Sanctuary (Jezebel's Ladder Book 3) (2 page)

At the door, Red also argued with
the mechanic, going so far as to order Herk to drag Crandall’s ass inside.

The mechanic shook his head as he
backed away. “I read the Override page three days ago, Red. I’m as strong as
Herk is and twice as mean. In a fight, you’d lose both of us.” Crandall
strapped himself in behind the COIL device. “Besides, if the Chinese come in
with their new space marines, you’ll need me to slow them down.”

“Thirty seconds till impact,” Herk
said with a sigh.

Red waved an arm, and the golden
door unfolded, shutting behind them. They didn’t hear or feel a thing from the
explosions outside. The group noted that the large, gold door, like any good
airlock, was soundproof.

****

To Mercy’s right was an empty,
trapezoidal chamber, about four meters deep. To her left, the
thirty-meter-diameter round room appeared to be filled with a forest of giant, artificial
toadstools, each two meters across. They were arranged in a faerie ring—no, a
spiral about four layers deep—surrounding a gray depression five meters across.

People were talking with their
helmets off and breathing the alien atmosphere. They still wore the ear and
throat gear for radio communication, though. Risking death for curiosity, she
removed her helmet as well. The air here was sterile and free of cow pies.

Only Herkemer kept his suit on,
constantly scanning the area for threats.

“They look like beanbag chairs,”
said the Japanese interface specialist. She could finally read his name, ‘Sojiro,’
on the helmet he carried under his arm. Odd, that was the name of a comic her
youngest sister read. He must be a fan, too.

Commander Zeiss noted, “Nine groups
of nine chairs.”

“Eighty-one total, the same as the
number of total paragraphs on the golden pages the aliens gave us,” Red added.
Without a helmet, Mercy could see she’d stopped dyeing her hair, reverting to
her natural honey blonde. Mercy was jealous because her own hair was a dull,
mouse brown.

“I guess they wanted to be prepared
for the maximum number of guests when they built this place,” said Sojiro. The
team had each doubled, and in some cases tripled, up on talents to reach the
minimum number of representatives required by the aliens, half the mission size
the UN expected. “What are we supposed to do next?”

Red closed her eyes and communed
with the alien no one else could hear while the sixteen other astronauts
swarmed over the mysterious devices. Eventually, she opened her eyes and
relayed, “Sensei said we all have to go through decontamination before getting
into the control room. First, we take off our outer clothes. Underwear is fine.
Then, each of us should climb under a bean bag. He’ll bubble us into the device
and use a safe chemical to scrub us. He can’t risk infecting the galaxy with
Earth viruses.”

Several people took a step back
from the pods they were examining.

“Physical or philosophical?” asked
Yvette, the therapist. “The alien manuscripts refer to certain behavior
patterns, such as murder, as viruses.”

“Maybe both,” Red said with a
shrug. “Does it matter?”

“I don’t want anyone scrubbing my
brain, and we need certain bacteria to digest our food.”

A pale-faced man with a medical
patch agreed. “Each person is a unique colony of micro-flora. How does
decontamination work? I mean, our spacesuit keep out nearly anything.” His
accent sounded Australian until ‘spacesuit,’ where he cut the plural ‘s’ and
spit the ‘t’ at the end. Then she pegged him as an Afrikaner.

Mr. Bacteria had the nametag ‘Toby.’
He might be handsome if he spent more time in the sun and stopped scowling. Mercy
recalled Yvette saying something about dating him once and calling him an odd
duck. In this crowd, what would constitute odd?

“What about all our gear?” asked
the Latina—Sonrisa, Herkemer’s wife.

“We check it at the baggage
counter.” She pointed to the small, trapezoidal chamber. “Whatever we can fit
inside that room goes with us after we close the door. I think there’s some
sort of automation layer hidden between us and the main ship. He’ll spray the
inanimate stuff separately and send it through. Everything has to be
sterilized, or we don’t get the prize,” Red insisted.

“How long does the process take?”
asked Zeiss.

Red wagged her hand in reply. “Time
is a goofy concept with Sensei. Maybe six hours? It could be four. I don’t know
if he means a quarter of our waking day or the whole day. It doesn’t really
matter; the mushroom pods are the only thing that can carry us through the
membrane to the next level.”

The pretty-boy pilot wiped a hand
through his wavy, sandy hair and looked good enough to pose for a cologne ad.
The scent could be called Confidence, and he reeked of it. Lou nudged Yuki
forward. “I say we send the spy first as a test.”

Mercy didn’t like the man, in spite
of the fact that all the girls swooned over him. According to Red, he might
have failed math if not for Zeiss. Worse, Mercy couldn’t stand the thought of
Lou using another person as a guinea pig. Without planning, she said, “I’ll do
it.”

All sixteen other astronauts turned
to stare at her. She explained, “I . . . um . . . have no skills you’re going
to need for the rest of the mission. I even left my camera behind. I’m deadweight.”
She gave a self-deprecating smile afterward.

Red’s jaw dropped open.

When Zeiss nodded, the group could
smell bacon frying as Red’s emotions flared. “You can’t do that to my best
friend’s sister.”

“She volunteered,” said Zeiss. “You
were okay doing it to Yuki.”

“That’s different.”

“Every crew member is valuable and
needed for the mission.”

While the couple argued, Mercy stood
beside the first pod in the conga line and raised a trembling hand to her
spacesuit’s neck collar. Sonrisa smiled and helped her. “You’re brave, Mercy.”

Yuki started to undress as well.
Zeiss stopped arguing long enough to say, “Wait. You don’t have to.”

In a timid, Asian accent, Yuki
said, “She was willing to give her life for mine. I will not let her go into
the unknown alone. If there is some unexpected malfunction, you will send me
next anyway. This way, I am not alone either.” The medical staff helped her out
of her suit.

Subdued, Red said, “Leave your equipment
out here, and we’ll check it at the baggage counter for you.”

The decontamination room was chilly,
about fifteen degrees Celsius. Thankfully, Mercy had on gray, granny underwear
developed by the Fortune space program to reduce the amount of coolant needed
in EVA suits. Her only adornment was a single coin made into a necklace. With
his back toward her, Herkemer blocked everyone’s view as she slid into the
depression beneath the toadstool.

By contrast, Yuki wore black
nanoweave engineered by J-wear for commercial space travel. They were smell-
and stain-resistant for up to a month, as well as minimally sized, to reduce
the amount of laundering needed. Several of the men stared at her thin,
athletic form. Only Herk was chastised for it by his wife.

“Ready,” Yuki said from under her
toadstool.

Zeiss said, “We’re going to keep in
radio contact with you on band two. Someone will always be monitoring in case
you need help or just an ear.”

Him, Mercy didn’t mind—tall, cute,
and gentle. She sighed.
Red had all the luck, damn her.
Every time Zeiss
touched Red, which he made frequent excuses to do, her childhood friend smiled.

Red said, “Each of you reach up and
tap the frills three times to begin the process. If you need to get out in an
emergency, do the same thing. But if you break the cycle, you have to start all
over again.”

The aliens were crazy about the
number three: three sections of the alien handbook, each with three pages. In
turn, each page had three paragraphs. She’d read a thesis claiming the alien
controls for the lens worked best when only three fingers were employed.

Mercy took a deep breath and tapped
the soft underside of the toadstool. The device lowered, cutting off all light.
Then the pod filled with fluid that matched her internal body temperature. At
first, she just floated, like a sensory-deprivation experiment. Then, the fluid
overflowed into her mouth. Spitting, she said over the radio, “It’s not (ptuh)
stopping.” She tried to tap the frills, but the weight of the device held her
hands down. “Won’t be able to (glub).”

She heard the others arguing in
bursts through the radio link as she held her breath. Only Red remained calm.
“Sensei says you should breathe in normally.”

As her pod filled, it lifted, and
through the new transparent sides, she could see the others staring at her.

Forcing down every natural instinct
she had, Mercy opened her mouth and let the warm fluid pour into her lungs.
After a few reflexive spasms, the pod ceiling rose further, and she was
floating in a fish bowl. The frills had attached to her bare wrists and ankles
like leeches. ‘Weird’ wasn’t strong enough to describe how she felt. She gave a
thumbs-up gesture and encouraged Yuki to take the plunge as well.

Mercy wasn’t able to speak while
immersed in the goop. The only thing that came out was “oooguh.” Fortunately
her hearing wasn’t affected, only her throat.

“Whoa, no way,” said the other
physician, the Maori. Rather than his impossibly long surname, the nametag bore
only his call sign—’Auckland,’ the place he was born. “Even I’ve seen those
space-vampire movies.” The others made him change channels.

Mercy pointed to her helmet and
activated her simulated keyboard interface by clicking her right thumbnail.
Moving her fingers, each with a tracking dot embedded in the nail, she
air-typed. She sometimes used this interface to get around her mother’s
arbitrary, fifty-hour-work-week limit. Some of her best ideas occurred when she
was supposed to be sleeping or in the shower. Everyone could read the letters
appearing on her curved helmet screen. The few errors she made, people filtered
out. ‘Why cuffs?’

Red replied, “Toby is our expert on
nanomedicine. He says it looks like a filtration system. While the liquid
scrubs your skin and lungs, the cuffs clean your blood.” The medic leaned over
her pod wearing an unusual set of goggles. “The fabric on the other pod we
checked had an array of straws with holes about fifteen nanometers wide.
Viruses over twenty-five nanometers are retained by the pod.”

‘I’m a germ smoothie,’ Mercy joked.

After a minute, Zeiss gestured for
her to keep talking, and Red asked, “How do you feel?”

‘Sleepy.’

“Blood loss can account for some of
that.”

When Mercy’s eyes closed, Red said,
“Yuki is already out, probably because she has lower bodyweight.”

‘M not fat,’ she objected. The pool
was so warm.

“Not at all. I want you to stay
awake for me while we set up a display for your heart monitor. Can you do
that?”

‘Try.’

Red said, “Tell us about the coin
you’re wearing.”

‘Susan B. Anthony,’ Mercy typed.

“How did you get it?” Red asked.

‘School zoo trip in first grade.
Got separated by entrance.’

“My parents
hammered
me
about kidnapping safety. Were you afraid?”

‘No. Spent all day watching coins
spiral down a funnel for a charity. Models gravity well. Teachers called
parents.’

“They must’ve been beside
themselves with worry.”

‘Dad left work. Only time. Corp
Security shut down zoo. Dad found me. Understood.’

“PJ Smith, the Chief Scientist,”
Red explained to the others.

‘I could see the strings, the
motion before it happened—energy. I broke open the coin box to send all of them
down again and again.’

“What did PJ do when he arrived?”

‘Gave me the dollar coin and
watched with me. He sees forces, too. Wasn’t alone anymore.’

“Susan B showed women were equals.”

‘Not many in engineering.’

“Your dad was telling you that you
could do anything you put your mind to. I’d hold on to a memento like that,
too.”

‘Tired.’ Her pod had moved toward
the center, sinking into the floor.
I am the coin.

“Toby says you’re safe now. Get
some rest,” Red encouraged.

Zeiss added softly, “You’re very
special, not useless at all.”

Mercy went to sleep thinking about
what it would be like to find someone smart and strong to kiss her the way her
parents kissed. She also asked herself why she had volunteered for such a blatantly
suicidal mission.

Mercy had made her critical decision three months before.

“That space mission I went on is
going to ruin our project,” Mercy Smith said to her father on the boat ride
from their beach-front mansion to the spaceport in Alcantara, Brazil.

Dad, seated opposite her at the
yacht’s breakfast table, was the head of research at Fortune Aerospace. He
referred to the task of managing engineers as ‘herding cats.’ Diplomatically,
he ignored her complaint as he marked up a technical paper, trying to reduce it
to thirty slides or less.

“What an odd choice of words, my
dear,” said her mother, lowering the computer pad with Dad’s schedule for the
day. She’d been an assistant to senators, and she always had her hair, makeup,
and dress perfectly done.

By contrast, Mercy had her father’s
fashion sense—straight, dark-brown hair, lab coats, baggy pants, and T-shirts.
She frequently forgot and left her badge and protective, self-dimming goggles
on outside work, causing her sisters to point and jeer, “Nerd alert.”

“That parade was only supposed to
take a few hours. Nobody told me Carnival in Rio lasts
four days
. I’ll
never get that time back.”

“Your younger sister Magdalene went
to most of the parties for you, wearing your mask.” All of the sisters but Mary
had brown eyes and could pass as wealthy locals. Everyone liked the extroverted
Maggie. Being the prettiest in the family probably had something to do with
that. “As the first Brazilian woman in space, you’re a hero to the local
girls.”

“I was just born here because Dad
was sending up probes to scan the artifact. I speak Portuguese like a
three-year-old.”

“Keeping your dual citizenship has
opened a lot of doors for us,” her mother insisted. “What’s really bothering
you?”

“I had to work out an hour a day
before I could qualify to show NASA how to install those new drive units, and
afterward I’m still stuck exercising.”

“But dear, I thought you enjoyed
our time together. You have to build up your bones. Swimming is a great stress
reliever, not to mention great for toning your calves and behind.” Mom crossed
her legs to demonstrate.

Dad lowered the paper to leer
approvingly at Mom’s aforementioned attributes.

Mercy sighed, covering her eyes at
the display of lust in fifty-year-olds. “It squeezes the rest of my schedule
too much. The board wants a test flight for the new, four-engine prototype,
Tetra-1,
in three months, and there aren’t enough hours in the day. We’re launching
components almost every week, but the parts already up there aren’t working
yet.”

Dad shook his finger. “Oh, that
reminds me, Mercy . . . a VIP from moon base is visiting today. I’d like you to
show them all the new toys that R&D has come up with.”

“Why do I have to do the
dog-and-pony show?”

“The price of fame, dear,” her
mother said, clearing the uneaten eggs from the galley table. “People like
hobnobbing with celebrities.”

“You have my math skills and your
mother’s good looks,” her father said, circling a single sentence and crossing
out the rest of the page.

“What about my
real
work?”

“Astronauts don’t whine, dear,” Mom
said.

****

A chauffeur met them at the docks
and dropped the ladies at the company pool. One of the bodyguards remained with
them. Mercy wore a robe over her one-piece suit until she jumped in the water.
She’d been attacked by a man late one night in the lobby of her campus
apartment while picking up her mail. Her self-defense training had enabled her
to escape, but the officer taking her report had pointed out that her pajamas
might have been too revealing. Since then, she always wore several layers of
clothing, even in the tropical sun.

That early on Monday morning, the
deep water wasn’t fully heated yet. To make matters worse, the fifty-year-old woman
kicked her bubble butt at laps.

Between the unusually cold water
and the tension, Mercy had neck cramps by the end of the workout. In the
changing room, her mother said, “Lie down in the relaxation room and let me get
you a massage therapist. I’ll rearrange your meetings this morning.”

“You go ahead. I can . . . ouch.”
When Mercy bent to pick up her sneaker, the young woman almost cried. “Okay.
That . . . sounds good.” She soaked in the hot tub for twenty minutes, trying
to loosen the muscles on her own.

When an athletic, blue-eyed,
freckled woman entered the secluded management area, her light-brown tresses
were tightly braided to look like a hair band.
How cute.
Mercy read her
name off the medical-branch badge. “Yvette? Thank goodness you’re here. Can you
do a neck massage?”

“But of course,” she replied with a
French accent. Mercy rolled her eyes as she grabbed a towel. The geeks who
normally used the masseuse for typing injuries probably ate this stuff up.
“Have you tried pills to reduce the inflammation?”

Walking hunched over toward the
relaxation room, Mercy held up a blue medic-alert bracelet. “I’m allergic to
Tylenol. I’d be coughing all day.” It was an odd side effect of the alien page
her father had read—a page that she’d been born knowing. Given her normal
mother, none of her sisters had inherited this trait. Whole sections of the
human brain could be reformatted or retasked by the pages, not always with
success. Everyone in Fortune Industries and assorted foreign space programs
recognized the symbol on her wrist.

“Very well, have you been massaged
before?”

Mercy whimpered, “Once,” as she
placed her face in the padded hole on the table.

“Would you like music?”

“No. I always feel compelled to
name the piece and composer like it’s a quiz show. When the piano’s out of
tune, it grates in my ears like nails on a chalkboard.”

Yvette warmed up some lotion.

When strong hands glided over the
cramped muscles, Mercy cried out.

“Be careful,
mademoiselle
;
we don’t want your bodyguard running in here to shoot me.”

“S’okay. Mom took him back to Dad’s
office.” Sharing this piece of information made the scientist a little nervous,
but she knew she’d seen the masseuse somewhere before.

“Do you have other problems due to
your pages?” Yvette asked.

“After I read a paragraph of my
second page, I see blue as three different colors. Sometimes people’s outfits
clash, and I just have to ignore it. Oh, right there. That’s the spot.”

“Alternating Gravity page?”

The color blue on the bracelet
indicated the gravity primer family of pages. It was a mental page, so anyone
treating Mercy had to be warned to watch for imbalances. “Yeah. Ooo. Harder.”

“Do you worry about Fortune syndrome?”
The syndrome attacked the central nervous system like Parkinson’s disease and
was common among those with mental talents who overextended themselves.

“Dad doesn’t have it.”

“He’s one of the weakest Actives
known, and his contract limits him to fifty hours of work a week.”

“Mom wrote that contract herself.
She put the same clause in mine, and she enforces it herself, even at home.”

“You still live with your parents?”

“I spent some time on my own. This
is more convenient.” Mercy had lost her own apartment for carrying classified
data home from work. She was, in the words of her employment contract, grounded
for another two months.

“But you’re a multiple talent. Symptoms
for those tend to manifest around forty-five. You’re a little over half that
age now. How does that make you feel?”

Like I have nitroglycerin
strapped to my back and any false move will kill me. Duh!
What Mercy replied
was more diplomatic and broached the stupid question people asked her most
often. “Most Icarus talents go nuts before then.” The name Icarus was math
shorthand for a unified physics theory obtained from alien documents. The proof
of the formula was a nuke-proof force field that repelled radiation and
hydrogen. Unfortunately, readers often went insane—obsessed with the belief
that
everything
should be ordered and connected, but often unable to
prove it. Mercy’s father had transformed the force field into a propulsion
system for spacecraft.

“Do you think
you
will?”

“The worst cases are
super-geniuses. Outside of gravity theory, I top out around 145. My youngest
sister Melissa is smarter than that. So I’m a pretty normal workaholic, a bit
less interesting than most.”

Yvette squirted more lotion, moved
the towel aside, and worked outward down the shoulder blades. “Don’t you like
men?”

Mercy’s eyes popped open, and she
sat up, fumbling to put the towel back into place. “Um . . . is that some kind
of offer?”

“Do you want it to be?”

“I haven’t had the time to date. I’m
working long hours or under armed guard most times.”

“That didn’t stop your younger
sister Mary.”

Mercy laughed. “You can’t keep Mary
away from men with locked doors and a fire hose.” Then she blinked. Mary had
never been photographed. Her current location in New York City was a secret
even some board members couldn’t be trusted with. Speaking to the ceiling, she
said, “Security to relaxation room—”

“Belay that,” said Yvette.

Rolling off of the table, and
keeping it between her and the masseuse, Mercy said, “I’d like you to leave
now.”

“Relax, Mercy, this isn’t an
attack; it’s an interview. I apologize for the omission, but I never lied. Your
father said you were expecting me.”

Could Yvette be the VIP her father
mentioned? “I was told to show you the cool new toys, like the gecko patch the
size of my palm that can hold 300 kilograms.”

“I’d rather continue this
discussion,” Yvette said. “Do you think the attempted rape has turned you
against men altogether?”

“There’s no
attempted
about
it. We both know that when a man climbs on your back without permission and
pushes your face into the carpet, it’s rape, whether or not he finishes. Has it
changed my worldview? Hell, yes. But I still have high standards—I want what
Mom and Dad have . . . someday.” Squinting for a moment, Mercy said, “I
recognize you from the wedding photo.”

“What photo?”

“The one for
she who must not be
named
,” Mercy said, dreading this topic. Miracle ‘Red’ Hollis was the
majority stockholder in Fortune Aerospace. Mercy’s sister was the woman’s media
shadow, drawing attention away while Red trained on the moon. Mentioning the
name without a surveillance-blocking device could cause her to be fired or
worse.

Yvette smiled. “She’s not an evil
wizard or demon. Is that how you view her?” The woman handed Mercy an
encryption-verified ‘cooperation’ card, the equivalent of a company-internal
subpoena.

“You’re a transparency
officer—ethics enforcement.” Every organization handling the alien pages had to
have this moral police force to prevent abuse of the new abilities and
technology they granted.

“As you signed the accords, you are
obligated to answer my questions honestly. My empathic training will tell me if
you’re dissembling. You’re permitted to have a lawyer present.”

“I need my clothes, and then I’ll
tell you anything you want.” Mercy slipped her smart badge out of the locker to
contact Dad in secret.

“Your father will tell you to talk
to me,” Yvette predicted.

When Mercy reached him, Dad gave no
hints, apologies, or explanations, only the words, “Answer her.”

A few minutes later, they were
seated in the secure conference room near Mercy’s office. The scientist
whispered, “Is this about me halting production? Any engineer in the company
can do that for safety concerns.”

“Is it for safety?” countered
Yvette.

“Why else?”

“You have a history of rivalry with
Mira.”

“Bullshit.”

Yvette pulled a thumb-sized device
out of her pocket and ordered, “Play.”

Mercy’s enraged voice ranted from
the player. “She needs to take a damn physics class.”

Blanching with anger, Mercy
squeezed the player’s off button. “That was a private conversation. Has
enforcement been recording me long?”

“Since you returned from space.”

Jaw set, Mercy breathed
rhythmically for ten seconds. Her father and two other judges must have signed
the warrant. She wanted to scream at the betrayal. Worse, she wanted to cry.
Instead, she defended her reasoning. “You need to take the statement on that
recording in context. By my second year at MIT—age seventeen—world-renowned
scientists were taking my intuitions seriously. I adopted the NASA safety
standard at age five and confiscated my mother’s phone for reading a text while
driving. If something
can
go wrong, I plan a way to prevent it.”

“But Red’s smarter.”

It was the truth. In an idle
moment, her sister’s friend could whip off an idea to revolutionize an
industry. “Building foundations under her castle in the sky took me and a team
of scientists a year of all-nighters and the GNP of Guyana to prove.”

“And she was right.”

“Always right. But no matter how
advanced they are, people make mistakes. Given enough time and resources, we
can implement just about anything. But it takes far more time and money to ‘tweak’
something after it’s been put into production. Doing it her way
after
the fact is dangerous because it’s not in the original design spec—
that is
the number-one cause of fatal incidents.
”

“So you don’t like her personally?”
the ethics officer asked.

“Her dad, Ambassador Hollis, gave
me my first pony ride. He’s a saint around my house. He could ask for anything.
Her mom, Jezebel, gave my dad his company. For God’s sake, the two of them paid
for the Caribbean cruise where I was conceived. To say I owe them is an understatement.”