At last, he looked up from the microscope, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and grabbed for his glasses. When he’d put them on, he turned around and blinked. “Oh, I’m sorry. Have you been there a while?”
“A few minutes,” Tolvern said. “It looked important, so we thought we’d wait.”
“What, this? No, I’m just looking at space barnacles.”
“You’re looking at space barnacles?” Tolvern asked. “What does this have to do with Apex?”
“Nothing whatsoever. It’s a side project of mine. Did you know there are eleven known varieties of space barnacle? Nine of them are related, and they seem to have a shared genetic code with the star leviathan—I think the same alien race must have created them both. Long ago—millions of years, in fact.”
“Wow,” Capp said, with no trace of irony. “That’s fascinating.”
Tolvern cleared her throat. “About your message to the captain . . . ”
“But the other two species are from an unrelated lineage,” Brockett continued, as if neither of them had spoken. “They are purely organic, like the mollusks you might find in a planetside ocean, except with adaptations for the void, of course. Where did they come from? How did they evolve for life in outer space?”
“Yes, anyway,” Tolvern said impatiently. “About your message to the captain . . . ”
“And here’s another thing. Humans have only been in this sector for a few centuries, but there are already small adaptations for our ships, a subspecies of barnacle that seems to be evolving to survive around our plasma engines. In another few hundred years, they could be a real problem, clogging up our engines and requiring costly repairs.”
“Fancy that!” Capp said. She sounded utterly sincere. Actually, a little more than sincere, and she was articulating her words with extra care. “I’d love to hear more sometime.”
“I didn’t know you were interested in genetics and biology,” Brockett said.
“It’s rather a surprise to me, too,” Tolvern said dryly.
Capp approached Brockett. “Can I look through your microscope? I want to see these space barnacles—they sound amazing.”
Brockett pulled up a chair, and Capp found a way to touch his hand as he adjusted the microscope for her. She glanced back at Tolvern. “We ain’t in no hurry, Tolvern. Gimme a chance to have a look, will you?”
Capp seemed terrible at this sort of flirting, and Tolvern didn’t know why she bothered. The ensign was more the type to grab a semi-interested man and drag him into a broom closet before he had a chance to think of all the reasons why it might be a bad idea. But Brockett was eating up the attention. Soon, the pair of them were whispering bad puns about barnacles, giggling at supposedly witty things that one or the other said.
Tolvern inspected the lab. It was a decent-size room, maybe eighty square feet, with stations for three scientists, although they only had one dedicated officer. The Punisher-class cruisers had long-range capabilities, and were built expecting that they would make deep-space expeditions during times of peace, exploring unknown regions of space. The ship had been outfitted with an array of expensive equipment. Of course, the last war had started almost the moment HMS Ajax slipped out of the spaceyards of York Town, and within two weeks of taking their new commissions, Drake and Tolvern had found themselves in the thick of the first major naval engagement of the war. Because of this, Ajax had never had a science officer. Brockett was the first to use the lab, and by the time they’d brought him on board, the ship had changed names, and its crew had turned to piracy.
Brockett seemed tidy compared to others of his type, and the drawers were all closed, the jars in their secured holders on the shelves neatly labeled. Charts hung from the refrigerator doors, with careful handwriting cataloging what could be found inside. Yet Brockett had an element of whimsy, apparent in many of the signs around the lab. One fridge was labeled “stinky stuff,” and the other “nasty stinky stuff.” Three gene splicers were labeled “maximus,” “minimus,” and “microscopius.”
A printed photograph of a woolly mammoth hung on the back side of the door, with “Stumpy” written in pen across the bottom. On closer inspection, Tolvern saw that the mammoth had an unusually short trunk. She’d seen mammoths at the zoo, and this one looked strange.
Brockett looked up from his conversation with Capp. “My favorite professor was part of the team that re-created the mammoth. That was his first attempt. You can see they didn’t quite get the trunk right.”
“Stumpy,” Tolvern said. “I get it. The ears look funny, too.”
“There were sequencing errors in the bit we extrapolated from elephant DNA.”
“Wow, you did that?” Capp said.
“Not me, exactly,” he said in a modest tone. “Most of this was twenty years ago, before my time. Although I was involved in the cold-weather tweaks. We used a snippet of musk ox DNA.”
“You can take that DNA stuff from one kinda creature and put it in another?” Capp asked. She looked suddenly more serious, as if she’d just had a bright idea, and Tolvern edged over, ready for some genuine amusement.
Brockett shrugged. “That’s what I was doing on Hot Barsa, manipulating sugarcane genetics by studying the local flora. On Albion, I spliced the genes from one kind of fish into another to make it cold water hardy. That’s what gave us the idea to try it with the mammoth.”
“That’s all neat and stuff, but what about when them animals are more different, ’cause I got a cool idea for when we discover a new planet, creatures I want to put on it and stuff.”
“How different?” Brockett asked.
“Um, you know what platypuses are, right? Platypii? Platy . . whatever. You know?”
“Duck-billed platypuses. Sure, from Old Earth Australia. They didn’t adapt well, so they’re confined to a few reserves on Albion. I think there’s a river on Mercia, too, but they’re endangered everywhere.”
“That’s exactly what I mean!” Capp said. “It’s a bleedin’ shame. With them bills and beaver tails, they should be more common. I always wanted a pet one when I was a kid, keep it in the bath tub. But maybe if you crossed one with something a little more fiercer, it could defend itself.”
“Like what?” Brockett asked.
“I don’t know, some water creature, but fiercer, you know.”
“Like a crocodile?” he said, chuckling.
“That’s ridiculous,” Capp said. “That’s a kind of lizard, and platypuses are mammals. Everyone knows that. I was thinking a hippopotamus, say, with them big mouths and teeth.”
Brockett brightened. “I like it.”
“You do?”
“We could call it a hippoplatypus.”
Tolvern groaned. She could no longer keep her mouth shut. “Enough of the puns.”
“Technically, that’s not a pun,” Brockett said. “That’s a neologism. Anyway, don’t tell me you wouldn’t pay good money to see a hippoplatypus if one existed.”
“Maybe,” Tolvern conceded. “Yeah, probably.”
“Hippoplatypus,” Capp said. “That’s fun to say. Try it, Tolvern. Go ahead.”
“Hippoplatypus,” Tolvern said. It was surprisingly satisfying. But the whole concept was nonsense. “Don’t platypuses lay eggs? Are you telling me that this two-ton monstrosity is going to lay a bunch of eggs and sit on a nest?”
“Technically—” Brockett began.
Tolvern shook her head. “Did you call us down here to show us what you found with the Apex tissue sample, or do you and Capp just need a chaperon?”
Capp brayed laughter, while Brockett looked aghast. He sputtered and pulled a computer from his hip pocket. He brought something up, then closed it again.
“I’m sorry. Commander Tolvern, please forgive me. It’s just that I work in isolation, locked in here all day, and nobody much cares what I’m doing. So when Ensign Capp asked questions, I . . . ” His voice trailed off. “I guess I got carried away.”
“You’re all right, both of you. I’m impatient and
toward the end of my shift. If you had actually crossed a hippo with a duck-billed platypus, I’d be as keen to see it as the next person.” Tolvern nodded. “Show us what you’ve found.”
Brockett went to the fridge labeled “nasty stinky stuff” and removed a large plastic container. When he popped off the lid, a disgusting smell like bird feathers and rot wafted out. He pinched his nose and hit a button on the wall. The circulation fans whirred louder, sucking the bad air out of the room. It helped a little.
Brockett put on latex gloves and reached into the container. He pulled out a leathery, bird-like head, fringed with feathers. The beak was open, and the thing’s tongue dangled from one corner, stiff and black. The end of the head was a stump with dried blood and bone sticking out.
“This is it?” Tolvern said. “I thought it was a tissue sample.”
“What did you think I meant?”
“I don’t know, a feather, or something on a slide for your microscope.”
“It’s a bloody vulture, is what it is,” Capp said. “Disgusting—put it away.”
“I thought you wanted to see,” Brockett said defensively.
Tolvern dropped her hand from her mouth and nose. “When I said ‘show us,’ I meant tell us, actually. We don’t need to look at the thing, to smell it.”
He lowered it back into the container. “I have a second head, if you—”
“No!” both women said at the same time.
“Okay, no worries.” He sealed the head and put it back into the fridge, then peeled off his gloves and dropped them in the bin. “But that’s where things get interesting. Let me show you a different way.”
He swiveled over a screen on an arm and brought up an image of two heads, side by side. Why he couldn’t have done that before was the first thought that came to Tolvern’s mind. One of the heads was the one she’d just looked at: gray, leathery skin stretched over a high, bald dome, with a fringe of drab feathers at the throat and ears. The second was covered with red feathers, had a less-prominent forehead, and the beak was more curved.
Tolvern leaned in for a closer look. “Is one male, and the other female?”
“Very good guess,” Brockett said. “Terran bird species can be sexually differentiated when it comes to their plumage, and plenty of other species exhibit divergence by sex. That’s what I assumed we had here, one of each gender of a highly differentiated species. But I managed to isolate their genetic structure a few days ago, a paired protein that behaves similarly to DNA. These two heads belong to different species.”
“Which one is Apex?” Tolvern asked.
“They both are, supposedly,” he said. “The notes the Hroom sent with the samples indicated they were taken from the wreckage of the same spacecraft. There were several of the red-feathered specimens on board, but they only found this one gray one.”
Tolvern turned this over. “And what does it mean?”
“I can only speculate. Maybe there were more of the gray variety in another section of the ship that didn’t survive the battle. Could be that the red ones are slaves of the grays, or vice versa. Could be that Apex is an alliance of two closely related species. Or the grays might be specialists, engineers or whatnot.”
Tolvern considered. “I suppose that if an alien race destroyed Blackbeard and salvaged the bridge knowing nothing of either human or Hroom, they could have the same discussion. What is this tall, purple-skinned alien doing among all of these upright apes?”
“Yes, but these two species are from the same lineage.” Brockett gestured at the bird-like heads on the screen. “You can see it at a glance. Not like Hroom and human, more like a chicken and a turkey.”
“They’re not chickens and turkeys, they are apex predators,” Tolvern reminded him. “Tigers and lions would be more apt.”
Capp leaned in and gave Tolvern a knowing look. “They got beaks. And feathers. Chickens and turkeys, only fiercer.”
“There’s one other strange thing,” Brockett said. “It may mean nothing, or it may be the key to the whole thing.”
“Go on,” Tolvern said.
“A sequential analysis of each specimen shows that both varieties of alien have been subject to heavy genetic manipulation. These two creatures are no more natural organisms than Stumpy, the mammoth.”
#
“That was disgusting!” Capp said, when they had left the lab.
“You don’t sound disgusted, you sound delighted,” Tolvern said. “All that stuff about barnacles—that was the disgusting part. You were all over Brockett. I thought you were going to tear his clothes off.”
“I wanted to. If you hadn’t been there, you bet I would have.” Capp punched the button to the lift.
“So, how will you get Brockett back to your room without Carvalho seeing it?”
Capp turned. “Huh?”
“Before you went in, you asked if I thought Brockett was handsome. Apparently, you have decided that he is, so I assume the next step is sneaking him into your room to have a go at him.”
“Nah,” Capp said. “No point to it now.”
“But you just said—”
“I mean, yeah, he is all right. That was fun talking to him and all. Bloke is kinda skinny though, and don’t seem to know what he’s doing with women. Bet he’s rubbish in the sack.”
“You never know until you try. Sometimes these geeky ones have it down to a science.”
Capp grinned. “Listen to you! Maybe it’s you what should make a move.” She nudged Tolvern. “Go on then, send him a note, ask him to meet you in the mess for drinks.”
“While you smirk at me from the other side of the room? No, thanks. Anyway, he smells like formaldehyde. If you don’t like the way a fellow smells, the relationship won’t go far.”
“That was the lab, not Brockett,” Capp said. “That smell washes off, you know. Could do it yourself with a nice, long shower, lots of soap.” Capp snapped her fingers. “I got it. Figured out how to get Carvalho to come back around.”
Tolvern laughed. “Soap and water?”
“Yeah, he’s working in hydraulics today, so he’ll come out all greasy, and that earns him a double hot-water credit. I’ll catch him in the stall when he’s naked.”
But that reminded Tolvern of the awkward moment when she’d stumbled into the captain’s bathroom, thinking she’d seduce him, only to find out that Catarina Vargus had gotten there first. Tolvern was no longer interested in banter about the science officer or anyone else as they exited the lift.
Instead, she was thinking about Apex. Two different species. She didn’t know what to make of it.
Chapter Twelve
Even while Drake was working with Nyb Pim to plot their new course, he couldn’t keep his mind off Rutherford’s message. Something about it was eating at him, but he couldn’t identify what while his pilot was going over numbers and charts.
Jump points were always roaming around space, continually moving on a difficult-to-chart path. They could be more or less stable, with some lasting a few years, while others had been in place for centuries. Some might only last a few months. This was what Catarina Vargus had identified with her secret jump point into the unexplored Omega Cluster, where she’d confided to Drake that she intended to lead a fleet of colonists.
The problem with Drake’s approach to Albion was that he needed to hook into the system through one of a handful of jump points. The system was famously short of them, which is what rendered Albion so defensible, like the Old Earth island of Britain itself, surrounded by a moat that had kept Hitler and Napoleon and all other invaders at bay from the days of William the Conqueror until the Great Anglosphere Migration.
Drake didn’t face the same restrictions as the Hroom death fleets, as pirates had the run of these frontier systems when they could stay out of the way of the Royal Navy, but he couldn’t simply waltz up to Albion without being challenged, either. The safest jump point was currently on the opposite side of the sun from Albion, but that would mean a long ha
ul toward the planet.
Run the forts and rescue his parents from York Tower. Then, join Rutherford in defending Albion against suicidal attacks from multiple Hroom fleets, while avoiding Dreadnought and Admiral Malthorne.
Simple, right?
“Captain, did you hear what I asked?” Nyb Pim said. He stared with his big, liquid eyes.
Drake looked down at the charts that the Hroom pilot had printed and spread across the table of the war room. He tried to rewind the conversation. Nyb Pim had said something about the final approach before the Albion jump. Beyond that, he had nothing.
“I am sorry, Pilot. My mind had wandered. Please repeat yourself.”
“I said there are two jump points that will take us close to the final approach. Both in Fantalus. The first one will drop us eleven hours closer to the Albion jump. But it is also the course the Hroom fleets will most likely be taking.”
“In other words, we could find ourselves facing one of them again.”
“Yes, sir.”
Drake didn’t think the Hroom would be so close. By his calculations, he should arrive at Albion almost three days in advance of the first of the Hroom, and two days ahead of Rutherford, based on the most recent message from Vigilant.
“Changing course to avoid the Hroom fleet makes no sense. If they’re that far ahead of our calculations, then we may as well turn around now, because we won’t get to Albion in time. Either that, or we launch our own suicide mission to stop them before they jump.”
“So you want the shorter route, sir?”
“Is there an escape for Orient Tiger that direction?”
“Does Catarina Vargus still mean to abandon our fleet, sir?”
“I don’t know, Pilot. I don’t know. But I won’t trap her into joining us by leaving her no escape route, either.”
“Yes, there are two other jumps nearby, either one of which would provide an adequate departure point for Orient Tiger.”
“In that case, yes. We’ll take the shorter route.”
“Very good, sir.”
After that, Nyb Pim addressed minor issues: where Smythe had identified a rich patch of gas where they could use their ram scoops to collect hydrogen, the speed needed for the various jump points, and how that would impact fuel consumption. They needed enough juice to fight the battle and then blast out of Albion again when they’d finished.
Dreadnought (Starship Blackbeard Book 3) Page 11
