The Seeds of Time (37 page)

“Oh dear, subverting my mission, now I can’t be quite so cheerful about that one, Tandy.”

Tandy’s lip curled. “What do you want to do, strip her down?”

“Colonel. You shock me. A pat-down would do.”

“She’s clean, Licht.”

“Well, we’ll see.”

In Tandy’s silence, Licht walked to the foot of the stairs. Looked up at the lieutenant, who slowly took Clio by the arm and led her down to the tarmac. Licht pulled the raincoat off her shoulders and discarded it at her feet. Then, gently putting her hands on the railings, either side of the stairs, kicked her feet wide apart, frisked her, starting from the neck. Leaned in, whispered, “Murdering bitch. Here’s a love bite, until I get you alone.” He pinched her nipples,
fiercely. Clio caught the grunt of pain before it left her throat, swallowed it back down. Don’t give him the pleasure, by God. Licht continued the pat-down, not hurrying. Finally he stopped, leaving just the cold breeze fluttering against her skin beneath the uniform. Then she heard his car door slam. She stood up straight, watched the van rumble off the airfield.

They climbed up the stairs. From behind her, Clio heard, “Sorry about that.” She spun around, looked down on Tandy a moment, despite the rain.

“Keep him away from me, Tandy,” she said. “Just keep him the fuck away from me.” Shaking, she climbed onboard.

He followed her, saying, “I’ll do that, Clio, the best that I can. Sometimes, you have to understand, sometimes, you give a little with these people to get a lot.”

“Give a little of
me
, you mean.”

Ryerson was coming out of the head, wiping off with paper towels. “Pick a seat,” he said. There were eighteen in this part of the cabin.

Tandy waved to the curtains down the aisle. “You’ll be riding with me, Clio. This way.” She noticed Ryerson’s eyes glance quickly down at the floor as he found a seat. Poking through the curtain, Clio found the first-class cabin with five seats and a wet bar. Tandy hung up his raincoat in the stowage locker along with hers.

“You can get some sleep here,” he said. He pulled back one of the seats until it lay nearly flat, then grabbed two blankets and a pillow from the overhead locker, tossing them on the makeshift bed. The plane’s engines wound up to a frenzy. They buckled in for a moment, he on one side of the aisle, she on the other, as the plane sped down the runway and grabbed for the sky. Clio looked at the flattened passenger seat in front of her, saw how it was going to be. Just more of the same.

She turned to Tandy as the plane climbed steeply, and he met her gaze. Get it over with. She started to unbutton her shirt. Be glad to get the damn wet stuff off anyway. He looked at her with narrowed eyes as she started working the
shirt buttons out of their soggy button holes. You get so that taking your clothes off is a weary thing, never mind who’s watching. It comes to that, eventually.

The plane flattened out its climb and Tandy unbuckled, standing over her, looking down at her. He turned to the stowage bin above his seat, looking for something. Found it in the next one. Clean fatigues. He pressed them into her hands.

“That’s not going to be our contract, Clio. May have been how you survived in quarantine, but that’s not what you need to survive with me.” He gestured at the head. “Go dry yourself off. Then come back here and get some sleep. I want you rested.”

“Suits me,” she said. She made her way into the head, managed to undress, dry off with paper towels and dress again in a space about twice the size of a coffin. Passed up looking in the mirror, passed up thinking about her body, the number of miles—rough, stop-and-go miles—she’d put on it. She washed her hands, mere skin over sticks. Opened the door, found the first-class seat made up like a bed, eased herself down.

Lying on her side, Clio could see the sleeping city below, as the plane banked and turned, a few squandered electric lights gleaming like campfires; then the mists closed in on the window and on her mind. Tired, by God.

“Where we going, Colonel?”

No answer, but she didn’t expect one. “Jared Licht,” Tandy said, after some time. “He’s deceptive, got to watch that one. He’s a lot like you, Clio.” He noted the expression on her face. “Well, yes, think about it. He’s an idealist, as you are.”

“Not like me,” she said again.

“A matter of degree, Clio. You have to know when you’ve gone too far.”

Gone too far. Always go too far. The whine of the engines hugged the skin of the jet with the disturbing noise of air escaping from a balloon.

“Why does he hate me?”

“Hate you?”

“Yeah. Not drugs, is it? Because DSDE and Biotime both knew I was stashing drugs to keep me Diving. Harper Teeg told me they knew. But they needed me to Dive, so they looked the other way.”

“You killed a DSDE agent, Clio. You were eighteen, an adult, and you killed a man.”

“So, it’s not about the drugs, then.” Clio settled into her pillow, beginning to fade.

“DSDE isn’t about drugs,” Tandy said. “It’s about control. They use people’s paranoia about the Sickness and homosexuals and drugs, roll it all together. They’re a tight-knit core, the department. You killed one of theirs. They raided your house, killed your mother, went after you and your brother. But you did kill one of theirs. Self-defense or not, they’ll never forget that. Licht will never forget it.” Tandy pursed his lips. “Well, never mind that now. We have a larger enemy to attend to.”

She barely heard, as Tandy’s voice joined the drone of the airplane. She dreamed, as so often, of home. This time of Mother giving her advice, arms crossed in front of her, cradling a cigarette, blowing out the smoke to punctuate her words. Even in her dream, Clio knew that the advice was a message from her own heart, so she tried to listen, and even as the words came out of her mother’s mouth, they dispersed in smoke, lost.

She awoke with a start. Tandy handed her a can of Pepsi. “Wake up your mouth,” he said. “We’re getting ready to land.” He watched her closely as she popped the top. “Bad dream?”

“Yeah. Dreamed I was captured by the U.S. Army.”

“Or, you might say, saved, eh?”

Clio looked sideways at him. “Right, saved.” Took a slug of Pepsi.

The jet noise changed in tone. Descent had begun.

Ten minutes later they deplaned onto another airfield, this one strangely vacant of terminals and activity. Except for a startling brilliance, in the distance. Gantries, launch scaffolding, it was. Clio drew in a gasp.

A space shuttle, by God.

A warm, dry breeze snatched the sweat from her face.

“We’re going upstation, Clio,” Tandy said.

Freeping obvious. Going upstation. The shuttle vehicle, primed and rumbling with prelaunch warm-up, nestled among the solid rocket boosters and towering external tanks, a four-pronged space truck aimed at the heavens. The thunder of the engines snatched her thoughts away, leaving only wave after wave of chills radiating out from her stomach to the ends of her limbs. Space shuttle, by God. An army jeep collected them, and Clio found herself raising her face at an ever sharper angle to view the towering mass. They stopped a short distance off and Tandy assisted Clio from the vehicle, across to the gantry elevator for the 120-meter ride up to the entry hatch, quaking all the way as the ground shook beneath the shuttle’s roar. As they faced the main hatch of the shuttle vehicle, Tandy shouted something at her, lips moving, words lost, and then he grasped her arm, helping her through the one-meter-diameter circular hatch. Ryerson came through and closed the hatch, throwing the bolts home.

She turned to get her bearings. They were standing on the mid-deck wall, with everything standing on end as the shuttle poised upright for launch.

Here on mid-deck, ten empty seats lay on their backs. The lieutenant helped Clio into one. She jerked her arm away. Can damn well strap myself into a passenger seat. Can damn well fly this baby, too, come to that. She stumbled into a seat, yanked the harness around her.

Her steak and broccoli meal was in the process of deciding whether to stay or leave. On her right, the personal hygiene station, close to hand—might damn well need it. On her left, two bunks with privacy curtain stowed, revealing a taped-up photo of a teenage boy raising aloft a trophy, the kind unaccountably shaped like a vase with handles on either side. Directly in front of the passenger chairs, the external airlock for debarking in space.

The swishing of cabin vents closing. A crackle on intercom: “Mid-decks, this is Commander Onishi, we are initiating prestart procedure and are configured for liftoff.
Secure all passengers and baggage.” A pause as the whooshing of liquid hydrogen built up in the external tank. After several minutes, the commander’s voice filled the cabin again. “We are go for launch.” Damn, too late to break and run. Clio leaned back, closed her eyes, trying to calm her stomach. Don’t care about this stuff anymore, can’t make me care. Just sick, that’s all. Dinner churning around. About to churn real good, baby.

Then the thundering of the solid-rocket-booster auxiliary power units, and mid-decks trembling hard. Boy and trophy fell cockeyed to one side, then the roar of the first shuttle main engine, kicked up to deafening as second and third ignited, booming against the launchpad with nine hundred thousand pounds of thrust. Underneath, the deafening scream of the solid rocket boosters. Ignition. Clio felt her body turn to gel, spread over the chair, noise pounding on her. Liftoff.

After what seemed like a very long time, but which was actually seven seconds, the shuttle rolled over 120 degrees in proper ascent configuration, and she was head down as the ship built up fast to fifteen times the speed of sound.

Going upstation. Used to live for moments like this, in the days before. Now, baby, just going along for the ride.

In a Vanda security cell, Clio slept for twelve hours. She was wakened by two army corporals who looked like they could bend steel with their bare hands. Behind them, a vastly smaller med tech stepped forward with a little paper cup and two red pills. She put them in her mouth, took a swallow of the offered water. The gorillas gave her two minutes to clean up, then herded her down the crew corridor of Vanda into the main causeway.

Clio squinted in the brilliance of lit corridors and polished metal. Magnificent Vanda, built in the days of space mania; no expense spared. The main gravity corridor was thirty meters wide, and long, designed to hide the curve with tricks of perspective. Swellings in the corridor signaled activity nodes with store frontages, and corridor seating with clusters of techs, crew, and, now, army. Trees and shrubs clustered around data-access VDTs. But for all Vanda’s four-trillion-dollar price tag, they still skimped by on the sickly greenish fluorescent lights. Clio’s head throbbed with the pounding of her escort’s feet as they marched on. No time to gape at Vanda, and no need to.

Been here before, many times and long ago. Vandarthanan Station keeps on spinning, same as before. But not the same. Army, everywhere army. A presence on-station, to be sure, and watchful, they were, not as though waiting for assignment. Twice her guards showed ID as they crossed from one quadrant to the next, as defined by the massive fire and airlock doors stowed against corridor walls. The mood on Vanda had changed. No longer the collegial, self-contained scientific community, but an army
base. Time was, Vanda had been the main base solely for Space Recon and the giant corporate enterprises feeding on it: Biotime, Timeco, Alpha One, those gallant companies of exploration, mining the galaxy for biota, bringing home the green.

Biotime and Timeco and the others—they brought home the green, all right. Some made it to Earth transition farms, where, Clio knew, they died. Earth went on rejecting the new DNA like a condor finding an eaglet in its nest, grabbing it by the scruff, and hurling it out. But Biotime, the rest of them, can’t give that secret away.

People have enough to worry about these days besides the end of the world.

As her escort turned her down med corridor, it hit her where they were going. Heading to the lab for some tests, oh yes, could guess what tests. She yanked her arm free from the linebacker on her right and stomped to a halt.