Toxic (19 page)

“To the right,” she decided.

With their feet in several centimeters of water, they moved towards the middle of the road. Brown currents dragged away the thin vegetation on the lower sides. The wind whipped their faces bundled up between their shoulders. They stopped in front of the wobbly entrances turned into walls of wild plant life. They came to the end of the street, which divided into two sections. A new choice was necessary.

Masters leaned towards her. He blinked frequently, annoyed by the rain. He used his umbrella as protection against the gusts. They both agreed that in any case, Dew couldn’t cover hundreds of meters in such a short time. Even though, he admitted, this guess was based on the behavior of a normal human being looking to take cover from this deluge.

“We’re going to go back and check each property,” she proposed.

With the properties transformed into clumpy swamps and puddles transformed into seas, each foray became an ordeal. While the nurse went around the buildings which were veritable palaces, Masters went through the gardens transformed into miniature jungles. His steps sunk into the soft ground to the point that he lost his shoes. Elaine tied her shoelaces on the marble front steps whose chic pink color could be seen under the debris and layers of green moss. Her hopes of finding Dew eroded as they explored the now defunct luxury residences. They came back to their departure point. The colonel looked at her several times with a resigned face. She made a resolution as cold as the climate: no, she wasn’t planning to stop the search because of difficult conditions.

She held on despite her doubts. One of the last houses justified her actions. They went in through the cast iron gate which closed behind them. On the mud-covered front driveway, an all-terrain vehicle with flat tires lay beside them. As if an omen, the rain became less intense. The two of them separated. Elaine followed the path leading to the porch while Masters plunged into the underbrush. A path encircled the villa, which had a watchtower at the junction of the main building and the wing.

The battering of rain diminished, allowing them to hear the noises around them. Her hearing accustomed to the new sound environment and she heard muffled wheezing, at first in the distance. She stopped near an outbuilding and listened. Without breathing, she concentrated on isolating the sounds. Her heart stopped right away. She had to get closer to make out the source. The paving stone path went around the building, which was a garden tool shed invaded by tall grass. Step by step, she moved in the direction of what had been a lawn maintained with care. Through the leaves, she made out the mirror-like waters of a pool filled with debris. A shadow crossed her field of vision. As a reflex, she put her hand on her mouth. It wasn’t Dew or Masters.

The characteristic grunts rid her of all doubt. She couldn’t hold back a tremor and felt her skin freeze. When the creature came out of the darkness provided by the vegetation, a panicked fear overcame her. Her first reaction was to run away. Masters came up behind her at that exact moment. She jumped. He put a finger to his lips.

“I found him,” he whispered.

She furrowed her eyebrows.

“Where?”

Elaine followed Masters, who led her to a bush. They crouched behind it and the colonel carefully spread apart the wet leaves.

“Up in that tree.”

The owners had probably had kids. That was such a cliché, she thought at the moment; a big house, an old tree at the back of the garden, a tree house; only the dog was missing to complete the picture. At the place where the trunk split into three thick branches, a platform held up a wooden building. Sitting on the edge of it, Dew balanced his legs nonchalantly above the drop. He overlooked twenty infected creatures that were at his feet. The creatures grunted and scratched the bark with their rotten fingers before the indifferent gaze of their prey, who seemed to be taunting them.

“What’s he doing up there?”

Masters shook his head, unsettled by the situation. A more pressing question was on his mind:
how were they going to get him out of that hornet’s nest?

N
aakrit requisitioned a T-J in the middle of the night. After a full-throttle take-off, his continued acceleration across the black sky spotted with stars came to its end some one thousand kilometers from the surface. The ship made an 80 degree turn, displaying its hull to the sun’s rays, which were emerging from the cobalt-blue cloud. The ship caught the kilometer-long tube which appeared at its side, perpendicular to the dark carpet. The top, covered with a disk, was home to two protrusions covered in bouquets of antennae and bulbous windows. Tamer ships took up two of the four landing spaces on the upper ring. The other end, fitted with a shining sphere, pointed in the direction of the planet. In the background, a ring of robots surrounded the megatransporter. All of this operation’s logistics revolved around this entrance point: an unobstructed view of the blue and white jewel.

A controller guided his approach and assigned him a spot. The Primark disembarked as soon as the flexible lips of the two joint airlocks opened with a sharp hissing. At the end of the pressurized connector, a reptilian officer welcomed him with an assured and frank whistle.

“Primark Naakrit, we have started preparations according to your orders. A part of the material is in the loading bay.”

“Perfect, abza’n Dunn.”

The dozen mercenaries who were posted here constituted a reserve which could be mobilized without warning in the event of problems on the ground. In reality, two or three supervisors would be enough to pilot the station, which was well provided with robotics. Naakrit entered the main bridge. The troopers saluted him by bowing, according to the protocol which he had implemented himself.

“Where do we stand?”

“We are verifying the decontamination packs before sending them to the site.”

“How much longer?”

“A quarto-diem”

The Primark raised a claw to show his satisfaction and started along the aisle separating the two control panels. The holographic spheres and information landscapes projected diaphanous glows and attested to a concentrated atmosphere. He stopped in front of the post of the second Sybarian, who had become very close to Sarejt shortly after her arrival. His mercenaries’ morals didn’t interest him; only results and loyalty counted. It was because of this that he had decided to keep her away from the Lynian emissary. Since then, she had been charged with long-distance detection.

“Have there been abnormalities during these last octo-diems?”

“No, Primark. No foreign spacecraft have crossed into this system.”

The blue-skinned female looked from the star to the rings, a marvel according to one of his astronomy specialists.

“The
Scorcher
is located near the sixth planet. It’s finishing its patrol. The
Niven
is preparing to relieve it.”

“And the outer perimeter?”

“Entrance points to the holding are clear,” the Sybarian confirmed. “Our automated outposts haven’t indicated anything.”

“Perfect. If contact ever occurs, I want them to be hunted immediately by our tamer ships. It’s crucial that every vessel be intercepted and not leave the system.”

The Sybarian leaned her head to the side. In this context, this gesture meant that she understood the importance of her task. In other circumstances, it signified submission.

Naakrit turned towards the reptilian officer. “You’re missing an essential piece of information to continue operations.”

“Well yes, the material’s destination.”

The Primark called up a map of Earth onto one of the floating panels. His claw pointed to a city in the middle of the African continent. “You’re going to install the second conditioning chain here, at the airport of this former city, Nairobi.”

By accepting the contract, even if he rarely declined requests coming from the Combinate, Jave had prepared himself to plunge his rootlets into an affair in which schemes and the desire for power and fortune came into play. As always, the merchant princes expected him to expose the sometimes ingenious embezzlement schemes, the most serious of which consisted in tricking them or double-crossing them. The Lynian’s reputation was generally enough to resolve the situations. The special advisor possessed the adequate abilities to distinguish between true and false. A talent which was widely appreciated…

There was no word, sound or non-verbal communication which could explain this talent or define it. Besides, sometimes it wasn’t aroused. Jave’s ability came into play at dawn, at the moment he left the American continent. It filled his mind with subliminal images which the emissary recognized right away.

In the pilot’s seat, in front of the translucent dome, his internal mini-mind projected images of the building’s basement. Jave once again saw the creature struggling with an animal fury to extract itself between the bars. The metal slivers hanging at its neck were of no interest to Jave’s ability. His field of vision moved towards the evidence of the presence of one or more healthy individuals: a suitcase, food left on the dirty floor and keys. Maybe they had opened the cage. The slow-motion projection continued. The bed disappeared to his left. He went along the cracked walls and the exposed bricks reminded him of the brown armor of an adult levi-yan. His mini-mind focused on a pile of fabric covered with blood. He recognized clothes. What did his ability want to conclude? What was not quite right about this clothing thrown into a pile in a corner?

Jave remained examining it for a moment. His rootlets quivered and his nasal vents contracted: they belonged to a child. One of the tickets said
A. Montgomery
. Even though he didn’t know the meaning of the
A
, he remembered the name perfectly, as it was the same one engraved on the pendant. There was therefore a link between the creature and its guardian. Humans developed profound relationships with their progenitors, especially during their early years. The analysis was found in the data banks and in the files that he had reviewed during his trip.

His vision didn’t change, still stalling on the pile.

Sometimes, the image lasted for octo-diems, until he discovered the hidden answer behind the evidence, which was more rarely the truth. Jave reviewed the references he had on the human way of dressing. He suddenly realized what his ability had fixed on: the gender. Males and females didn’t dress identically. The person who had fed the creature was female.

The scene burst into a myriad of aspects which were gathered in an aerial view which came from the drone. He remembered very well. Three individuals left a low building and ran in the direction of the survivor, among them a young girl.

While viewing the sequence, he stopped on the group. Close-ups of faces were transferred to the database. One of them tripped the software filters of the data network.

The adult male has black skin?
Jave asked himself, confused.

The orbital station occupied a key position in the mercenaries’ plans. All strategies contained one elementary component: an entranceway which always worked both ways. Anticipating a way out was just as vital as the maneuver which allowed them to force their way into a theater of operations. Even though there existed as many possibilities as there were ways to get out of a mess, the ultimate solution never varied. It was starting with a clean slate.

The Primark moved along the line of containers. The verified material was then transported on floating pallets. The activity of the ring of robots between the warehouse and the dock looked like that of a beehive. Naakrit spotted a trunk containing humidity condensors. A mercenary inspected the load. With the facilities planned in a tropical area, he was double-checking the perfect functioning of this critical equipment. The trooper, concentrated on his task, didn’t see his commander in chief head towards the agrav tube. The zero-gravity elevator linked both poles of the station. Naakrit stopped on the lower level. There, an airlock opened automatically in front of him. Just behind it, the second one required biometric identification. The reptilian stuck out his tongue which deposited a few molecules with a unique composition into a circular recipient. The door moved aside immediately.

From the other side, Earth’s blue color took up almost all of the view from above, with only the corners of the window giving way to the cosmic darkness. The room contained a large desk. Naakrit sat on the chair and the information landscape lit up, showing the state of the systems. No abnormalities were detected. His claws lingered on a touch keypad which resembled steamy glass, attached to the console and a glass hood with a range of buttons on top of it: his way out. In case the expedition turned into a complete disaster.

He had come across a human expression very relevant to his ordeal on the tera-servers: the scorched earth policy. Exactly what he would obtain by using the planet scorcher. He watched the cloudy rotations. A communication bubble pulsed outside the data volume.

“The emissary is requesting you,” Dunn announced.

The Primark’s forked tongue slithered between his pointy teeth. “Where is he?”