by Sara Creasy
Before she had time to disembark, Caleb beeped her commlink from the lab building.
“New data coming in from the highlands north of our base camp,” he said. “I need you to take a look.”
“We just landed,” Edie said. “Give me a minute, okay?”
“We don’t have a lot of time. This is…It’s some sort of meltdown. Like the biomass collapsed overnight, and it’s spreading.”
“What do you mean, collapsed?”
“I don’t know. We can’t get accurate data because of these storms. The survey team had to turn back and our aerial drones aren’t much help. Maybe it’s some sort of blight.”
Some sort of blight? Caleb was still fooling himself that this wasn’t a fundamental problem with the terraforming process, that it could be fixed.
“I’ll be there soon.”
Edie climbed down from the skiff. Local time was early afternoon, not that it was obvious with the sun obscured by the storm. Peering through the haze of the compound’s shielding, she saw the vague silhouette of a sprawling mountain range rising up to the north, shrouded in low rain clouds. The compound itself was nestled in the foothills, and what vegetation she could see cowered under the gale-force winds.
Winnie stepped up beside her. “Jezus, I hate touching ground. Last time I was here was…let’s see, ten months ago, setting up the shielding.” She indicated a nearby shield generator, one of dozens lined up about ten meters apart around the perimeter of the compound. They projected the force field that kept the biocyph’s lethal retroviruses—and the weather—at bay. “The lab’s in the east wing. I’m sure Caleb’s eager for you to check in.”
Winnie went to help the meckies offload equipment brought down from the Learo Dochais. Finn was among them. They stacked crates onto pallets and hauled them into the nearest building. Edie followed the walkways to the lab. Inside, in a room half the size of the main lab on the Learo Dochais and packed with twice as much equipment, Caleb and three other tecks hunkered over consoles as holos wafted around their heads.
Caleb glanced up, stark-eyed and pale-faced in the middle of his personal hell—the end of Ardra. Without offering any greeting or bothering to introduce the other tecks, he waved her over to his console.
“Take a look at this. What the hell is going on?”
Edie glanced at the sims that Caleb flashed to the holoviz. This was even worse than she’d imagined. Caleb had been very creative with his updates and no one, not even Natesa, had dared to question his reports until now.
“Look at how erratic these biochemical pathways are,” Edie said. “Your regulator code has raised the level of retroviral interference to the point where sims can’t accurately predict the results. Those error logs we’ve been working on are always ten steps behind. Where’s the raw data from the BRATs? When was the last time you actually jacked into one?”
“Until two days ago, one of us was out there every day,” Caleb insisted. “The storms have kept us away. And now they present a physical threat, in this region anyway. The rain is washing away the degraded vegetation and topsoil on the mountainside, right down to the bedrock. We’ve orders from Natesa to get back out there, reprogram the BRATs manually if we have to.”
“When will the weather clear up?”
“Not today. But this can’t wait.”
“Uh, have you looked out the window?”
“I mean it, Edie. Large areas surrounding the compound are already mash.” His lips twitched on the word. “The nearest BRAT is about three klicks from here, due east. You need to get out there right now.”
“When did we become you? You’re not going?”
“I’m working on some urgent sims. Nothing you’re qualified to handle.”
This was new—instead of talking about security clearance, he was now talking about qualifications. Caleb was certainly more experienced with biocyph than Edie, but she knew she was better at interfacing with it. And experience didn’t count for quite so much on Prisca, where the situation was novel.
She glanced at the holoviz again. “The degradation is irreversible. You know that.”
“Yes, but if we can stop it now, the rest of the ecosystem may absorb the damage.”
“Are you just making this up as you go along? These sims estimate thirty-two percent of the planet’s biomass is either mash or well on the way to becoming mash within the next few days. Prisca isn’t going to recover, Caleb. All we can do is try and figure out what went wrong.”
“Which is why you’re going out there. Take a biocyph module.” He pointed to a crate in the corner that one of the meckies had brought in. “If the weather gets too dicey out there, you can at least get a download imprinted on the stock biocyph. It’ll give me a better feel for the BRAT than this dry data.”
“How do I get to the BRAT? The skiff?”
“No, there’s nowhere for a ship to land halfway up a mountain. We have an amphibious skidder on standby.”
Knee-deep slime, gray with swirls of green, sucked at Edie’s boots. Her e-shield kept her legs dry but it didn’t make trudging through the muck any easier. Rain fell steadily. Despite Caleb’s insistence that they leave immediately, Winnie had refused to head out in the storm. They’d waited two hours for a window of relatively mild weather.
The BRAT seed was just up ahead, a three-meter-tall elongated dome buried in a natural indentation, shrouded in mist and drowning in mud that had run down the incline and become trapped.
Not really mud, Edie reminded herself, but a soupy mix of rotting biomatter. This was what an ecosystem turning to mash looked like. The cells of every living thing touched by the biocyph’s ineffective and confused retroviruses were breaking down, destroying the structural integrity of foliage, wood, bacteria, worms, animals—everything—from the inside out. Only their e-shields protected the humans.
Up ahead, ton upon ton of twisted vegetation and broken branches stuck out of the mud that the rain washed downhill. Below them, the mud ran down into the valley in sluggish streams, coursing between boulders. They’d taken the skidder out of the valley and across several kilometers of rough terrain—she and Finn, Winnie driving, and a milit escort who introduced himself as Ramirez. For the first half hour, the compound behind them had been visible through the rain and fog as a diffuse light in the far distance. Now it had disappeared.
“This is a landslide waiting to happen,” Finn said, plodding along beside Edie and carrying a biocyph module in one hand. His miserable expression showed what he thought of the field trip. They had to tackle the last few meters on foot.
“The compound’s shielding will protect the buildings, won’t it?” Edie asked.
“If it holds.”
They both looked up the slope at what used to be a thriving forest, now a jumbled compost heap. What didn’t turn to mash could still come sliding down once the root systems were compromised.
“Winnie,” Edie called over her shoulder, “maybe you should send a couple of aerial drones into the hills to check out the stability of all that vegetation.”
“They took recordings three days ago.”
“Yeah, but it’s changing fast.”
Winnie shrugged and returned to the skidder, where the drones were stored. Ramirez continued after them, a few paces behind.
“Any other dangers out here?” Finn asked. She knew he was thinking back to Scarabaeus and the vicious slaters they’d encountered there.
“On land Caleb’s team hasn’t identified anything more advanced than flightless insects. Most of the biomass comes from mosses, cycads, ferns. The main danger here is to the environment, not to us.”
They arrived at the BRAT, sliding the last few meters over the edge of a ridge to reach it. The mud was deeper here, reaching Edie’s upper thighs. It was littered with half-rotten debris that swirled and bubbled around her like stew boiling in a pot. She waded over to the access port, reeled out a hardlink from her belt, and jacked into the BRAT.
She was used to listening to t
he datastream of Prisca’s sims. Letting the real music of Prisca flood her splinter, direct from the source, was a different experience—louder, richer, and far more chaotic than she’d anticipated. She tried to attach a glyph to the datastream so she could follow it. The glyph wouldn’t stick. It dissolved in the churning, discordant music that sounded to Edie like a thousand different tunes melded together, each out of sync with the rest.
The boosted biocyph had taken so many shortcuts in its calculations toward the Terran ideal that the retroviruses simply couldn’t keep up. They were rewriting DNA code across the planet, always a step behind the next round of calculations, the next round of retroviruses. A hundred steps behind. It was as if nature had gone into shock, and the shockwaves were spreading. According to the latest data, this level of confusion and degradation was being repeated across many of the eight hundred BRATs scattered across the planet’s surface.
Reconstructing the data into orderly tiers was a hopeless task. There was no saving Prisca, regardless of Natesa’s determination and Caleb’s ego-driven confidence.
Something caught her attention. A new tier, wedged between the others, complex and robust and humming like a well-greased engine. This was the regulator code that Caleb had installed. She noticed it not because it was unusual, but because it was familiar. And it was not Caleb’s work.
She called him on her commlink.
“Have you begun the imprint yet?” he asked before she could say anything.
“Not yet.” She had to raise her voice over the rain drumming on the BRAT’s surface. “I found something interesting, though.”
“What?” He sounded wary.
“The regulator code. You took this from Scarabaeus.”
Silence for several seconds. Then, “I developed it from subroutines I found there, yes.”
“Why have you been hiding that fact?”
She knew, of course. He wanted all the credit for his “innovative” code and with his next words he admitted as much.
“It’s still my work. It took my skill to recognize it and extract it and modify it for Prisca. It’s all my work.”
“You could still have told Natesa…and me! This could be an important clue as to why Prisca is failing.”
“She’d probably have forbidden me to use it. She wants nothing to do with Theron’s work. And I couldn’t tell Theron because then Natesa would have owed him another favor. She was already in the red for having me reassigned to her team only weeks after I joined his.”
Up on the ridge, Ramirez edged closer and yelled, “Are we done yet? The wind’s picking up. We need to leave ASAP.”
“The storm is making this area unstable,” Edie told Caleb. “We’re heading back.”
“No! It’ll only take thirty minutes or so to download.”
“I’m not risking four lives for such a pointless exercise.”
Finn overheard. He’d been watching the mountainside as the rivulets of mud cascading toward them turned into turbulent streams. Now he turned and waded over to her, leaning in close to be heard. “Come on, we’re leaving.”
Edie jacked out of the BRAT. Caleb wasn’t done.
“You’re not leaving. I need that imprint. Nothing else I’ve tried is working.”
“Nothing will work, Caleb. Just accept it.”
“Edie!” It was Natesa on her commlink. Caleb must have called her to get some authority behind his demands. “I didn’t send you down there to give up and do nothing. At the current rate of degradation, this is our last chance.”
“Then take me to another BRAT where the weather’s nicer.”
“It will take half a day to get there on the skidder. The weather indicators are not showing a storm that’s out of the ordinary.”
“The storm itself is not the problem. We’re halfway up a mountain whose entire face is about to slide down on top of us. We have to get back to the compound.”
As she spoke, Finn was already dragging her back to the ridge, his hand clasped tightly around her wrist. She didn’t resist, but it wasn’t easy going. They were fighting the tide that tugged at them and the undercurrents that threatened to sweep them off their feet.
Ramirez was listening to rapid-fire instructions on his commlink. He looked nervously up the gray mountainside before turning back to slide down from the ridge. He landed right next to Edie and Finn in deep mud.
“My orders are to stay here for another half hour.”
“Go right ahead,” Edie said.
“Ma’am, get back to the seed,” Ramirez said, fidgeting with his spur.
“Don’t be stupid, Ramirez,” Winnie called from above. “Natesa’s not here. She doesn’t know how dangerous it is.”
Ramirez ignored Winnie, but there was a desperate look in his eyes as he sensed the other three—and his common sense—were against him. He was only a couple of meters away but hadn’t raised his weapon—yet. “Ma’am, please do as she says. You,” he told Finn, “move aside.”
“We’re leaving—now,” Finn said, projecting an authority that Ramirez couldn’t match.
Finn braced Edie’s foot so she could clamber up the slope, and Winnie helped pull her up from above. Then the two of them hauled Finn onto the ridge, digging their toes into the rock for traction. They trudged toward the skidder. When Edie looked back, Ramirez was still standing there, staring at the black sky as though the heavens might tell him what to do. Then he gave up and followed them.
CHAPTER 22
The way Finn kept looking at Winnie, Edie could tell he wished he was in the driver’s seat. Not that Winnie was doing a bad job in the appalling conditions, but it was a hair-raising ride. The skidder slid down the mountain, half the time carried along by the river of sludge, the rest of the time grinding against rock. The sheer wind slammed into them, never quite spinning them completely out of control. Edie’s e-shield dulled the sting of the wind in her face, but she felt every jolt of the skidder. Ramirez sat up front with Winnie. Edie and Finn crouched in the back of the vehicle. Its sides were low enough that they were in danger of being pitched overboard.
Someone was yelling over the vehicle’s comm. Winnie was too busy dodging boulders to notice. Edie hit the commlink on her belt and redirected the message.
“This is Hueber at base camp. Can you hear me?” Edie vaguely recalled the name—one of the utility tecks on the ground team. “Where are you?”
“We’re on the skidder, about a kilometer from base camp,” Edie yelled over the howling wind.
“The landslide is right on us.” The link crackled and died for a second, then came back. “…four generators down, the rest struggling…”
Edie peered through the murk in the direction of the compound. It should be visible by now but she saw no lights. She dragged herself to the front of the skidder and leaned over to yell in Winnie’s ear.
“Where’s the compound?”
“It’s out there. I’ll find it,” Winnie screamed through the wind.
“I think they’re in trouble.”
“More trouble than us?” She threw Edie a grim look.
Edie felt Finn’s hand at the scruff of her jacket. “Get back here. Stay low.”
She hunched down with him, her fingers wrapped around the railings. With her free hand she tapped her commlink, trying to reconnect to base camp.
“Hueber, are you there?”
The line spat and hissed. “…to evacuate…lose the perimeter…”
“It’s the perimeter shield,” Finn said. “Sounds like the storm has downed some of the generators. The others can compensate, but only so much.”
If the shield failed, the entire compound would get washed away. Edie raised her head to search again for the lights of base camp. She saw something at last—a bobbing white glow. It wasn’t the light that was bobbing. The raging river beneath them buffeted the skidder so violently that the misty gray world around them seemed to be shaking.
To her horror, Edie saw a sharp drop-off to their right. Winnie was
no longer able to keep the skidder on anything resembling a straight path and she turned around suddenly, her face pale with terror.
“Jump! Jump!” she yelled over and over.
Ramirez looked around in panic, as if trying to figure out the danger. Finn reacted more instinctively. He reached out for Edie. They locked hands and clambered to the back of the vehicle. The skidder careened to the left, the engine screeching, and they were flung to the floor, but they kept a hold of each another. Then pulled themselves up and jumped blindly into the mud.
Edie slid along slick rock, her hands scrabbling for purchase. The skidder’s taillights filled her vision. It careened down the incline and over the edge. It wasn’t a deep drop-off, but the torrent of mud raged twice as fast, quickly carrying away the skidder. As she clung to a rough outcropping, Edie watched the skidder bob and spin in an impossible dance and finally crash into rocks. It upended and rolled down the mountainside.
She hadn’t seen Winnie or Ramirez jump. There was no sign of them. She twisted her head to search for Finn, her mind still reeling from their dizzying leap. Then her commlink crackled.
“…your ETA?…Tanning! Ramirez!…emergency evacuation!”
Edie fumbled for her commlink. By the time she had it, the line was dead again.
“The comm tower’s down.” Finn emerged out of the gray, a dark shadow in the rain. Visibility was so poor she hadn’t seen him approach. He pointed to the compound in the distance. “I just watched its lights go out.”
“Did Winnie and Ramirez jump out?”
“No. The skidder’s gone. There’s nothing we can do for them. Come on.”
They clasped hands again and got moving, keeping to the rocks and the remaining islands of land where possible, and to the edges of the rivulets where the flow was slower and just about manageable. Edie kept her eyes on the compound lights. To one side, the landing pad was brightly lit and she could make out the shape of the skiff. The sound of an evacuation alarm reached her ears.