Undertow (16 page)

“What does that have to do with far-swimmers?”

—You swim from home to mate,
it explained.
—The farther you swim, the stronger those who will mate with you. Exoparents contribute zygotes. Endoparents raise the broods and teach them.

“Somebody else’s children.”

This time, it just pointed at the
no
button.
—Your children, humen. Somebody else’s genes.

André gestured around the camp. “You’re not a far-swimmer.”

—I was a liaison.

“So was Tetra asking if you would be its…endoparent?”

The ranid hesitated long enough for André to wonder if he’d crossed some line of taboo. Then it crumpled the leaf in its hand and made a quick oblique gesture that André thought meant no. As if realizing that he didn’t understand, it reached for the slate again.

—not that.
And pushed the slate away, decisively. And then just as decisively, took it back.
—Pay us
.

“…pay you?”

—We take you through bayou, not for bandweal or clanweal, you owe. Pay us.

It stared at him, fishy eyes unblinking, focused intently on his chin. The dropped articles were haste, he thought, not ineptness. Alien cultures, and no way of knowing what sort of bargaining Jean Kroc had done to make it accept his protection. “How do I pay?”

—Tell me a story, André
.

Gourami was good at understanding humen gestures, for a person. Which was not very good at all compared to the complex information that humen could convey with nothing but a rearrangement of their facial muscles. Se thought the long blinking stare was befuddlement, perhaps shock. But se could not be sure.

—A story?

—A narrative. A tale. A fiction.
This new slate came with a built-in thesaurus. All these complicated humen synonyms that weren’t, quite.

Se liked it.

André Deschênes stopped and now he was definitely staring. Staring and blinking: for a moment, Gourami almost thought of him as a person. But then he said the most astounding thing se’d ever heard. He spread his stubby hands, paler on the ventral than the dorsal surface, and shook his head.

—I’m sorry, but I don’t know any stories.

9

CLOSS WAS LATE ENOUGH THE NEXT MORNING THAT JEFFERSON
beat him in, even though Jefferson overslept. Centuries before, virtual commuting had been hailed as the wave of the future. People would eat, sleep, play, work in the same spaces.

Like so many other predictions, it hadn’t quite worked out. In Jefferson’s opinion, this was because the setup ignored the basic human need for politics. For a community.

People seemed to enjoy the separation, the act of putting on a suit, skinning up, and coming in to the office. And the ones who didn’t enjoy it needed the discipline. Leaders and followers, the top dog and the pack animals. It was how it was.

Anyway, Closs’s uncharacteristic tardiness was extraordinarily convenient when Jefferson had contingency plans to lay that he didn’t really want Closs getting wind of. And that Jefferson preferred to implement in person.

Not that he ever expected to have to use any of this. But it was good to have a fallback position.

The bioengineering labs were on the
Richardson Explorer,
a massive vessel currently moored about thirteen kilometers offshore, using the oldest group of omelite platforms as its base. The labs were too delicate to trust to a barge in Novo Haven, and trying to build a permanent structure bigger than a minifab on land on Greene’s World was an exercise in pissing to windward. If unstable earth didn’t collapse into sinkholes beneath it, a vast tropical storm would scour it from the surface.

On Greene’s World, security meant being able to run.

Jefferson took a helicopter out. He flew himself, because the day was clear and he needed the hours, and it was just as well if Closs couldn’t corner his pilot and ask awkward questions. All of Charter Trade’s helicopter pilots were ex-military, and all of them revered Timothy Closs.

The clear morning gave Jefferson dazzling light off the water, and he spent the brief flight marveling as he always did at the view through the poly floor panels. The bay itself was brilliant as white spinel, the drop-off to the gulf delineated by the dashed row of drilling platforms.

Any clouds were scudding, cotton-candy things, but Jefferson double-checked the weather report compulsively. Weather blew up unexpectedly in Novo Haven, and cyclone season was upon them. Not that a real howler would come tearing out of the tropics without a week of warnings to get the city out of the way—and Rim’s Exigency Corps conjuring like hell to bend its path in the least harmful direction—but savage squalls could arise out of nowhere. And helicopters were inherently delicate creatures, hanging as they did from a single joint.

The flight, for all his caution, was uneventful. The
Richardson Explorer
had cleared her landing deck for him. After setting his chopper in the bull’s-eye and powering down, he clambered out of the bubble and met the second mate on deck. “Don’t worry,” he called, as soon as he was close enough to make himself heard over the sea wind without screaming. “This isn’t an inspection tour.”

The woman smiled too much, but at least it wasn’t that canned fake laughter. “Dr. Schaffner is waiting for you below.”

He followed her down. Her role of tour guide could have been played by any ensign, and he amused himself by deciding, as they walked, if he would choose to accept the honor in the spirit in which it was offered, or have a word with the captain about the wasteful use of trained officers.

Maybe a memo, he decided, rather than picking a fight today. And one that didn’t mention this particular officer’s name: she was trying too hard, but her heart was obviously in the right place.

The forward bioengineering lab was two decks down, still well above the waterline. The second officer rapped on the door, then opened it from a keypad.

“Why knock if you’re going to let yourself in?”

She shrugged, lifting the handle. “It’s polite to let them know we’re coming.” And stepped aside to let him precede her.

He followed her into an unpleasant, echoing space. The ceilings were low, metal, ringing back sounds with hard crispness. The long room was crossed at regular intervals by slate-topped tables cluttered with interfaces, isolation hoods, incubators. A centrifuge hulked at one end of the nearest lab bench like an irate stone toad. Other things hummed or dinged; Jefferson winced.

He glanced over his shoulder at the second officer. She shrugged. “The safety officer is always after them to wear ear protection in here.”

“I’ll see to it,” Jefferson said. “Why haven’t they requisitioned soundproofing?”

“We were denied, M~ Greene.”

He turned. White noise had drowned out her footsteps, but Dr. McCarter’s voice carried over the machinery hum. She was a tall woman, broad-shouldered, made taller and broader by high-heeled slides and a white labcoat. She was a startling blue-eyed blond, her hair twisted up at the nape of her neck. Jefferson wondered how much of it was a skin; she didn’t affect particularly pretty, but there was something about the eyebrows and eyes that was very…engaging.
“Denied?”

When she smiled, her cheeks appled. Even when it was as insincere a smile as she used now. “An unnecessary expense, Chairman. If you would come with me? Dr. Schaffner is expecting us. He’s just selecting some images for you to look at.”

Jefferson glanced around the lab, with special attention to the scraped ceiling. He hurried two steps to catch up, aware of the second officer’s understated withdrawal. “Unnecessary?”

“So the lab budget committee informed us. This way, please?” She gestured through a sliding door; he stepped through, and it sealed behind them, cutting the worst of the noise. This was a smaller compartment, the walls upholstered in noise-dampening foam. Dr. Schaffner sat before a wood-topped desk, hunched over an interface. He peered one-eyed through an eyepiece, and lifted one hand in greeting as they came in.

“Hello, Doctor.”

“Jeff.”

Schaffner got up, rubbing his nose to smooth away the dent from the eyepiece, and blinked a few times to refocus. He stuck out his left hand, and Jefferson shook it while Dr. McCarter stepped back, rounding the desk to the far side.

Schaffner was slab-cheeked, tall, a little stooped, with theatrically busy eyebrows. He continued. “I’ve picked out some good ones to show you, but I hope you don’t think this is going to be easy. Or fast, for that matter.”

Jefferson nodded, taking the chair Schaffner gestured him into. He smoothed his hands over the warm wood of the table, considering its contrast to the dinged and whining equipment on the other side of the wall. “What are we talking about here, in terms of fast?”

“Years,” Schaffner said. He fielded a significant glance from McCarter and amended, “Years at the earliest, reasonably speaking. If we had a sample of the pathogen to back-engineer, it would be different, of course. But we—”

“—don’t. I understand. Hey, Neil, what if you got lucky?”

“How lucky? Lucky enough, we could have you something—for testing, not for use—in a few months, but that’s so unlikely I wouldn’t want to hang a statistic on it.”

“I think the chairman is asking what would happen if he saw to it that we got lucky,” McCarter translated, without looking up. She seemed to be scanning files on her headset; Jefferson caught the telltale flicker of her eyes and the micromotion of her fingers. “If I’m not out of place in saying so.”

Was her voice cool? Or was she distracted? She seemed not to notice as Jefferson eyed her, briefly. He cleared his throat and said, “How come you can get a hardwood interface, but no ceiling tiles?”

The last directed at Schaffner, who rolled his eyes theatrically. “Because the desk comes from equipment and durable goods, and the tiles come through facilities. Genius, isn’t it?”

Jefferson shook his head. “Genius. I’ll see if I can get somebody fired for you, Neil. Now, what about these pictures you wanted me to see?”

Schaffner reached for the control, hesitated with his fingertips resting against it. “Was Judith right, about what you were offering?”

Jefferson nodded. “Yes, if you’ll take the entanglement. It’s painless.”

Neil Schaffner looked at him, pale eyes catching light under the silver thatch of his hair. He pushed the start control.

“I’m going to need some ranid volunteers.”

It wasn’t a great idea to call Moon Morrow for comfort, but somehow Closs found himself doing it anyway. He caught her at lunch, dining from hand-painted china with delicate silver manipulators. The food was bitter greens and some cold, rare, shaved red meat. Bison, probably, unless it was offworld. He didn’t imagine that Morrow would eat anything as unsafe as Earth beef, even if it were possible to get.

She wrapped greens in a shred of meat and raised them to her mouth, balancing the bundle on slender tools. He waited until she had swallowed and cleared her palate with a sip of water. He was opening his mouth to request her attention when she fixed him with a glance and interrupted. “There’s been another attack, Timothy.”

His voice died with the breath that carried it. “Where?”

A transfer icon blipped red in the corner of his display. Expecting a map or a series of still images, he accepted the data stream. And found himself immersed in VR as if dumped into fifty feet of water in a weighted vest—the images rushing past him while he struggled to start breathing, to remember to keep moving the air in and out.

And then the hard-earned combat reflexes took over, and—like a fish dumped overboard—Closs began to swim.

A starship—not a lighter, no, and he still read consoles well enough to see that they were slowing from relativistic; inbound rather than outbound, then. Alarm claxons sounded outside his helmet; he was suited and armed, the powerpack of a beam weapon weighing across his back. This ship had been relativistic for some time; the equipment was not unlike what he’d used when he was active duty.

For a moment, he was afflicted with a powerful sense of déjà vu. He could have been twenty-two and a lieutenant again, a kid fresh from Titan Academy, with more brains and guts than sense. But then the body he rode in moved and he wasn’t in charge of it, and he relaxed. This was a game he’d played as a line commander, riding along in the back of a sergeant’s or lieutenant’s head—sometimes four or twelve at once. The miracle of modern warfare: even the guy at the back knew what was going on at the front, from many angles.

He couldn’t imagine what it must have been like when you had nothing to go on but estimated positions, radio reports, and guesswork. What a way to fight a war.

He checked his vehicle’s vital stats—PFC Amelie Heaney, age twenty-three (or about 115, nonrelativistic), currently nursing a sprained ankle from training and a sour stomach from the antifungals she was taking for a welting, cracking case of athlete’s foot.

The information might flow faster, but the soldier’s lot never changed. Currently, her heart rate was elevated, her eyes were darting port and starboard and up and down, and she was only breathing slow and deep because she was consciously regulating the pattern. Her squad was six; two were right behind her, three more detailed to survey a different corridor. Her ship was the Earth Core Company
True Blue,
and she was one of twenty-four marines on board, each of them working out a resettlement stake.

Their normal concern was pirates, though PFC Heaney had never seen one. She thought they were pretty romantic, for space scum—striking, pillaging, and vanishing into the future on a trail of hard-bent light. But there weren’t many; cargo didn’t travel by shipping, which left only the ransom for human lives to interest an opportunist. So they mostly struck shipping close to its point of origin, while there might still be somebody alive on the homeworld who cared.

Once they’d passed the halfway point, she’d started anticipating a quiet trip.

And it had been. Until about ten minutes ago.

And now she was sidling along the
True Blue
’s aft main corridor, her half-squad guarding her back, a beam cannon strapped to her right arm, and every siren on the ship warning of imminent hull breach. Unless they wanted the ship herself, PFC Heaney didn’t have the first idea what might be going on.

Closs envied her innocence. Because now Morrow was feeding him schematics, the real-time record of the ship’s nervous system, the sensory motes that webbed her hull and bulkheads. That knowledge overlaid Heaney’s advance, and he wanted to shout at her, as her own commander must be doing, that the hull ten yards down the corridor was losing integrity, that the corridor would soon be violently open to space.

He multitasked; Morrow threw more feeds at him. He could handle the six half-squad leaders; he made Heaney primary—she was closest to an incipient breach—and watched the other five peripherally, also prioritizing the hull sensorium.

Heaney and her squadmates quit their cautious slide and hustled. Forward, not back, as befitted marines. Their goal was to clear the airproof bulkheads and be on-site when the boarding party came in through the breach. External cameras were showing something weird; not just crawlers ripping the shielding with armored talons, but a night-black macro-fog, a machine made of multiple-component machines—each as big as Closs’s fist, and black enough that the object looked at first like a missing patch in the hull of the
True Blue
. It flexed against the hull like a starfish humping a submarine, and sudden white crystals glittered around it.

The snow-globe effect was why Closs knew a split second before Heaney did that the hull had been breached. She found out the hard way; the joints of her vacuum suit stiffened, and the boarding claxons fell silent, though she could still feel their shiver through the magnetic soles of her boots. In the corridor, both behind the half-squad and ahead, airlock shields crashed down, sealing them in.

The rush of expelled air ripped at her suit, but the magnets held, and she was still planted solidly, bringing her weapon to bear, when a knobby matte black tendril curled through the rent in the hull. It groped, twitched, telescoped at the marines with reflexive speed—

Heaney’s weapon lashed out silently—no atmosphere to sizzle under its bolt—and was followed a split-second later by those of her squadmates. There was a projecting bulkhead on either side of the sealed airlock and just inside, designed to provide cover; the squad dove behind it.