“Ah, well, I see,” Weatherby said, though he didn’t quite understand her statement. “And, what of your future, once our task is complete? We are indeed headed for Jupiter and her moons. There may be some opportunities for you there if you wish it.”
“I suppose I should think on it more than I have. But I honestly do not know what will become of me,” she said, her smile fading. “It’s rather new to actually have a future to look forward to. But I have no idea what I will make of it.”
“What of a family, perhaps?” Weatherby said, not realizing the full gravity of his words until they were spoken. He suddenly felt as though he were venturing upon the frozen Thames at winter—never a safe endeavor.
However, Miss Baker misunderstood him. “I have no family to speak of, Tom,” she said, falling into a familiarity that had grown over weeks of conversation. “Perhaps I will stay in one of the Jovian colonies after all. I understand they are more tolerant of a woman on her own. Who knows? Perhaps I can make some small business of my alchemical skills.”
Weatherby raised his eyebrows at this. “Had Dr. McDonnell taught you that much?” he blurted out.
She turned and smiled at him coyly. “Why, Tom, you do not think I have it in me to be a great alchemist? Or perhaps a swordswoman instead?”
He hated how that smile so quickly robbed him of rationality and confidence. “No, of course not. I mean, you have skill with the sword. And with alchemy, it seems. I, um, simply meant to suggest, well . . . perhaps I am not entirely familiar with life in the colonies.”
“No, I daresay you are not,” she replied. “But I am, and I’ve survived it. And with the knowledge Roger—I should say, Dr. McDonnell—has given me, I can make my way well enough. One way or another.”
“Was it that hard?” he asked, trying to mask his curiosity with compassion.
Her eyes drifted downward to the deck. “I lost my father to the mines when I was eight, and my mother to the pox when I was twelve,” she said. “I did what I needed to do, and I picked up some skills, as you just witnessed. Thankfully, in the end, Roger took me in, gave me a home, helped me greatly.”
Weatherby was struck not only by the story, but the familiarity she had with her employer as well. “I’m sure he was most kind to you,” he said, for want of nothing better.
She looked up with a hardness in her eyes. “As I said, he helped me greatly, and I him.”
“I see.”
“No, Tom, I don’t think that you do, but that is a conversation for another day, I think,” she said. She then looked down at his sword, her smile returning. “So. With my swordsmanship no longer in question, do you think we might put my alchemical knowledge to the test, then?”
He followed her gaze. “What did you have in mind?”
“Give me your sword. You shall have it back the next time you stand guard over me.”
“I should hope so,” he said, unbuckling the scabbard from his belt. “The men haven’t been in port for quite a while!”
She laughed at this, then took the blade in hand and drew it. “A fine blade, Lieutenant. But we shall see what I might do with it. Could you escort me to the alchemical laboratory?”
Weatherby left her at her impromptu quarters; unsurprisingly, Finch was nowhere to be found, his story about O’Brian an obvious ruse to begin with. Their parting was awkward, as it seemed neither wished to be the one to say good night. Finally, Weatherby took his leave when he saw O’Brian having returned and tarrying nearby, as it was his watch to begin with.
After that, Weatherby decided to retire for the evening, but found his curiosity kept him from sleep. Miss Baker was, perhaps, all of seventeen, maybe eighteen at most. She had spent at least a year in the employ of Dr. McDonnell, and Weatherby felt it safe to assume that her feelings toward her former master, while mostly compassionate, were mixed at times. And that left a space of . . . four years? Five? It was a long time for a girl to be orphaned, especially on an outpost like Elizabeth Mercuris.
“I did what I had to do.” Images of a young Anne Baker, beggar’s bowl in hand, haunted him as sleep came. He resolved to be more cautious with his feelings toward her until he learned all he could of her troubled past.
Morning arrived abruptly in the form of a rather loud and exuberant midshipman. “Mr. Weatherby! Mr. Weatherby! Wake up!” Forester shouted.
“What? What is it?” Weatherby asked, feeling suddenly panicked. “Are we under attack?”
The boy merely laughed. “No, sir! Miss Baker is asking after you. She’s setting up a demonstration!”
Weatherby swung his legs out of his hammock. “A demonstration? A demonstration of what?”
“Alchemy, sir!” The boy headed for the door. “We’re told it’s to be quite spectacular.”
“I see,” Weatherby grumbled, running a hand over his face. She was headstrong, certainly. Were he more awake, and perhaps of a more self-reflective personality, he might admit such stubbornness was part of his burgeoning attraction. “Go on, Forester. I will be up in a moment.”
After splashing some water on his face, Weatherby grabbed his hat and coat and went above decks, where he could see a small crowd of idlers on the main deck, looking forward toward the bowsprit. There, Miss Baker had set up a table and had one of the 18-pound cannon balls upon it. “Ah, there you are, Lieutenant!” she called as he approached. “Let him through!”
The idlers parted and allowed Weatherby to move forward. “I did not think you would make such a spectacle of this,” he said quietly, trying not to allow his foul mood enter his voice.
“Nonsense,” she said sweetly. “If I am to make a name for myself as an alchemist, I need to start somewhere.”
“Very well, then,” he said. “I hope, for your sake, this comes off well.”
She handed him his sword. “If you please, Mr. Weatherby.” Her tone was one of challenge.
He looked at the blade. It caught the sun and stars particularly well; if nothing else, she had polished it perfectly.
“Now then,” she said, loud enough to be heard on the main deck below. “Let us see if I’ve been successful. I’m but a woman, so surely I am quite unable to test the blade properly.” The onlookers had a laugh at this; the tale of her bout with O’Brian had obviously spread. “Take your swing, sir.” She motioned toward the cannon ball.
Weatherby looked to see at least twenty men on the main deck, all rapt attention. Even Captain Morrow and Dr. Franklin were looking at him from the quarterdeck. He felt a stab of panic at the thought of seeing her working fail before everyone. “Miss Baker, are you quite sure?” he asked.
She put her hands on her hips. “Swing, Tom,” she said with quiet intensity.
“Very well.” He took his position in behind the table, facing the crowd, praying that whatever happened would not embarrass the young woman too greatly. Rearing back with the blade in both hands, he sliced downward.
A moment later, two halves of a cannon ball fell to the deck upon either side of the table, followed quickly by the two halves of the table itself—and then the blade, which embedded itself into the deck planking by more than six inches.
A cheer erupted from the men, and even Morrow and Franklin could be seen applauding and talking amongst themselves on the quarterdeck. Weatherby heaved and pulled his blade from the deck.
“Shall we deem this a successful test, then?” Miss Baker asked.
“My God, I should say so,” Weatherby breathed, looking at his sword with new appreciation. “It cut so cleanly!”
“Don’t forget your scabbard,” she said, handing it to him. “It’s been similarly treated. This blade will slice through any other scabbard you would use.”
He carefully sheathed the sword. “I don’t know what to say. I am in your debt.”
“Not at all, sir,” she said, nodding to the crowd. “When we arrive at a friendly port, these men here will say more than enough about it. And that was the point.”
“Very clever,” Weatherby said. H
e then quietly added: “You have given your future far more thought than you first let on.”
For once, the young woman blushed. “Perhaps so. And perhaps we may yet discuss it further, you and I.”
Weatherby smiled and, alchemical marvel in hand, found himself quite entranced, caution thrown to the solar wind.
July 26, 2132
Shaila knew she should’ve been unnerved by the prospect of strange, homebrewed technology secretly buried near the base. Instead, as she presented her case to Yuna and Stephane, she felt downright euphoric. It had been a bad day all around, and here, she thought, was something that could begin to explain what the hell was going on.
The good feelings didn’t last very long.
“Shaila, I know you want to be a part of this investigation, but I really think these boxes you and Dr. Greene discovered aren’t related at all,” the older woman said, a kindly smile on her face. It was the smile that hurt the most, perhaps, with its mix of worry and concern. It was the kind of smile you give overly imaginative children or frightened old people, and it pissed Shaila off to no end.
“Yuna, there is a ring of these boxes all over our ops area,” Shaila said, trying to sound reasonable. “We’re sure of it. And that ring and those ravines could very well encompass the lava tube. It’s throwing a ton of energy and EM fields all over the place. You can’t tell me that’s a coincidence!”
Shaila didn’t realize her voice had carried over the mess hall, but the stares quickly made it evident. The JSC astronauts looked at her with worry, while the miners whispered among themselves, half-lidded eyes pointed in her direction.
“Shaila, I commanded this base on two separate tours, back in the day. You know how many little experiments we had going on, before Billiton came over? Why, everyone had some little project to tinker with, and the stuff that failed probably didn’t get recorded. Who wants to be embarrassed by something like that?”
“So you’re saying it’s some kind of old experiment?” Shaila said, disbelieving.
Yuna smiled again. “You’re stuck on Mars, without even mining ops to keep you busy. Of course you tinker some. And remember, we did have some U.S. military types who came to play around with some top-secret things. Could be something of theirs, too.”
Shaila looked up at Stephane, trying to keep her face straight. “What do you think?”
The geologist frowned into his dinner. “I do not know,” he said simply.
“That’s it? You do not know?” Shaila didn’t mean to mock his accent, but it came out that way regardless.
“Yes, I do not know, Shay. Theoretically, you could generate an electromagnetic field area big enough to create a kind of tremor, I guess, but—”
“See?” Shaila smiled at Yuna. “It’s possible.”
“But,” Stephane continued. “Look at the box you found. Old batteries from pressure suits and datapads? You would need fusion reactors for enough energy to create an earthquake.”
“So you don’t think it’s anything,” Shaila said, eyes downcast.
Stephane looked genuinely concerned. “If we cannot find other causes, we can look at your theory. For now, there are far more realistic things to consider. But what about the book?” he asked, baldly changing the subject. “What have you found there?
Shaila shrugged. “Haven’t looked at it much.” In fact, the only thing she did was to password-encrypt the containment unit’s controls, in case Greene got too curious.
“You should. It is an amazing story,” he said.
Shaila finally looked up. “I flipped through it in the cave. It’s blank.”
“No, it’s not,” Stephane said, a genuine grin on his face.
“Fine. I’ll give it a read,” she said dully. “Thanks for hearing me out, guys.”
She quickly got up and headed for the tray return, then out the door.
“Shay!” Stephane jogged up behind her and awkwardly avoided plowing into her, sending them both down the stairs to the Hub.
“Jesus, Steve! What is it?” She managed to land on her good leg, and grabbed Stephane’s coverall just in time to save him from face-planting on the deck. “Going to tell me I’m nuts?”
“I do not think you are nuts,” Stephane said. “I just do not know if these boxes are really anything we should look at now.”
“They are,” Shaila said, willing herself to believe it as much as her voice implied. “This can’t be a coincidence, and I’m going to track them down.” Shaila let go of his coverall and, with a nod, jumped down the stairs toward the Hub, turning briefly at the landing to face him one more time. “And thanks for saving my ass back at the cave.”
She jumped down the second set of stairs before he could respond; it was hard enough leaving him there like that. It was good—great, really—that he was taking ownership of the investigation in her absence. But . . . she really wanted someone to believe her. And the two most likely candidates just put her off completely.
As she walked through the Hub, she noticed that the banter between miners was far more subdued. They were clustered together more, talking animatedly but quietly. Two junior JSC astronauts stood guard over the remaining emergency transports, something Shaila had recommended to Diaz earlier. Good to see that some of her ideas weren’t crap. But the looks she got from the Billiton crews made the hairs on her neck stand up on end. They were getting just a tenth of their usual haul, and that wouldn’t be sustainable for more than a few more days, most likely.
After that, well . . . Shaila had her doubts. To be fair, in the history of interplanetary resource extraction there had been exactly one riot: the 2107 Freeport Vale Riot. Roughly 125 men were promised good money if they went to work on lunar extraction. Problem was, the company’s geologists were taking a gamble on the site chosen—the strata seemed promising, but their sensors couldn’t penetrate far enough to confirm it. Three men died as they spent two months digging into the lunar crust; the promised veins of minerals never showed. The Freeport Vale geologists and project leaders never made it back to Earth, and the surviving miners all had similar memory loss as to how the honchos died.
Shaila knew things at McAuliffe were far better than a generation ago on the Moon, but as she made her way down the corridor and passed several Billiton personnel—and no JSC people—she was acutely aware of how outnumbered they’d be in the event things got interesting.
When she got back to the containment lab, Greene was nowhere to be found, but he had taken the precaution of locking down the EM device in the other containment unit. He had to have been worried, since he would need Shaila or some other JSC officer to unlock the unit for him if he wanted another look at the gizmo.
Shaila flopped down into one of the room’s three chairs, put her feet up on the work bench and filed through e-mail on her datapad. Harry was creating a holy ruckus, CC’ing everyone in JSC about his failing quotas and McAuliffe’s “unreasonable and unwarranted” safety requirements; he probably knew the details of Freeport Vine better than she did, so his hell-raising wasn’t entirely surprising. Scrolling down further, she saw that someone in JSC actually agreed with him—the diggers would be back to standard safety protocols tomorrow, so long as they stayed well away from the cave. At least that might get some of the hard cases back on the job. Idle hands, after all . . . .
A cargo ship was due in tomorrow, the Giffords, bringing a new rotation of six miners and a few tons of consumables that would get the base through the next few months. Shaila saw her subordinates had handled the preparations pretty well. Of course, the new blood wouldn’t make up for the eight miners who bailed earlier in the day, so even without the harsher safety regimen, Billiton would still fall behind quota. Maybe the six guys who were due to rotate out would be convinced to stay.
Shaila tossed the datapad on the table in disgust. It didn’t matter. The biggest thing to happen on Mars since Spirit and Opportunity landed, and she wasn’t in on it. Nobody wanted her in on it. She rubbed her hands over her face in ex
haustion. Maybe they were right. Time to hang it up, maybe go work for United Airlines on the Earth-Moon run. Of course, with her luck, she’d end up on the Dallas-Cleveland run.
She forced herself to get up and address matters at hand. She wouldn’t give up on the two pieces of the mystery she had left to her. She couldn’t.
The EM device appealed to her far more than the book, despite whatever Stephane found written in it. She remembered a holoshow about ghost hunting—funny how they never seemed to find solid evidence of the afterlife—that said high EM fields could create feelings of paranoia or hallucinations. Maybe that’s why she was seeing and hearing things in her head. She put that out of her mind quickly, however. It wasn’t something she was interested in dealing with, and if she told someone about it, with her record on Atlantis, they’d send her home in a straitjacket.
Instead, she walked over and took a look at the book, sitting closed inside the unit. Opening and reading it would be a huge chore; the unit’s manipulator claws were far better suited to handling rock samples than turning pages. So she simply programmed another sensor analysis, followed by a computerized comparison with the one she took earlier. At least she could see if the Cherenkov and EM readings were changing or not. It would take a little time to crunch the numbers, so she could let that run while she followed up on the linear EM problem.
Shaila brought one of the lab’s workstations to life. She knew Diaz wouldn’t be happy with her withholding information about the EM device or the book, but it seemed to be the quickest and surest path to some kind of redemption. Or at least the surest way to feel like she still mattered.
Straightening up as the screen flickered to life, Shaila dialed up the base’s pressure suit beacon log. The base computer kept tabs on everyone who EVA’ed on the surface, going back two years. She and Greene had wandered pretty far from the access road to find the EM device’s location, which wasn’t near any mining ops or JSC sites. Thus, anyone who showed up on the beacon log prior to today would automatically be a person of interest, as the police holodramas liked to say.
The Daedalus Incident Revised Page 20
