Drake touched his tumbler to Darwin’s with a click. “No clink. Now I wish we had glass. But to interstellar commerce, and to bringing the rest of the team home.” He tossed his drink back.
“Cheers to that,” said Darwin, and finished his own.
∞ ∞ ∞
A few days later Ryden got a message confirming that the samples had been received. He heaved a sigh of relief, he’d been concerned that Drake might have wondered what was going on and put a hold on the shipment while he investigated. Apparently not.
As Darwin had asked, Ryden dutifully uploaded his notes on growing the yeast cultures to the lab’s wiki.
Chapter 21: Leverage Supplied
Skrellan Pharmaceuticals, Earth, two weeks later
“We need more squidberries, or at least the extract, and more of the yeast,” Lodgson told his boss. “We’ve still only managed to grow the yeast on the extract, although it looks like we’ll be able to apply the process in a standard bio-reactor for a pilot plant, but we can’t continue our trials with the meager samples we have.”
Victoria Holmes looked up from her desk, annoyed at the interruption and especially annoyed at the situation Lodgson had just presented to her. “There isn’t any more. Oh, a few grams as museum specimens and the like, but we’ve exhausted what came back with the Heinlein and Chandrasekhar. I’ve asked through several channels. They all say the same. Some of the crew have just been released from quarantine and they’re on their way back to Earth. Maybe I’ll hear something different, but I doubt it.”
“Damn it. When’s the next expedition? We can ask them to bring more.”
“There isn’t a next expedition,” she said, shaking her head. “The whole program is in chaos.”
“What? Didn’t they leave a crew there? Can we ask for them to bring more samples back?”
Holmes restrained herself from the face-palm she wanted to give herself. Lodgson was a brilliant biochemist, but clearly the fine points of interstellar travel were lost on him. It came with specialization, she supposed.
“Okay,” she began. “First, yes, they left a crew there, but it was on the other terraformed planet in the Centauri system. There are two.”
“I know that, they can just fly to the other one.”
“Two, Alpha Centauri is four-point-three light years away. If we send a signal now, they won’t get it for four years and almost four months, so no, we can’t just ask them.”
“What? Oh, oh, of course.”
Holmes could see the light slowly coming on in Lodgson’s brain.
“Finally,” she continued, “the Anderson is stuck on the planet. The wrong planet. They have no refueling module, they couldn’t take off if they wanted to—and by now I’m sure they want to.”
“They were marooned there?”
“They volunteered. It was a chance to investigate a planet nobody had landed on yet, with all its exotic lifeforms.”
“Oh, yes. I can see where scientists might want to do that.” Lodgson appeared to be digesting this. “But, you say there’s no return expedition? How will the team get back?”
The debate about launching a return expedition, or a rescue mission, had been raging for a while. It was high profile news, at least when not displaced by some politician’s or celebrity’s antics du jour. Still, Holmes wasn’t entirely surprised that Lodgson had been oblivious to it. His ability to ignore all distractions while focusing on a research problem was legendary around the company, much to the chagrin of some of the others who had to work with him.
“They may not,” she said. “There’s a faction that doesn’t want anything to do with going back into space. They’re terrified of running into the terraformers. And they say that given that the life forms seem to be of terrestrial origin, the crew can probably ‘live off the land’ until such time we’re better equipped to get them. Or they’re all dead of old age and it doesn’t matter, although they don’t come right out and say that.”
“But that’s intolerable!” Lodgson said, clearly outraged.
Maybe Lodgson had a few feelings for his fellow man after all.
“How,” Lodgson continued, “are we going to get more squidberries to work with if nobody goes back?”
Or perhaps not.
Holmes considered the possibilities. Skrellan Pharmaceuticals had considerable influence in both the US government, and through its overseas subsidiaries, in the governments of several other spacefaring nations, as well as smaller countries where Skrellan still sent out expeditions to rain forests and sea bottoms looking for potential new drugs. They employed a lot of lobbyists. Could they apply influence to launch a return expedition? Perhaps with the right leverage.
“How would you feel about selective disclosure of your findings so far?” Holmes asked.
“What? We’re nowhere near ready to publish. What do you mean, ‘selective disclosure’?”
“We have a number of potentially extremely valuable products riding on the squidberries. The anti-aging effects of your cephalomycin are significant, and would have particular interest to certain powerful and influential individuals.”
Lodgson might have tunnel vision where science was concerned, but he hadn’t gotten where he was without learning to play the funding game, either. Holmes watched as Lodgson slowly nodded in understanding. “I think I see where you’re going,” he said. “Yes, with appropriate non-disclosures I’d be willing to release some details. Perhaps even give a small presentation.”
Holmes was impressed. Lodgson hated giving presentations.
“Can we get an exclusive on the squidberries?” Lodgson added.
“I’d been wondering the same thing. We’ll have to get our lobbyists involved, it will take political pressure. I’ll have to talk to the CEO, and he’ll have to run it past the Board. I’ll let you know.”
“Please do. This could be a game changer.” He grinned.
Inwardly, Victoria Holmes cringed.
Chapter 22: Leverage Applied
Skrellan Pharmaceuticals, three days later
“Ms. Holmes, you have a call on line two,” her secretary announced.
“Who is it?” Most of the people she had any interest in talking to would have called her omni, but there were exceptions.
“He said his name was Frank Drake, and that it regarded a recent shipment. I tried to transfer him to shipping and receiving, but he mentioned Dr. Lodgson and said you would be interested in taking the call. Should I just give him the brush off?”
Frank Drake? Franklin Drake? Commander of the Centauri mission? “No, put him through. Thank you.”
“Victoria Holmes here. With whom am I speaking?”
“Ms. Holmes, this is Commodore Drake. We haven’t met but we have some mutual acquaintances, or perhaps our acquaintances have mutual acquaintances.”
“Quite possibly. What is this about?”
“I understand Skrellan Pharmaceuticals has an interest in certain specimens we brought back from Alpha Centauri.”
“Yes, we’re one of the labs working on those. Why?”
“I think you have a little more interest in them than that, but I don’t want to take up your time on the phone. I happen to be staying a few blocks from your building, and there’s a nice little restaurant just around the corner, Il Palagio. Perhaps you’d care to join me to discuss it over, say, wine and cheese? Or perhaps some strawberries?” There was an emphasis on berries. He knows something, Holmes realized.
“I already have plans for this evening.”
“Just a pre-dinner appetizer and a short conversation. We can schedule another time to continue it if you choose.”
At the very least, she had to find out what he knew. And perhaps she could leverage his influence to get a return mission to Alpha Centauri under way.
“Very well, Commodore. Shall we say five
-thirty? I’m sure I’ll recognize you, you’ve been in the news.”
“No doubt, but I won’t be in uniform. Let me beam you my contact information.”
Holmes put her omni beside the desk phone and tapped a control. “Go ahead.”
There was a soft beep and Drake’s contact information, as well as the name and location of the restaurant, appeared on her omni screen. “Got it.”
“I’ll see you at five-thirty then?”
“I’ll be there.” She clicked off the phone. Then, decisively, pinged her secretary.
“Yes Ma’am?”
“Find Lodgson. I want to see him in my office immediately! I don’t care what he’s in the middle of.”
“Uh, yes Ma’am, right away.”
Maybe Lodgson had some information as to how Franklin Drake came to know anything about their interest in squidberries and squidberry yeast. Drake was no biologist, so it was a sure bet that if he knew, somebody else—Darwin?—also knew. If he knew Skrellan Pharmaceuticals had smuggled something out of the quarantine...that could be bad.
Her secretary pinged her.
“Ma’am? I found Dr. Lodgson. He’s on his way.”
“Good. Now get me Legal.”
∞ ∞ ∞
Il Palagio was small but elegant restaurant, set into the side of a larger building—not Drake’s hotel—with seating spilling out onto a patio area next to the sidewalk. He avoided these, he didn’t want the meeting too public.
He made sure to arrive early. Victoria Holmes might recognize him, but all he knew her by was a few dated PR photos, which he knew from personal experience were rarely helpful in identifying somebody out of context.
He looked toward the door as a tall blonde woman entered, looking to be perhaps in her mid-forties, although Drake had never been very good at guessing a woman’s age. She caught his eye, nodded, and strode towards his table.
“Commodore Drake?”
“Franklin, or just Frank, please. Ms. Holmes?”
“Victoria.”
As he stood to greet her, a waiter hurried over and pulled back the chair for her. “Something for you, madam, or do you need a moment?”
“A Riesling, please, a Mosel. Upper Mosel preferably. Just a glass.”
“Certainly, ma’am.” The waiter departed.
“An Upper Mosel? I would have taken you more for something with a blush to it. But a good choice. 'Sonnenfeuer, Sternengold, Kühlen Mondlichtschein'.”
“Red wine if we were dining, but as I said earlier, I can’t stay. Was that German?”
“Something an obscure poet from the region said about Upper Mosel wines: ‘The fire of the Sun, the gold of the stars, and cool moonlight’. It seemed appropriate.”
“I didn’t realize you knew wine so well. It’s an honor to meet you, Commodore Drake. Sorry, Franklin. Mars, Alpha Centauri, you certainly are well travelled.”
Drake grinned. “I was on the third expedition to Mars, hardly noteworthy if Darwin hadn’t found his organisms, and I never set foot on any of the planets orbiting either of Alpha Centauri’s stars.”
“Still both noteworthy accomplishments. So, to what do I owe the honor of this meeting?”
The conversation paused while the waiter brought Holmes’s drink and waited to be sure it met her approval. That gave Drake a chance to decide how best to broach the subject.
“As I mentioned on my call, I understand that Skrellan Pharmaceuticals has found some interesting new biochemicals in the specimens we brought back from Alpha Centauri.”
“Well, of course we have. Anything from an alien world is bound to be interesting. Whether or not ‘interesting’ turns out to be ‘useful’ is, of course, another question, as I’m sure anyone in the pharmaceutical business will tell you. I have no doubt other companies and labs found interesting compounds too. But for every useful drug, we go through thousands of interesting ones. So, why us? Why me?”
“Well, you are the vice president of research operations at Skrellan.”
“And why Skrellan?”
“Because Skrellan is the company which arranged to have certain biological specimens shipped to their labs in violation of some very strict quarantine regulations.”
Holmes drew in a sharp breath at this, and Drake saw her hand twitch on the stem of her wineglass. But otherwise she played it cool.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand. All specimens are shipped to us following regular procedures, they’re sterilized before leaving the Moon. Are you suggesting somebody mixed up a shipment?”
It wasn’t exactly an outright denial, and he hadn’t expected her to come out and confess immediately.
“What I’m talking about, Ms Holmes, is somebody custom growing a culture outside the originally planned experimental procedures, then taking deliberate steps to bypass sterilization procedures for samples of that culture to be shipped to Earth. To your employee, Doctor Lodgson, at Skrellan, to be precise.”
He noticed her face pale slightly, and was idly thankful that his own dark skin wasn’t as prone to such tells. Not that it was completely void of them, of course.
“If one of my employees went rogue and did something like that, of course we’ll discipline him. But what leads you to that belief? The quarantine isn’t part of your chain of command, is it? Why didn’t this come from Director Kemmerer’s office, or the FDA?”
“Let’s not play games, Victoria. You found something from the Centauri samples—something in the squidberries, most likely—and wanted more to experiment with. You wanted to grow your own, so I’m guessing it’s the surface yeast, so you needed live samples.”
Holmes’s face was now a mask. Drake had played enough poker to recognize the expression, or lack of one, as that of someone desperately trying not to reveal anything of interest.
“Lodgson was working with squidberries,” she said evenly, “among other samples, yes. Why would that have anything to do with me?”
“You’re his boss. If he found anything, he’d tell you. Requisitioning the Centauri samples takes big money and/or political connections, either of which he would have to go through you to get. You had to know he was ordering extra specimens.” Holmes started to speak, but Drake raised his palm to stop her. “Before you tell me that you didn’t know anything about live samples and that his requisition was routine, be aware that we’ve traced payments to a certain lab technician on Luna back to Skrellan, to an account Lodgson has no signing authority on. You did a fair job of covering up the trail, but you had to know it wouldn’t stand to anyone actively looking, only to a casual observer.”
Holmes said nothing. She took another sip of her wine, studying Drake’s face. “Tell me,” she said, “if you’re so sure of your facts, why am I sitting here talking to you and not a team of lawyers from the FDA or the Center for Disease Control or whoever has jurisdiction over that sort of thing?”
That was the opening he’d been waiting for. “Because I believe at the core of it, we both want the same thing.”
She raised an eyebrow speculatively, but said nothing.
“By the way,” Drake continued, “I have a jammer going, none of this conversation can be recorded.”
“Interesting.” She tapped her omni. “So do I.”
“Let me assume that you found some, not just interesting, but promising biochemicals in the squidberry samples we sent you. Perhaps more specifically, in the surface yeast on those berries.”
“Go on.”
“If it was just the yeast, and you had found a way to culture it on some Earth-based organism,” he held up his own wine glass and took a sip, “grapes, for example, then you probably wouldn’t have put in another request for whatever squidberry samples we had left.”
“That would be a reasonable hypothesis, if your facts were correct.”
“The problem is, that yeast doe
sn’t grow on anything besides squidberries. We know, we tried.”
“Did you now? Did you isolate the missing nutrient, if that’s what it was?”
“No, and it may not be that simple. Without going into detail,” mainly because he didn’t entirely understand it himself, he was no biologist “it seems to require more than just an extract from the berries.” That part wasn’t strictly true. He knew Darwin had duplicated Ryden’s work, and grown the yeast on an extract made with whole berries. “It’s not just a sugar or a protein.” That part was true. And that was the extent of his knowledge.
“Hmm. I’m no expert,” Holmes said. “I do have a background in biochemistry but my advanced degrees were all in business. It could have something to do with the micro-structure of the berry skin. I’ve heard stranger.”
Drake shrugged. She could be right. “Either way, if someone wanted to culture squidberry yeast, they’d need more berries to figure that out.”
“Indeed.” She paused as though considering how much to say. “You may be aware we’ve begun talking with certain highly placed individuals about a possible return mission to Kakuloa.”
“And that’s what I’d like to talk to you about.”
Drake watched her expression change as realization dawned.
“Your crew,” she said. “You want a return mission to recover the rest of your crew.”
He nodded. “Exactly.”
“Aren’t they going to send one anyway? Just refuel the Heinlein and go?”
“It’s not nearly that simple. I wish it were. I had hoped it would be. But we need another lander, or at the very least another lander refueling pod, which needs a nuclear reactor and fuel, and... well, the bottom line is that it would take several years to be ready to go, and that’s if the politicians decide to spend the money.”
“They’d leave the Anderson crew marooned at Alpha Centauri?” she said, then shook her head. “Who am I kidding. Of course they would. If they thought there was political advantage to be gained, they’d send their own grandmothers with a one-way ticket.”
Alpha Centauri: The Return (T-Space Alpha Centauri Book 3) Page 13
