“You didn’t ask us to do anything that we wouldn’t have volunteered for.”
“Would you have volunteered to come back without an arm?”
“I came back. That’s the important thing, and I have you to thank for that. What’s done’s done. We saved fifteen hundred people.”
“It was a mess, Wenna, from first to last. The odds against us were stacked so high we couldn’t see over them. I couldn’t see over them.”
“You and Ronan are a pair. He still won’t look me in the eye because he thinks he let me down. You’re still beating yourself up about all the deaths that you couldn’t avoid. Survivor guilt, Ben. Get over it! You did the best you could with the knowledge you had, but you didn’t know. You couldn’t know . . .” She dropped her voice. “You couldn’t know that our own people had sold us out. Even Crowder didn’t suspect until afterward. Anyhow, the difference is we know about the platinum this time, and they don’t.”
She rubbed her shoulder as if just thinking about Hera-3 made her missing arm ache. “Was Crowder okay about the cover-up?”
“He wasn’t happy, but he gave me his word. It goes no further.”
“Then I’d ask what could possibly go wrong, but that would be tempting fate, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes. There are too many things to go wrong. Our own crew is the biggest danger. I trust the old team, but I don’t know the new ones well enough.”
“Agreed. The fewer people who are in on it, the better it will be.”
“So schedule me in for regular survey work, and I’ll cover the likely platinum areas. Cut down on the risk. I don’t want to step on your toes, Wenna. You’re still in charge of the section.”
Wenna nodded. “What about Cara?”
“She’ll fly with me.”
“I meant are you going to tell her about the platinum?”
“No. She’s not done mineral survey work before, so she probably won’t spot it unless I’m stupid enough to draw attention to it.”
“What happens if something goes wrong and the news of the platinum leaks out?”
“I asked Lorient to plan for that, but he won’t, and I can make as many plans as I like, but as soon as I let anyone else in on them, I’m contributing to the possibility of needing to put them into action. If I had my own way, I’d sell the platinum to the outfit with the biggest guns and get the hell away to a new planet.”
• • •
Crowder didn’t know Crossways well, but he asked around and paid well for reliable information. There were a lot of shady laboratories, but the biochemist with the best, or scariest, reputation was undoubtedly Janek. Knowing was one thing, getting to him was another matter altogether, although Crowder had one contact who might prove useful. Hammer worked in an altogether smaller and more discreet environment, manufacturing chemical mood solutions. Word had it that he was also one of Janek’s agents.
Crowder took both Jusquin and Danniri. No sense in being incautious, especially on Crossways.
“Tell them we’re closed for business, Tolly.” The thin man in the stained lab coat didn’t look up from his bench as the door opened.
“He tried to tell us that, but I think he’s got a speech impediment,” Crowder said pleasantly. “I think it might have something to do with losing his front teeth.” He jerked his head over his shoulder to where Danniri had the unfortunate Tolly pinned against the wall, blood smeared over his jaw. “He’s got a bit of an unpleasant way with him, your receptionist.”
“That’s what I pay him for.” Hammer pulled his eyes away from the job in hand. “I expect he’ll want double time for today.” He glanced toward the outer office. “And his dental bills paid. I hope you gentlemen are calling in a commercial capacity and not about to start any rough stuff. If you’re going to get boisterous, can you give me a minute to finish this first, please?”
“No rough stuff. We’re here strictly on business.”
Hammer grunted. It might have been relief or maybe satisfaction at his test results. He hit a button and the arcane glow from the apparatus subsided. “Are you buying or selling?”
Crowder crossed into the middle of the room and leaned casually against Hammer’s bench. Jusquin stayed by the door to watch the corridor outside.
“Buying. I need something tailored for a certain situation. Something virulent but short-lived.”
“I don’t mess with that shit. Too dangerous.” The chemist’s voice hardened. “Go and see Janek if that’s what you’re after.”
“That was entirely my intent, but I need an introduction. Professor Janek is not at home to casual callers,” Crowder said.
“Neither was I.”
“Your man, Tolly, is a pussycat compared to Janek’s lab security.” Crowder leaned forward. “I need to keep my liver in one piece to be able to use the virus after I’ve got it. The word on Janek is that he’s as slippery as they come and likely to sell me talcum powder pills. Word on you is that you’re straight if the price is right. I want you to act as an intermediary. Make sure I’m getting what I pay for.”
Hammer grunted. “All right then, four thousand—in advance. That’s just my fee for an introduction. What do you want?”
“A virus that has a one hundred percent kill rate, airborne, that will run through a whole planet in a matter of months and then burn itself out so that the place is safe for recolonization within, say, six months to a year. I need it deployed in a grain shipment, which I will provide.”
Hammer whistled. “You don’t want much, do you?”
“I’m willing to pay for it.”
“It won’t come cheap, and it won’t come fast.”
“Do your best, Hammer.”
Hammer snatched the proffered credit chip and nodded sharply.
• • •
Ben’s first mapping run came soon enough. He’d be away from the main compound for the whole day, so he needed a strong Telepath with him. The electromagnetics on this damn planet played havoc with regular comms. He never really considered himself off duty. He searched for a reason to ask Cara to join him and then got angry with himself. Dammit, he shouldn’t need a reason. She was an attractive woman and he enjoyed her company. This stupid marriage sham was getting in the way of a genuine relationship developing at its own pace.
He found her sitting at one of the plain, functional tables in the canteen. As he slid into the seat opposite, Cara lifted the lid from her tray and poked at the steaming contents of the dish.
“I’m trying to decide what this is,” she said. “It’s got meat in it, but I can’t identify it.” She took a forkful, put it into her mouth, and curled her nose up.
“Well?” he asked.
“We didn’t have alligator on the manifest, did we?”
He shook his head. “It’s probably something local they’re trying out.”
“Well, I wish they wouldn’t, not without a warning.”
“You could always go and complain.”
“You’re the boss. You go and complain.”
“Are you kidding? I’ve declared the kitchen out of my jurisdiction. Ada Levenson is more than a match for me. Have you seen the way she wields a cleaver?”
“Coward.”
“Absolutely.” He laughed. “Actually, I think she likes me. She keeps sending over hot meals if she notices I’ve missed dinner.”
“That’s even more scary. Euwww, just look at this.” Cara poked at the contents of her tray again.
Ben felt like a gauche schoolboy about to ask a girl on a first date.
“I thought I’d go and take a look around. Wenna’s short-handed in Mapping while she’s having to devise a training program for Lorient’s volunteers. Want to come with me?”
“Of course. Where you go, I go. I’m your comm Telepath.”
“You have a choice.”
She smiled. “Then I’d be delighted to accept your invitation.”
He was surprised by the little tingle of pleasure he felt.
“Let�
�s make an early start in the morning.”
“I’ll bring food. But it won’t be this stuff.” She poked at the unrecognizable meat again and pushed her tray away.
• • •
Cara and Ben walked in companionable silence to the hangar and signed out a two-person flitter just before the sun was fully up. Cara flipped up the bubble top, stepped onto the swept-back wing, and climbed inside. Ben pulled the flexible harness across his shoulders, clicking it down firmly. It molded to his shape and locked.
“You or me?” Ben asked.
“Me, please. I need to log air time on these flitters.”
She ran the checks and kicked in the antigravs to lift the flitter a meter off the ground. She taxied the elegant little machine out of the hangar and onto the landing pad. She cut the drive back to idle, while the antigravs’ whine rose in pitch, then hit the alt control and felt the craft rise straight upward to a height of about twenty meters, plenty to give them a safe buffer.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Ready.”
The main drive fired, taking over from the antigravs, and the craft shot forward and skyward. They circled, and Cara looked down on Landing, still no more than a work in progress, with half-dug foundations and trenches for pipework weaving between thin-skin warehouses for tools and raw materials just waiting for the settlers’ resuscitation.
In the distance she could see Timbertown growing out from where the forest of broccoli trees met the river. Lorient had asked for some stone buildings, liking the site well enough for a permanent settlement.
Once they reached Ben’s designated grid, she released the controls to him and sat back. Spending the morning as Ben’s passenger in a Mapping flitter was much more relaxing than heaving crates out of a cargo shuttle. She hadn’t had much experience with mapping teams, but Ben flew the kind of patterns she was expecting and ran routine surveys. They overflew a dense forest of trees that looked similar to Earth’s giant redwoods.
“These don’t look much like broccoli trees,” Cara said.
“They’re seeded,” Ben confirmed. “Looks like bexan, to me. We had huge groves of them on Chenon.”
When the original survey was done three hundred years ago, it was standard procedure that several pods of seeds were released into the atmosphere to see what might stick.
“Irresponsible husbandry.” Cara scowled. “Lucky they haven’t wiped out all of the native species.”
“They’re not native to Chenon, either, but I’ve always loved them. Not sure which planet they came from originally. Lunch.” He changed the subject easily. “You brought it, so we might as well eat it. Shall we see the forest from ground level?”
He pointed to a suitable spot, and Cara skimmed the broad river, which poured out into a ribbon lake, and landed the flitter on its antigravs on a pebble beach.
“Wildlife?” Cara asked.
“Nothing bigger than a squirrel in the immediate vicinity.” Ben checked the scanner.
As they floated in to shore, Cara saw that the trees were taller and greater in girth than even the biggest of the Californian redwoods were reputed to have been, but they were broad-leaf evergreens, closer in appearance to some of the Australian eucalypts than to Earth’s northern hemisphere trees.
*Oh, that’s beautiful.* She wasn’t sure if she’d said that out loud, but she felt Ben agreeing silently.
The flitter grounded in a handspan of water on a firm sandbank and Ben lifted the bubble dome.
On the shore, the trees swelled above them like pillars in an ancient cathedral. Cara, unwilling to break the perfect silence, watched the play of sunlight through the broad, green leaves turn the surface of the water into a starry pool.
*It’s like one of those old English cathedrals. You know—all stately stone pillars and vaulted roofs.* Even her thought was hushed.
“Make the most of it. We can spare an hour, but not much longer.”
Cara dumped the cool carrier on the shingle shore and opened it up.
“You got chicken.” Ben helped himself. “How did you manage that?”
“I asked the night staff, and said it was for you.”
The chicken was good. Cara licked her fingers.
“Better than camp rations,” Ben said.
“It certainly is.”
Feeling better with chicken inside her, Cara sat back, leaning on her elbows, and breathed deeply.
“You know,” Ben said, “there’s been so much going on since we got here that I haven’t had time to stop and smell the roses. This is great.”
A small voice whispered in Cara’s brain it’s only temporary. If only she could break this neural block.
As if to echo her dark thoughts, a heavy cloud sailed in front of the sun and the light took on a strange greenish hue. A sudden chill gust, noticeably colder than the brisk spring air, slammed into them and was gone again. It almost took her breath away. Cara rocked forward and sprang to her feet. The trees blocked out a view of the sky, but over the lake the clouds gathered fast and the water looked like a darkening purple bruise.
Lightning cracked and the flash dappled the forest floor through the leaves. The air was still, but it was heavy with ozone and the promise of thunder.
“This storm is blowing in fast,” Ben said. “Check with base and find out what’s happening.” He ran toward the lake. “Let’s get under cover. Go farther into the forest while I anchor the flitter.”
Cara looked around, and the wind slammed into her, nearly lifting her off her feet before it died away again. She needed to find a safe place. The giants had probably withstood storms like this one for a few hundred years, but there was nothing to say that they wouldn’t have branches torn off by the wind. The ones on the lake side were more vulnerable than the ones farther into the forest.
As if to remind her that even the giant bexans had a finite lifespan, she found a fallen tree, far enough away from the edge of the lake to act as a shelter. Beneath its trunk, down at the root end, there was a space just big enough to shelter them. She wriggled into it, twisting around so that she could see Ben while she contacted Wenna. The wind gusted again, and this time it didn’t die back.
Ben reached the flitter, threw up the bubble hatch, and leaned over inside the cab. Then he stood up, clinging onto the grab-handle for stability, and locked the hatch down tight with his free hand. He let the wind blow him back up the beach, his body leaning back into it, fighting to stay upright.
“Move over.” He threw himself down beside Cara and busied himself with his handpad, activating a sequence. Then he held his fist toward the shuttle. The bubble-top machine floated backward out into the lake, working on the remote. When it was far enough out, it sank until it was completely out of sight.
“There,” he said. “That should keep it reasonably safe and make sure we get out of here afterward.”
“If there is an afterward.” Cara clapped her hands to her ears as a monumental roll of thunder boomed over them.
“What’s happening in Landing?”
“Nothing. They’ve got no sign of a storm, but they’re battening down the hatches and following this on long-range sensors. Some of our groups away from base are caught in it.”
For fully ten minutes the world went mad. Even the giant trees couldn’t stand against the wind and their trunks bent and swayed more than Cara would have thought possible.
There was no other choice but to keep down while the storm raged around them. Cara and Ben huddled beneath the fallen tree, faces down in the earthy leaf compost that covered the forest floor. There was a movement in the dead tree roots and a small rodent-like creature made a run for their hiding place. Seemingly without fear, it skittered past their noses and down to the far end of the trunk, where the space beneath wasn’t deep enough to accommodate a human.
*I hope that nothing else calls this tree home.* Cara aimed that thought tightly at Ben. “We don’t need a leaper trying to share our space.”
Their shelter shudd
ered as something, a branch from another tree perhaps, hit it. Cara flinched, and Ben put his arm across her back. She tucked her head into his shoulder, relieved she wasn’t alone.
Then it was over.
The wind dropped as quickly as it had started, leaving the rain lingering for a few minutes before that, too, ceased and a mellow breeze raised the temperature back to normal.
They emerged from their hiding place, brushing dead leaves from their buddysuits. Ben called their flitter up, using the remote on his handpad. It rose out of the water, stately as a galleon, totally unharmed.
*All teams, report.* Cara connected Ben to the whole network of Telepaths. Messages flew at them faster than verbal ones possibly could. Thankfully, there were few casualties, though there was some damage to half-built houses in a settlement the residents had called Amory.
Cara felt Ben disengage from her mind. “We got away quite lightly,” he said. “This time. But if one of these hits the settlers while they’re out in the open, there will be some squealing. Hopefully, the worst of them will be over for this year before they travel. The meteorology team seems to think that this is the season.”
• • •
Are these people complete idiots? Ben fumed as he flew the four-man flitter to Amory township, one of the four most affected by the recent storm. Fliss Ruffalo, the psi-tech liaison at Amory, had called for help on behalf of the settlers. That was just peachy!
He really needed to be doing survey work, not babysitting settlers who couldn’t look after their own supplies.
“This doesn’t look good.” Suzi Ruka sat in the seat beside him. Archie Tatum and Lewis Bronsen, a Finder, were in the back.
Set in a clearing just below a rocky gorge and on the edge of a broad forest of broccoli trees, the township of Amory was a mess. Houses had been smashed to matchwood, and the shallow creek that gushed out of the gorge had risen and swept away a wagonload of seed grain. On top of learning that Lorient’s cooks had milled eight sacks of seed grain for flour, the loss prodded Ben into a grim mood.
The water still ran high between broken and muddied banks. Silt and deposited rocks half-covered what had been a road in the making. From the air, he saw tiny figures below picking through the rubble.
Empire of Dust Page 26
