Adrift

by W. Michael Gear

  He nodded, not sure what a classificatory system was, but if Vik said so, it had to be.

  “Like calling all boys Felix,” Sheena told him crossly. “You’d never know you from Toni or Kayle, if you were all called Felix.”

  He waited until Vik couldn’t see and stuck his tongue out at Sheena. She just giggled and lifted her chin to show him she didn’t care.

  Vik was pulling on gloves. “All right, let’s take a look. We have the cameras on to record everything we do. Why is that important, Felicity?”

  “So everyone can see how it’s done?”

  “Well, yes, but also so that everyone can see the same anatomy we do. Scientists will look at this recording for years and learn what we do. So to begin with, I’m going to describe what we’re seeing.”

  Felix and the rest listened and watched while Vik described the tube’s head, the jaws and teeth, measured it, inspected the lines of triangular fins and the three holes in the tail that she said were vents.

  But the real fun came when Vik used a scalpel and sliced down the length of the thing.

  “Zambo!” Felix whispered as Vik used metal probes and laid the tube open so that its insides were exposed.

  Felicity said, “Ohh” and made a face.

  Breez asked, “What’s it made of?” She stood to the side, eyes still wide. Periodically, she would press at the bottom of her jaw and the sides of her throat as if it hurt.

  “Fascinating,” Vik said. The woman carefully splayed the creature across the blotter, exposing all kinds of linear “organs” that ran the length of the creature. Pointing at this piece and that, Vik rattled off a lot of terms that Felix couldn’t understand as she made the official record. For long moments Felix lost himself, suddenly frozen when the Voice took over. It used Felix’s eyes to stare at the exposed pieces of the tube. The Voice was listening, watching, and totally absorbed as Vik picked through the tube’s separated guts with a probe.

  Felix might not have been in his body, as if the Voice was running it, learning. Weird. Felix was there . . . and he wasn’t. Sort of like he was in a dream.

  From a great distance, Felix heard Vik say, “What all that scientific jargon says is that this creature has three sides, see. People, like you and me, have two. Right and Left. That’s bilateral symmetry. Donovanian life is three-sided. Like the tube. So, look. There is a central, shared digestive system that runs through a kind of web. When you look closely you can see the little bugs it ate for dinner being digested in different places around the net.”

  “Ohh!” Felicity took a step back.

  “Grow up,” Sheena told her. “This is zambo.”

  “But here”—Vik used her probe to separate out one of the three light-brown strands that ran from the root of one of the jaws clear to the vent—“we have the most fascinating organ. See the thick places with all the blood vessels? Those are the gills, our equivalent of lungs, and then we have these bands of muscles running all the way to the vent at the rear. I’m betting they work like our esophagus does, through something called peristalsis. They expel water out the back and shoot the tube forward like a jet. This organ serves to both aerate the blood and propel the creature. Call it a gill jet.”

  “What’s wrong with lungs?” Sheena asked and made her point by breathing hard.

  Vik considered, her brow furrowed. “Nothing. We do fine with them. But, like fish, life on Donovan has found a more efficient solution than either the vertebrate or arthropod versions of lungs.”

  “What’s a arthro-what’s-its?” Felix asked, coming back into possession of his body. In an instant it was like the Voice had never been there. Felix could move his arms and legs again.

  “Like spiders and scorpions. Being born on Ashanti, you’ve never seen one.”

  The Voice made him ask, “Are humans better designed?”

  “Not necessarily better,” Vik told him. “We’re just adapted to a different environment. The nervous system, our organs, and bones are made for walking and living on land. The tube is designed to live in the sea. Feel the bones in your arms, and then look at the tube. Notice how the bone structure is?” She prodded a line of hard structures that the gill jet was attached to. “It’s not the same as bones, but more like a plastic.”

  Off to the side, Felicity had gone blank, her eyes unfocused. She kept humming the melody to “London Bridge Is Falling Down” under her breath. It was all he could do to keep from singing with her.

  Felix felt it when the Voice took control of his eyes, seemed to be directing them to different parts of the splayed creature.

  “This is how we know how things work,” he told the Voice.

  “Yes. I see.”

  55

  Her first thought was that she was smothering, only to have a blast of air inflate her lungs. With a start, Talina jerked, coughed. Felt something shift her body, lowering it onto a painful surface as she gasped for air and coughed. And coughed. She grew aware of the powerful roar; it seemed to fill the world. In addition, Talina’s back ached. She shouldn’t be this cold. This uncomfortable.

  A racking bout of coughing sent spasms through her body. Caused her to sit up on the hard gravel.

  Gravel? Shit on a shoe, the stuff was eating into her backside and butt.

  But, where the hell . . . ?

  Talina tried to understand. The little angular stones under her butt were part of a lenticular gravel bar in the middle of a river. On either side, the water was bounded by the vertical walls of a high gorge. Bits of greenery—some of them with gorgeous blooms—clung to cracks and fissures in the black canyon’s sheer sides. Colorful four-winged flying creatures wheeled overhead in flight. Smaller than mobbers, these were apparently a cliff-dwelling species. To Talina’s instant relief, none seemed to pay her the least bit of attention. Maybe they didn’t have human on the menu.

  From long habit, she checked. Her pistol, knife, and survival pouch were on her belt, but her overalls were soaked, as was her hair, and she could feel the water squish in her boots.

  Craning her neck, she stared back upstream to the twin cascading waterfalls for which Two Falls Gap was named. The gravel bar had to be four hundred meters downstream from the thundering falls. She stared across the roiling water, gaped at the dizzying heights; how the hell could she have survived that plummet?

  Another fit of coughing left her breathless.

  To her right, a soggy Dek Taglioni sat with his butt on a driftwood log, his feet at the lapping water’s edge. The man had his forearms braced on his knees, limp fingers dripping water where it drained out of his soaked overalls. He had a crooked smile on his lips, a daredevil twinkle in his designer-yellow eyes that she hadn’t seen for some time now. The pink scar contrasted with his pale skin. And what was it about his eyes? The pupils seemed larger, darker, with an uncanny depth.

  “What the hell?” Talina shifted, groaned. Her body felt like it had been pulled sideways through a singularity. “Did I just fall off a cliff? Am I remembering that right? Like, I was moving at the same speed as the water falling next to me?”

  “Remember hitting the bottom?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Probably because the way you hit, it should have broken your back.” He paused. “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I tore loose of your hold, so you wouldn’t fall. What happened?”

  “Rock came loose under my foot as I was careening for balance. What do you mean you tore loose? You did this on purpose? You leaped off the cliff and went over a waterfall? That’s a fricking thirty-meter drop! You trying to kill yourself?”

  “Yeah, well, I figured it was worth the risk. Had to do something to get that little shit out of my brain. That stuff, that TriNA was picking through my head, playing with my emotions. Making me hate myself. Turned me into a fucking lab rat. I was losing,
Tal.” Again the crooked grin. “Maybe you’ve been too busy to notice, but I don’t like losing.”

  She shook her head, which did nothing but slap wet hair around. Gasping, she made herself stand. Her whole body felt like a bruise. Every joint ached. Cocking her head, she used a finger to squeegee the water out of her ears. “So, maybe it’s you who haven’t noticed, but we’re on a gravel bar in the middle of the river. How did we get here?”

  “I was treading water at the bottom of the falls when I saw you pop up a couple of meters away. I swam over, got your head out of the water, and towed you downstream. Pulled you up on the gravel. Got the water out of your mouth and throat and as much of your lungs as I could. Repaid you a favor. Gave you mouth-to-mouth until you coughed your way back to consciousness.”

  That sense of smothering and the burst of air? Mouth-to-mouth?

  “I don’t taste peppermint.”

  He frowned, worked his tongue. “Me either.” A laugh. “The bastards were too panicked by the near-drowning. I can feel them cowering inside. Is that weird, or what? I mean, they’re just molecules, right? From the moment I hit the water, I’ve just been me. After the last couple of weeks? I can’t tell you what a relief this is.”

  “This is what your plan was? Throw yourself into the river?”

  “I remember what you told me about quetzals hating water.” His shoulders jerked in a halfhearted “Oh-well” shrug. “The waterfall wasn’t in the original plan. Just dive into the river below the dome. Submerge myself and play like I was drowning. Easy, right? Get control, and wade back on shore. Repeat as necessary until I could figure a way to keep Demon at bay.”

  He winced. “The molecules wouldn’t let me. We just kept struggling, me trying to get into the water, the quetzals trying to keep me out. Might have gotten it done my way, but Flute and Rocket’s bunch were just as afraid as Demon’s. We seesawed back and forth, and just kept battling our way downstream until there was nowhere to go. By then I was desperate enough to shoot myself rather than let Demon win.”

  He worked his right index finger as if pulling a trigger, staring at it thoughtfully. “I was going to get him out of my head, even if it meant blowing him out with a bullet. Weird thing. I had the distinct feeling he couldn’t comprehend what I was doing. That somehow, given quetzal sensibilities, the fact that I’d kill myself confused him. Sort of like it was so far beyond any rational action it defied reality.”

  “Quetzals don’t understand suicide? Makes sense. It would be a dead end for TriNA, which is essentially immortal. Quetzals eat their elders, pass the TriNA along down the generations. The idea of just letting all that information go to waste would be a nonstarter. An act of incomprehensible futility.”

  He gave her a soft look. “When I saw you floating, I had a moment of complete panic. I was afraid you were dead. That it was my fault.”

  “Nope. It was the quetzals’.” She looked around at the roiling water as it swirled and sucked its way on both sides. The closest bank was a good thirty meters away, but the basalt walls were sheer. The other shore, maybe sixty meters distant, was wooded back for a distance of ten meters or so before the vertical wall of stone rose to the tree-topped heights so far above. “But, more to the point, how are we going to get out of here and back to the dome?”

  Dek made a face as he glanced around. “Okay, now there’s a question. And we’ve got another problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “After I dragged you out and got you breathing, I pulled a number of soft tube-shaped sucker things from where they were chewing on our overalls.” He pointed to a frayed spot on his sleeve and then to a couple more on his and her pant legs. “See? None of them had latched onto flesh, but if they could do that kind of damage to fabric, I’d bet skin wouldn’t even slow them down.”

  Talina fingered one of the frayed spots in her right coverall thigh. “Well that sucks snot, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” Dek was staring back up at the falls, at the high cliff from which they’d fallen. “Got my pistol and your rifle up there. That pistol on your hip still functional after a soaking like we just had?”

  “Military model. It will take a lot more than a dunking to disable it. But it’s a short-range weapon. Only carries ten rounds of explosive tip. We run into a Tyson-type treetop terror, we’re gone. If what’s left of those mobbers find us, we’re going to end up sliced finer than sandwich cuts. If we come face-to-face with a quetzal, I can put him down if we’re up-close and personal. The good news is that it will make sausage out of sidewinders, bems, and skewers. But that’s assuming we can get back to land.”

  “Yeah.” Dek glanced around, fixed on something large that passed just under the water’s surface and made a splash. “That was a whole lot bigger than one of those tube things. Think it’s dangerous?”

  “Just what planet do you think you’re on?”

  Talina turned her attention down-canyon. The distance was perhaps another four hundred yards, and she couldn’t be certain, but it looked like an alluvial fan spread out from under a crack in gorge’s sheer walls.

  She pointed, saying, “That might be our way out.”

  “How are we going to get there? I consider it a miracle that I was able to tow you to this gravel bar without being eaten. After seeing that big thing swim by, getting in the water is about as exciting as letting quetzals back into my mind.”

  She studied the chabacho log he sat on, took in the couple of pieces of aquajade that had had the misfortune of being tossed into the river by their fellows. Definitely not enough to make a raft out of.

  She unsealed her pouch, poured the water out, and found what she was looking for. A tube of adhesive and a roll of cord.

  Raising an eyebrow, she told Dek, “Time for us to get naked.”

  He grinned. “I thought you’d never ask. But shouldn’t we be putting our energy into getting off this gravel bar first?”

  “What if I told you I have a plan?”

  56

  Michaela had come at a fast trot when Anna Gabarron had paged her through com, saying, “Director, we’ve got trouble.”

  Michaela took the stairs to the lab level two at a time. She had been in her quarters, at her sink, preparing for bed. Now, a robe wrapped around her, her broken arm in a sling, she rushed through the quiet Pod.

  The only sound was the soft purr of the HVAC system and the distant splashing of water on the pilings. She’d seen the latest view from the external cameras. The once-white pilings were now blue-green, covered with a thick and slimy coating of algae. The stuff had worked its way up to cover the bottom of the Pod. In places it looked like it might have been a couple of centimeters thick and was now creeping up in dendritic patterns that almost reminded her of veins.

  She wasn’t sure why that was surprising; she’d seen algae and moss growths back on Earth that were twice the size.

  Turned out that not everything on Donovan was terrifying. Some things, like the algae, were a constant. Right down to the ever-present patches that Tobi Ruto kept blasting off the deck and more particularly out of the Underwater Bay. The good news was that the power washer removed the stuff in mats that just peeled free and sluiced back into the sea.

  At the top of the stairs, she made the left, hurrying to the clinic. Ducking inside, she closed the door behind her, asking, “What have we got?”

  Anna turned from the isolation tent—a clear, plastic bio-container with its own oxygen and ventilation system. The intravenous drip fed a needle in little Toni Yoshimura’s arm to keep him hydrated and fed; a catheter ran from the little boy’s penis to the collection bag on the isolation tent’s wall. Samples could be drawn through the plastic by means of a syringe for analysis.

  “Got a problem,” Anna told her. “Sorry to bother you, especially with everything that’s going on, but I thought you should know. Toni’s got some kind of growth in his neck.
I saw the swelling under the corners of his jaw. Didn’t think much of it, but it’s creeping down the sides of his throat. Take a look.”

  Michaela stepped close, looked down through the plastic to where Toni lay on his back. The IV in his arm looked incongruous, too large for a such a little boy. The half-lidded eyes remained vacant, the kid’s breathing oddly automatic, more like a machine’s than a person’s.

  And yes, there, at the corner of the jaw, Michaela could see the swelling. It looked linear, running down on either side of the child’s trachea to just above the collarbones.

  “Mumps?” Michaela asked, searching for anything in memory that might be similar.

  “Mumps has been extinct on Earth for the last hundred years. Thought it might be an infection, maybe from a molar that was draining through a cloaca into the soft tissue. I’ve got a negative on any kind of titer or elevated white blood cell count. No sign of infection. If it was a swollen salivary gland, it wouldn’t be running down the neck that way. So, with nothing else left to try, I used a needle and aspirated the edema.”

  Anna turned away, tapped a finger to the wall monitor, flipping through images to the one she wanted. “That’s what I got.”

  “What am I seeing here?”

  “Those are cells, Director. Donovanian cells interacting with human cells. The invaders are the ones without a nucleus. But look at the structure. This is ordered. Not random like cancer cells. These are forming a specific . . . God, what do I call it? I’m not sure that it’s an organ and not sure that it isn’t a tumor. It’s something new. Half-human, half-Donovanian.”

  “What does Raya Turnienko say?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got a call in, but Two Spot said she was in surgery. Fixing some guy’s foot who got it run over at the mine. Said she could get back to me, but it would be late. I told him that I’d call back in the morning.” Anna ran a hand over the back of her neck, a soul-deep weariness in her eyes. “I thought I’d show you before we called Yosh and Mikoru.”