Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 (6 page)

Patty was second, and she did it all herself. But of course nobody ever believed that.

She collected her HCD and scuffed down to the common room in her ship slippers, which reminded her of rubber-soled socks. The lights were dimmed; Patty sighed in relief and didn't order them up when she entered. She curled in a bucketlike chair near one of the two observation posts and watched Clarke Orbital Platform and the nighttime globe beyond it sparkle in the darkness, seeming to roll in slow circles that were actually the result of the habitation wheel's spin.

She had just switched on her HCD to start her homework when the door slid open again and a brisk footstep startled her. She expected Carver, and a raised eyebrow at the way she was sitting in the dark grinding away at her assignments. Carver was gifted, though. Everything came easily to him. He couldn't have understood how Patty had to work to live up to her parents' expectations.

It wasn't Carver. “Lights,” Patty said.

A burly blond man—a crew member in a heather-gray athletic shirt stenciled Property of HMCSS
Montreal
—paused inside the doorway. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn't realize anybody was in here.”

“I was looking at the view,” she said, standing.

The crewman crossed to the beverage dispenser and drew himself a cup of coffee. “Would you like anything, miss? . . .”

“Patty,” she said, feeling foolish and about ten years old. “Patricia Valens. Seltzer water, if they have it?”

He fussed with the panel, not turning toward her. “Are you related to Colonel Valens?”

Because a girl never would have made it here without knowing somebody, right?
Patty's back tightened. “He's my grandfather. Who are you?” Almost brusque, her voice startled her.

The blond crewman handed her a disposable cup full of clear fluid. “I'm Lieutenant Ramirez,” he said. “Chris. That's water with lemon juice flavor. Best she'll do.”

“Thanks.” Patricia sank back into her chair and set the cup on a low molded table, which she noticed was bolted to the floor. “I'm sor—”

“Think nothing of it,” he answered with a dismissive wave. “All you pilots are testy. I know. Will I be invading if I sit here and do some work?”

“What are you working on?” Intrigued despite herself.
He called me a pilot!
“I'm not a pilot yet.”

“I'm a specialist,” he said, producing a hip unit from somewhere and tapping it on. “I maintain the ship's operating system and the pilot interfaces. We'll probably get to know each other very well if you decide to stay in the program.”

Not
if you don't wash out
.

Patty felt another blush stain her cheeks as she drew her knees up and, burying her feet under her butt, hid herself in differential equations again.

0430 Hours
Monday 6 November, 2062
Clarke Orbital Platform

If there was any fate in the galaxy more miserable than suffering through a cold on a space station, Charlie Forster hoped he never had to encounter it.

It could have been worse, of course. It could have been zero G, or he could have not caught on that he was getting sick until the
Montreal
was under way. Which was a good way to burst an eardrum, if the decongestants and antihistamines didn't quite keep up with the flow of snot.

As it was, he'd managed to catch the
Gordon Lightfoot
returning to Clarke, and was able to weather his misery in conditions of relatively stable pressure, gravity, and acceleration. Which wasn't to say that he wouldn't cheerfully have died about three times an hour. But at least he wasn't in immediate danger of his head bursting open like an overripe plum, no matter how imminent it felt.

And he had his work to distract him.

Charlie leaned back in his desk chair and pressed a damp, freshly microwaved cloth to his face. The aroma of menthol, citrus, and camphor pierced the fresh-poured cement clogging his sinuses, and he coughed in the middle of a sentence “—considering for a moment my own research on Mars, Paul—”

“You sound
awful
.”

“I feel awful,” Charlie admitted. “One of the ground-siders must have brought something up from Toronto or Brazil. Half the station is sick.” There
was
a light-speed lag in communication, but it was barely noticeable compared to the eight minutes one way he'd been accustomed to when he was working on Mars.

“What about the
Montreal
?”

“Nobody sick over there yet,” Charlie said. “Give it a couple of hours. It looks like a three-day incubation period, which means if they go they'll start dropping any minute now. The earliest infected Clarke staff is already recovering. And
Montreal
's life support is more efficient. More modern. Augmented carbon dioxide cycle over there, rather than straight canned air.”

They couldn't see each other, Paul Perry and Charlie. A waste of bandwidth on the scrambled channel when they were just talking. But Charlie knew Paul well enough to pick up the worry even from the tinny, digitally compressed tone. “There's no chance it's a bioagent?”

“PanChinese sabotage?” Charlie shrugged. “Possible but unlikely. They're not above bioweapons, but if I were going to wipe out a space station's crew complement, I'd go with . . . dunno, what do you think? Legionnaire's?”

“Influenza,” Paul answered, after a pause that was half lag and half thought. “Engineered influenza. An incapacitating one, high fever, nausea, death in say, thirty-six hours after a seven-day incubation?” He sighed audibly. “It would be doable, too. I'll see that screening protocols are instituted immediately. I wonder what else we haven't thought of.”

“Whatever the one that gets us is,” Charlie answered bitterly. “If that's dealt with, I still want to talk to you about Mars—”

Lag. “Listening.”

“I had another thought.”

“Most scientists are satisfied with three or four unprovable hypotheses in a career, Chuck.”

“Instead of three or four a week?”

Paul's laughter. Charlie got up to microwave his face cloth again. The steam did help. He pulled another cloth out of the plasti-foil pack while he was up, and heated that one to lay across his scalp and the back of his neck, where it could ease aching muscles. God, for a steaming-hot, old-fashioned dirt-side shower— “Do you want to hear this or not?”

“Sure,” Paul said, easy and relaxed. Before he'd become Riel's science adviser, Paul Perry had been a number of things. One of which was a consultant on the government side of the joint Canadian/Unitek Mars mission that had discovered the two vessels buried under the red planet's wind- and water-scarred surface. “Tell me your crackpot theory, Mr. Bigshot Xenobiologist.”

“There's an ejecta layer over the craft on Mars.”

“There's an ejecta layer over most of Mars. And isn't it several ejecta layers? I know your dating of the ships relies heavily on the geology.”

Charlie breathed in through steam, bending double to cough as the glop on the back of his throat peeled loose. “Good—God,” he gasped, tasting sour-sweet metal through even the camphor reek of the cloth. He sat down on the stool bolted in front of his secondary interface. “I think my dating was wrong.”

“Wrong how?”

“I said the ships had been there about two, three million years. Which would put it very close to the development of sentience on Earth.”

“Close, geologically speaking.”

“But now I think it's closer to sixteen million years.”

Dead silence through the link. Charlie smiled. “You see why I called you?”

“Why do sixteen million years and Mars sound familiar—” Paul's fingers were moving rapidly enough over his interface that Charlie could pick out the sound of the
enter
contact being depressed. “You're talking about ALH84001.”

“I'm talking about life on Mars. Above the microbial level.”

“That doesn't make any sense, Charlie. Why ground a ship on Mars—wait. Presumably you're assuming that the—that
they
were using their derelict ships in somewhat the same way the Americans used Viking or the old Soviet Union did Venera—”

“Space probes. Sure, why not? If they needed an FTL drive to get here anyway, and they were junking the ships—”

“Spoken like a Yankee, Chuck. Do you have a box in your garage labeled ‘pieces of string too small to save'?”

“If I had a garage, I probably would. As it is, I travel light.” The cloths had cooled; Charlie didn't have the energy to get up and microwave them again.
Memo to me,
he thought.
Invent a cold cloth with an integral heating circuit. Why hasn't anybody thought of that?

Maybe the microwave manufacturers get kickbacks—

“But why Mars? We've got evidence of microbial life sixteen million years ago, but—”

“How long did the Venera probes last?”

Tapping. It was always reassuring when Paul didn't just
know
something, Charlie thought. “None of them over an hour.”

“Earth's a much more corrosive environment than Mars,” Charlie hazarded. “Maybe they did send us ships, and they didn't survive. Or maybe they were keeping an eye on Mars because the life there
was
so much more fragile. Earth's ecosystem has survived some pretty astounding blows—”

“You're thinking of the Yucatán meteor impact, aren't you?”

Charlie laughed, which turned into a gagging cough. “God
damn
this cold. That was a sissy hit, Paul. We got one about 251 million years back that made that look like—nothing. And the ALH84001 meteorite is the remnant of a relatively minor knock that still managed to kick chunks clean off Mars. Mars doesn't have the gravity or the atmosphere Earth does. The atmospheric blowout, water and oxygen and carbon loss from a few of those would have put paid to whatever chance multicellular life might have had there.”

“So what do you think the ships were for?”

Plaintively. Charlie managed not to laugh this time. “You're the sober, responsible ecologist. I'm just a wild-eyed xeno guy. I come up with the crazy theories, you figure out why they don't work. I'm reasonably certain, though, that after all my work with the nanotech we're using on the pilots, it was
intended
for organic interfacing. And the freaky thing: it self-adapts. You show it a cat and it knows it's a cat. You show it a beet and it knows it's a beet. I haven't gotten any beet-cats yet.”

“Why do you always get the fun jobs?” Paul sighed. “What if the ships were part of a, a—terraforming—no, a
xenoforming
attempt that failed?”

“Hey, you do okay with the crazy theories on your own.” Charlie grinned, the cold cloth dangling forgotten from his fingers. “Huh. Possible. Or possibly they're interstellar altruists who dropped their nanotech off on an ecologically damaged Mars—figure the atmosphere leakage had already started, say, or a little axis wobble, or what have you—to see if the ecology could be reconstructed. To see if those Martian microbes would evolve into something more impressive, given a fighting chance. And then the system got nailed with another couple of catastrophic failures—like the meteor impacts—and folded. It makes as much sense as them leaving a couple of ships there so the hairless monkeys would be able to call next door for a cup of sugar if we ever got off our own little blue rock.”

“Miocene, Charlie. Not that there were hairless monkeys—”

“Fussy.
Carcharocles megalodon,
then. Space sharks.” Charlie braced his palms together, fingers meshing and biting air, and laughed at his own childishness.

“
Carcharocles translunaria
. Ew. What an image.”

Charlie could picture Paul's elaborate shudder, and dropped his hands, scrubbing them against his trousers. “If they didn't take a crack at Earth, there could be two reasons, I guess.”

“One, they liked Mars better. It was more like home.”

Charlie nodded, forgetting Paul couldn't see him. “Or, as you said. Earth was more hospitable to life than Mars.”

“So?”

“So maybe they're good guys. Anticolonialists. Maybe they figured we had a chance on our own.”

A long silence, and then Paul Perry laughed ironically, his rich voice made tinny by distance and empty space. “Our own colonial history as hairless monkeys is so
rife
with altruism, after all. Don't go buying into that twentieth-century cultist trope that the aliens are advanced and enlightened, Chuck. It worries me. Figure the odds.”

Figure the odds,
Charlie thought, wondering how naive he could possibly be.
And then figure the odds on life. And then consider the difficulty you have talking to your pet dog, Paul, and figure the odds that life from another planet will want things that are even comprehensible to life from ours
. He sneezed again and wiped his nose on the camphorated cloth.

0500 Hours
Monday 6 November, 2062
HMCSS
Montreal
Earth orbit

I wake early, ship's time, alone in my bunk and wearing the kind of bad attitude that makes you hate living in your own skin. I know what it's about, too. I haven't had a drink since we left Earth, and I've been a borderline alcoholic for twenty years. Self-medication is a wonderful thing.

You don't need it anymore, Jenny.
Yeah, right.

So I can sleep nights, when two months ago I couldn't. Somebody loves me and isn't shy about showing it. My monsters are all dead now. Dead and buried. Lost and gone.

So why am I waking up mornings wanting a drink? Or thinking about the vial of diminutive yellow pills in my blazer pocket?

Oh, hell. Today is another test-drive day. I get to jack into the
Montreal
live and for real, take her up and out, and put her through her FTL paces. Not the virtual reality simulator, like the one Leah is probably flying right now, somewhere on Earth. Not a model. A real, live, deadly powerful ship with some three hundred souls on board.

I roll over out of the bunk, hit the floor palms flat, and start my push-ups. Endorphins. Good thing. One, two, three, four, nose dipping down to almost touch the porthole in my floor, nothing out there now but the trackless dark—