Raising Caine - eARC (34 page)
Read Raising Caine - eARC Online
Authors: Charles E. Gannon
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #Space Opera, #Alien Contact, #General
Hwang nodded, winced as he reached into his pocket. “This is what happened when I tried to take a sample.” He produced the vial. The vaguely cubical, fleshy mass at the bottom had been replaced with a brown ooze. “As soon as I uncapped the container, it deliquesced. With extraordinary speed. Gave off a nasty smell; like rotting patchouli. I recapped the vial as quickly as I could.”
“And did that stop the reaction?”
“Not immediately. It slowed, but continued for as long as there was air left in the container.”
Riordan kept his voice low. “That’s what happened to the organism they took out of Nolan Corcoran’s body during his autopsy, just a little more than a year ago.”
Gaspard started but said nothing.
Hwang nodded. “So I recalled. But you reported that the Dornaani—well, Alnduul—told you that they had put that organism in his body. To help his heart.”
That and possibly other things, as well.
“Correct.”
Gaspard stared hard at the slime in the vial. “Are you suggesting that the Dornaani might be behind this sabotage? And the attack?”
Caine shook his head firmly. “No. If the Dornaani wanted us dead—which makes no sense—we’d be dead. Most of our sensors can’t even see their ships if they don’t want to be seen. So whatever attacked the Slaasriithi shift-carrier wasn’t their technology. And Danysh’s screening indicated that he could not have been contacted by the Dornaani beforehand, so I can’t see how they could possibly be behind his sabotage.”
“So is it just a coincidence, then?” Gaspard wondered. “Or could someone else have the ability to geneer an organism that destroys itself after it has been used?”
“It certainly is a possibility, so we can’t conclusively assign this biotechnology to any one of our neighbors’ flags. We only know that something analogous has been employed by the Dornaani. Ben, do you have any idea how this thing”—Riordan aimed his chin at the vial—“manages to deliquesce so quickly? It was already looking pretty sloppy when Veriden found it.”
“
If
Veriden ‘found’ it,” Hwang corrected with signal emphasis. “Actually, if one’s xenogenetic science is advanced enough, and one chooses the right organism, it would not be so difficult to build a failsafe switch into its basic biology. You could create a hormone or protein that activates when the creature’s autonomous functions stop. Those hormones could work like triggers to initiate changes in the membranes that protect the life form from it’s own digestive juices.” He shrugged. “That’s only one possible method of achieving this outcome.” They both looked into the vial; faint misty wisps rose up from the formless goo.
Gaspard cleared his throat. “The question is, how did Mr. Danysh come to have it in his possession?”
Hwang’s tone was deferential but firm. “I must once again point out, Ambassador, that it is impossible to verify Ms. Veriden’s account of how she came to possess this vial. It is possible that she, not Danysh, was in possession of this vial.”
Gaspard nodded impatiently. “So, lacking any concrete evidence, Captain do you suspect that other saboteurs are involved, or is it possible that Danysh was working alone?”
“Let me answer your last question first, Ambassador. Since we can’t
know
that Danysh was working alone, then we have to presume he
wasn’t—
and so we have to remain alert for further sabotage. Beyond that, too many details at the crime scene almost shout ‘set up.’ For instance, those two handguns I discovered along with the bodies: we’re
presuming
they were the weapons used. Just as we’re presuming that any of those three people used them. It’s entirely possible that there was a fourth person—the real shooter—who killed them all and staged it to look otherwise. And it does make operational sense that there would be a second saboteur, one unknown to Danysh.”
Hwang nodded. “That way, the second agent could kill Danysh and thereby prevent us from acquiring any knowledge about how he crippled the shift-carrier, how he received the orders to do it, or from whom. The other two victims might just have been convenient means of misdirecting us, of allowing us to presume that Danysh had been working alone.”
Whether by spoken or silent consensus, the searchers were now returning, their duty suits soaked. One person remained in the water, as far to the rear of the wreck as the encroaching lily-pads allowed: Hirano Mizuki.
Of course
. Despite her mild demeanor, she had a stubborn streak a mile wide. She wasn’t about to give up on her notion of finding the missing food, not until someone made her do so, Caine realized. He stood up: “Ms. Hirano!” She either could not, or chose not, to hear him.
Riordan walked down to the water’s edge. “Ms. Hirano, you’ve done everything you can. There’s nothing to find.”
She half-turned. “I think I feel something, just down here.” She had made the same claim three times in the past ten minutes. She pointed further aft. “I am going to take one last look.” The others on the shore had stripped out of their duty suits; they’d dry faster that way, and the air was warm.
Caine put his hands on his hips. Although tempted to order her out of the water, he held back. He’d get compliance, but that might also start stratifying this overwhelmingly civilian group into sharply defined leaders and followers, and to disincline spontaneous sharing of ideas while simultaneously stirring up resentment. No reason to go that route until and unless it was absolutely necessary. “Ms. Hirano, we’re going to—”
But she didn’t hear him: she ducked under the water. The vermillion lily-pads bobbed in unison with the ripples made as she passed under them in an effort to get further back along the hull. And they continued to bob. Even once the ripples had subsided.
Before he knew why he was doing it, Caine was sprinting into the water: “Ms. Hirano!”
A meter beyond where Hirano had ducked under, her head burst through the lily-pads, sending up a spray of water and a piercing scream. The water around her churned in fine, ferocious agitation, as if a pot teeming with minnows had been brought to a sudden boil.
Riordan hardly heard the shouts from the shore—“Mizuki!” “No, Caine!”—as he ploughed through the water, saw red blood on the orange water-lilies. Covering her head and her hands, small wormlike fish writhed and burrowed in desperate, ravenous delight. She flailed to break free of the twitching, clutching water plants, went under—
Just as Caine got close enough to plunge his arm under the surface, and—careful to keep the neckline of his duty-suit out of the water—grab for her. He got a handful of hair and pulled upward as more of the ferocious creatures swarmed out from under the water-lilies with which they evidently had some kind of symbiotic relationship.
Hirano Mizuki came up, shrieking, sputtering, gagging. Riordan felt the flutter of the small fish all along his body, felt them pressing and gnashing at his duty suit. He got an arm under hers, started to haul her toward the shore, felt the first stinging nips breach the legs of his suit. Macmillan, Salunke, and Xue were splashing out to meet him, arms outstretched for Hirano, whose face and neck were still speckled with the quivering, fry-sized carnivores, but it was unclear if they would get her to shore in time. Or if he would, either: Riordan could feel more of the piranhalike minnows sawing through the legs and waist of his suit—
On the far shore, a dim form rose up in the mists, sending a swift, powerful ripple across the river’s central currents. It was five; no, eight; damn, maybe ten meters tall—and it emitted a strident, higher-pitched version of the same hoot the group had heard earlier.
The piranha-minnows immediately sprang off Mizuki Hirano’s savaged flesh and dove deep into the water. Riordan let the rest of the team take her from him, as the strange shape, a gargantuan badger on heavy stilts, hooted again, even more stridently. Riordan felt the insistent rippling of the worm-fish against his duty suit diminish rapidly; the sensation was gone by the time he had reached the knee-depth shallows. The lily-pads, their coordinated undulations working like a wave-generation machine, began to back away from the wreck and push out into the downsteam current. As they did, the immense silhouette across the river sunk down and disappeared back into the mists.
As Caine staggered up the bank, Gaspard was there to take his arm and help him up the slight slope. “
Mon Dieu
, you are mad, brave, or both, Riordan. But heroics are not your place; you cannot lead us to safety if you are dead. What were you thinking?”
Caine stared at Gaspard, shook off his hand. “I was thinking of saving my team-member’s life.” And he stalked up the silt to where Hirano Mizuki was screaming in agony.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Southern extents of the Third Silver Tower; BD +02 4076 Two (“Disparity”)
Unable to move Mizuki, the group had to stay put for the rest of that day. Her screams diminished into sobs by dinner, and then soft moans when she began drifting off to sleep and losing conscious control over the pain. Besides widespread wounds that looked like horribly pulped flesh, one of the piranha-minnows—or, now, pirhannows—had bored partway into her left eye, breaching the sclera.
During the night, they rested in shifts, each armed watch staring out into dark brush that blinked, waved, and rippled with bioluminescence, particularly at dusk and dawn. Just as dim light began brightening the sky, and the pre-sunrise bioluminescence began to subside, Ben Hwang sat down beside Caine. “Ms. Hirano’s eye could become necrotic if it is not removed.”
Sitting only two meters away, Xue leaned toward them and whispered. “How could that be done? Such a surgery would require anesthetics.”
“Or she would need to be restrained,” Hwang murmured.
Caine looked out at the river. The sky was beginning to reflect in it as a light grey-green-blue. “Mr. Xue, can you give us another option?”
“I can attempt to pack the wound in between irrigations, but I am still unable to determine if the blood supply remains intact throughout the sclera.”
“Let’s say you do that. How much warning will you have if you ultimately need to operate?”
“I will know in two days from now, at the most.”
“Okay, then. You will continue to irrigate and change the dressings on the wound while you monitor it.”
Hwang frowned. “It is kind that you wish to preserve her eye, but it might be better to—”
“Ben, I am not just preserving her eye. I’m trying to preserve our morale, too. Holding someone down to exenterate the entire eye without benefit of anesthesia would shake up any group, but civilians more than most. And how long do you figure it would take for her to recover from what will almost certainly have to be a mid-day surgery, so that Mr. Xue can adequately see what he is doing?”
Which is to say, “an intrinsically difficult surgery for which he is totally untrained.”
Xue lowered his eyes. “I would not want to ask Ms. Hirano to become ambulatory for at least three hours.”
Caine nodded. “And that means more lost time. As it is, we lost the end of yesterday. At least now we’ve got our kits repacked and can make some progress. If our enemies come down here to search for us, we’ve already taken a terrible risk by remaining at this site for twenty-two hours. Let’s get moving.” He started reaching for his pack.
Nasr Eid stood quickly. “Captain Riordan, how can we travel safely when there might still be a saboteur among us?”
Caine lifted his pack, settled it on one shoulder. “Mr. Eid, you make an excellent point. But every minute we delay here is a much greater danger. If any enemies remain out there to strike at us, the worst thing we can do is remain at the crash site.”
“Yes, but we are traveling as an armed party.” Nasr eyed the rifles waiting to be picked up by the three persons who would be assigned to the first security patrol. “If there is still a saboteur, we are arming them, enabling them to finish their job.”
Riordan shook his head. “Most saboteurs are not suicidal, which is exactly the kind of pathology that attempting a one-versus-nine attack requires. It would also require a world-class assassin to ensure that none of us would escape during their attempt. And if there was such an assassin among us, he or she would have attacked at dusk last night, when most of us were trying to help Ms. Hirano, distribute food, set up perimeter watches, arrange basic challenges and passwords, and dig a privy pit.”
Which was why I felt like I needed an additional eye in the back of my head when dusk came on, and why I slept with one open all night long.
“So,” said Mizuki, her voice hoarse and a bit brittle, “you think it unlikely there is still a saboteur amongst us?”
Riordan heard the hopeful, rising note at the end of her question: it was an unconscious plea for him to make at least one of her fears go away. But Caine couldn’t do so, not at the expense of the truth and the vigilance that the group had to maintain. “No, I’m not saying that, Ms. Hirano. But if our spaceside enemies intend to finish us off, then a saboteur’s logical objective is to guide them to us, not mount a solo attack. That’s also the only way for a saboteur to get home, because they’re certainly not leaving Disparity in that”—he hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the ruined shuttle—“or getting out-system without a shift-carrier.”
Caine put his other arm through the pack’s other strap. “We’re moving out. First security patrol is Mr. Macmillan, Ms. Betul, and Mr. Eid on rearguard. Second patrol will be Ms. Salunke, myself, and Ms. Veriden on rearguard. Questions?” There were none.
Wordlessly, the group began following the narrow shore toward the downriver bend.
* * *
Shortly after turning that bend, the river became increasingly constricted between tough volcanic formations which refused to submit to the wear of the water. Instead, its currents had backed up and scalloped out a turbulent pool, framed by basaltic outcroppings which split the outflow into several different watercourses. Judging from what they could see in the distant mists, these various streams all ran between low, rocky ridges, each channel becoming a rock-strewn flume. The one exception was a wide-mouthed outflow which was also the shallowest. Its relatively broad, clear shores were covered with tightly thatched mini-ferns that were the local equivalent of meadow and marsh grass. Various narrow points promised easy fording: swathes of modest white ripples stretched between the two shores. Without even stopping to confer, the group began working around the pool toward the wider, shallower stream.
Caine, who only nine months ago had been leading Indonesian guerillas in the West Java jungles, dropped back a few steps to walk alongside Ben Hwang. “I must be out of shape from shipboard living. I never used to notice the humidity. How are you holding up?”
“About the same. But I’m not so sure that it’s just the humidity we’re feeling. The filter masks significantly dehumidify the air. I’m worried about inhaled microbes.”
Caine frowned. “The filter mask should be even more effective at screening those out.”
Ben nodded. “Yes, assuming we are wearing them all the time.”
Riordan heard the veiled accusation. “I know you think that those of us who went dunking for food rations yesterday were idiots for for taking off our masks. But since you didn’t, how do you explain your own shortness of breath?”
Hwang smiled. “Last night, when I woke up for my half-watch, I saw that three people had removed their masks in their sleep. Then I realized that I had also.”
“They are pretty uncomfortable when you’re trying to rest,” Caine agreed. “I wonder if there’s a way to rig them so they are harder to get off?”
“I’ve been thinking about a modification to the straps that might help with that. I’ll try making the adjustments when we stop for lunch.”
“If we do stop for lunch,” Caine amended.
Hwang glanced at him. “I know that you’re in a hurry to put some distance between us and the wreck, but—”
“Ben, it’s possible that Mizuki is never going to be any stronger than she is right now. Not if her eye infects and requires exenteration. And if our respiratory problems are the onset of a microbe, once again, our ability to make progress is never going to be any better than it is right now. So today, we eat on the move. Because we can.” Caine picked up the pace again, heading for the rocks that stretched across the one narrow watercourse that lay between them and the wider, shallower one that was their ultimate objective.
* * *
Not knowing what other dangers might lurk in the shallow water or beyond the far margins of the shore, Caine kept the group to the center of the riverbank, which turned into an impromptu walking tour of the disparate flora and fauna that might have inspired Disparity’s name. The plants varied from cactus-analogs with feeler-laden twigs instead of needles, brain coral spongiforms that could open into four equal parts and lure a in a variety of quickly flitting creatures, and a thick tangle of black-maroon ground cover that resembled brittle, self-climbing kelp. These plants and their permutations tended to occur together, either in clumps, or as extensive, shore-lining swards.
The other, wholly distinct class of flora was more reminiscent of terrestrial forms, and the further they moved downriver, the more of it Caine noticed, particularly along the water’s edge. The most dramatic exemplar was what the group came to call bumbershoots. Their tops, vaguely reminiscent of palms, were immense, pouting petals: in the daytime, the tree resembled a ridiculously tall umbrella. The tops of the petals were a dark, rich violet, whereas the undersides shone as if they had been brushed with a thin coating of silver-gold. But as the first day’s march came to an end and the light began to fade, these petal-fronds drooped until they lay flat against the bole of the tree: an immense cluster of millimeter-gauged tubules with an almost lacquered exterior. Around the bumbershoot was an entirely different form of ground cover: the tiny spatulate fern-grass that they had seen near the crash-site. Beneath that, almost invisible, was a substrata of ground-following fungi and lichen.
It was among these plants that the group witnessed much of the second night’s bioluminescent light show, which winked and flashed as creatures occulted the glowing foliage during their silent dashes through it. Caine started keeping count and timing the eclipses of three particularly bright plants. By dawn, he had concluded that either there was quite a bit of nocturnal fauna roving about, or that, if it was sparse, it was also quite hyperactive. He mentioned it to Hwang.
The biologist nodded slowly. “There is, of course, another explanation.”
“Several. We could be attracting curiosity because we’re different. Or some of the local wildlife is shadowing us before they decide attack.”
Ben nodded. “I’ll pass that word, if you like.”
Caine considered. It might panic a few of the team, but the others were shaping up well enough that the possibility of an impending encounter might give them the extra edge of alertness they needed to detect and foil an ambush. It would also give everyone a bit of an adrenal boost and help them march a little faster and a little longer. “Thanks, Ben. By the way, how are you holding up?
Hwang rubbed the right side of his torso, just a few centimeters lower than the pectoral. “Sore, but no more sharp pains. Xue and I agree that I’m healing from whatever internal dance my viscera did during the crash.”
“Has he looked at Mizuki yet this morning?”
Ben nodded. “So far, so good. That means we probably don’t need to worry about trauma-induced necrosis. But an infection could bring us back to the same point.”
“So we keep irrigating and using the disinfectant from the medkits.”
“Yes, but at this rate, we’re not going to have much left if anyone else needs treatment.”
“Necessary risk. We can’t afford to have Mizuki slow down, and I’m not going to leave her or anyone else behind. So we use the resources we have to keep going now.” Caine rose. “Ready to move?”
Ben smiled as he rose. “Not really, but let’s go.”
* * *
About an hour further into their march, the large stream split into two meandering courses, and the foliage became more dense, largely because of a profusion of trees that were more akin to immense bushes with high ground clearance. Their broad leaves, each a collage of green and orange, rose into a domed canopy that reached as high as fifteen meters, crowning the plant like the head of an immense mushroom sagging down to conceal its own stalk. The smaller, younger specimens did not have rounded canopies; their foliage was akin to a broad cone—
A cone.
Riordan dropped back to where Ben was helping Mizuki; her compromised depth perception made her susceptible to falls. “Ben, look: cone trees. The same species we saw on Adumbratus.”
Ben dashed Caine’s momentary hope that he had been the first to notice them. “Yes. It’s clear now that we are on a battle line. Walking right along it, in fact.”
“You mean, the battle line between the different biota.”
“Yes. The self-climbing kelp and related plants are clearly the native species. The others, including the cone trees, have been introduced by the Slaasriithi.”
Caine felt a quick pulse of hope. “Which they must watch over. To track the changes that they are trying to induce.”
“True, but they might not visit here more than once or twice a year. If that. As Yiithrii’ah’aash pointed out, they are not in a rush to effect change.”
They were drawing close to a copse of cone trees that had tall bumbershoots mixed among them. Mizuki looked up along the lichen encrusted trunks, murmured, “Fascinating. And elegant.”
Caine looked, saw how the underside of the palmate fronds sent back whatever light was reflected upward by the leaves of the cone trees. “You mean the way the bumbershoots make sure that the cone trees get all the light they can, even bouncing back what they don’t capture on first exposure?”
Mizuki’s good eye rotated toward Riordan. “You are a quick study, Captain, but I was referring to the bumbershoot’s trunk.”
“The trunk?” Caine echoed. He had gone from feeling botanically perceptive to utterly stupid in the space of a single second.
“Look closely: do you see how it shines? That is water, from condensation, which trickles down and feeds the ground around the cone tree. Which, because of its own dense canopy, catches almost all the light that falls upon it, yet sheds almost all the water.”
Gaspard, who had drifted closer to them as they walked, shook his head. “And how is that elegant? It sounds quite the contrary. The cone trees would be strangling themselves out of existence if the bumbershoot didn’t supply it with water.”
“But that is not coincidence, Mr. Ambassador,” Mizuki retorted. She pointed at one of the largest cone trees, located toward the center of the copse. Its impressive wide-spreading canopy sheltered low thickets of ferns, mosses and fluffy crabgrass nestled between the roots that radiated out from its gnarled trunk. Day-glo yellow lichens were growing up into the lower shoots of the tree, and apparently, beginning to strangle it. “What do you see?” Mizuki asked.