Dominant Species Volume Three -- Acquired Traits (31 page)

Habershaw
knew the doctor. He was an old and bent, extremely unpleasant sort named
Cochran—an old burnout, unable to retire, and the best they could get for the
lowly contractors.

Rachel
wasn’t there, that was clear. Habershaw wasn’t crazy about asking the question,
but he had to do it.

“Have you
treated a woman for glass cuts this morning?” he asked.

“Nope,”
Cochran said with disinterest, not looking up.

“That
solves that mystery,” Habershaw said lightly to the waiting woman. She smiled,
but it was something only passing for a smile.

* * *

That left
one alternative. If she was getting medical treatment it was down in the
plant’s guts.

When he
got back to the rig, Habershaw went straight to the locker and told John and
Donna what he’d learned.

“That’s
no medical clinic,” John said with a note of apprehension. “It’s a very
weird-assed laboratory just filled with this alien surgical technology.”

Habershaw
knew what he had to tell them wouldn’t go down very easily, but they had a
right to know. He told them what he and Lavachek had seen in the last few weeks
prior to the migration. When he was finished, John slumped against the wall.

“What the
hell are they doing in there?” he almost whined. “What is wrong with those
people?”

The idea
that Rachel might be used for some ungodly experiment made him swoon with
dread. He remembered how she had almost fainted when she first saw the lab—how
it had made her physically sick to be in it. He looked up and blinked and his
mouth turned into a straight, tight line.

“Hey,”
Donna said with a focused look. “We don’t know anything yet. We’ve got a ways
to go before we reach any conclusions. Besides, Jacob’s taken some special
interest in Rachel . . .”

“That’s
what I’m afraid of,” John said forcefully.

“Right—but
it doesn’t necessarily mean what you think. Try not to think about it until we
have the facts,” she said.

Sure,
John thought. How do I not think about it.

“I’m as
concerned as you are,” she said. “She’s my family, too.”

Sure.

“There’s
only one way into the lab that we know of,” Donna said to Habershaw. “And
that’s through the tunnel you described as tunnel E. John and Rachel have
explored it dozens of times.”
 
She
blotted her brow on her sleeve.

“So how
do we get in?” Habershaw asked.

“Create a
diversion,” John said. “Then go in shooting and get her out.”

“No. That
won’t work,” Donna said. “I’ve got it. We’ll drop down one of the vertical
ventilation shafts from the top of the structure. You know how Rachel thought
that big hole in the ceiling of the lab was connected to the vents somehow. I
bet she was right.”

“How? We
don’t know which one of those shafts, if any, dumps into the lab,” John said.
“And it’s a long drop besides. How are we gonna manage that? Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

The fear
he felt for Rachel’s welfare was causing his brain to shut down. Donna picked
up on it. She’d have to fill in some for him right now. She hoped it was
temporary.

“We’ll
use a utility shuttle. We’ll steal it, fly it to the top and winch ourselves
down. Simple.”

“Which
one? Which shaft?” John asked.

“John,
relax. We can do this.”
 
She watched him
take a breath and waited until he let it out. “That time we were up on top,
remember? The first time? We counted what—ten chutes in a ring? We’ll go down
each one until we find the right one that’s all.”
 

“What
about the soldiers in the lab?” Habershaw asked. “Chances are there aren’t
any,” Donna said. “They’ve put all their security at the sub-chamber where the
material gets dropped off. My guess is they have no need for soldiers in the
lab itself.”

“I know
that sub-chamber,” John said. “It’s three or four hundred meters from the lab.
If she’s in there, it should be an easy matter to drop in, kill a few
bystanders, snatch her and get the hell out before the guards get to us. We
know the layout better than they do. We have that advantage. We need some
communication equipment. Where can we get some?”

That’s
more like it, Donna thought. I thought we’d lost you.

“I’ve got
some old stuff we once used on the rig,” Habershaw offered. “It doesn’t have
any range, but it’ll work.”

“Good,”
John said.

“What
about the shuttle?” Habershaw asked.

Donna
shrugged and looked at John. “That’s the pilot’s job. What do you think,
Soledad? Can you fly a shuttle to the top of that thing?”

“Blindfolded.
The problem’s copping the shuttle. That could be tough. But I might be able to
convince one of the other pilots to let us borrow one for a while.”

“Who?”
Donna asked.

“I could
check with Paul Mayflower. We were pretty close. I’ve known him for a long
time.”

“You
can’t go strolling over to the shuttle pool and say, Howdy, can I borrow your
shuttle?” Donna said, “So Bill will have to arrange it. Tell him it’s for his
old friend, John Soledad—that kind of thing. See if he’ll buy in. Don’t tell
him he won’t be getting the damned thing back. If he doesn’t go along, we’ll
kill him and steal it.”

“That’s
pretty harsh,” John said with a grin, astonished at Donna's transformation to
guerilla fighter.

“It’s harsh
times,” she replied.

“I’ll
handle it,” Habershaw said. He could schmooze with the best of them.

* * *

Habershaw
found Mayflower later that day, sitting in his shuttle between flights, eating his
lunch from a plastic box. He seemed eager to engage in conversation with
another contractor, and Habershaw swooped right in. He was sure he’d ridden in
his shuttle once or twice and told him so just to get things started. They
talked about the weather, the settlement, the plant— and then the move.

They
commiserated about how shitty everything was, sharing anecdotes about the
contemptible behavior they saw around them. Habershaw even told him about Joan.
The grief and anger he showed was genuine.

“These damn
things hard to fly?” Habershaw asked, finally changing the subject.

“Takes
practice,” Mayflower said. “The damned tests are the hard part. The craft is
fairly easy to control once you get the hang of it. Here, I’ll show you.”

Finally,
Habershaw brought the conversation around to John Soledad. Mayflower was very
interested in what had happened to him as were all the other pilots. When
Habershaw told Mayflower that John was in hiding, Mayflower was both surprised
and concerned. When Mayflower asked what he could do to help, Habershaw had no
trouble broaching the subject of borrowing the shuttle.

“I’ll
leave it parked right here with the keys in it,” he said. “Take the thing.”

With that
done, Habershaw went back and looked for the ancient head-sets he and Lavachek
used to use. He found them stuffed in the old canvas bag he carried from job to
job.

Donna,
John and Habershaw met later back in the locker and took inventory. There
wasn’t much. They would use the rescue harness from the shuttle attached to the
winch to lower one of them down. They had lights and they had the rifle. That
was it.

“Who goes
down to get her?” Donna asked.

“I do,”
John said. “No arguments.”

“How much
wire’s on the winch?” Habershaw asked.

“It’s got
a thousand meters on it.”

“That’s
plenty.”

“Yeah.”

“So we go
tonight,” Donna said.

“Tonight,”
Habershaw echoed.

“Tonight,”
John agreed, only wishing it could be much sooner.

“Then
we’d better get some sleep,” Donna said. “By sunup tomorrow, I want to be as
far from this place as we can get.”

15

B
y the time John got
into his net suit and took up a perch on the rig’s high railing, the night had
begun its noisy song. There were lights still on in the monolith that cast long
shadows of the equipment parked in front of the opening. Like strange rays,
they struck harsh patterns of light and dark across the clearing. John looked
down and checked every corner, every dark spot, looking for movement. From
where he was, it would be impossible for anyone to move without him seeing a
shadow. He watched for ten minutes or more, making sure. All he saw were the
tiny, back-lit wings of insects flying in front of the opening, drawn by the
lights. They flew like snowflakes in the wind, but never blew inside,
constantly repelled by the structure’s remarkable chemical defense.

Donna
came up quietly and looked with him. She didn’t have to touch his arm to know
it was taut as a spring.

“That’s
the strangest damn thing, isn’t it?” he said.

“What’s
strange?” she said. “The whole planet is strange.”
 

“Look how
the insects cluster around the opening and never go in. Look how they seem to
bump into an invisible wall just where the opening starts. What’s keeping them
out?”

“Some
repellent, like Rachel thought.”

“But none
of them go in. None. It’s fantastic really.”
 
She reminded herself about John’s amateur interest in biology. But he
was creating a diversion for himself, going somewhere far away in his mind even
if for a moment. She wished she could do the same.

“Yeah, I
guess it is,” she said, acting like a good sister. “It’s amazing. I’m no
expert, but I’d say that thing has evolved a great way to keep out pests.”

John
checked the moons’ positions. They were just coming up, no more than a few
degrees over the horizon. It was dark enough to get started.

“Did you
sleep any?” he asked.

“No.”

“Neither
did I,” he said and huffed a long exhale. “We’d better get going.”

“Hey,”
she said.

“What?”

“This
could work. It could work real easy.”

John
nodded his head. If one of those holes led to Rachel, he’d find her. That’s all
he cared about. “I hope you’re right,” he said.

They met
Habershaw on the dark side of the rig behind the massive track. He was antsy,
nervous about being off the rig and out in the open at night. His experience on
the road had left a figurative, as well as a literal, impression on him. He
constantly brushed the bugs off his net suit—a futile task. One eye was always
on the jungle’s edge, waiting for one of those giant grubs to shoot out its
grabber at him. John and Donna seemed not to mind, largely ignoring the insects
clattering around them.

Donna saw
Habershaw's obvious discomfort. “You get used to it,” she said casually.
“They’re only bugs.”

They
moved at a tangent away from the light then circled wide and entered the
shuttle pool in near total darkness. There were a dozen or so shuttles parked
in an irregular row. Habershaw kept moving until he came to Mayflower’s. When
he pulled on the latch, the door opened wide.

“Perfect,”
he said. “Mayflower always was a man of his word.”

John
moved to the pilot’s seat and turned the shuttle on. The instrument panel lit
up brightly. He dialed the intensity down just to be on the safe side. When he
turned the suspensors on, the shuttle hummed quietly then gently lifted off the
ground. He banked right as soon as he cleared the treetops and swung around to
the back side of the monolith. He waited until the moons were out of sight and
they were in the structure’s shadow before he started his ascent. They moved
vertically along the structure’s sheer wall and were at the top in less than a
minute.