“Thank you, Ryden. And I appreciate your initiative, just play it safe, okay?”
“Absolutely.” Ryden had every intention of playing it safe, which to him meant not getting caught.
∞ ∞ ∞
Smuggling out the yeast samples proved easier than Ryden had expected. The specimen containers were tagged with adhesive labels printed for that purpose, containing data about the specimen, the destination lab on Earth, a tracking serial number and bar-code, and so forth. The specimens were still being sterilized before shipping. The Quarantine Director wasn’t yet comfortable with shipping any live alien cultures to Earth just yet, despite the fact that nothing alarming had been found. There were a few Kakuloan microorganisms that were happy to munch on Earth life, but no more so than anything native to Earth, and easily controlled by antiseptics and antibiotics. Still, that was enough to warrant caution, or at least the director thought so.
Ryden had planned to use the adhesive side of a label to pick up a yeast sample, then apply it to the bottle. That wouldn’t work if the bottles were still being sterilized. However, he had found that a little bit of the right solvent rubbed on the bottle’s surface before applying the label would cause the label to loosen during the sterilization treatment. Oh, not enough to fall off completely, but loose enough that it looked like it might do so. Then he would helpfully volunteer to print new labels to stick over the loose ones, just in case. Those labels had the yeast culture on them. Fortunately for Ryden, the job was a fairly mindless task that nobody else particularly wanted to do, nor would they pay attention to him while he did it.
The technique had the added advantage of making it easier for the intended recipient to know which specimen vials had the yeast samples. They’d be the ones with two labels stuck to them. At least, the ones going to Skrellan Pharmaceuticals had. Ryden similarly prepped a few other vials, this time without the yeast on the second label, to mask any correlation between the destination and the funny labels.
He just had to pick a time when things in the lab were relatively quiet to do the labeling. Just after dinner would work.
∞ ∞ ∞
Drake sat at the computer in his small office reviewing his files. There were messages from Captains Tsibliev, Patel, and Tracey, congratulating him on being cleared at the court-martial, and offending condolences on his lack of promotion. Under less cloudy circumstances, the journey to Alpha Centauri might have earned him admiral rank. He put those messages on hold, he didn’t feel like answering them just yet. There were miscellaneous maintenance reports from the teams working on the Heinlein, only of academic interest to him now, but other folks working on the next generation of ship—if there was a next generation—might find some of the information useful. Everything from wear and tear on the warp drives to radiation and micrometeorite effects on the ship’s skin. Actually, he decided, he could really use a drink, but he didn’t like to drink alone. He wondered what George Darwin was up to.
He could have pinged Darwin’s omni, but he was restless and wanted to stretch his legs. He checked the time. It was just after dinner. Darwin typically wasn’t a heavy eater, but was enthusiastic about his work. He’d try the labs first.
Drake made his way down the corridor, by now well accustomed to the easy one-sixth gee lope required in Lunar gravity. He palmed the door contact, and the door slid open. Except for one young tech, the lab seemed to be empty. The tech had spun around at the sound of the door, knocking a specimen bottle and a sheet of something, it looked like labels, from his workbench.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you,” Drake said, “I was looking for Doctor Darwin. Is he here?”
“Uh, no, no. I think I saw him in the dining hall.” He picked up the bottle and labels from the floor. “Some of these labels were coming loose, I was just putting on new ones.”
“Fine,” Drake said. He wasn’t familiar with lab operations, so he didn’t really care what the tech was doing. “The dining room? When was that?”
“Uh, just a little while ago, ten or fifteen minutes, he might be still there. If he comes in here I’ll tell him you were looking for him, sir.”
“Okay, thanks.” Drake turned to leave, then paused. The tech seemed awfully anxious for him to leave. “Everything okay in here?”
“Yes, yes. Fine. Why?”
“Just checking. I wouldn’t want the Director to be working you guys too hard, mister, uh?”
“Uh, Ryden, sir.”
“Of course, Mister Ryden. Don’t let Darwin or the Director push you too hard. It is after dinner time after all.”
“Oh, ha ha.” The laugh sounded forced. “No, it’s fine. Just wanted to get this taken care of before I forgot. I’m not staying long.”
“Okay then. You have a good evening.” So saying, Drake turned again to leave.
“Thank you, sir, you too.” The tech’s voice came as the door slid shut behind Drake.
Well, that was odd. Drake replayed the scene in his mind. There had been a small shipping box on the bench, with specimen bottles in it, the kind used for sending samples on to the Earth labs. That fit with the tech’s story. But there had also been a tray of Petri dishes on the bench. Something seemed a bit off with that. He’d ask Darwin about it.
Chapter 20: Leverage
George Darwin was just leaving the dining hall when Franklin Drake came around the corner of the corridor.
“George,” Drake said, “just the person I was looking for.”
“Oh? What’s up, Frank?”
“I was going to ask you if you’d be interested in joining me for a drink. I still have most of a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, their 200th anniversary special reserve, in my quarters, and I don’t like to drink alone.”
Darwin didn’t know him to drink much at all, but then most of the time he’d spent with George was aboard ship.
“I’d be happy to. I’m more of a Scotch man myself, but I have nothing at all against a good bourbon.” He said, falling into step beside Drake.
“Bourbon!? The good people of Lynchburg might be inclined to lynch you for a crack like that. It’s fine Tennessee whiskey, if you please.”
“Okaaayy... No offense intended to the good people of Tennessee, but what’s the difference?”
“Really, George? That’s like asking what the difference is between, oh, a Highland Scotch and an Islay. Technically Tennessee whiskey is bourbon, but processing differences aside, and most importantly, it’s made in Tennessee.”
“Fair enough, but Islay scotches have a different flavor, too.”
“Which is fine if you like seaweed.”
Darwin chuckled at that. “Barbarian,” he said.
By now they were well out of earshot of anyone coming or going to the dining hall, so Darwin asked. “Something on your mind, Frank?”
“A couple of things, actually. But let’s get that drink.”
They reached Drake’s room. As a senior officer and commander of the exploration mission, Drake had one of the larger rooms in the quarantine complex, almost a hotel room. A small one. Maybe one step up from a high-end college single dorm room. It was not quite as fancy as what Darwin had had when he was director of the Quarantine Lab, but he’d taken a demotion from that position to be the lead exobiologist on the expedition. His own quarters now mirrored Drake’s. A privacy screen separated the bunk from the office/living room area, with its desk, dresser, wall screen and computer console. There was no kitchen, but there was a coffee maker and a mini-fridge, and a small cupboard.
Drake opened the door on the latter and took out a pair of plastic tumblers and a square bottle, the promised Jack Daniel’s. “Sorry about no real glasses to serve this in,” he said.
“I’m just surprised you have a glass bottle.” Actual glassware was scarce in the facility, weight lifted from Earth was still something of a premium, and t
here was the breakage concern, although the Moon’s lower gravity made it less likely a glass would break from being dropped. “I could grab you a couple of beakers from the lab if you want.” Much of the labware was plastic too, but glass still had a place.
Drake had grabbed ice out of the mini-fridge and dropped it into the tumblers. “That’s fine. This,” he held up the tumbler, “doesn’t affect the taste any. High grade stuff,” he said with a smile. He poured a shot of liquor into each glass, carefully—liquids behaved a little differently in one-sixth gee—and passed one to Darwin. “Cheers.”
“Cheers,” Darwin replied, raising the ‘glass’. He took a sip. Powerful, a little sweet, without the strong peaty taste that he liked in Scotch, but eminently drinkable. “Better than I remember,” he said. “So, what’s on your mind?”
“Mostly, trying to light fires under people to get a return mission under way. Nobody seems to have the sense of urgency that I do. Even you. Aren’t you worried about Elizabeth?”
Darwin thought about that. He certainly hoped she, and the rest of the second landing crew, was doing well. He also knew she was highly competent and if anyone could get the team through the months they might be on Alpha Centauri A II it would be her. And yes, part of him missed her, and at the end there, he thought she might feel the same way. But....
“Elizabeth and I have, had, a complicated relationship. We both respect each other—at least I think she respects me, although she doesn’t always show it—and yes, we had a physical thing for a while. But we separated a long time ago.”
“You got along fine on the Centauri mission.”
“‘Got along’, yes. You ordered us to. You weren’t expecting us to get back together were you? You’re not the matchmaker type.”
“You and she were both the best people available for the mission, you know that.” Drake paused and took a drink. “All right, as a friend to both of you, I wouldn’t have minded seeing you two get back together, you made a great couple when you weren’t shouting at each other, but you know that’s not why I invited you along.”
Darwin shook his head and raised a hand. “No, you’re right, I knew that. Sorry. But to answer your question, yes, I’m concerned about Elizabeth, and the rest of her team. I don’t know that there’s anything I can do about it, except to keep insisting that we need to learn more about the system and, since it was terraformed, what it can teach us about the development of life here on Earth—”
“We’re on the Moon.”
“You know what I mean. I don’t have any political influence beyond that. I can get others in the life sciences communities to push for return missions, but that’s about it. You’ve got more political sway than I do.”
“I think you underestimate that side of yourself. You didn’t become director of this facility by accident, you lobbied hard for establishing the quarantine lab here on the Moon in the first place.”
Drake had a point. Darwin had pushed for the facility, and leveraged both his academic contacts and his fame for being the astronaut/exobiologist who discovered life on Mars to get the place built. “Fair enough. I’ll see what I can do, although I’m not sure how much political capital I have left. The lab was a hard push, and I’m not the director anymore.”
Drake nodded. “Thanks. And speaking of the lab, there was something else.”
“Oh? Lab related?”
“Might be nothing, I don’t know enough about your procedures for the samples. But when I went looking for you just now, I went to the specimen lab first. There was a tech there, working alone. He acted a bit strange when I came in.”
“Huh. The techs sometimes work late; there’s not a lot else to do up here, and they’re interested in the work. ‘Strange’ how? And who?”
“A bit like he felt guilty about something, or was trying to hide something. He seemed anxious for me to leave. Ryden, I think his name was. I don’t know all the techs.”
“Ryden? Interesting. What was he doing, do you know?”
“Something with labels and specimen containers. He said some of the labels were coming loose and he was putting on new ones.”
“Sounds reasonable. Maybe he was nervous because your rank intimidated him?”
“He’s not under my chain of command, so that shouldn’t matter. But he also had a tray of Petri dishes on the bench.”
Petri dishes? Now that was interesting. There was no good reason, and several bad ones, to have live cultures—if that’s what they were—out at the same time he was labeling specimen bottles, unless he was prepping the bottles for sterilization and shipping. But if the labels were coming off, that meant they’d already been through sterilization. That did not sound good.
“He was sticking labels over the loose ones, you said?”
“That’s what he said he was doing. I hadn’t even asked him, it was like he was trying to justify his presence there. That’s what I thought odd. Why, what do you think he was doing?”
“Last week I came across a batch of cultures that he’d been growing, squidberry yeast or some such, but the experiment wasn’t part of the scheduled test regime. I told him to make sure it was documented and congratulated him on his initiative. Now I’m wondering if something else is going on.”
“If he’s doing something that violates quarantine, that could be serious.”
It could be, but Darwin wasn’t as worried about that now as he might have been earlier. Everything they’d tested had been benign, he was reasonably confident that nothing they had brought back would cause a runaway plague or blight the world’s food crops. “Possibly, but in fact we’re getting close to lifting quarantine anyway, at least on some of the specimens. The labs on Earth will be happy to get something they can try growing.”
“So maybe Ryden is just jumping the gun? Why would he do that?”
“If he wasn’t working in a bio-suit, I think we can rule out that he’s found a virulent pathogen he wants to smuggle to some terrorist outfit.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
“But if one of the commercial labs on Earth has found something, they may want to get a head start on potential competition.”
Drake nodded and picked up the thought. “If they can grow their own cultures of whatever they found interesting, that would give them quite a jump, wouldn’t it?”
“A few weeks at least, more if they’ve been pursuing something that nobody else has noticed yet. What?”
Drake had gotten a faraway look in his eyes. Darwin wasn’t even sure he’d heard his last words. “Frank? What’s up?”
“Squidberry yeast, you said? Like the bloom on grapes?”
“Exactly like that, why?”
“I may not know much about biology, but I know a bit about wine. Do you think they’ll be able to grow the yeast without squidberries?”
“I have no idea. It depends what nutrients it needs. Ryden was growing it on squidberry-infused growth medium, so maybe it does need something in the berries. What’s your point?”
“Suppose they did find something useful. If Ryden is really trying to smuggle live yeast samples back to Earth—he could put some on the back of a label, couldn’t he? It’s just like powder.”
Darwin nodded. That would be a pretty clever way to do it, at that.
“If that’s what they’re after, and it needs squidberries to grow, they’re going to need more of those, aren’t they?” Drake continued. “Can they grow here? Did we even bring back seeds?”
Darwin began to see where Drake was going with this. “Some of the berries had seeds, but I don’t think we’ve been able to get any to germinate. I’ll have to check the lab reports. Even if so, from what Klaar and Tyrell reported, the vines were growing on something like a banyan tree. We have leaf samples but I doubt anything to grow a tree from. They may be symbiotic.”
“And the
two people who would know that best are still at Alpha Centauri.”
“Where we’d have to go if somebody wanted more squidberries.”
“Exactly. Listen, can you intercept the shipment to make sure it is what we think? We don’t want to ship anything harmful back to Earth, and we’ll want to document it, for evidence. Are you okay with sending live yeast samples?”
“So, if that’s all it is, let the shipment go?” Darwin considered the consequences. The risk seemed low. “Sure. As I said, we’re looking at dropping most of the quarantine soon anyway.”
“Really? Good. I have a job waiting for me at headquarters back on Earth, as soon as I can leave. When do you think that’s likely?”
“Maybe sooner that you think. I’ve been talking with Kemmerer, and we can probably start releasing people within a week. Those who have had minimal direct contact with any of the specimens, anyway. Just a final medical check before you go. You may be on your way to Earth in a week.”
“Something else to celebrate, then. But about those specimens...?”
“Sure. I’ll review the lab reports too, see if there might be something to the idea. I imagine you’ll want to know where those particular samples are being sent? Planning on exerting a little leverage of your own?”
Drake grinned. “You’ve got it. I’m not getting my hopes up, but if there is something commercially valuable back in the Alpha Centauri system, somebody might be interested in helping finance a trip, or at least having their lobbyists push for it.”
“You know they could just figure out a way to synthesize it. I wouldn’t pin my hopes on interstellar commerce just yet.”
“Oh, I know that, and I’m not. But they’ll at least want more material to analyze and run trials with, and all I need is one expedition to get our people back. If it pays off in the long run, so much the better.”
“That works for me. I can’t wait to see what else they’ve found up there.” He raised his cup, there was still a sip of Jack Daniels left. “Here’s to interstellar commerce.”
Alpha Centauri: The Return (T-Space Alpha Centauri Book 3) Page 12
