View from Ararat (22 page)

Inside the infirmary the lights were going on automatically, turning the windows into small white squares in the twilight, while the rest of the camp lay silently in shadows and creeping darkness.

22

Rock-Biters

NATASSIA'S STORY

We began receiving disturbing reports from the small mining towns of the Fringes. Some of these towns were only a few hundred strong, some were thriving communities of a couple of thousand. Peaceful, exposed communities, they had developed in a period of calm and prosperity, with no experience of the kind of social upheaval that was about to descend on them.

Growing up around the rich mineral deposits of the Mid- and Southwestern Regions, they were towns whose only historical struggle was with the earth and the elements. After all, this was Deucalion, where even the Revolution of 101 was less a revolution than an almost bloodless reassertion of democratic principles.

But all that changed in a few days at the beginning of 203.

As the cities suddenly fell apart, and the fear of death rolled across the landscape like a bushfire, survival meant isolation. Towns which had had no contact with the Crystal found ways to keep things as they were, sometimes with peaceful warnings, sometimes with threats of violence.

Deucalion was always a flyer-linked society. The vast distances and hostile environment meant that roads were not a viable method of travel. But vehicles did exist, and the few refugees who managed to flee the cities with some kind of land-transport made for the Fringes, crossing through passes in the Ranges, and driving through the night, to make it to somewhere – anywhere – where they could wait out the crisis.

But they were turned back by the communities desperate to remain ‘clean'.

Reports of confrontations, and even murders, trickled into the Internet complex and into my small broadcast booth, but set against the backdrop of planet-wide devastation they hardly rated a mention – until the rise of the ‘armies'.

Deucalion was unique among human settlements, because it had never experienced a war. With no external enemies and a central, democratically elected government, there was no one to have a war with, and with an environment that required total cooperation just to survive, there was never any reason to look around for extra trouble.

But the Crystal Death changed everything.

Before the plague began its spread there was no army on the planet, but within days of the outbreak in Edison there were a number.

Perhaps ‘armies' isn't a very accurate description. Consisting mainly of former Security personnel, who had access to communications, transportation and, most importantly, weaponry, they were more like large gangs of maybe two or three hundred men and women, armed with ‘liberated' weapons. These gangs made their way across the Ranges in search of towns free from the contamination sweeping the rest of the planet's settlements. They were looking for peaceful towns that had no way to stand up to that kind of force, but with enough supplies to support extra mouths for as long as it took to plan the next step in the group's ad hoc survival strategy.

Most of the armies commandeered fleets of vehicles and descended on the unsuspecting towns, often at night, taking control before the inhabitants knew what had hit them. Their methods were efficient and brutal, and resistance was severely punished.

Soon news of the invasions had travelled through the towns of the Fringes, and with nowhere to run to, communities up and down the inland began preparing their defences . . .

Baden

Western Fringes

Edison Sector (Southwest)

1/2/203

MAC

Baden is an armed camp, a hastily fortified and defended stronghold on the edge of the Great Desert.

A town of miners, its ring of defences has grown out of the skills of the miners, and standing on the crest of the last of a line of rounded hills overlooking the small but prosperous community, Mac Porter nods his approval. There is an unspoken kinship among rock-biters which spans the light-years between Jupiter and Deucalion, and he silently acknowledges the feat of engineering that has created the scene he sees before him.

Using the huge machines that split the rock and tore the wealth from the ground in less dangerous times, the miners of Baden have gouged huge trenches in the barren land around their small town. Three or four metres deep, and maybe four across, they form an impenetrable circle around the settlement, with the extracted soil and rock forming a wall inside the huge dry moat.

And behind the wall, spaced at intervals around the town, the huge machines, some of them two or three storeys tall, stand like guard towers – armoured gun-platforms manned by the town's few armed defenders.

‘I've got a bad feeling about this.'

Cindy has come up behind him, unheard. He turns towards her.

‘Leave the talking to me,' he replies, without taking his eyes off the scene below. She knows the signs. Mac is planning.

As the others reach the crest, he begins his journey down to the valley floor.

CINDY'S STORY

There was a small gap in the wall of rock and soil, and a platform of thick timbers stretched across the trench in front of us, like a drawbridge over the moat of an ancient castle. For over an hour we had been approaching the town of Baden, and for all of that time I knew we were being watched.

It made me nervous.

I'd been using the punchboard to keep track of the political landscape, and I knew it was naive to think they'd be willing to accept us with open arms, so I was waiting for the inevitable confrontation.

Finally, as we stood before the makeshift bridge, a man moved out to block the way. He was carrying a pulse-laser, and he spoke to Mac, who was closest to the bridge.

‘We don't want no trouble,' he began.

‘Good,' Mac replied. ‘Then we are in agreement.'

‘So if you'll just be on your way, nobody'll get what they don't want.'

I looked at the control panel on the side of the weapon he was holding. The safety was off, a fact I was sure Mac would have taken note of. And though I didn't look up, I was certain that there were other weapons trained on us from the cabins or the building-sized buckets of the two huge earthmovers that had been positioned at either side of the small opening in the protective wall.

But Mac held his ground and his eyes never wavered. I don't know too many people who could stare down a man armed with a pulse-laser that could blow a hole in you big enough to drive one of those earthmovers through – with room on both sides – but he did it.

‘Nice job of engineering,' he said, as if they were old friends discussing home-renovations. ‘What did you use, the Tremont or the Oldfield?'

I was watching the man's expression. For a moment the steel wavered in his eyes, and he shifted his grip on the rifle.

‘The Tremont. You a digger?'

‘JMMC . . . Fourteen years on the Jovian moons. We ran mostly Tremonts and Fords. The Oldfields couldn't handle the temperature deviations.'

‘They can't handle shit. Show ponies . . .'

Mac pressed the slight advantage.

‘Listen, man. We've been walking for days across the Ranges and through the Fringes and the kids are about spent. One digger to another, you wouldn't send us away without a chance to rest, would you?'

The man risked a look up at the cab of one of the huge machines, and I caught a glimpse of the tiny two-way hidden in his ear. He was taking instructions from someone else.

I looked at Mac and he winked. He'd seen it too.

The man turned back to face him. ‘Io or Ganymede?'

‘Both. Ganymede mainly. Crud-hole of a planet, but it's a living . . . just. Look, digger, we're clean. We've been out of touch with anyone but each other for almost a month, and not so much as an itch. Tell your boss we can help out. Cindy here is a computer/communications-whiz. Research-trained, but still one of the best young rock-biters I ever worked with. And Cox has seventeen years up – on Ganymede, Io and a stint on Titan with TMC – so he's got the balls for a fight, if it comes to it. Tim and Krysten, Lexie and Jenna are his four kids.'

He paused. There was no need for the man to say anything. Whoever was making the decisions had heard every word already.

After a few seconds of silence, Mac added, ‘Oh, and a free bit of advice. If he doesn't want to lose the Tremont in the first attack, I'd suggest he turns it around to shield the auxiliary tank. It's not armoured. One direct hit with a pulse-laser and you'll be seeing fireworks.'

The man looked towards the huge machine on his right, then back at us. Then he smiled and lowered the weapon. He held out a hand and Mac shook it.

‘Boss says you're welcome. What's a team of rock-biters doing mountain climbing?'

They turned and made their way across the drawbridge, discussing the relative merits of different makes of heavy machinery, and we followed, passing under the house-sized bucket of one of the machines in question. Behind me, I heard the sound of a huge engine starting as whoever was in charge of Baden's defences took the advice of one of its newest inhabitants.

23

Samples

NATASSIA'S STORY

They could see the destruction of the Wieta camp from the bridge of the
Pandora
. Terry said there was a blinding white flash, then a red glow that lasted for the best part of half an hour before it faded away.

Strangely, there was no word afterwards from the medical team. Jerome Hamita, the head medical officer of the complex, had reported the death of the last inmate and his intention to activate the fusion devices, but no one had heard from him since, and the sensors on the
Pandora
had picked up no vehicle leaving the area of the camp.

It wasn't until much later that we found out what had happened to him and to the others who had left Wieta in its last hours.

There was a lot we didn't know at that time that we found out later . . .

Genetic Research Laboratory

Carmody Island

Inland Sea (Eastern Region)

5/2/203 Standard

CHARLIE'S STORY

‘Nice set-up, guys.' Jerome had come straight from the hopper to the lab and he was impressed. Naturally.

He'd been working in a well-appointed infirmary, but it's not quite the same as a state-of-the-art genetics Research lab. The machinery we had access to existed only in the dreams of most professionals – even in Edison – but we were going to need every bit of it, if we were going to make a difference in the coming weeks.

Already, in the five days since our visit to the cave, we'd run gas-spectrometer analysis and electron-microscans of the kids' blood samples, and we were halfway through the gene-mapping process, looking for anomalies. The gene-maps we'd downloaded from their files on the
Pandora
were a start, but they were fifty-year-old technology, and in those days any ‘unknowns' were approximated by the scanner. It was precisely the ‘unknowns' that we were interested in.

Galen was hunched over close to the monitor on the electron-microscope when Jerome walked in, and apart from a slight wave of his hand he didn't change his position. Concentration was always one of his strong suits.

‘Make yourself at home,' I said, as Jerome homed in on another piece of gleaming equipment. I walked across to where Galen was squinting at the image frozen on the screen. ‘Got something?'

‘Not sure.' He spoke without looking up. ‘What do you make of this?'

‘What's the magnification?'

He checked the dial. ‘One-point-five million. I can bring it up a bit if you like.'

I nodded, and he shifted to two million.

‘The Crystal,' I said. ‘The intersection curve of two of the planes.'

At that magnification you could see the tiny imperfections of the planes, and the stresses of the electrical charges holding the thing together. But we'd seen that a thousand times, so there had to be more.

‘What am I looking at?'

‘Nothing. That's the point. No change.' He looked up at me. It's a sample from JD.'

We couldn't keep calling her the kid from bed seventeen, so we'd given her a name – sort of. Officially she was a Jane Doe, and she'd been found by our friend Jermone so she became JD Hamita.

I think Jerome quite liked the idea. He'd become very attached to her. In an environment where your level of patient-loss was running at pretty near a hundred per cent, I guess it was natural to form a bond with the only survivor.

So JD she was. And I was staring at one of her samples on the e-m, trying to figure out what Galen was talking about.

‘It's not expanding its reach, and it's not breaking apart. Total equilibrium. Now watch . . .'

Behind the isolation screening the specimen train shifted, locking a different sample into the machine. Tapping a few keys, Galen focused the e-m and waited for the system to adjust to the new settings.

‘Two mill?' he asked, and I nodded, as the screen resolved into an image similar to the last one except for one startling difference.

As we watched, the line of intersection began to dissolve, as the charges holding the structure together disintegrated before our eyes and the Crystal disappeared from the screen.

‘I cheated a bit,' Galen admitted. ‘That's a video replay. I caught it earlier. It's slowed down three hundred per cent. It happens too quickly to see it that clearly. That was a sample of Maija's blood. We introduced the Crystal to it in the lab and recorded the results in the e-m. Ready for the scary bit?'

I nodded again.

‘This is at point seven-five, so we can see a bit more of what's going on around it. It's your sample.'

There's something sick about making something like this personal. He must have read my eyes, because he went mock-defensive.

‘I needed a clean specimen. This is post-thirty seconds.'

The machine showed a number of Crystal formations, and suddenly my blood ran cold, even though I'd seen it happen before. The molecules immediately around the formations began to rearrange themselves, moving into position like soldiers in a complex parade formation. Then they locked into place and a new Crystal was formed in each location. And as we watched, the process repeated again, each new Crystal forming new ones around itself.

Galen realigned the machine again.

‘Now this is Élita's sample. We introduced the contaminant two minutes ago. A massive dose. Back at two mill.'

Again the Crystal filled the screen, and almost instantly it began to break down.

‘It's reacting with something in the sample. Something that breaks down the intermolecular bonds. The damn thing simply disintegrates, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. There's nothing unusual in the pH or the blood count and it's at body temperature, but it smashes the things to pieces. Ramón's does exactly the same. I'm doing a new scan of the blood-chemistry now. I just wish I had a clue as to what I'm looking for.'

‘You might try some kind of enzyme structure. That could draw electrons away and change the Crystal's field charge, maybe . . .' Jerome had appeared over my shoulder while I'd been concentrating, and his voice made me jump. I saw Galen's eyes narrow as he looked at the doctor in a new light.

‘I thought you were a physician.'

I am, but there's no law says you can't be interested in other areas.'

‘Enzyme?' Galen was frowning, because it was an angle he hadn't thought of and he felt he should have.

He reached forward and tapped a few keys, bringing up a screen on the data frame.

‘New search,' he ordered, leaning slightly towards the v-a pick up. ‘Amino acids, proteins, and' – he looked at Jerome and half-smiled – ‘enzyme-structures.'

‘Ocra, anyone?' I asked. I knew Galen wouldn't think to offer.

Al-Tiina Village

Wieta Clan Lands, Vaana

6/2/203 Standard

ERIN

The Healer looks down at them where they lie. They seem to sleep, but their spirits are further removed than mere sleep. Two human children. They live where the others could not, but it is through no action of the Healer's art.

Eriin kneels for a moment beside the sleeping platform, and places her hand again on one child's chest. And again she feels the touch of Death. It tingles on her skin and creeps beneath the surface, then fades to nothing.

With a final look at the young child, she stands and leaves the hut.