Ammonite (2 page)

The known dangers she had prepared for, as far as humanly possible. The vaccine would be waiting for her in D Section.

As for the unknown dangers… Well, they were unknown. Nothing she could do about them.

She stretched out her hand, clumsy in the gauntlet, and tapped out the sequence slowly and carefully. The red panel blinked off and the lights around the door flared green.

The door slid open.

B Section was silent and dark. Ice glimmered in the dim sodium glow of the emergency floor lights. Marghe stepped over the sill and the door closed behind her.

It was done.

The lights ran like runway flares down a narrow corridor between stripped, bare beds, each with its entertainment hookup coiled neatly at the head. Marghe’s boots glowed orange as she walked. Her breathing was loud. She felt utterly alone.

She was the first person who had walked here for five years; five years since the glittering dumbbell shape that was
Estrade
had been hurriedly converted from an orbital monitoring and communications station to a research and decontamination facility. Five years since the station crew had taken refuge in Section A, leaving Sections D and C for the decontamination of occasional Jeep personnel. B Section, and the long corridor beyond—the shaft of the dumbbell—was the crew’s insurance, their buffer zone, with movement allowed one way only: to the dirty sections.

Marghe watched her boots rise and fall through the orange glow; there was no dust.

The lights at the airlock blinked a reassuring green. The door opened and the wall display told her to blank her visor and hold out her arms; she keyed in the sequence on the next door, stepped through.

The corridor seemed a mile long. The familiar orange running lights gleamed on unsheathed metal and exposed wiring. Gravity decreased rapidly as she approached the center of the shaft; her suit automatically activated the electromagnets in her boots and she had to slide her feet instead of striding.

There was another airlock at the center of the corridor. She went through the dictated procedure, familiar now. The micro-gravity and her sensitivity to the strong magnetic field under her feet made her dizzy. She closed her eyes and took three fast breaths to trigger a meditative state, monitoring for a moment her heartbeat and electrical activity.

She went on: more corridor, another lock. C Section.

In C Section there were beds, like B Section, but each had a hood waiting to be lowered over an occupant to suck out her blood and lymph, ready to push physical and electrical fingers deep into her intestines to kill and remove the swarm of bacteria and yeasts, eager to sear away the first layers of skin and leave red, raw tissues with colorless fluids until new skin grew back. Tombs for the living. She hated them.

They had not been able to save her mother.

She walked faster; she wanted to be out of C Section.

In the lock.
Hurry
. Eyes shut and arms out.
Faster
. Key sequence.
Now
.

Nothing. The panel still flashed red.

Marghe stared at it. If she could not get through into D Section, she was trapped.

The lock systems would not permit her to retrace her steps without a record of her having undergone either isolation in D or fluid replacement in C.

Think.

Perhaps she had input the wrong number sequence. She had been in a rush. Yes.

Precisely, accurately, she tapped in the code a second time.

No change.

She tongued on the comm channel. “Hiam, can you hear me?”

Her helmet speaker clicked. “I can hear. Go ahead.”

“I’m still in lock four.”

“So my readouts say.”

“It won’t accept the sequence.”

“You’re sure you got it right?”

“Seven-eight-three-six-nine.” Silence. “It’s the right one, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Another silence. Marghe imagined the
tck-tck
of Hiam’s nails on the keyboard. “How much air do you have?”

“About eighty minutes.”

“There should be an emergency suit. In the locker to your left.”

Marghe opened the left locker, then the right. They were both empty. “Nothing.

And all the emergency blow patches have gone.”

“I forgot. We had to clear everything, just in case someone infected tried to blow her way out. Let me think.”

Marghe stood in the dim light and breathed precious air. Eighty minutes. She did not want to die here, alone, surrounded by nothing but dead machinery and empty space.

The audio relay clicked back on. “Nyo’s back from her repair stint,” Hiam said.

“She knows more about the systems than I do, she’s working on it right now.

She—hold on.” Marghe thought she heard a muttered conference. “Sigrid says Nyo’s on the track of some software glitch.”

“How long will it take?”

“Hold on.” More muted discussion. “No guesses. But Nyo’s working fast.”

Minutes dragged by. Marghe concentrated on increasing her blood flow to tensed muscles, washing away fatigue acids and stress toxins. She checked to make sure her boot electros were off. She had seventy-one minutes of air left.

“Marghe, listen, I’ve been talking to Sigrid, and we agree. We’ve decided that if Nyo can’t rewrite in time, then we’ll EVA out from here, open up the exterior hatch of that lock, and bring you back here.”

“You’d risk contamination—”

“Yes.”

Hiam was serious, Marghe realized, in spite of what she believed about Company and the fate of contaminated employees. “Sara, I…” She floundered. “Thank you.”

Hiam laughed, only this time it was not that awful bark, but longer, lighter, more friendly. “Don’t thank me yet.” She clicked off, and once again Marghe was surrounded by the sound of her own breath. Her breathing was strong and even: there were people on her side.

Click. “This is Nyo. Try seven-eight-four-six-nine. We’ll monitor.”

A four instead of a three. A difference of one digit. Marghe input the sequence: seven, pause, eight, pause, four, pause … The door lights flicked from red to green.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”

D Section was dark. She had not expected that. She switched over to suit broadcast. “Lights.” Brilliant white light sliced on, making her blink.

D was square, only four beds. Two mobile hoods like slick cauls by the far bulkhead. Several workstations. Not dissimilar to crew quarters. Her visor frosted over. She scrubbed at it clumsily, scanned her readouts: external temperature 24

degrees Celsius, air composition and pressure at normal levels, no apparent toxins.

Just to make sure, she sat down at the nearest workstation.

“On.” The gray screen went black, ready. “Readouts of internal atmospheric composition of this sector. ” Figures blinked obligingly, agreeing with her own readings. She still felt nervous. “Confirm lock and hull integrity.” The screen flashed CONFIRMED. “Off.” The screen went back to dead gray.

Awkwardly, she took off her left gauntlet. The right was easier. The slick plastic of her helmet was still cold. She twisted it anticlockwise and cool, clean, untouched-smelling air spilled in under the opened seal. Marghe lifted off the helmet and breathed deep. She was safe, for now.

Marghe pulled hair still damp from the shower free of the collar of her crisp new cliptogether. She commed Hiam.

“I’m ready for the FN-17 now.”

“In the food slot.” Marghe padded over to the slot. Inside it were two softgels and a glass of water. “Double dose for the first day,” Hiam said, “then one tomorrow, one the next day. After that, one every ten days. There’s a possibility of fever the first forty-eight hours, nothing dangerous.”

Marghe squeezed the gels gently between finger and thumb and held them up to the light: they were watery pink. The glass of water was the same temperature as her hand. She swallowed both gels at once, then put the empty glass back in the slot.

Marghe heard Hiam sigh. “You think I’d back out at the last minute?”

“You never know. ”

Marghe lay down on the bed farthest from the hoods, face still turned to the screen. “I want some privacy for a little while.”

“I’ll have to keep the bio telemetry.”

Marghe nodded. “But no visual, no audio. Just for a while.”

“Fine.” The speaker clicked off.

The click, like that of the comm channel in her helmet, was deliberate, meant to reassure the subject that she was not being monitored. Either could be simulated if the observer deemed it desirable; Marghe chose to believe that this was not one of those times.

It could take up to two minutes for an object to travel down the esophagus to the stomach. She imagined the softgels dropping gently through the pyloric sphincter, the acids in her stomach breaching the gelatin of their shells, the watery pink liquid spilling FN-17. Enzymes breaking it down, carrying it into her bloodstream, into her cells. An experimental biofactured vaccine against Jeep. Jeep the virus, named after the planet.

For more than two years she had tried to imagine how it would feel to swallow the vaccine. She put her hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling.

“You’re running away,” her father had said, pacing his study in Portugal, wandering out of the screen visual pickup’s line of sight.

“I’m not,” Marghe had objected. It was spring, and the scent of grass and the sound of ewes lambing on the Welsh hillside carried through the open windows of her cottage. “This is the most fabulous opportunity for an anthropologist since…

since the nineteenth century.”

“And why do you suppose the joint Settlement and Education Councils are offering it to you? Because you’re the best qualified person?”

“I’m not as naive as that.”

“Then think, Marghe, think! You resigned from SEC once. They haven’t changed—just as corrupt as ever. Last time you got beaten up and hospitalized.

What will happen this time? There’s more at stake. And this, this running away because of Acquila’s death won’t help anyone.”

“I can do this job. I understand the risks. And Mother’s death has nothing to do with it.”

“Doesn’t it?” Suddenly he leaned forward, close to the screen pickups. He looked concerned. Marghe was reminded of the time when she was four and had fallen down the crumbling steps of the remains of the Portuguese cathedral in Macau, and her father had appeared as if from nowhere and scooped her into his arms.
Daddy will take care of everything
. But he hadn’t. Two years later he had gone to the Hammami region of Mauritania, to study the changing social structures, he said. And her mother had gone up to the moon, to teach social anthropology at the new university. All the young Marghe had had of her parents for the next two years were three battered books that lit up with their names on the fronts and their holos on the back when she thumbed them on, and a telescope through which she had watched the moon on every clear night.

She shook her head impatiently. “Mother’s dead, and I’m sick of teaching at Aberysrwyth. I’m good, too good to be stuck here.”

“You should never have accepted that post in the first place.”

It was an old argument. The fact was, she had not had much choice. SEC was the main career path for linguists and anthropologists these days; after her promising start on Gallipoli, she had gone to Beaver, the Durallium Company’s mining planet, where her worldview and her face had been forcibly rearranged, and that path had no longer been open to her. Or so she had thought.

She changed tack. “Look, if you could go anywhere in the universe to study people, where would you choose? Jeep. This is a chance of a lifetime, anybody’s lifetime.”

“The last SEC rep died.”

“Courtivron and the others didn’t have the vaccine. I do.”

“And maybe the vaccine will kill you.”

“Maybe it will. But, John, don’t you see? I don’t care. The chance they’re offering me far outweighs the risk. Acquila went to the moon, you went to Hammami during those awful wars… I’m going to Jeep.”

“But they’re using you!”

“Of course they are. And I’ll be using them. A fair exchange. ”

“You’ll be risking your life; they risk nothing. You’ll be alone, powerless. Your SEC position as independent observer will be as much protection as an ice suit in hell. SEC’s been in bed with Company for years.”

“Don’t lecture me on corruption and power politics. I know better than most what it means.” She took a deep breath and started again, more calmly. “Anyway, I won’t be alone. Two of Courtivron’s team are still alive. And I’ll only be there six months. Besides, what if I am Company’s guinea pig? So what if SEC doesn’t give a damn about my report? The important thing to me is that I get six months on a closed world to research a unique culture.”

Her father had sighed. “I’d probably have made the same choice at your age.”

And Marghe had noticed for the first time how old and frail he seemed.

Marghe contemplated the smooth white ceiling of D Section…
And maybe the
vaccine will kill you
, her father had said.

She got off the bed, suddenly restless. Exercise, that was what she needed. She pushed two of the beds back against the wall and the edge of a workstation and stood quietly, hands by her sides in the space she had created, centering herself. She raised her hands slowly to waist level, then across, in the first move of a tai chi form.

She knew several different styles, fighting and meditative, but Yang style, with its even and measured movements, its grace, was her favorite for moods like this.

When she finished, her restlessness was gone.

“Lights, low.” They dimmed and the place looked more friendly. She crossed to her screen.

D Section’s information storage was held separately from
Estrade
’s main files, and was a disorganized patchwork of technical, anecdotal, and speculative notes added to by each decontaminee. Files ended mid-sentence and had large chunks missing. Marghe began to scroll through material with which she was already familiar, looking for the files that had been uploaded from Port Central during the eighteen months she had been aboard the
Terragin
.

Grenchstom’s Planet had been rediscovered five years ago by a routine Company probe. Preliminary satellite surveys had showed a small indigenous human population living in various communities scattered over the planet, origin uncertain, though likely to stem from the same colonizing spurt that had seeded Gallipoli.