Message from Gondwana

by David Wiley

CHAPTER 5

  The last two days had passed more smoothly than stock options into an executive's portfolio, as Juls put it. Candece stopped by Lani's workspace to thank her for cheering Mumson up with the multimeter project. Bax successfully placed the five results of that project around the perimeter of the slab without serious injury to humans or plants. Back in the lab, the biochemists identified over a dozen new compounds with potential, including one that turned glassware to liquid. That caused a few problems until Emma corralled her discovery into an unaffected container made, oddly enough, of plastic. Even Professor Jonze was smiling at supper.

  Lani woke to the sound of rain pounding on the roof. Its intensity was a soothing sound to a girl born on Nemos. The planet's largest land mass, a southern continent, experienced intense squalls and thunderstorms for ten months out of its fourteen-month year. She snuggled closer to Bax's warm body and was drifting back to sleep when the intrusion alarm shrieked from the speakers.

  "Oh, bloody hell," Bax groaned as he lurched out of bed only to have Lani's elbow slam into his jaw as she pulled her coverall up. The hutches were not intended for two full-grown adults dressing in a hurry. She planted a quick kiss on his lips by way of apology and ducked out into the corridor, half-dressed, and was nearly run over by Kiet strapping on a flame thrower as he headed for the hatch.

  Within a few minutes only Lani and Mumson were left in the corridor. "Marx, but I wish they would let me use a flamethrower," Lani said, "I feel completely useless."

  "You feel useless," Mumson said. "What about me? I know how to use a flamer, but Old Jonze won't let me go out while she leads the charge. Neither will Candece for that matter."

  "But Kiet? Isn't he worried about anything happening? He's got to be well over a hundred and he's still going out."

  "That's what happens when your entire family is killed in a megatyphoon on Atlantis. That's his home planet you know. Well, it was, anyway. I don't think he really has a home planet anymore."

  "I didn't know that. How many years ago did it happen?"

  "I'm not sure, maybe seventy?" Mumson shrugged. "Anyway, it's probably better to have Kiet out there now than me. I'm liable to go catatonic at the worst possible moments and I still have trouble communicating when under stress."

  "I'm sorry. I know how that feels," Lani said. "If I'd thought of it sooner—"

  "If you had not thought of it when you did, I'd be dead," Mumson tried to smile encouragingly. "C'mon, let's go watch the action with the Geek on the big monitors."

  "A false alarm, kind of," Jonze's expression was tight. "The rain allowed some type of slime mold to cover the outer several meters of the electrical grid overnight. It completely negated the detection components and, of course, the zapper. Fortunately only a few vines had snuck in before we deployed the flame throwers. Unfortunately, one of them managed to reach Bobbie's landing strut and half-dissolve the metal before we fried it. Also, Soren caught a few darts launched from some new sort of plant."

  "Lucky us," Juls grumbled.

  "We will start mounting a watch whenever we expect any significant rain. Zach will draw up a rotating schedule to start in the morning." She tiredly waved away the groans. "Shut it! This is not my idea of fun either. If the Quaddie was still in orbit, or if they had given me the auto laser cannon like I wanted for the roof—well, let's just say I wish it was the bean counters with their fat asses on the line out here instead of us."

  A resounding silence met her unexpected outburst. "Sorry," she apologized. "Four and a half weeks before the Quadratic Equation is due back. If we are careful, we should be able to make it until then, and I would rather not lose any of you. You would not believe how much paperwork I have to fill out if someone dies—especially if all that is left is little, bitty pieces."

  Only a few nervous chuckles greeted her attempt at humor.

  Lani was a fish, a small fish with arms trailing behind, being chased by a large fish with a mouthful of sharp teeth. She frantically twisted this way and that, barely evading those teeth before suddenly releasing a cloud of ink to make her getaway. She woke in her own bed, the covers wound around her.

  Within the hour, she was in her lab fortified by a generous mug of caffeine, which was euphemistically called coffee by the dispenser in the galley. The ink cloud had started her thinking. She called up the analyses from her field trip again.

  "Just take it with you," she pleaded with Bax a few hours later.

  "This is supposed to be better than a flame thrower?" He eyed the small, pressurized canister rather skeptically. "Okay, Lani, I'll do it for you, but if the other kids laugh, you'll have to make it up to me."

  She met his lecherous grin with one of her own. "I think I can manage that."

  Karl and Candece stood in front of an aerial holograph of their most recent prospecting site. Candece rapidly shifted the view back and forth. "Do you see it? Right here, there's a straight line, less vegetation, a small square, about 50 meters on a side, inside a larger square?" The view shifted left, overhead, right. Karl firmly removed the projector control from Candece's hand, eliciting several sighs of relief.

  "Sorry," Candece flushed. "But did you recognize it?"

  Juls squinted, "Looks like another prospecting base?"

  "Exactly. So we decided to investigate," Candece gestured as Karl switched the view to a dimly lit video. Up close, the scene looked like a cave, surrounded by large trees, with shrubs and clumps of grass covering the roof and vines nearly obscuring its entrance.

  "Is that the hatch door?" Lani pointed to something lying off to the side. "It looks kind of twisted."

  Karl nodded, "It was and it is. It looks like something ripped it right off its hinges." The video zoomed in on a nameplate beside the hatch. A blue circle with PfiBayer written vertically and horizontally, crossing at the common "B", was still visible.

  "Damn, the competition got here first," the Geek made a disgusted sound. "Looks like two or three decades ago."

  "Kind of reminds me of the Church Universal's quartered cross," Soren remarked. "Suppose that's a coincidence?" he asked to several nervous chuckles.

  The camera operator ducked to enter the dim recesses of PfiBayer's former base. Panels hung down from the corridor ceiling, draped with something that looked like Spanish moss. The camera rotated to peer through a doorway to show the remains of the lab, at least some of the lumps enshrouded by vegetation had the same shape as expensive laboratory equipment.

  "We checked after we got back," Candece's voice sounded hoarse as the tour continued on the wall behind her. "Hoover has some limited records of previous expeditions to the planet that the Geek managed to decrypt for us. As best we can tell, PfiBayer abandoned this base about three years ago."

  "Three years?" Emma was incredulous. "That degree of decomposition has to have taken twenty years, fifteen minimum. I've studied decomp you know." Lani didn't think Emma meant to insult Candece, but Emma's people skills were so bad that there was a persistent rumor about her being one of those androids that the kartels supposedly had illegally developed to be their perfect employees; the employees who had no personal life and didn't want one. Lani did not think that was the case, she felt she would have been able to tell, but sometimes she wondered. And how did one bring up the subject? "Hey, Emma, let's talk, I kind of know what you're going through."

  The video was showing the outside of the fusion reactor. "The shielding there is supposed to withstand a high energy explosive, but all that is left is shreds," Soren noted.

  "Maybe the shielding had some sort of mineral the plants wanted," Lani said.

  "I don't care," Emma said as the scenes of decay unrolled before them, "I think we should leave before something happens."

  "Right, with what blagging ship do we do that? I agree with the Professor. I'd love to drop a few of our corporation bean counters out here without any support and see how they'd do," Candece snarled. Mumson unsteadil
y reached for her hand, but she turned away. His face fell, but Lani saw Candece furiously blinking away the threatened tears.

  "Turn that off," the Professor commanded and Karl quickly complied. "Look, take it as a cautionary tale. We are in a nasty spot, I agree, but we have not had anyone killed yet, and I want to keep it that way. So, we go about our business, but if you get in a bad situation, do not risk it. As of now, I don't care about the blagging quotas. If the bean counters object, I'll take the heat. Just take care of yourselves, okay?"