by Dayton Ward
The nurse nodded. “Absolutely. She likes me.”
Leone was happy to hear that his plan—somewhat sneaky but not at all sinister—was beginning to have a positive effect. Having Amos talk with Seta in the hopes of the young Tomol girl becoming comfortable around her and by extension the rest of the Endeavour crew would go a long way toward earning her trust as they worked together to understand not only her role as leader of her people but also what he and the rest of the crew could do to help her. “What have you been talking about?”
“Everything,” Amos replied. “Her life here, her training to be Holy Sister and eventually take over as priestess from her mentor, the laws and rituals surrounding her people, including their commitment to sacrificing themselves when the time came—all of it. The Tomol pretty much live their lives in a perpetual fast-forward mode, Doctor. They take in a lot at a young age, far more than anything you or I had to deal with as teenagers.”
“I don’t remember that far back,” Leone said. “How’s she doing, though? I mean, since we brought her aboard?” Exposing someone from a primitive culture to the wonder that was a starship orbiting the planet they called home would be a shock for anyone, regardless of her age, and while the doctor had of course been concerned about Seta’s reaction, his gut instinct told him that the girl would adapt in short order to her new surroundings. She exuded an inner strength that belied her handful of years, he decided, even more so than what she had been required to demonstrate just as a matter of course for a Tomol and after being tossed into the proverbial deep end so far as her new leadership role.
“Aside from that one incident, she’s been fine.” Amos shrugged. “Kids adapt.”
Leone grunted. “I appreciate your helping her through that. Adolescent emotional outbursts never were my strong suit.” He paused, realizing his off-the-cuff comment had given him something new to consider. “When you think about it, this is probably the first real crisis that any of them have experienced in their lives, I mean ever.” When Amos frowned, obviously uncertain where he was going with this, he added, “Think about it. With no one on that planet who’s older than . . . what? Twenty? They have no one from a previous generation to tell them how tough things were in the old days, or that a crisis is survivable. They can’t look to older relatives or friends for help or advice when there’s a problem, and as problems go down there, someone deciding not to jump into that fire pit is a big damned deal.”
Amos nodded. “That makes perfect sense, and it has to be unthinkable that someone would bring such pain to his or her own village. Seta knows her people must be lost down there trying to figure things out, and the one person they look to for answers is the Holy Sister, and where is she? Eating ice cream.”
Scowling, Leone looked through the window separating the lab from sickbay’s front office but could not see the young Tomol. “Really? Ice cream?”
“Hey, it was your idea, remember?” Amos hooked a thumb over her shoulder, toward the patient ward. “It blew her mind. She’s a fiend for the stuff.”
“Better than french fries, anyway.” It had been Leone’s suggestion to let Seta try the dessert, which was one of his few real vices. As silly as it might sound for a man of his years to admit, a bowl of ice cream was one of his preferred methods of relaxing at the end of a long day. It also had fewer detrimental side effects than bourbon. “Let’s not tell the captain about that, all right? For all we know, introducing french fries and ice cream to a prewarp civilization is a Prime Directive violation.”
His workstation, silent for the past few moments, beeped to alert him that the program he had been running had completed. “Hey, come look at this. I want a second set of eyes on something.” As Amos stepped toward the lab table, he pivoted the computer terminal so that she could see its display.
“Are you looking at the Tomol helix?” Amos leaned closer, her eyes narrowing as she studied the image on the computer screen, which depicted a strand of Tomol DNA.
“Yeah. Now watch this.” Leone reached for the terminal’s keypad and entered a sequence. “This is a computer simulation of the tests I’ve been running.” On the screen, a flood of small blue particles swept across the image of the slowly twirling DNA helix. In short order the particles began attaching themselves to the helix, concentrating on a single section of the strand before beginning to disassemble.
“Those look like virions,” Amos said, to which Leone replied with a silent nod. “Are you infecting the Tomol with a virus?”
Leone made a show of holding one finger to his lips. “Just watch,” he said in a deliberate stage whisper.
The computer screen depicted the severed ends of the helix as they started to lengthen, carrying the virions along the new segments that had formed, before reattaching themselves to the point of the original split.
“It’s replicating code and repairing the genome,” Amos said. “You’re creating new genetic material.”
Impressed with her summation, Leone replied, “In theory, yes, based on the existing material and gaps of information that predictably should be there, and letting the new sequences fill in the blanks. I’ve run this model over and over, and I think it’ll reset the Tomol’s genetic profile back to the way it was before it was first altered.”
Amos frowned. “So this won’t eliminate the Change?”
“No, we don’t want to take that away,” Leone said. “The Tomol were always supposed to evolve in that manner, but without turning into destructive psychopaths along the way. I’m basically trying to cancel out the errant genetic coding introduced by the Shedai and allow whatever’s left to carry on without the extra piece. It was Klisiewicz who pointed me in this direction. Once we started thinking of this from the standpoint of how the Shedai likely would’ve tried to correct the problem, some things started to make sense.”
He pointed to the helix on the screen and indicated sections of the simulation that were highlighted in yellow. “See these areas? These are parts of the sequencing that—as far as the computer’s able to determine—don’t belong there. They’re not part of the Tomol’s natural DNA. I mean, they are in a sense, since every Tomol’s born with them, and we’re talking about genetic manipulation that would’ve happened hundreds of thousands of years ago and passed on from generation to generation. Still, even after all this time, these markers have Shedai fingerprints all over them. Klisiewicz made the point that whatever the Shedai did would’ve been motivated by their desire to control the Tomol rather than trying to cure or help them, so anything they did would still show in the genetic code as something that’s not supposed to be there in the first place.” He tapped the computer monitor. “So we basically built a synthetic virus designed to seek out, hunt down, and rewrite anything within a genetic sequence that’s determined to be not part of the whole, using existing information to fill in the resulting gaps.”
“I don’t understand,” Amos said. “I read the report Doctor Babitz sent from her own analysis of the Tomol. According to her, entire sequences of their DNA had been replaced by the Shedai with their own genome segments, and there was no way to know what had been taken out of the original code, and to attempt a resequencing like this would be hazardous if not fatal to the Tomol.”
“Oh, ye of little faith,” Leone said. Again, he indicated the computer model. “We have Mister Klisiewicz to thank for this bright idea, too. Instead of looking at this like a geneticist, he took a different approach and came at it like someone writing a computer program. It was his idea to create what I’m calling a ‘generic marker,’ or basically an ‘adapter.’ He says he stole the idea from the Shedai themselves, based on some research he did back when we were involved with Vanguard.” He paused. “By the way, you know the first rule of Vanguard is that we don’t talk about Vanguard, right? I mean, ever? As in, once we’re done here, you flush it from your brain and forget we ever had this talk?”
Her eyes widening, Amos nod
ded. “Yes, Doctor.”
Satisfied, Leone continued, “Good. I’d hate to see Admiral Nogura fly all the way out here from Earth just to kick both our asses.” He rapped his hands on the lab table. “Okay, back to work. Klisiewicz’s idea seems to have paid off. It took us a while to work out all the particulars, since there are no examples of the Shedai metagenome to work from, but the kid was a champ. He helped me work out the genetic sequencing models with the computer, and we even managed to conceptualize in pretty crude fashion the missing segments of the original Tomol genetic segments. Once we did that, we had everything we needed to let our new generic marker go and do its seek-and-find thing. If all goes according to plan, the Tomol will still change, but now that cycle won’t be interrupted or hijacked by the Shedai elements of their genetic code.”
“What about those who are already Changed?”
There’s the rub, Leone mused. “Good question. I don’t have a sample of that DNA, so I can’t run any tests to determine if this will work the same way for them. Besides, we may never even get close enough to one to take a sample, let alone administer any cure we come up with.”
Nodding in understanding, Amos said, “There are nearly fifteen hundred Tomol down there.” She shook her head. “I guess we’d better get started synthesizing the compound.”
“Yeah.” Leone ran a hand through his hair. “And we’ll also need equal doses of a general antibiotic and antipyretic that works with Tomol physiology.” He gestured toward the computer. “According to the computer model, the patient appears at risk of developing a pretty nasty fever while undergoing the genetic resequencing. The scenarios show the febrile neutropenia kicking in anywhere from two minutes to six hours after the viral agent is introduced. In English, that means every patient’s going to be different, but we knew that already, because that’s the way it always is.”
“I can start searching the pharmaceutical database for something compatible with Tomol physiology,” Amos said.
Waving toward the computer again, Leone replied, “I’ve worked out the basics already. We just need to refine it.”
Amos smiled. “Sounds easy enough. I’ll get started.”
“Great,” Leone said, stifling a sudden yawn. “Now if you don’t mind, I think I’d like to get something to eat before slipping into a coma.” The evening plans were shaping up nicely, but he put that thought on hold as the intercom beeped.
“Bridge to sickbay,” said the voice of Lieutenant Klisiewicz.
Keying the companel on the wall behind the table, the doctor said, “Sickbay, Leone here.”
“Just letting you know that the captain’s cleared us for the landing party, Doctor,” replied the Endeavour’s science officer. “Our shuttlecraft departs in ninety minutes.”
Leone scowled. “And we’re still going with the idea that something on the planet won’t want to shoot us down when we try to land?”
“Doesn’t seem to be an issue, at least for the moment. We’ve reentered orbit and there’s been no reaction. We’re keeping sensors away from the underground caverns, and the captain figures there’s really only one way to find out how the obelisk might react to a shuttlecraft.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Leone said, trying to sound more confident than he felt. “Anything new from Commander Stano?” He had been told by Khatami about the attack on the Sagittarius, and that unlike their first skirmish with the Changed, this encounter thankfully had not yielded any casualties from the scout ship’s crew or the Endeavour’s landing party.
“They’re finalizing repairs to the Sagittarius and getting ready to move. There’s not much we can do for them at the moment, but maybe the Preservers can show us some other way to help. See you on the hangar deck, Doctor. Klisiewicz out.”
The connection terminated and Leone leaned against the lab table, drawing a long, deep breath. “I guess that’s that, then.” Looking to Amos, he said, “Feel like another excursion?”
Amos nodded. “Of course!”
Was there no crushing this woman’s enthusiasm?
“Let Seta know we’ll be leaving soon,” Leone said, “and let’s work up some doses of the viral agent and our accompanying antibiotic. We may as well give that a shot, too.”
“Right away, Doctor.” Amos departed the lab area, leaving Leone to talk to no one but himself.
He sighed, shaking his head. “So much for dinner and a coma.”
22
Advancing through the forest, Kerlo felt his mental abilities growing stronger with every step. Trees bent or broke at his approach, falling away and clearing a path through the undergrowth as he pressed forward. Though he was certain he did not yet command the level of power exhibited by Nimur, there was no mistaking the heat growing within him, along with an increasing awareness of the world around him and even his place in it.
This was the clarity of which Nimur had spoken with such conviction, the implicit, instinctive understanding of the potential he harbored and that all Tomol possessed.
Kerlo had been a fool to deny what his wife had tried to show him. The energy radiating from his body and from his mind was rightfully his, just as it had been the birthright of every Tomol. That it had been denied to him and his people for uncounted generations infuriated him, though there remained a part of him that could not believe that the Shepherds, who had taken such steps to safeguard them here on this world, had done so for malevolent purposes.
Questions lingered, and while instinct told him he and his people were meant to evolve in this manner, he could not deny the swelling sensation that the Tomol somehow had been betrayed, whether by the Shepherds or another party.
And what of the sky people and their allegiances?
They already had demonstrated their willingness to fight and even kill Nimur and any of the other Changed who threatened them, but Kerlo knew that any danger they posed was limited, and growing weaker with every moment. Soon they would be helpless before the unfettered power he and his people wielded, but the sky people must not be destroyed. To that end, he had instructed his followers not to kill them but instead to capture and bring them to him. He did not need all of them, of course, but there was no way to know who among the group of intruders would provide the most value, for despite their collective weakness before the Changed, they still held one thing of value: their sky-ships. At least one or two of the interlopers would be of use in obtaining access to the ships, and with those at their disposal, Kerlo and his people did not need to remain confined to this one world. Perhaps there were Tomol living elsewhere among the stars, waiting to be reunited with others of their kind and to have their true potential revealed to them.
We need the sky-ships.
Cries of alarm and the sounds of movement echoed through the forest, and Kerlo could discern through the trees the silhouettes of numerous Tomol running along the winding trail that connected the village with the Caves of the Shepherds. He suspected that his fellow Tomol would seek shelter in the caverns, and it was likely that a significant number of his people had already found their way into the subterranean passages.
Would the wordstone protect them?
It had failed to do so when Nimur had entered that sacred realm, but Kerlo did not discount the possibility of Seta, the new priestess, having found some new weapon to use against him and his fellow Changed. Was it she who had unleashed upon them the flying weapons that had doomed Nimur and other Changed to the fate shared by the other Endless? Kerlo’s thoughts still were haunted by the image of his wife, imprisoned within the stone shroud, perhaps for eternity. Might Seta be able to turn those weapons upon Kerlo and his followers?
There also were the sky people, who wielded their own versions of the fire lances carried by the Wardens, but even those had proved to be of only limited effectiveness. Still, Kerlo knew that he did not yet possess the strength exhibited by Nimur, so there remained a tangible risk to him an
d those he led. Therefore, the best course of action now was to attack with speed and ferocity, in the hopes of overcoming the sky people before they could assert any kind of advantage.
We also are outnumbered, and there is only one way to address that disparity.
23
As the shuttlecraft Simone’s personnel hatch depressurized and slid open, Leone was the first one to disembark from the compact vessel, and as his boots touched the ground he gave serious thought to kneeling and kissing the soil.
“I want to thank you for that ride, Ensign Gaulke,” he said, looking back into the shuttle’s passenger cabin as Klisiewicz stepped through the hatch.
“Anytime, Doctor,” replied Adam Gaulke, the security officer charged with piloting the Simone. “All part of the service. Sorry about the bumps, though.”
The flight down from the Endeavour had been anything but dull, thanks to the Preservers and their unpredictable planetary defense system. Though the ancient, inanimate artifact had taken no apparent notice of the starship’s return to geosynchronous orbit over Suba, it had exhibited a keen interest in the Simone’s passage through the atmosphere and down to the ground, despite Ensign Gaulke’s best efforts to give a wide berth to the mountain containing the Preserver complex, at least until whatever monitoring systems that were tracking the shuttlecraft determined that it was unarmed or otherwise posed no discernible threat. Those few moments had been harrowing, to say the least, though Gaulke had executed a series of impressive evasive maneuvers to avoid the two attempts by the defense system to bring down the tiny vessel. Following that bit of momentary excitement, the ensign had brought the Simone to an uneventful landing in a clearing near the Tomol village.
“If you find my stomach in there, let me know, all right?” Leone said as he waited for Seta and Nurse Amos to exit the shuttlecraft, followed by security officers Carlton McMurray and Derek Zapien.