In the Company of Others (26 page)

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Authors: Julie E. Czerneda

BOOK: In the Company of Others
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Gods
, Gail thought admiringly,
humor.
The man was either more tired than he looked, or they were actually making headway in understanding one another. “You're right. I want something else here.” She held up the cup shard. “This,” she told him, tapping the words along the base.
Grant's dark eyes narrowed and she could see his body tensing automatically from its inadvertent moment of relaxation. “The
Merry Mate II.
But you knew she was here well before finding that in the bar.” A nod at the shard.
So
, Gail thought with satisfaction,
he had noticed.
Such a pleasure dealing with the observant. “Why that ship?” Grant gave a short laugh. “Let me guess, Dr. Smith. It's where our unconscious friend hangs that suit of his—making it one of those derelicts outside the station. Am I close?”
“On the money, Commander.”
“And now we need the ship as well as the man?”
She gazed at him for a moment, then corrected: “I wanted the man in order to find the ship.”
The FD commander's face bore a sudden, striking resemblance to granite.
Or was it ice?
Gail wondered. “You could have told me.”
It was Gail's turn to be amused. “You didn't need to know. Then. Now you do.”
“This old freighter is important enough to bring the
Seeker
all the way here.”
“Yes,” Gail insisted, her voice level but her hands tending to grip the edge of her desk. “As Pardell is in no condition to help—and I've no reason to believe Malley's ever been Outside—we'll have to find her ourselves.”
Grant inhaled slowly, then let the air out again in an almost soundless whistle. “I'm open to suggestions, Dr. Smith. Most of the ships the 'bot caught on vid didn't have visible idents. They've been deliberately obscured in some cases, scoured away by dust in others.”
“I don't know how. But we can't leave without the
'Mate.
”
He could read her by now
, Gail sensed. Instead of arguing as Tobo might have, Grant nodded. “As you wish, Professor. But let the Captain put us at a distance. The station may not be armed, but you don't need a pulse cannon when your victim's sitting on the doorstep. A hammer works just fine.”
“The station is no longer a threat,” Gail disagreed. “We both know why.”
His lips twisted. “Because by now the tranks have worn off? You think that's going to improve the relationship?”
“These people live by balancing debt,” Gail said, keeping it blunt. “It's in our favor right now, Commander. Any blood is on their side of the scale, not ours.”
Grant's nostrils flared. He was breathing hard, suddenly, as if everything that had happened since they arrived on Thromberg was hitting him at once. “They were under my command when they died,” he snapped at her. “Following my orders—”
“
My
orders,” Gail corrected. “And I'd give them again, based on the information we had at the time. Do you want to know why, Commander Grant? Do you want to know what they bought with their lives?” She curled her hands around the cup shard, as though cradling something precious. “Maybe—just maybe—the only ship to visit a Quill-infested planet and return with life on board.”
That shocked the anguish from his face. “The Survivor?” he jeered. “You really believe in those tales—those legends about a Survivor of the Quill? My people died for this—this—nonsense?”
“Of course not.” Gail was again grateful for the closed door. “As I told Forester, I don't chase legends—I deal in facts.”
“What facts?” Grant immediately answered his own question. “Facts you have and I don't.”
Gail looked at him for a long moment, weighing many things, then nodded. “Is the room clean?” she asked.
“Of course.” Slight offense. This was one of the FD's responsibilities. She had to admit that so far, they'd been able to keep ahead of Reinsez and his toys—although Titan's representative had come on board with a seemingly unending supply.
She had to take Grant's word for it.
Gail opened the lower left drawer of her desk and pulled out a rectangular box. It looked ordinary enough, except for the warning symbol on the top indicating its contents would be immediately turned to ash if any hands but hers tried to unlock it. More expensive, but also more secure than a simple gene key, which, though highly specific, could be stolen and used by anyone. Gail preferred not to take chances.
Inside were an assortment of old-style data disks as well as several sheets of paper—not ordinary paper, but privacy sheets which could be encoded to show their contents only after contact with a specified genome. They'd been “opened” already.
She plucked one sheet to hand to the commander. “Read this,” Gail ordered. “My authorization,” she added as his eyebrows rose at the warning stamped across the top of the page and the way origin and destination were blacked out.
Titan University Archives Excerpts from the personal recordings of Chief Terraform Engineer Susan Witts Access Restricted to Clearance AA2 or Higher
... I received the request to cosign your loan for the freighter from Callisto shipyards, Raymond. I've done it, of course. You only had to ask. It didn't have to come through Titan. I would have bought you the ship—there must be enough accumulated salary in my account after all these years. I've no need for money out here.
A freighter, is it? The
Merry Mate II?
And a wife, I'm told. I suppose this means you've abandoned graduate studies. I can understand why. Sol System can feel pretty cramped when you've all of space calling. I met your father on a starship. Did I ever tell you that? For all anyone knows his ship is still out there, somewhere, exploring. I prefer to think so. It's better than imagining other reasons why they never came back. Space doesn't suffer fools.
I hear I'm already a grandmother. Where has the time gone? Jeremy Norman Pardell. A fine name, Raymond. I do understand why you changed yours before enrolling at Phobos University. They tell me I've become something of a celebrity back on Earth. That can't be easy on the family, but there was nothing I could do about it. People are starting to sign up for immigration. It's finally here, Raymond, and our name—my name—happened to be the one swept up in the excitement . . .
Grant stopped reading midway. “Pardell . . . Aaron Pardell . . .
Witts'
great-grandson?” he breathed. “I knew you were hunting one of the terraformers' descendants, but hers?”
She waved at the sheet to keep him reading.
... one day the record will be set straight. It's not as though I'm the only terraformer. There's a team of us. Most have been with me since we started Stage Three, some since we began testing seeding procedures—where you were born, Raymond. I've been there lately, you know. It's becoming so beautiful, so very peaceful. The trees I planted for you are almost full size. Did I tell you I'd thought about asking Titan's approval to open it for settlement, too? I wouldn't have minded retiring there myself, when that time comes. But the others convinced me not to try. They're worried we didn't follow Terraforming Protocols, which is ridiculous—the protocols didn't even exist back then. We were on our own, being told to develop this amazing technology. Everything was so—possible, then. If you ask me, they're just afraid Titan will take away their pensions if the secretary finds out we did something without petitioning the department for approval.
I suppose it doesn't matter anyway. We won't need another world, with sixteen official new homes waiting. Can anyone on Earth or under the domes of Sol System conceive how much room that is? How many people could live under these open skies? That's not considering the next set of worlds—which will be ready long before there are enough people for them. You've probably heard the sociologists predicting humans will become so used to wide, empty places, we won't tolerate being crowded anymore and that will drive us outward even faster. They could be right. There are five of us on World XI at the moment and we sometimes don't talk for days. Yesterday, I found myself begrudging poor Millie her share of the lab space. I can't enjoy the sunset if I can see someone else walking in the distance. The others tease me I should go back to Earth for a while and get used to people again.
What do you think, Raymond? If I came . . . would you let me in the door this time? Would you let me see little Jeremy? Meet your wife? Or does it keep going like this, with messages routing through Titan, with you locking me out of your life?
I don't want to argue anymore. Would it help if I admit I was a poor excuse for a mother? I will. But how could you ask me to choose between you and providing for the future of our species? Did you honestly believe I could simply pick up and leave the most significant and fragile project imaginable whenever you scraped a knee or lost a pet? You're a grown man, Raymond, and if you don't understand the importance of my work by now, well, there's certainly nothing I can say to convince you. History will have to do that.
I don't think I'll be coming to Earth soon after all. I wish you luck with your ship and congratulations on your family. If you need anything, anytime—you only have to ask. Remember that. I'm your mother and I love you, Raymond. Always.
When Grant looked up with a wealth of questions in his eyes, she answered what was likely to be his first. “Where did I get this? Her son returned her letters—they made it as far as a drawer on Titan. Seems someone in the terraforming department thought it could upset Susan Witts to know her mail wasn't being accepted by her family. After her death—and the Quill—every piece of documentation remotely connected to her was studied and then sealed. But these couldn't be read. Raymond Pardell had died in an accident, his body given a spacer's burial. Neither he nor Susan Witts had left their genomes on file.”
“That didn't stop you,” Grant concluded, leaning back and studying her.
Gail nodded. “I was interested. And I'd already begun recreating Susan Witts' genome as part of this project. As you know.”
Grant had been briefed—he'd had to be, as his people were the ones who would conduct the planetside trials and, hopefully, find the Quill at last.
Risking their lives on her logic
, Gail thought with an inner chill, but didn't dare doubt herself now.
The Quill weren't the mysterious monsters the public at large believed. At least, they hadn't been. While no one claimed to understand how they'd become a threat on the terraformed worlds or how they killed, the reason Quill couldn't be found and captured by remotes was simple enough.
They were perfect biochemical mimics—so perfect, current methods constantly and utterly failed to distinguish what was Quill from anything else alive.
The Quill, according to admittedly sketchy observations, were little more than fungallike filaments with an alien, but not inexplicable, biochemistry. Some of that biochemistry resulted in an attractively fluid play of color on their surface, making the filaments into living jewelry—supposedly the reason some deep-space explorers had kept the filaments in the first place. Gail had her own ideas about that, controversial and not publicized.
Those ideas hadn't gained her funding for this project and control of the
Seeker
. What had was something much more acceptable, based on the finding that the Quill's biochemistry was also designed to produce a camouflage of genetic markers on the organism's exterior. Where an Earth animal might detect, then reproduce the color of its background in order to hide, the Quill seemed to detect, then reproduce the genome of its living background, perhaps for the same reason.
It hadn't been a scientist who'd made this discovery about the Quill. Spacers who wore Quill bracelets found they couldn't give their bracelets to anyone else. A filament was so attuned to its biological background that, once it touched one person's skin, an individual Quill wouldn't be worn against the skin of any other—reputed to drop to the ground and die rather than linger on a stranger. There were unconfirmed rumors that a Quill might move from a parent to a young child. The original match was precise enough, some stories had spacers using their Quills as substitutes for their gene keys.
This talent of the harmless, pretty Quill might have remained one curiosity among the millions recorded from the myriad life-forms found outside of Sol System, but the Quill became killers—killers with the ability to blend into their preferred biological background, completely hidden among the plant life on the terraformed worlds.
Until Gail Smith had her inspiration. Humans could find Quill—they had originally. So what was needed was a way to put humans on the surface to do the hunting. No technology had provided protection against the lethal Quill Effect. So Gail decided on a different approach.
She would use the Quill's camouflage technique against them.
They knew the original Quill had been brought to the terraformed worlds by the leaders of the various Stage Three teams—rare, previously untouched Quill that had been gifts from Susan Witts to celebrate their project. So Gail painstakingly identified and obtained the genomes of each terraformer, making the assumption that these would be the “human” patterns recognized by the alien life-forms.
Ironically, that of Susan Witts had been the hardest to obtain. Opening these letters had been the reward.
“What you were told about this mission—my project—was the truth,” she told Grant. “I am collecting certain genetic markers and Pardell's, because of his heritage from Susan Witts, will be a useful piece of that puzzle. But I needed more—and I found it in this letter. A place.” Gail paused triumphantly.

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