They Also Serve: A Jump Universe Novel Part 13

If he'd cannibalized that mule..."Kat and company back from their little jaunt?"

"A hour ago. Brought back an entire family. She and an old fart she found are swapping info packets faster than any net."

The outline of an action plan was forming in Ray's head. "You got us a downfeed from their news and media?"

"Running. Base is getting an eyeful. Also the archives. Don't know if they'll be much help. They're pretty corrupted."

Ray breathed out slowly. Forced himself to compose words that should have come to him with practiced ease. "Good on all accounts, Lek. You, Kat, and company hang close to the shuttle. We'll be heading back first thing today."

"Trouble, sir?"

"Don't know, but I want to be ready for it."

Ray called the base. "Duty office, Third-Cla.s.s-Petty-Officer-Chin. How-may-I-help-you, sir?" shot back to him.

"Colonel Longknife here. Advise Captain Rodrigo I want a meeting at oh nine hundred tomorrow with her, doc, and if she can lay her hands on him, Father Joseph."

"I'll advise them both as soon as their commlinks show them awake, sir. I'll send a marine to invite the padre. I think he has an early-morning Ma.s.s."

"Thank you. Longknife out."

Ray glanced at his wrist. He had a good three hours to test the craziest ideas ever to come from his mouth. Still, if even half of the absurdities he was playing with matched reality here, he might be saying the most important words he'd ever spoken. Possibly that any human being had ever spoken.

EIGHT.

RAY DISMOUNTED THE shuttle, the familiar smells of farms and cooling lander accompanying him. Just being away from Refuge seemed to have a calming effect on his troubled gut. Mary waited in the first mule. As Jeff helped Harry settle his family in the second, Mary nodded at Dumont. "What's he doing here?"

"Doesn't want to be my murdering dog anymore," Ray answered softly. "Got a job for him here?"

"Always need troops in the motor pool. We're lugging food in from farther away."

From the open hatch of the shuttle, Dumont listened. "Can I leave my rifle behind?"

"Du," Mary shot back, "I don't think folks would mind if you left your clothes behind. They just want our coppers."

Ray turned on his heel. "You can if you want, Dumont, but think on it carefully. You saw what was going on last night. If you find yourself in a situation, you can always choose not to use the rifle you've got. You can't use the one you don't have."

"I'll think about it, Colonel."

"Do that, Du."

An hour later, fed and up to date on the base's status, Ray settled into his place in the conference room. The chairs and table were the usual cheap, imitation wood, on loan from the wardroom of Second Chance, standard issue to any military unit in human s.p.a.ce. The room's walls had come out a beige identical on military installations since, Ray suspected, Alexander the Great's campaign tent.

To his right, Mary waited, expectant. Beside her, Kat yawned. Was she finally getting too old for all-nighters? Doc Isaacs sat next, intently going over his reader; that settled who went first this morning. At the foot of the table, Lek sat next to the padre, whose hands were folded, eyes closed, asleep, or lost in meditation. Jeff and the new recruit, Harry, sat close on Ray's left. They'd been talking when they came in. Now they eyed their surroundings, waiting.

Ray cleared his throat. "I'm told you should never look a gift horse in the mouth. This planet was here when the crew of Santa Maria was desperate." Nods from the left side of the table. "Still, this gift extracts a price. The extent of that price has yet to be determined. Doc, you want to brief the new folks on what you've found?"

Doc quickly explained the tumors in the Santa Marians and their rapid appearance in the landing party. His new listeners showed dismay as the briefing went on.

"What's it mean?" Jeff asked.

Doc shrugged. "d.a.m.ned-if-I-know. We've got the tumors. They appear to be benign. I've found what looks like fragments of two different unknown viruses in our blood."

"Two!" Ray asked. "Does it take both to grow a tumor?"

"Maybe, maybe not." Doc looked around the table. "Any of you folks remember sneezing, scratchy throats, watery eyes, itchy skin the day you came down?" Every member of the landing party nodded before half the question was asked.

"Any of you having any more allergic reactions?"

Blank stares.

"Now, me"-Doc leaned back in his chair-"I'm allergic to d.a.m.n near everything in the Milky Way. Nearly flunked my draft physical for allergies."

"No," came in awestruck sarcasm from the marines and Kat.

"Yes, boys and girls, it is possible to flunk a draft physical. You're looking at someone whose allergies almost pulled it off." Doc Isaacs paused. "And who showed no allergic reaction to any samples in, the test kits this morning? I may actually get myself a cute kitten."

"This means..." Ray left the question hanging.

"Every white cell I got has changed beyond recognition. Couldn't have an allergic reaction to save my life. Which, taken at face value, scares the h.e.l.l out of me. We are supposed to be allergic to some stuff. Doesn't matter. My lymph nodes and the white cells they're pumping out will accept anything."

"That can't happen overnight!" Kat insisted.

"Right. Can't. Did. You do the math," Doc shot back.

"One of the viruses?"

"Maybe. All I got so far are fragments in our blood. I'm testing the atmosphere for complete samples."

Ray mulled that over. Guesses. Just guesses. Like his dreams. He turned to Jeff and Harry. "You've heard what we've found. Something very strange happens to people who live on this planet, even just visit. What can you tell me?"

As Jeff opened his mouth, the older man placed a restraining hand on his elbow. "What can you tell me about this solar system?" Harry asked.

Kat pounced like a kitten on a ball of twine. "Star is only two and a half billion years old. The planet is estimated at less than two billion years old."

"Early in its formation for such an abundance of life forms, don't you think?" Harry drawled.

"And three different evolutionary tracks," Doc added.

"On most life-appropriate planets, Earth included," Kat said slowly, "tiny ocean life forms took most of the first two billion years just to get their acts together before venturing onto the land. So what makes this one so different?"

"Maybe because it was someone's garden," Harry offered. Ray started at his choice of imagery. Had he met the Gardener?

"Whose?" Mary shot back.

"I believe that is what we are trying to figure out," Harry said with a wry smile. "It is possible, from my core samples, to surmise that three million years ago this planet was very nascent; nothing but one-cell critters. That changed real quick about two and a half million years ago. It appears the planet entered into some kind of warm, pleasant golden age a bit over two million years ago. That ended close to a million years ago, to be replaced by a strange seesaw as raging weather patterns alternated with periods of equilibrium. The past five hundred thousand years have seen the seesawing getting worse."

"That's in the core samples?" Ray had been looking for confirmation. He hadn't expected to have it handed to him on a platter.

"Some say it is, myself included. Others disagree, insisting there is nothing there." Harry turned his palms over in a dismissing gesture. "Since we have drawn them from only a small part of this continent, a very small area of this planet, I cannot refute the doubters with any authority."

Ray sat forward in his chair. "Tell me about some of those bad-weather patterns. Major storm surges? Tidal waves?"

"I've drilled up evidence of six inches of sand twenty, thirty miles onto the Piedmont plain around Refuge and New Haven. Happened four or five times."

"How strong were the mineral readings at the breakpoint between the end of the golden age and the beginning of the troubled years?" Ray went on.

"Don't know. Unless I drilled through a major ore seam or an old river, metal on this planet is very hard to come by. Not enough tectonic action in its short history. Why?"

"Mary, you got any gear for very small samples?"

"Down to parts per billion. What do you have in mind?"

Did he dare say? "I bet if you find an area buried suddenly a million years ago, you'll find a very rich mineral layer."

"Want to say why?" Mary asked.

"Not yet. Any places like that near here, or do we have to go back to the coast?" Ray asked Harry.

The old man pulled a well-used map from his hip pocket, unfolded it and studied it, right hand ma.s.saging his chin. "The James River valley goes quite a ways inland. Much of it was flooded three, four times," he said slowly. "Where the river hasn't carried away the overburden, I could probably find that first layer." He looked up, eyes bright and a smile forming. "I'd love to work with a few of your miners. Jeff told me what they did to a single hill. When can we start?"

"As soon as the boss wants us to," Mary drawled. "By the way, Colonel, while we're stacking up anomalies, I got one to throw on the pile." Ray waited while Mary gnawed her lower lip.

"I lost nearly ten percent of my nanos yesterday. Normal attrition is less than one percent. I recovered ninety-seven percent of the nanos. But six percent of the ones I got back carried nothing and are unusable." Ray raised an eyebrow. "The nanos were modified at their atomic level. Grapplers broken off, electric motors wrecked."

"That's impossible," Kat insisted.

"Yep, impossible, but that's what happened to my little metal wranglers. It's like they've been in a fight. Only, neither the metal nor the mountain's supposed to fight back."

Unless the metal were fighting for its life, Ray thought, slumping in his chair. "Mary, work with Harry today. Get me a good spectrum from a million years back."

"What are you looking for?" Mary asked.

"I have no idea. Lek, I want you to get the sky eyes back up. One over New Haven, another for Refuge, one circulating around the Covenanters."

"You don't trust the news media?" Kat asked.

"Let's say I don't trust them to know what they're looking at, or what's important. I want my own raw data feed."

"I'll patch it into the stuff we're getting from Lek's taps," Kat said. "We'll get you one consolidated intelligence report for tomorrow morning, Colonel."

"Good." Ray turned back to Lek. "While you're working on other stuff, spend some time meditating on what a surveillance system or computer network might look like after we've had a million years to polish the technology. Any ideas?"

"No."

"Me neither. But for the moment, a.s.sume something very high-tech grew over the million quiet years, and some of it is still humming." Ray's subordinates looked at each other, then at him. "We need an estimate of the situation to work from. I'm offering one, You have an alternate, I'm listening."

"A million-year-old technology that's been rusting for a long while. You know something we don't?" Doc asked.

"Maybe. I'm not sure. Kat, fit the data to the curve. Tell me where my guess doesn't fit."

The young middie shook her head slowly. "There's not enough data to conclude anything, sir."

"Okay, I've stuck my neck out. Now you get out there and prove me wrong. By the way, Harry, before you go, would you let Doc take a picture of the inside of your skull?"

"Kind of a new-employee physical?" the old man grinned.

"Doc, I also want to spend some time on the table," Ray said, getting to his feet. "You've got your a.s.signments, everybody. Have at them. Oh, Lek, Mary, and I found an interesting pillar in a cave yesterday. Once you've got the sky eyes up, take a look at it; see if you can find anything electromagnetic about it."

Ray walked over to the hospital with Doc and Harry. If he weren't so dead on his feet, he might have been able to skip the cane entirely. Then again, maybe he was just being optimistic. Doc scanned Harry quickly, ending it with a whistle and a question. "You have many headaches?"

"When I was a kid. Not recently. Why?"

Doc motioned Harry and Ray over to look at his scan. "I'm finding most Santa Marians have some kind of growth in this section of the brain. Yours is one of the largest I've seen. The Colonel here sports a bigger one." Ray nodded and Jerry pulled up his scan, as well as the kids'.

Harry frowned. "What do you make of it?"

"Right now," Jerry said, "nothing. I can't even figure out an approach."

On that, Harry left and Ray took his place on the table, got comfortable, took a deep breath, and told Jerry, "Today we do a brain activity scan. I'll think something, and you tell me what part of my brain lights up. I had a baseline done a while back."

Doc fiddled with his station for a while. "Here's that part of your file. Let's start with the multiplication tables."

"Seven times one is seven," Ray began. He'd droned through the eights before Jerry called enough.

"I'm supposed to show you some dirty pictures. All I've got is a couple of boring inkblots."

"I'm a married man, Doc. Going to be a daddy soon. I ought to be able to provide a few thoughts gratis." Rita in her, folks' garden, at the lake, on the ship.

"Nothing's changed there, Colonel. Try a tactical problem."

Ray went over the a.s.sault on the pa.s.s, trying for the umpteenth time to figure out how he could have gotten around Mary and her bag of surprises.

"Yeah, that's a match, in spades," Jerry said. "You're dialed in. What did you want to show me?"

Ray thought of the Three. The soaring towers and purple gardens. The doctor whistled, started tapping his board like mad. Ray remembered the caverns of the woolly leg-legs, The art on the walls of the long tunnels. "Any change there, Doc?"

"None. I mean, yes. No. Keep doing whatever it is you're doing." Ray switched to the aeries of the spinners, dancing on the winds where gravity's kiss was but a light caress.

"That one is a bit sensuous," Doc observed.