The discrimination was just in her head, then.
Caty looked behind her to thank the worker, but he was already climbing back inside the hover. The ramp retracted under the van and the doors slid shut. A few short seconds later the van hovered up, generating a wicked wind that whipped dust into her face and forced her eyes shut. Then the wind died down, and she opened her eyes to see the hover roaring away into the distance, already a dwindling speck against the slate gray sky.
Something felt wrong about that. Caty turned back to the camp with a frown, feeling suddenly alone and vulnerable. She caught some of the refugees glaring up at the hover van as it left, and her bad feeling grew stronger. Suddenly she realized what was wrong. The van had left her here, but all the geners were going somewhere else. Somewhere nicer, maybe?
So much for all the implants and retroactive treatments to make her like them. Natural-born still meant degenerate to them. Caty frowned. Hefting her pack off the ground, she slung it over her shoulders and walked up to the nearest person in the camp—a man with a scraggly brown beard and an unruly mop of hair to match. He was handsome in a rugged way, but not nearly enough to be a gener.
“Hello, I’m Catalina de Leon,” she said.
The man tore his gaze from the sky to regard her. “Dahveed,” he said with a strong accent. “¿Hablas espanol?”
She nodded. “I speak Spanish, but it’s better not to up North. Raises too many eyebrows.”
David snorted. “True that. You can get away with it I suppose.”
Caty cocked her head. “Get away with what?”
“Speaking English. Pretending to be a gener. You’re pretty enough to fool them.”
“Well, I’m not trying to fool anyone.”
David’s brow wrinkled. “You should try to fool them. You might live longer that way.”
Ice trickled through Caty’s veins. “Live longer? What do you mean?”
“You don’t know?”
“I just arrived.”
Another snort. “Supongo que yo debo orientarte entonces. Mira—aqui, somos sus perros.”
“How’s that?”
“You’re really going to stick with English?” David sighed and shook his head. “They make us go out, no suits, no protection. They use us like dogs to find other survivors and bring them in.”
“But the ones who rescued me were—”
“Geners rescuing geners. They must have thought you were one of them, and only realized their mistake later. Like I said, you can pass for one, but me?” David shook his head. “I was picked up by a rusty old street bus. The driver was a Mexican. All Latinos on that crew. We find ours and they find theirs, but there’s always a guard with us to make sure we pick up any geners we find. No one’s really looking for us.”
“Then why are there so many people here?” Caty jerked her chin to the field of tents.
“They need to conscript rescue workers somehow. The more of us they rescue, the more of them they can find, but as soon as we stop finding geners you can bet we’re going to fall through the cracks and straight into hell.”
“It can’t be that bad.”
“No? Go talk to the warden.”
“The warden?”
“That’s what we call el jefe aqui. Go tell him you don’t want to join the crews. Then go get your rations for tomorrow. You’ll get a liter of dirty water and a bag of saltine crackers. Go back tomorrow night and tell him you changed your mind. You’ll get four liters of clean water and enough food to keep you from dreaming about it all night. Either you join the search or you join the search. Only children get a full ration if they don’t go.”
“What about the sick and injured?”
“Don’t have any. We gather them up and call in the hovers to get them, but who knows if they actually rescue the natural-borns. Anyway, point is, this is a work camp, and they only rescue us because they don’t want to risk their own lives out there looking for each other.”
Caty’s jaw dropped a few centimeters. “No suits?”
“No.”
“What about the radiation?”
“It’s bad, but no one’s going anywhere close to the epicenters yet, so you’ll be okay—at least for the next ten years while the cancer grows. Suppose cancer later is still better than starving to death now.”
Caty blew out a breath. “I guess I’d better go volunteer then.”
David nodded. “Deberias.”
“See you.”
Ten minutes later, Caty was standing in front of Warden Theodore. She didn’t bother asking him to check if conditions were as bad as David had indicated. Despite David’s obvious resentment toward geners, he had no reason to lie to her.
After promising to join the search effort, she was given two cans of corn, three cans of beans, a can-opener, a spoon, and a four-liter jug of water. They were about to give her a pack and bedroll, too, but she explained that she already had hers, so all they did was assign her a tent number. They told her to follow the white numbers spray-painted on the ground until she found 5097, and then report for duty tomorrow morning with the bell. Five o’clock sharp.
Caty made her way up the rows of tents until she found hers. A teenage girl with black hair tied up in a bun sat outside the tent beside a dying fire, scraping beans out of a pot with an old rusty spoon.
“Hi,” Caty said.
The girl looked up, then back down into her pot.
“I’m Catalina, but you can call me Caty,” she said.
“Rosa,” the girl replied.
“Pretty name. Fifty ninety-seven is your tent?”
Rosa nodded.
“Me, too. Guess we’ll be getting to know each other better then. I just arrived.”
No answer.
“You here all alone?”
Rosa got up from her tree stump stool and breezed by. “Voy a dormir.”
Caty frowned. The sun hadn’t even set yet. Wasn’t it too early to go to bed? Rosa climbed inside the tent and zipped it up after her. Caty sat down on the tree stump and regarded the empty pot. It wasn’t clean, but something told her that was too much to ask for. Her stomach grumbled. She hadn’t eaten yet. Picking up the pot, Caty shrugged out of her pack and found a can of beans she could heat up. The can-opener didn’t work very well, but she managed to get the can open and pour the beans into the pot. Then she stoked glowing orange embers into the pale gray sky until the fire was radiating enough heat to make her cold beans hot—lukewarm actually, but she was too hungry to care.
She drank a few cups of water with the meal and soon she needed to use a bathroom, but she hadn’t seen any facilities, and it was already too dark to walk around and look for one, so she waited until it was fully dark and found a patch of grass between her tent and the neighbor’s. She’d grown used to using grass and bushes for a bathroom since leaving her shelter, but usually not with thousands of potential spectators nearby.
That night Caty slept beside the glowing coals of the fire, out under the stars. She lay awake listening to people cough inside their tents. There was too much smoke in the air from all the forest fires. Caty’s throat itched, too, but she muffled her own coughs, not wanting to draw attention to herself. Every now and then she heard someone walking between the tents, the gravel crunching underfoot, and she remembered the shadowy man at the Seven Eleven.
Caty cringed. Best to keep quiet.
“You’re pretty,” the dead man’s words echoed inside her head, making her skin crawl. She’d never even seen his face, so it was easy to imagine a monster rather than a man.
That had been her wake-up call. Now she knew better than to trust other survivors.
Unfortunately the rescue workers had confiscated her Berreta. It was probably better they didn’t let refugees enter the camp armed, but Caty felt naked without it. She was beginning to wish she had pretended to be a gener—or dead. It might have been better if they’d left her at the Seven Eleven.
Someone screamed nearby.
There came
a piercing silence, as if the entire camp had woken up and stopped coughing so that they could listen. Caty’s heart thundered in her chest. She lay frozen on the ground, wanting to get up and run for her life, but too scared to move.
They can’t see me in the dark. They’ll think I’m a log.
Caty squeezed her eyes tightly shut, willing the danger to pass. I’m a log, I’m a log, I’m a log…
The coughs came once more, and Caty didn’t hear any more screams. Maybe she’d imagined it.
The next morning, after the bell went off, news spread about the woman who’d been found dead in her tent. Caty found David in the line to board the buses, and she asked him about it.
He just shrugged. “The ones who don’t join the crews have to survive somehow. When they get hungry enough, they steal. If you see them, they’ll kill you not to get caught. Someone tries to steal your food, you let them. Pretend to be asleep, look the other way.”
Caty’s eyes grew round and she nodded. “What about security?”
“What security? There are ten thousand refugees and only fifty guards. There’s only ten of them on patrol at night. That’s one for every thousand people, or one for every five hundred tents.”
“There must be something we can do. What if we organize our own night watch?”
“Tried it. Not allowed.”
“What? Why not?”
“We need to keep up our strength for the searches, and the warden doesn’t want any vigilantes in his camp. Curfew has us in bed by nine and up at five.”
“Then we should leave. We don’t have to stay here, do we? They can’t force us to stay.”
“No, not yet anyway, but where would we go?”
Caty shrugged. “Somewhere, anywhere!”
David smirked. “And eat what? Drink what? Do what? Like it or not, they have us all here as willing slaves until we can find some way to fend for ourselves. Right now the only job for any of us is here, searching for survivors.”
A thought occurred to Caty. “What about the military?”
“The military?”
“Aren’t they accepting recruits still?”
“You want to trade one certain death for another? The entire fleet was destroyed. If this cease fire ends, you’ll be the first one to die. At least down here you might last for a few more years.”
Caty felt her whole body grow cold. “The entire fleet?”
David nodded. “Both sides are defenseless. Why do you think they called a cease fire? They don’t have any guns left. You go ahead and sign up. I’m not even sure they’ll know what to do with you. At this point they might strap you to a missile and get you to be the guidance system.”
Caty blinked a tear. David frowned and looked away. That was when it really hit her. Alexander was dead.
A few seconds later, David turned back to her and opened his arms awkwardly. “Ven aqui.”
She didn’t argue. He enfolded her in a strong hug. He didn’t smell very good, but then again neither did she.
The line started moving to board the buses, and they shuffled along together. He held her, whispering reassurances and apologies. They sat down together on the bus. Caty sniffled, feeling foolish and embarrassed. Then the bus jolted into motion, and David gave her a haunted look. “I lost someone, too. Ella era mi todo.”
“Your wife?” Caty asked.
“My everything,” David said again, this time in English.
Caty nodded and looked out the window, watching blackened, fire-scorched trees blur by. “Alexander was mine,” she whispered.
CHAPTER 17
Max Carter sat in his quarters watching the approach to Wonderland under normal gravity. After passing through the so-called David Davorian Belts, the mission was back on track.
Max set the viewport in his room to show the view from the Lincoln’s bow cameras and then magnified and enhanced Wonderland for ease of study. A mottled blue and white ball appeared, floating in a glittering sea of stars. They were still three days out, but with magnification the planet now looked close enough that he could reach out and touch it.
Beautiful. Amazing what technology can do, he thought.
Max considered everything that lay ahead for him and the crew of the Lincoln. So far his mission was going according to plan, and the crew of the Lincoln was none the wiser. He had detected some suspicion from Commander Korbin during a routine interview before everyone had entered the G-tanks, but Korbin didn’t really have anything to go on.
Suspicion and proof are two very different things.
Max smiled. Catch me if you can.
* * *
May 22, 2790
(The Lincoln’s Frame of Reference)
After three days of forced rest, Doctor Crespin reluctantly discharged Alexander from the infirmary so that he could watch the Lincoln’s final approach to Wonderland from his seat on the bridge.
The planet swelled before them, looking startlingly like Earth. The day side of the planet lay dead ahead, with the terminator line on the far left side of the planet, making Wonderland look egg-shaped rather than spherical. The day side shone a familiar blue with white patches and swirls. Somewhere near the center of the planet, mottled reds and purples peeked out through the white.
Someone whistled.
“She’s a real exotic beauty,” Lieutenant Stone said, identifying himself as the whistler.
“Vasquez, what are sensors telling us so far?” Alexander asked.
“Land temperatures on the surface range from twenty degrees Celsius on the day side to five degrees on the night side. There’s ice at the poles and—”
“Ice?” Alexander interrupted. “Then you’ve confirmed that the blue we’re seeing is liquid water?”
“Yes, sir.”
A cheer went up from the crew. Water wasn’t all that rare, but liquid surface water was a big requirement for human habitability.
“What about those colorful smears? Are they what I think they are?” Alexander asked, pointing to the mottled red and purple areas.
“Possibly plants,” Vasquez replied.
“Damn straight!” Lieutenant Cardinal replied from gunnery.
Alexander smiled. As the mission’s botanist, Cardinal had a vested interest in finding alien plants on Wonderland.
“Could also be rock formations,” Stone replied. “If they’re plants, why aren’t they green? Don’t they need chlorophyll for photosynthesis?”
“Assuming alien plants derive energy from photosynthesis in the first place, they don’t need to absorb the same wavelengths as plants on Earth,” Cardinal replied. “The surface of Earth gets mostly green light, but that’s the color that our plants reflect away from them. Evolution doesn’t always yield the most efficient design. I’ll bet you a month’s wages those colorful regions are plants.”
“You’re on,” Stone replied.
Alexander smiled. “As long as we’re betting, I’ll bet that the atmosphere is breathable, and that we’ll find plants and animals.”
“Well, if we do find animals, the first thing I’m going to do is slap one of them on a grill and see if it tastes like chicken,” Stone said.
Laughter rippled across the bridge. Alexander joined in, but Korbin shot him a dark look, and he wiped the smile off his face.
“Our first encounter with alien life and you want to cook it?” she demanded.
“Why not?” Stone replied.
“All right, you do that, and when you die from some alien parasite, we’ll just chalk it up to karma being a bitch.”
Alexander cleared his throat. “He was joking, Korbin.”
She sent him a thin smile. “Who says I wasn’t?”
Alexander snorted. “Davorian, how long till we enter orbit?”
“Ten to fifteen minutes, sir, depending whether it’s a high or low orbit.”
“Make it a low one so we can do our first pass around the planet in less time.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
“Vasquez, start scanning
for the best place to land our shuttles.”
“Already on it, Captain.”
“Good.”
Alexander settled back to watch as Wonderland grew steadily larger on the MHD. It was a beautiful planet—mottled red and purple landmass, bright turquoise oceans, and familiar white swirls of cloud. It looked startlingly like home, except for the odd colors and the greater percentage of surface water.
Once the Lincoln established a low orbit, Davorian killed thrust to the engines, and let Wonderland’s gravity do all the work. Without active thrust, the sensation of gravity disappeared, replaced by the zero-G free-fall of orbit.
It took over ninety minutes to orbit the planet once. During that time, Vasquez identified the primary landmass as the one they’d seen on their approach. There were also a number of islands, but everyone agreed that they’d learn more by setting down on the planet’s Pangaea-like super continent.
“Time to go pack our things, everyone,” Alexander said. “We’re all going down to the surface together—except for Davorian and Hayes.”
“Except for me, sir?” Davorian sounded crestfallen.
“We’re not going to see Wonderland?” Hayes added, putting in his own objection.
“Davorian, your specialty is astrophysics and astronomy, so you’re better off staying up here to see if you can find some indication of where we are in relation to Earth and the rest of the universe. And Hayes—we need someone manning the comms in case Earth tries to contact us. But besides that, we need at least two qualified bridge crew to take shifts up here on the bridge. Davorian, you have seniority, so I’m leaving you in charge.”
“Yes, sir,” Davorian said.
“We’ll be in touch. As for the rest of you, let’s go.” Buckles clattered as everyone unfastened their harnesses. Alexander lingered an extra moment to send Davorian a private comms. “Keep an eye on Hayes.”
There was a brief pause, and then Davorian replied, “What should I be looking for?”
New Frontiers- The Complete Series Page 14
