Deucalion

by Caswell, Brian

  ‘And I’ll “absolutely need” a hundred thousand creds?’

  ‘Not personally, but if we’re going to play amateur Security agents, we’ll be up for some major expenses. There’s only so much I can liberate from Security stores, and nothing comes cheap on the Black Market.’ He dug deep into the backpack. ‘I did manage to liberate this, though.’ He stood up, holding out a tiny black disk about the size of a thumbnail. ‘It’s a satellite location beacon.’ In his other hand he held a small vid-screen. ‘It’s ether-linked to this. Security designed it for long-distance surveillance. It doesn’t send out a constant signal for the target to detect. Until it’s activated, it just sits there like a . . . piece of plastic, but it’s digitally encoded to respond to this unit. Press this button and the signal is activated for a hundred milliseconds. Just long enough to read a satellite triangulation and transmit it. Because it’s ether-linked to the navigation satellite and to this unit, transmission is instantaneous. In less than a second, I can pinpoint the target anywhere on the planet. To the nearest ten metres.’

  Jane nodded, suitably impressed. ‘But why do we need it?’

  ‘Because I don’t think the people we’re after are from around here.’ He paused, and she waited for him to go on. ‘I’ve been checking around. And there’s a couple of odd things . . . I didn’t make the connection at first. I was too tied up in our own problem. Do you remember, a couple of days after you started hiding out at my place, there was a news report of two people “disappearing” from the Base Hospital in the middle of the night?’

  Jane nodded, not really remembering, but unwilling to stop the flow.

  ‘It turns out that not only were they the only survivors from the crash of Johannsen’s flyer – the two who miraculously walked out of the Ranges alive – but one was a Security operative, which made them news around the Corps. Rumour was that there was something “special” about the girl, that a request had come down to the New G office a couple of weeks earlier for information about her and her mother.’

  ‘Down?’ Jane interrupted, trying to get the situation clear in her mind.

  ‘Down. From the Council. From Councillor Gaston’s office. Gaston, our new esteemed President-elect. It set me thinking. The flyer is sabotaged, taking out Gaston’s only rival – who was, incidentally, streets ahead of Gaston in all the polls. And on board, for no good reason, are two people Gaston is tagging. Then the girl and the other survivor disappear. By the way, just to add to the mystery, they found enough DTX in the girl’s drip to stop an elephant. If it had got into the girl’s system it would have killed her and left no trace. But that wasn’t what got me hooked.’ Unconsciously, he pressed a button on the box in his hand, and the screen lit up with a set of coordinates. He switched it off again. ‘A routine Security report from outside the hospital at about the time they disappeared mentioned a hopper.’

  ‘A hopper?’

  ‘That’s SecCorp jargon. A hopper is a flyer with motion-detection screening. Very expensive, very sophisticated. The only time they can be detected is when they are stationary, or moving very slowly. The effect is that one minute the flyer appears on the screen, the next it “hops” and we lose it.’

  ‘And this hopper appeared and disappeared outside the hospital?’

  ‘At the exact time the two of them pulled their own disappearing act. It headed off due west, then blipped out.’ He looked her in the eye as he came to the point. ‘But here’s the key. There was another report of a hopper about a week earlier, at the entrance to the Genetic Research Facility—’

  ‘On the night Hendriks disappeared.’ Jane finished off the sentence, and it was Denny’s turn to look suitably impressed.

  ‘Don’t ever let anyone tell you you aren’t smart.’

  She reached up and stroked his cheek with the backs of her fingers. ‘Nobody ever did. As far as I can remember.’

  Denny touched her hand and went on, ‘We won’t be able to track them in motion, but if we can attach this little baby to the hopper while it’s still on the ground, we’ll be able to pinpoint where they end up. All we have to know is the “where” and “when” – which you have neatly scribbled on the back of your hand – and be there when they land.’ He sat down. ‘You can congratulate me now.’

  Jane leaned across and kissed him. ‘Don’t let anyone ever tell you you aren’t smart.’ She paused. ‘But I’ll save the congratulations until you succeed in tagging the hopper.’

  16

  ON THE ISLAND

  Carmody Island

  Inland Sea (Eastern Region)

  16/11/101 Standard

  DARYL

  Standing at the edge of the cliff, I could feel the wind tugging at me, trying to pull me towards the sickening drop just a few centimetres away. It reminded me of the feeling that had swept over me so often as we shuffled our way along the narrow track across the top of the Ranges, a few months earlier.

  In another lifetime . . .

  I came up onto the cliff-top often. Just to be alone. It wasn’t like I had anything to complain about. Certainly not with the way I was being treated. The whole community on the island was friendly, and I wasn’t singled out because I was different. After all, Hendriks was different, and he was running the place.

  Apart from him, there were four or five of us, but the others were all ‘attached’ in one way or another.

  They had let me use my expertise to revamp the security systems on the island, and in the four months since I had arrived, they’d done what they could to fill my shopping list of gadgets to make the island and its activities ‘invisible’ to the outside world. If anyone in that world was bothering to look in our direction in the first place.

  Anything more than a few hundred clicks west of the Ranges seemed to hold no interest for anyone. There were enough mineral resources along the east coast and on the Fringes to keep the whole population of Deucalion occupied for another fifty years, so it wasn’t worth the expense of looking further afield. Especially not as far as the inland sea. The island was as safe as anywhere.

  They tried to make me welcome. I was invited to all the gatherings, where people made an effort to talk to me. And as far as Elena was concerned, I was still like a favourite uncle. A favourite, retarded uncle.

  I kept remembering the reception I’d got from Gwen, that first night on the flyer. She’d seemed distant to me, patronising almost, even though I was maybe four years older than her. Getting to know her later, I realised that she really wasn’t like that at all. In fact, except when she was preparing for a mission, she was a lot of fun.

  But she was different from me. They all were. It was a fact of life, and I couldn’t escape it.

  Up there on the cliff-top, I was alone. But no more alone than I felt in the middle of the group, with them all carrying on conversations around me that I had no chance of becoming a part of.

  To be fair, from time to time they would strike up a conversation in language I could understand, but you could see they were making the effort for my benefit. Even Elena, who until four months earlier had known only one language . . . even Elena needed to concentrate to remember that she had to say the words aloud.

  Hendriks didn’t seem to worry about it. But then, he was so obsessed with the problem of reversing the ‘ageing factor’ that he often didn’t emerge from his lab for days at a time. When I did get to talk to him, it was usually about his work, and his efforts on behalf of ‘the kids’.

  You see, apart from Hendriks, at twenty-two years old Standard, I was the oldest person on the island.

  In the beginning, he informed me, there were a few more like him, but they had since died; some ‘mysteriously’, some of natural causes. Together, years earlier back on Earth, they had begun the rescue operation. Now ‘the kids’ were basically running it themselves, and he was desperately trying to find a way to keep them alive past the age of forty.r />
  How can I explain the island – or ‘the kids’?

  I guess the only way is to try to fit together the bits and pieces I managed to drag out of Hendriks during my time on the island, and what I learned later from others. No one ever sat down and told me the whole story. Maybe nobody knew the whole story.

  Anyway, here goes:

  The story began back on Old Earth, around 2195ad. I’m still not exactly sure of the conversion scale, but that would put it about half a century, Earth standard, after the foundation of the colony on Deucalion, or around seventy Earth years before I ended up on the island. When you try to do the conversions between one planet and another, it’s easy to get messed up, so let’s just say it was somewhere around that long. Of course, for most of the individuals involved, fifty of those years were spent in stasis, travelling from Earth to here.

  But actually, the story began with the establishment of the settlement on Deucalion.

  Being human, and not having too much respect for anything that wasn’t human, the colonists on the first C-ship decided that, rather than send the ship back empty, the scientists back home might like to take a look at the Elokoi firsthand. So they kidnapped a couple of the creatures, put them into freeze-sleep, and sent them off.

  Of course, it wasn’t until after the ship was on its way that they discovered the Elokoi’s Gift. And they had no idea of the effect the freeze-sleep would have on a mind that remained awake for the entire fifty years, even while the body was in stasis.

  By the time the creatures reached Earth, fifty years of solitary confinement had reduced them to madness, but that didn’t stop their arrival being treated as an event among scientists. After all, while the ship had been in transit, hundreds of warp-shuttles had made the two year round trip out to Deuc and back to the mother-planet, many of them with news of the Elokoi and their ‘special capabilities’. So they were a long-awaited happening.

  By then the World Government had passed a whole range of Native Species Protection Acts, which made it illegal to do what had already been done fifty years before. There were also strict rules against the ‘unauthorised manipulation of human genetic material’. Which is why the Icarus Project, as it was codenamed, was so secret.

  It was simple in theory. The minds of the unfortunate Elokoi were gone, but their genetic material was intact, and locked inside those genes was the secret to the mind-power that men had dreamed of for millennia. If the responsible genes could be isolated, telepathy was within their reach.

  The gene-cluster was located, and a secret batch of forty or fifty embryos was created, with surrogate mothers hired to bring them to birth. None of the mothers knew the nature of the experiment. They were just poor women, offered what was, by their standards, a huge amount of money to have a baby and keep quiet about where it came from.

  But there was a leak somewhere. No one knows who or what alerted the authorities, but the net began to close and the scientists panicked.

  By that stage, the first generation of Icarus kids were about two or three years old. Suddenly they started disappearing. Hendriks was a newly Funded Researcher assigned to the Seoul Facility, and he came across the project by accident, at just about the time when the Grants Council pulled the plug on the group involved, and issued the ‘termination’ order. Under the Act, the children were ‘unauthorised and illegal experimental material, subject to summary termination’.

  The whole thing was never made public, of course. It was an election year and the moral arguments on both sides could have proved politically damaging, so it was all swept under the rug, with everyone sworn to silence on pain of a cancellation of their Funding.

  I wonder, sometimes, if it was just the nature of the experiment that prompted the reaction. If it had been different, if it hadn’t involved such a potentially powerful ability, would they have been allowed to live anyway? But I guess the decision-makers got nervous.

  How many politicians could stand the thought of a whole group of people out there being able to tell what really went on behind the big smiles and the baby-kissing?

  Whatever the reason, Hendriks and a few of his closest friends were unwilling to regard the kids as ‘experimental material’, so they worked out a rescue strategy. The colonisation drive was in full swing by then, and for a little extra money they were able to persuade most of the surrogates to make the move before the authorities caught up with them. Those who didn’t agree were persuaded to give the babies up for adoption, and other potential immigrants were found.

  The deal was a good one for the mothers. There wasn’t exactly anything on Earth that they’d want to hang around for, and the amount they were paid, plus the fifty years of interest it earned while they were in transit, meant they would never have to worry about money again. A change of identity, and they were ready to go.

  Hendriks applied for reassignment to the Facility at Edison, so that he could make certain nothing went wrong at the other end, and the rescue was on.

  Of the forty or fifty original children, they managed to save around thirty or thirty-five, who arrived in the colony with new names and no idea of their past. All reference to the Icarus Project was removed from the mainframe database on Earth and on Deucalion and that was the end of it.

  The children grew up showing little evidence of the abilities the scientists had hoped for and the politicians had feared. Hendriks kept track of them over the years. As they matured and began to have children of their own, he was able to stay in the background, watching, and building his career at the Facility.

  Then Gaston rose to prominence, and the Icarus children began dying . . .

  HENDRIKS

  The screen was filled with endless columns of data, which the program had selected as possibly important. Strings of DNA code-symbols, compared and contrasted by a machine which could operate at the speed of light, spitting out calculations and information as fast as he could request them, but showing all the insight of a plate of pasta.

  Which I could do with, just at this moment.

  Hendriks allowed the thought to break his concentration. The whole line of enquiry was wrong anyway, and he knew it. What he needed was a completely new approach, but he was too tired to work out where to begin.

  Time was running out for his charges, and he had run out of ideas. It wasn’t the sort of research you should attempt to run on your own, but who else was there? Who else could he trust?

  He sank his head in his hands, and closed his eyes.

  Gwen would be halfway to Edison by now. The pick-up was scheduled for just before midnight; usually the safest time. But safe or not, he could never relax until they were safely back.

  He stood up and moved across to the window, looking out over the lush greenery of the forest. It was the main reason he had chosen the island. It provided protection, and it reminded him of his childhood on the island-province of Tasmania. One of the last true wilderness areas of Old Earth.

  How long ago it seemed. How long ago it was. And how far away.

  He was weary. He would sleep . . . No time. Tomorrow, maybe. With a long, last look at the wall of trees beyond the glass, he turned back to the machine.

  17

  RENDEZVOUS

  Central Greenspace, Edison

  16/11/101 Standard

  JANE

  Hidden just inside the cover of the trees, the man stood with two small children. The girl, who was about two or three years old, was crying quietly, and he reached down awkwardly to touch her hair, as he tried to support the baby with his other arm.

  It was dark. Deucalion’s twin moons were at opposite ends of their cycles; their crescents hung in the sky like a pair of parentheses, bracketing nothing. We were taking turns watching the man through one of the hi-resolution ’scopes which Denny had ‘liberated’ from the Security stores. The ’scope was switched to infra-red at maximum magnification, and we could see
and hear everything.

  ‘Come on, Mariella.’ He sounded tired, and there was a pleading tone to his voice as he spoke to the little girl. ‘I need you to be brave. You promised Mummy, remember?’

  The girl looked up and wiped her eyes. ‘Where’s Mummy?’

  For a moment the man didn’t reply. Then he crouched down, trying not to disturb the sleeping baby, and looked into the little girl’s eyes.

  ‘Mummy’s gone away, Marrie. The bad people sent her away. She won’t be coming back. Now we have to go, or the bad people will come for us. I need you to be brave. Just for a little while. Soon our friends will come and we’ll be safe.’

  The little girl said nothing and the man stood up again, switching the baby from one arm to the other. The child stirred in its sleep then settled again, and the man stared up into the sky, facing west. Waiting.

  Five minutes later a flyer swooped down from overhead and came to rest a few metres from the group. Denny was in motion before the supports had settled onto the grass of the Greenspace. I had to run to keep up with him.

  As I ran, I watched a group of four or five young people climb down from the flyer and approach the man and his children. The ’scope was hanging from my neck and I supported it as I moved, but it was switched off and there was no chance of listening in to what was being said beneath the trees.

  A few metres from the flyer, Denny dived to the ground and began shuffling up to the vehicle, commando-style. I crouched in the shadow of a bush and watched.

  He reached the flyer and slapped the magnetic tagging disk hard against one of the support struts. The flyer was situated between my vantage point and the group under the trees, so I was blind to what was going on. I switched on the ’scope and pointed it in the direction of the group, but the bulk of the flyer muffled the sounds of conversation.

  I was concentrating hard and watching Denny crawling back, when I felt a faint buzzing, like an itch deep inside my head, where I couldn’t scratch. It was only momentary, but it disturbed me. I let the ’scope fall and shook my head to get rid of the dizzy feeling. Then I heard the voice. Perhaps ‘heard’ is the wrong word. ‘Felt’ is probably more accurate.