The Seeds of Time (12 page)

Clio’s eyes were on the crew-deck hatchway, waiting for it to blow if the launch bay did.

Posie was on the intercom, but so were a few other people. Finally Russo’s voice piped in: “Posie to medical emergency in the launch bay. We are repressurized. Everyone else, clear the crew-quarter passageway and maintain your stations.”

Estevan spun open the hatch lock and made way for Posie, who rushed aft to the launch bay.

Hillis appeared in the same hatchway Posie had just vacated. He swung down the ladder and headed for the coffee spigot.

“What the hell happened?” Clio asked.

“Not much. Shaw was in the launch bay, and the hatch to the landing pod must have failed, or he opened it without
checking on the lander’s pressure. The room sounded like it was coming apart.” He looked at Clio. “So did he.”

“Jesus,” Estevan said.

The launch bay was the loading area and access point for the landing pod
Babyhawk
, which coupled up to the ship just aft of the crew quarters.
Babyhawk
was the crew’s express service from ship to ground and back again. Normally, she rode the ship unpressurized except for prelaunch and when carrying crew.

They heard Shaw then, screaming, as they carried him down the passage to medlab.

Meng stuffed the cards back in their box. “Sounds like he’s alive, anyway.” She headed up the ladder to crew station.

“Mother of God,” Estevan said, after she’d gone. “That witch has no heart, you know?”

“Meng’s OK. Just keeps to herself, that all,” Hillis said.

“You kidding? That woman wouldn’t care if Shaw was wallpaper in launch bay right now.”

Hillis poured a cup of coffee from the spigot. “Sure she would. She hates a messy ship.”

“No, I’ll tell you what she really hates,” Estevan said. “It’s having her poker game broke up when she’s winning. She’ll hold it against Shaw, you wait,” Estevan said. He followed Meng up to crew station.

Clio moved toward Hillis, and he pulled her close to him. She rested her head on his shoulder. “Think he’ll live?”

“Like Meng said, least he’s screaming. It’s when they’re quiet that you worry.” He released Clio and started poking around in the refrigeration hatch for something to eat.

Clio watched him, the old Zee thing forgotten. All through the Niang voyage, Hillis had sought Clio out, seemed to want her company more than ever. And Clio wanted that company. Sometimes she and Hillis slept in the same bed, just slept, or talked. He clung to her at first, not talking about future Earth, just clinging to her. And so Clio held him while he talked, talked about Green politics, about
his work. About his family and growing up. The East Coast, the fancy schools, the big family with not one close sibling. His father, a remote, depressed federal judge. Hillis looking for meaning among the easy privileges of wealth, finding it, finally, in the early conservation movements, escalating to Green politics, ecowarrior sentiments. Leaving law school for a botany degree. His family’s disappointment. Looking at him with strangers’ eyes.

Clio would look into Hillis’ deep blue eyes, searching for him, but finding instead an absence. A grieving, retreated, Hillis. Until Niang.

Hillis snapped the top off a carbo tube. “We’re not going to let this stop us,” he said. “Shaw’s down, and we need a second pilot on the shuttle. Russo won’t send it down without a backup pilot. So that means either her or you.” He squeezed half the contents of the tube into his mouth, then threw the tube into the trash.

“Russo won’t send me,” Clio said. “We’ve got to Dive to get home. She won’t send me.”

“Well, it’s not going to stop us.” He sat in a chair, resting his head on the bulkhead, eyes closed, exhaustion draped over his features. “Turquoise,” he said. “The jungle’s turquoise. It’s as though the plant life has gone beyond green. It’s moving down the spectrum of visible light. Like playing scales, in cosmic time. It’s the music of evolution, Clio. Music.”

Clio looked at him. He had forgotten about Shaw already. Whereas she was still trembling. His long frame was stretched out, one arm thrown back to cushion his head, an unconscious, sensual pose. And he spoke like a man in love; he’d taken one look at Niang, and fallen in love.

“So all of a sudden Recon’s OK, huh? Niang’s gonna save us?” Clio said.

Hillis shrugged. “You have to ride the winning horse.”

“Right. Hope that’s what Niang is, Hill, a winning horse.” She pulled herself up the ladder and through the hatch to crew station.

Estevan, Meng, and Liu were at workstations, deep into their tasks. One end of the big cabin was rounded, a
duplicate of the bridge above them, pressed against the nose of the ship. A circular table in the center of the cabin served as a conferencing place and station for observers like Clio. Computer consoles wrapped around the room, running the onboard experiments and monitoring Niang.

Liu, ship’s ecologist, nodded at Clio as she entered, then turned back to his screen, where he was running the geologic survey, in search of rare metals.
Starhawk
wasn’t designed to conduct mining operations or haul heavy mining loads, but each mission included a reconnaissance for potential ores. Liu wasn’t a geologist, but he ran the programs, doing double duty in his specialties, like most of the
Starhawk
crew. Someday they might have the technology to send out the size ship needed for mining operations. The landing pods would have to be big, the ship itself bigger yet. Vandarthanan’s theory related time travel to mass, and attempts to design a mining ship had so far resulted in a ship’s mass exceeding the limits for Dive. Someday, when they had the technology, they’d go back for metals. And Biotime would sell their treasure maps for a nice profit.

Meanwhile, they had to travel light. Content themselves with an array of sample plants and, most importantly, seeds. The U.S government paid premium dollars for good seed.

If it grew.

Starhawk
’s lower deck waited to receive the biological payload. The science deck embodied a two-billion-dollar investment in biological laboratories and a quarantined greenhouse, hermetically sealed. A bulkhead pallet could turn outward, dumping rejects into space. There would be plenty of time to ferret out the rejects. The trip in real space back to Earth would allow three months to conduct onboard analysis of the Niang haul.

Recon missions always required both time and space travel. The Dive only put them in the vicinity of their target. They’d had to travel three hundred thousand kilometers in real space to find Niang, and they had to cover about the same distance to get back, not unusual for a Dive this long. Made the Crippen Dive look like a walk around the block.

Clio sat up straight as Russo entered the cabin.

Estevan, Meng, and Liu turned from their stations, watched the captain as she swung into a chair.

When she had their attention, she began: “Shaw’s going to be fine. Got the bends. Posie’s got him in a pressure bag. He sustained a concussion. Bruised up pretty bad.” She looked at Clio. “He’s not going to fly, we know that.”

Clio felt her stomach flip over. Got a bad feeling about what was coming down.

“Near as we can piece it together, what happened was that the landing pod in its bay wasn’t pressurized. Shaw was in the launch bay, decided to check out
Babyhawk
. I’m not clear what he was doing in there, but he opened the pod doors. Launch bay air pressure crashed in a hurry. He must have half managed to punch the door closure button, but he was yanked across the room and thrown against the half-open pod door. Ship pumped up the pressure real fast. Lucky for him.” Russo scanned their faces, looking for questions. Found one.

Estevan asked, “How come the pod wasn’t pressurized this close to launch, Captain? I thought we were launching at nine hundred hours.”

“We don’t know. It’s pressured now. We’re checking out any leaks. But don’t expect to find any. My view of what happened is that the pod was never pressurized to begin with. Shaw assumed it was. Tells you how far your assumptions will take you.” Russo stood up. “We’re going ahead with the mission. Thirteen hundred hours. Finn, you’ll replace Shaw.”

There was a stunned silence in the cabin. Meng slid her eyes over to Estevan. A signal for him to speak up. He didn’t.

Clio nodded slowly. Russo was risking her Dive pilot. Russo wasn’t going on the ground mission. Clio was. Simple as that.

Crew stared at her, a squall settling over their faces. Russo shifted to another foot, watching them, her face hardening. “We don’t send out
Babyhawk
with one pilot. That’s
the rules.” She paused, staring them down. Then left the cabin.

Meng looked at Clio. “Looks like the Red Queen is going to chauffeur us down. Lordy, lordy. Going to have to earn your pay this trip, Finn. Same as me.”

“No, I never plan to work
that
hard, Meng,” Clio said, smiling hard. “I might break a nail.”

The landing pod squatted in the middle of a black, circular patch where its thrusters had blasted the ground. Surrounding them for a distance of two hundred meters, a field spread out. Beyond, the jungle loomed. As soon as they debarked they smelled the peculiar fragrance of Niang, the boiled-fruit smell, at first pleasant, then cloying. The 1.1 g seemed to press a sugary glaze onto their skin, half Niang humidity, half human sweat in the ninety-five-degree heat. From all sides came the incessant chittering and creaking of jungle life.

Zee stood with Clio, gazing out at the wall of forest. “We wanted plants; looks like we got them,” Zee said. A trickle of sweat zigged down his face.

The dense edge of the forest soared high, defined by huge palmlike growths, taller than Earth trees, that looked like they couldn’t possibly stand. Indeed, they appeared to lean on each other at the top where their fibrous heads were woven together in a turquoise canopy, like a crowd of Siamese siblings, joined at the head. A profuse undergrowth thrived below them, but stopped abruptly at the field, where a carpet of thick moss asserted itself.

The crew had moved quickly to set the perimeter wires, a precaution against attack by animals or sentient inhabitants. The tents were clustered around
Babyhawk
. the main tent for meals and conferencing and tents for botany, crew quarters, personal hygiene, and medical. Teeg, as mission leader, had a private tent.

Besides Clio and Teeg, there were seven crew on the ground mission: Hillis, heading up botany and assisted by
techs Meng and Shannon; Posie, second-in-command, in charge of medical and zoology; Liu for ecology; Estevan for anthropology and security; and Zee on security.

Clio was standing at the perimeter wire, gazing out at the ring of jungle, when Posie came up beside her.

“Listen to that racket,” he said. The forest surged with the cacophony of its local singers. “There’s a million eyes staring at us right now, you can be sure of that.” He patted the gun, holstered at his side. “Anything comes out of there, I say zap it.” His eyes narrowed as he looked at her. “Where’s your weapon? You’re supposed to wear a weapon.”

“Yeah, I was issued one.”

“Lot of good it’ll do us, in your duffel bag.”

Clio was assigned to security. She nodded. “I’ll get it. We just got here.”

Posie shook his head. “As far as they’re concerned,” he said, indicating the forest with a movement of his head, “we’re invaders. We’re little pink men coming out of the sky. They’ll shoot first, ask questions later. Right?”

“Who’s they, Doc?”

He looked at her, exasperated. “Well, we don’t know, now, do we?” He drew his gun, looking down the barrel toward the forest. “Makes it all the more dangerous. Not knowing.”

He pressed the trigger. A muffled crash issued from the direction of the burn. Posie holstered the weapon, heading back to camp. “Just a little demonstration of our firepower. Let them know we can defend ourselves.”

Deterrence, Clio thought. Twentieth-century foreign policy introduced on Niang. A great beginning.

The only fauna the crew had seen so far were flying insects with colorful, segmented bodies about the size of robins. In fact, Posie initially declared them birds, and grew annoyed as the crew insisted on calling them dragonflies.

One of these was now circling near Clio and settled on the perimeter wire. A wisp of smoke drifted past Clio’s nostrils, the remainder of the dragonfly.

Clio thought about the gun in her duffel, and whether she would have to use it. Thinking about what it felt like to
kill with a gun. It wasn’t impersonal, like they said. You pulled the trigger and there was the bark of the gun, and the recoil, and the heat in the palm of your hand, and the carnage in front of you. Hard, metal violence. Not pretty and easy, like in the movies, where people fell over, clutching their sides and dying silently.

She thought about Russo drawing the long straw on that fatal mission, watching the rest of the crew die. Wondered if they died silently, drifting off to sleep, or fighting for their last breaths, gasping the vacant air. Russo had her reasons for hating the landing pod, for staying shipboard. Clio wondered if maybe one of those reasons was cowardice. By rights, Russo should have commanded the ground mission, not Teeg. And Clio should have stayed on
Starhawk
.