In the Company of Others (56 page)

Pardell gazed down at the slime on Gail's brand-new suit and fought the urge to simply wipe it off with his glove.
Malley had it right
, he thought with disgust.
People shouldn't have died—shouldn't have had to live as they did—because of something you couldn't grapple with, that you couldn't rip apart with your hands.

Despite his rage, Pardell was helpless to hold his mind to the here and now. As his thoughts detached, expanded, grew distant, he could hear Dafoe's voice and sensed the change in it from caution to alarm, but it was as if the words became air, air that pushed and grabbed him as if it had fingers.

His awareness encompassed this world,
his world
, a planet coated in Quill. There wasn't one, or a nest, or a favored place—they were the world, contaminating everything that lived, even he and Dafoe. His thoughts spun outward, helpless to resist perception and analysis, toying with concepts like ecosystems and dependencies, balance and evolution—finding nothing to encompass this obscenity.

Just like this . . . that filaments must have slithered over his newborn flesh, found entry points, contaminated him as well as this planet.
They were under his skin even now.

Hopeless . . . hopeless . . . how to destroy the Quill without destroying all else?
Pardell understood, finally, the danger should the Quill reach the warm, living world that birthed humanity. The blockade, the deaths, the struggle to exist—all faded against the absolute imperative of species survival.

How to destroy the Quill inside him?
He wanted to live, too.

“Hey, Aaron! Not the time, friend.” Malley's deep and unexpected rumble jarred Pardell back into synchrony with the moment.

“So when did they let you have a comm?” Pardell asked, tearing his eyes from the Quill riding his suit and straightening.

“I'm not sure ‘let' is the right word—these Earthers get kinda tense about their toys.” The laugh filling his helmet was close to normal, if not quite.
Malley was watching this
, Pardell reminded himself, wondering at the cost to his friend of facing an open sky. “You okay? Not very considerate of your date, Aaron, going spacey like that. Cathy's going to think you don't care.”

Cathy?
Was there anyone on the
Seeker
Malley didn't know on a first-name basis after a week? Pardell turned to look for Dafoe. She was standing, as he was, in the Quill-grass. He had another complaint about the suits—it would have been much better if they could see one another's faces, instead of reflections of themselves in the headgear.

“Specialist Dafoe—my apologies. I was distracted. I'm not suffering any effects or sensations out of the ordinary—”

Malley snorted rudely in his ear.

“Thank you, Malley.” Gail's voice. All business.
It had to be
, Pardell knew.

“Glad you're all right, Pardell,” Dafoe told him, relief plain and sharp. “Dr. Smith wants us to put our ‘friends' into a box to bring back up to the ship. I'll go first.”

Pardell nodded his understanding. He watched closely as Dafoe walked back to the ramp. The Quill stayed on her legs, one on the outside of each calf. “I'd keep them separated, Dafoe,” he called out.

“Why?” Gail again.

Pardell kept forgetting this was an open comm—something no 'sider would ever risk. “Only one climbed up each leg,” he ventured, “even though there's room for more. Maybe they can't tolerate physical contact with one another. A guess.”
Albeit an educated one
, Pardell thought somewhat wildly.

“One per box, it is,” Gail responded. “Thank you.”

Her voice lingered in his ears.
Not like music
, Pardell decided.
Something more intimate than sound alone, filled with the past, present, and—future.
He'd promised her he'd come back.

Pardell looked out at the horizon, tracing the lines of distant mountains with his eyes.
Were they real if he couldn't touch them?
Another breeze shoved against his back.
Was it air, if he didn't breathe it?

“It's not going to work.”

He whirled to see Dafoe rubbing her blue-only legs. “Dr. Smith. The things slipped through my fingers when I tried to handle them,” she said. “Pardell? Any suggestions?”

“Toss me a box,” he said. “I'll try from here.”

The stasis boxes were small but heavy, a consequence of the technology meant to contain a biohazard of unknown potency. Pardell made the catch easily enough, but put the box down on the grass. He resisted the temptation to run his gloved fingers along the stalks and investigate their strange, living textures.

“Gail?” Pardell said lightly, steeling himself

“I'm here.”

“This should work—but if it doesn't, I want you to know—I need to—” Pardell swallowed. “I'm glad you came to Thromberg. Okay? It's all been worth it.”

“Wait!” nothing businesslike or calm in her sudden cry in his ears. “Aaron! Dafoe—stop him!”

Before Dafoe could do more than turn his way, Pardell had pulled off his headgear. He smiled, he hoped reassuringly, at the FD specialist, before stripping the gloves from his hands. He put the gear down, carefully, on a flattened patch of grass.
Old habits, new place.

The first thing Pardell noticed was the way the air whistled and roared past his ears, even as it tossed hair to tickle his forehead. Then he felt the sun—warm and soothing on his face, overbright until his eyes adjusted, a prickling irritation on his gold-veined hands. “I think they stay on the lower parts of the grass to avoid the direct sunlight,” he said, knowing every word would be recorded. The comm was built into the neck of the suit, not the headgear. Pardell drew a long, deep breath in through his nostrils. There was so much flavor to this air, it was like taking a drink of some exotic wine. If he'd ever had doubts this was a world built by humans, for humans, they were erased by the way his lungs welcomed this blend of gases, his blood soaked up its oxygen.
Pardell's World.

Complete with a threat.

Pardell swallowed again, hard, then reached down and gently, but firmly, grasped the filament clinging to his right leg.

He let go immediately, feeling himself shake.

“Aaron—what is it? Your vitals went off the scale.”

“I don't know. Nothing.”
Nothing
, Pardell reassured himself, not needing the suit's monitors to feel how his heart still pounded.
Nothing.
Just the unexpectedness of the filament's dry, almost powdery surface under his fingers. The thing looked like slime.

“You aren't feeling anything from the Quill—there's no effect at all?”
Was the relief in her voice for him—or the experiment?

“All systems nominal,” he quipped, winking at Dafoe. “I'll see if I can get this thing into the box.” Cautiously, Pardell bent over and reached for the filament again.

“Pardell!” Dafoe warned. “Look!”

The 'sider followed the direction of Dafoe's pointing—and shaking—hand. All around them, the grass was vibrating, as if each stalk was being moved independently of the others. “The wind?” he asked hopefully.

“Get back in the
Athena
before I haul you in!” Gail ordered. “Hurry!

“We came for the sample,” Pardell objected. “Just give me a minute more.” He moved quickly, in case the filament released and dropped to the ground, but it stayed in place until his fingers pulled it free.

Pardell almost threw the slender filament into the stasis box, slamming closed the lid. The one on his other leg dropped and disappeared into the ground.

“Hurry up!”

“Done,” he told Dafoe, picking up the box as well as his gloves and headgear, clutching the pile to his chest. “Let's go.”

Almost running, Pardell made it to the ramp only to have Dafoe hold up her arm to stop him. He halted with barely enough room to avoid her touch. “What's—that?” Her voice was almost a whisper. She was looking behind him. Pardell turned and stared.

That
. . . a spot marked by the end of the trail they'd stamped into the grass.
That
. . . place where the grass was coming free from its roots, whirling in a column that reached more than head high.

“Wind can do that,” Pardell heard himself say. He might have believed it, if the air against his face wasn't perfectly still.

“It doesn't do
that
...” Dafoe replied, as the column began to condense into a shape.

Before Pardell could do more than gasp, the shape became something more, something they knew.

Human. A woman, woven from grass and Quill filaments, standing in what was now a circle of disturbed, black earth.

Disturbingly vague in detail, but the figure had two outstretched arms, holding what could have been a baby. Holding it out toward them.

Pardell dropped what he was carrying. He bent and began collecting the gloves, box, and headgear by feel, never taking his eyes from the statue.

Dafoe's voice came sharp, hard, and clear: “Dafoe here . . . Commander Grant. Code Alpha Prime. One, Niner, Niner. Do you copy,
Seeker
? I repeat . . . Alpha Prime. One, Niner, Niner.

“We have a First Contact situation.”

GAIL had thought she understood the Quill—well enough to find them, and destroy them when she did.

She'd thought she was in charge of this ship and its mission—that all aboard, with the notable exception of the Titan-serving Reinsez and his few cohorts, obeyed her commands.

What else would she be wrong about today?
Gail wondered, shaking her head wearily.

At least Pardell and Dafoe were safe. She had to trust they were. She hadn't seen or talked to either since the FD specialist delivered her code.

Alpha Prime. One, Niner, Niner. First Contact.
Words setting a blur of events in motion with the smoothness of extensive planning and complete determination. Gail had barely time to be stunned by the words and their implications before Grant had commandeered the intership comm, rattling off a string of equally incomprehensible codes that echoed throughout the
Seeker.

Oh, Grant had had help
, she reminded herself. The First Defense Unit had come on board twenty-five strong. Twenty-five in blindingly obvious uniforms; twenty-five men and women so physically similar no one—especially herself—had thought to look for anyone else.

Of the
Seeker
's crew complement, it now appeared that three-quarters were also FDs. Of the
Seeker
's scientific population, a depressingly significant number of techs and even a few of the scientists had responded immediately to Grant's coded instructions.

As a mutiny
, Gail decided,
it likely held a record for the most willing participants.

“What's going to happen?”

Startled out of her thoughts, Gail looked up at Captain Tobo. Both of them had been evicted—courteously—from the bridge. It was no consolation that Szpindel had been among those barred from the command sphere. She shrugged. “I've no idea, my esteemed Captain. At least Titan U and Vincente are unlikely to worry about my little transgression in light of all this.” Gail waved around the room.

Tobo's eyes twinkled. “There's that,” he agreed, taking a seat at her table. They'd been herded into the science sphere's dining lounge two hours ago, Tobo spending much of that time in huddled conversation with others of his crew. Gail had decided she might as well take a late supper, if she was going to be here any longer. “Although I've heard three patrol ships are en route. On the behest of a concerned Titan University,” he mimicked a worried parent, “following those alarming reports from their esteemed representative.”

Gail took her time cutting, stabbing, and chewing her next mouthful. “Three, huh?” she mumbled thoughtfully after a moment, then swallowed. “That's all?”

Tobo helped himself to a roll from the basket between them. “Well, Vincente may have realized it was somewhat unlikely you'd single-handedly hijacked this ship, despite Reinsez's hysteria. He knows you. Three might seem to him accountably frugal, while sufficient to escort back one unsuccessful project leader . . . if you were wrong.”

“I wasn't,” Gail said with sudden, fierce delight. “I wasn't wrong about the Quill. They are here. The suits work. And, best of all, we have a living sample.”

“All true. So Vincente and Titan will doubtless take the position you acted on their authority to achieve these marvelous things,” Tobo said with cheerful irony. “You will be famous, of course. As you always wanted.”

“Maybe in another lifetime, Tomoki.” Gail lost her appetite and sat back, gazing at her old friend. “Or maybe it was another me . . . someone who cared about a reputation, about arriving on Earth to bands and parades. Gail Smith—the Salvation of Humanity.”

There was no judgment on his gentle, round face—only understanding. “Whether you still seek fame or not, you've earned it,” he assured her. “Defeating the Quill will mean everything to those people back on the stations. You will have saved them.”

“Will I?” Gail shook her head. “Are you sure I haven't doomed them?” She drew little circles on the table with one finger. “I've read how strong the First Contact movement was on Earth, before the disaster of the Quill shifted power to the Reductionists. Now? We've caught the stations between those who want Earth to look outward and those who'd make translight taboo—if they could figure out the right incantation.”