beginning.
She shook her head. “I saw it in your eyes the first time you looked at me.”
“Then you’re very perceptive,” he said. “But why am I not surprised?”
They stood side by side on one of the balconies, watching the sun go down over the sea. Surreptitiously he studied the planes of her face in the setting sun. He still wasn’t sure if she was exactly as he remembered her. There were times when she seemed as familiar as if they’d been together for years, and times like this when he was reminded that their relationship was still in its nascent phase.
“You’re right,” he said grimly, deciding to trust her. “The earthquakes and the floods were only the beginning…”
ELYSIUM
The Gizmo grew bigger. It now occupied most of the space between the house and the barn and threatened to spread into the front yard until Willa protested and Heston began expanding it away from the house into the fields beyond. Added to the power station were deep-core probes to read seismic activity, and a high-atmosphere weather drone. Chris was fascinated by the weather station, its old-fashioned anemometer whirling in the morning breeze, the ambient temperature and humidity altering by the second. Mischievous, he liked to breathe on the humidity index just before Heston came around to check it every morning.
“Funny…” Heston would mutter to himself, rubbing the back of his neck and gazing up at a cloudless sky. “It doesn’t seem that damp…”
Every time Heston went into the city, he came back with more bits and pieces which he spent the next day or so, well into the night, fitting into place.
“Pretty soon that thing’s going to be able to predict the future,” Charlie remarked dryly, trying to cheer Willa up. It only made her frown deepen.
“It’s becoming his whole life,” she said, shaking her head. “And if it doesn’t do what he says it’ll do, it’s not just about our having to abandon the homestead. He’ll take it to mean that he failed somehow. A man who can move continents, but can’t manage his own land…”
Whatever dire predictions the Starfleet engineers might have made about new fault lines, everything was quiet for now. Summer came and went, and the winter rains returned, but less violently this time. The new colt and filly flourished, and soon it was evident that Maia and another mare were carrying as well.
Chris grew like a weed. By his eleventh birthday, he was nearly as tall as Willa. Working with the horses, running and climbing, had made him wiry and strong. Charlie made note of him watching the foals longingly from the rail fence, and made a decision.
“Too young?” Charlie repeated what Heston had just said. Charlie usually steered away from the Gizmo unless Heston specifically asked him to help, but he’d risked it today. “Heston, I sat a horse before I could walk. He can start on Petula as soon as her colt’s weaned.”
The day was overcast, and it would probably rain. Chris was up in his room doing math problems, but the windows were open and the damp air made the men’s voices carry farther than usual. Leaning cautiously out the window, he held his breath, not daring to hope.
“Maybe,” he heard Heston say. “You don’t have enough else to do? You’d have time to teach him to ride?”
“It’d be a privilege,” Charlie said.
“All right, you’ve worn me down,” Heston grumped.
Chris didn’t dare breathe. He went to the window and stuck his head out, hoping neither man would look up and notice him eavesdropping.
“What?” he heard Heston say. “Is that it?”
“If Maia has a colt…” Charlie began.
“Oh, no, you don’t! These horses aren’t pets; they’re an investment.”
“You want me to break ’em for you,” was all Charlie said.
There was a long silence.
“This is beginning to sound like blackmail,” Heston said, only half joking.
“Maia’s got the best bloodlines of the six,” Charlie said evenly, unperturbed by the accusation. “If she has a filly, you’ll want her as part of the next generation of breeders. But if it’s a colt…”
“Fifty-fifty odds,” Heston said. “You drive a hard bargain. All right. If it’s a colt, Chris can raise it. But I’ll decide down the road whether or not he gets to keep it.
”
Chris nearly cracked his head on the window frame in his haste. With a whoop that startled both men, he came tearing down the stairs and out into the yard.
“Thanks…Dad!” he blurted, throwing himself at Heston in a wild bear hug that nearly knocked them both over.
It was the first time he’d called Heston that, and the big man actually flushed with pride. Only then did Chris remember the real reason he was getting his wish. He turned to Charlie. “And thank you, Charlie.”
Charlie’s eyes crinkled. “Maybe you won’t thank me when you find out how much work it’s going to be…”
Charlie led Petula over to the rail fence. Chris swung up onto the mare’s back the way Charlie had shown him, a little awkwardly, but Charlie seemed not to notice. He adjusted the stirrups for the boy’s long legs, showed him how to hold the reins and said, “Give her her head. She’ll know what to do.”
It took Chris a moment to realize just how high off the ground he was. He wondered if horses, like dogs and big cats, could smell fear. Consciously he relaxed the muscles in his legs until he was “holding” Petula just the way Charlie had shown him. Feeling him settle, the mare responded by walking quietly around the paddock for a few turns.
“Now give her a nudge,” Charlie instructed quietly, and he did.
The mare eased into a gentle loping trot. Suddenly confident, Chris nudged her again and clucked to her the way he’d heard Charlie do, and she began to gallop.
At once terrified and exhilarated, Chris held on as Petula made the circuit of the paddock three times, four times before he reined her in, exactly the way Charlie had shown him. By the time he slid down to the ground, his cheeks were flushed and his eyes were glowing, and he was grinning from ear to ear. Only then did he notice Heston, leaning on the rail fence beside Charlie, scowling.
Chris looked from Heston to Charlie, wondering if it was something he’d done wrong. But Heston just made a noise in the back of his throat and went back to tinkering with the Gizmo.
“He’s determined to harness that volcano even without Starfleet’s help…” Willa muttered grimly, watching him from the porch. Chris noticed she’d developed a tendency to talk to herself as if no one else was around. But it was the word “harness” that caught his attention.
“Heston said something about that when we first came here. What does it mean?”
“It means…” Willa sighed. She was holding the small of her back as if it ached her. “…he’s going to scavenge parts from the Gizmo and move them in sections up to a weak spot in the magma core and channel some of the flow underground into the water table. It’ll harden almost instantly, raise the groundwater levels, and stabilize those faults.”
“It sounds dangerous.”
Willa shook her head. “It’s part of what he does, but usually with much more sophisticated equipment. The Council has refused to give him the permits or the equipment to do it on his own land, but he’s determined to go ahead on his own anyway…”
So, apparently, was the volcano.
The rumble under Chris’s feet was different this time. He saw it before he heard or felt it.
Heston had gone off in one of the ’cars that morning to, as he put it, “talk to the volcano,” bringing a section of the Gizmo with him. Willa was in the city overseeing a new shipment of building modules. Chris and Charlie were getting ready to drive the horses upland to graze on some of the new grass when the wind suddenly dropped and the birds went silent.
Charlie had been tightening the saddle cinch under Jenna’s belly. His head came up, listening, even before hers did.
“Uh-oh,” he said, looking over to where Chris was. “Hang on.”
Chris instinctively looked up to make sure nothing would fall on his head if it was a bad one, then braced himself against a support beam. Through the open barn door, he witnessed the most amazing thing. The open ground between the barn and the house began to ripple like a series of waves incoming on a beach, moving toward and past them.
The yearlings, who were out in the paddock and less acclimated than the mares, began rearing and running in frenzied circles. Chris held on as the waves reached the barn and the ground bucked beneath him. He heard things smashing in the house, watched as Willa’s hanging planters on the porch swung like lanterns on a ship in a storm. The jellyplants around the foundation had gone fluorescent, warning of danger. There hadn’t been any quakes in so long, he’d gotten out of the habit of checking them.
Mesmerized despite the racket the horses were making, not to mention the rolling thunder of the ground beneath them, Chris found himself counting the “waves.” When they reached thirteen, they stopped. Not sure if it was safe to move yet, he did anyway, hurrying outside to survey the yard, amazed that there was so little damage. The grass was torn up in places, and cracks had formed in some of the drier dirt, like crazes in glass when a rock hits it. One of the thermal vents was steaming a little more energetically than usual.
Distant rumbles suggested the waves were still continuing, moving away, and he wondered if they’d reach the Neworlders’ farm. Beyond that, it was unnaturally quiet.
Then the Gizmo fell.
There was no warning. The central core simply started to lean, then with a creaking, groaning sound that escalated into a high-pitched shriek, it tore away from the maze of interwoven jointed pipes and conduits and probes and circuits and toppled over with a great thundering, shaking the ground more than the worst of the quakes had, sending the horses rearing again. Instinctively Chris clamped his hands over his ears, then tentatively took them away, listening for something else to fall and break.
But the damage was done. The Gizmo lay on its side like some gigantic beached squid, all functions off-line, and with them everything on the homestead that ran through it.
“Aux power,” Charlie said quietly. The main connector was adjacent to the embryo chamber.
“Heston took it off-line!” Chris said, slamming the side of the chamber in frustration. “He’s been scavenging it to grow the Gizmo. He did this, you know!” He turned on Charlie. “It’s him fooling with that volcano that did this! I hope it kills him!”
Charlie didn’t say anything. He was outside seeing what he could reclaim from the Gizmo when Chris came running after him.
“I didn’t mean that,” he said.
“Yes, you did,” Charlie said, not looking at him. “Contrary to popular opinion, it’s when we’re angriest that we say what we really mean. You said it, and you got it out of your system, and no one heard it but the horses and me, and I’m not talking. You might have to give Maia a little extra sugar to keep her quiet, though.”
That made Chris laugh and broke the mood. He was helping Charlie pull pieces out of the fallen Gizmo when Heston’s aircar came sailing into the yard.
“Leave that alone!” he shouted, sliding the windscreen aside while the ’car was still powering down. He strode across the yard and stood between Charlie and the Gizmo, hands on his hips, scowling.
“Looks like you poured your thermocrete over a weak spot in the bedrock,” Charlie pointed out calmly, unperturbed by the bluster. “Your little ‘talk’ with the volcano set the wave motion going, cracked it right in half.”
“It’s not irreparable!” Heston barked. “We’ll have it up and running in less than a day.”
“You’ll need aux power before that,” Charlie pointed out. “Everything from your lights to your comm to the embryo chamber is out.”
“The embryos—!” If they started to thaw, he would lose them. Heston stormed toward the barn. Charlie calmly went back to what he’d been doing. He and Chris had the aux power up again within the hour.
Two days later, the volcano erupted, for the first time since Starfleet had surveyed the planet over two decades earlier. And Heston ended up seriously hurt.
“Spawned a little fumarole on the east flank, threw off a lot of steam and enough ash to make flyspecks on the Neworlders’ windowsills,” Heston dismissed it,
climbing over a knot of twisted piping to assess the damage to the Gizmo from a different angle. “Had absolutely nothing to do with the experiments I was running, no matter what Cotton Jonday says. Matter of fact, I was on my way back to tell you my readings indicated the beast was due for an eruption when the wave motion started. Anyway, we got the power back without losing a single embryo. And as soon as I get the Gizmo back online, I’m going to try a different approach.”
He made it sound as if he’d planned the whole thing, and no one had the energy to contradict him. He’d drafted Chris and Charlie to help him get the Gizmo repaired. Willa had started to pitch in, too, but he stopped her.
“Not until the doctor okays it,” he said gruffly.
“Doctor?” Chris repeated, turning to look at Willa in alarm. He saw his mother and stepfather exchange one of those looks then that made him wish he were older, or maybe younger, too young to constantly be caught between them.
In an extraordinary display of temper, Willa flung the spanner she’d been holding into the shrubbery.
“Thank you so much!” she spat at Heston. “I wanted to tell Chris myself!”
She stormed toward the house. Chris expected Heston to go after her, but Heston just picked up where he’d left off. Charlie took the conduit Chris had been holding in place and jerked his chin in Willa’s direction, and the boy ran after his mother.
“We still need your help with this!” Heston called after him, but Chris ignored him.
He and Willa sat on the porch while she told him her news.
“In a week or so we’ll know if it’s a boy or a girl,” she said when it was clear he didn’t know what to say. “Or we can decide to be surprised. What do you think?”
“I think I wish you’d told me before…before Heston said what he did.”
“I’m sorry. I should have told you as soon as I knew. I was trying to find the right moment. Are you disappointed?”
Burning Dreams Page 7
