“They’re burning them out,” said Donna Rose. Her leaves constricted visibly about her torso, and her shoulders slumped.
“Can we get more magnification?” asked Frederick.
In answer, the picture shifted back to normal light and rapidly enlarged, zooming in on the edge of a patch of cleared farmland, a farmhouse. Tiny, moving figures became visible, though it was impossible to tell whether they were human beings or bots.
“There,” said Frederick. He pointed at a patch of bare soil near the farmhouse, a garden, where a group of smaller figures didn’t move. “Bots. Those must be the kids.”
“Can’t we do something?” asked Donna Rose.
Frederick laid one hand on her shoulder while Hannoken shook his head. “We have spaceplanes, but there aren’t any landing strips near enough to let us land. And we don’t have troops or weapons.”
“Just where is this?” asked Renny.
Behind the screen, Sandor recited coordinates and added, “But we don’t have time. That fire’s growing fast. There must be oil trees down there.”
Renny did not answer. He was running toward the door as fast as his hands and feet could carry him.
“Where’s he going?” asked Sandor.
“He’s a pilot,” said Frederick. “And a Q-ship…”
“Might be able to land,” said Hannoken. “But he shouldn’t try. No one’s done it before, and we can’t afford to lose it.”
Donna Rose glared at the Director. “At least he’s trying. Not playing.”
The clerk turned to leave. Hannoken sighed and turned toward the plant he had gengineered.
“Tear it up,” said Donna Rose.
He nodded. “I’ll try again,” he said. “I still have some of that sample.”
“Just so you don’t…” She gestured toward the pot.
“To her,” said Frederick. “That’s a monster. Add to her genes. Don’t subtract.”
“I’ll try.” The Station Director faced the bot. “Maybe you’d help with the design?”
She snorted, but her face relaxed.
* * * *
Two of the new, larger Q-ships had been completed and were fully fueled. The other four were nearly done. All six floated outside the construction shack a few kilometers from Probe Station, tethered to a metal-framed, fabric-skinned sphere already full of lunar dust. Not far from the fuel depot floated a pod of dust waiting to be transferred to the sphere.
Renny deliberately took a route to the Station’s airlock that passed by the training simulator. As he expected, the simulator was occupied by one trainee, with a second awaiting a turn. “Buran!” he said to the latter. “Who’s in that thing? Stacey?” When Buran nodded, he added, “Get her out of there. We’ve got a mission.”
It took Renny only moments to don the suit that had been tailored to his unhuman frame, thanking whatever gods might be that he had decided to trade his forepaws for hands, cursing the awkward tail that he still retained. He thanked those gods again as he rode a gas-propelled scooter toward the Quincy, his ship. On the way, he used his suit’s radio to tell Buran and Stacey what he wanted them to do: To grapple the Quentin to the waiting dust pod, to take the three workers floating there, in suits, near the larger depot, to collect the necessary pumps and hoses, and to follow him toward Earth. They would stop at Nexus Station while he went on, and when he came back, if he did, they would refuel him for a second descent.
He wished Lois McAlois was back from her long journey. She was better than he, and he knew she would easily, quickly, almost instantly adapt her skills to the new, larger ships. But she was needed where she was. This job was his and no other’s. He hoped desperately that he would succeed.
There would be nothing to delay his departure. The Quincy’s dust tanks were full. He had already test-flown it. He knew it needed a crew of no more than one, that its capacious cargo bay could hold over a hundred passengers. He knew that it had no wings and that it was only minimally streamlined for atmospheric flight but that it had the brute force to land successfully. The designers had included a ladder for boarding from ground level, just in case the ship ever set down on a planet such as Earth or Mars. There were no seats for passengers, but nets could be pulled down from the ceiling and attached to the floor. They would serve to cushion the multi-gee strains of acceleration, and if they were not quite as good as proper acceleration couches, he was sure that injury was preferable to certain death.
He vented gas and stopped the scooter beside the Quincy’s hatch. He did not need to undo the belt that would have held a human’s thighs to the scooter’s saddle, for he did not bend that way. He grasped the recessed handle of the hatch and used his legs to push the scooter away. He used his radio to say, “Get going now! I’ll need that fuel.” He did not watch to see whether the trainee pilots obeyed. He was sure they would.
The Quincy’s cabin was just as he had left it the last time he had visited. He strapped himself into the pilot’s seat that had been shaped for his body—notched for his tail and curved for his still-canine back and hindquarters—and activated the ship’s systems. He did not take the time to run through all the many steps of the standard pre-launch checklist. It was enough that the indicator lights for the Q-drive were all green and that the tank gauges all said “Full.”
He sighed with relief when the ship’s rear-view cameras showed that no one was in the way. He switched on the com and said, “Quincy launching. Earth descent and return.” His fingers—marvelous things! how had he ever done without them?—danced across a keypad to activate the Q-flux generator.
“Wait a minute!” was the immediate reply from Probe Station’s communications center. “You can’t…”
“Ask the Director.” He flipped off the com as thrust began to push him gently against his seat. With agonizing slowness, he maneuvered free of the other ships and positioned himself for a powered dive from the lunar orbit that was home to Probe Station. As the Station fell away behind, he swore at the great distance he must cross. He fed the ship’s computer the coordinates of the landing site he wished, told it of his wish for utmost haste, and grinned wolfishly when it indicated that he could have what he wanted. He pressed the keys that gave control of the ship to the computer. The vibration of the drive did not falter.
Only after he had fastened the passenger nets into place did he try to relax at last, to luxuriate in the hours of waiting. But he could not help thinking of the raging fires coming closer to the refugee encampment, of time running out. He hoped his utmost haste would be fast enough, and he wished that he could increase the thrust of the seat against his back, speed the wheeling of the stars across the port as the ship neared Earth. But at last the Quincy did turn to present its tail toward the planet. He had only minutes now before the ship would begin to spout its greatest torrents of plasma against the planet’s gravity.
He watched the play of indicator lights across the panel in front of him. He knew when the computer increased the power of the Q-flux, producing from the uncertainties of the very vacuum a flood of mutually annihilating particles, a flood of raw energy, the wherewithal to vaporize the dust that was entering the thrust chamber, generating plasma hot and wild and roaring to be free. He caught his breath just as the Quincy began to roar beneath him, thrust grew greater, greater, weight pressed him into his seat, and the ship tipped and began to slide down the gravity well toward whatever was happening far below.
He labored for breath. The root of his tail began to complain as his weight ground it into the now-hard padding of his seat. He had flown the Quincy, yes, but only in space. He had never used it to fight a planet’s gravity well, never put so much weight and strain and pain upon his body. Nor had he ever felt such pain before; the spaceplane he had first ridden to orbit had been a gentle thing by comparison, and besides, he had not been on his back then. A bone snapped, ag
ony stabbed through his hindquarters, and he tried to scream. He managed only a twisted moan against the weight of thrust.
Earth’s air shrieked against the Quincy’s hull. Glowing plasma billowed outside the port but still he thought he could make out wisps of cloud and bluing sky. The altimeter’s numbers grew ever smaller, their flicker slowing, the weight upon his chest and broken tail diminishing. Earth weight finally, the numbers steadied, and he steeled himself against the agony of his broken tail. He was hovering half a kilometer above the ground, held upon a pillar of fiery plasma. He activated once more the rear-view cameras, scanned the ground, saw the farmhouse and the field, and recognized the match with the spysat photo he had seen in Hannoken’s office.
He saw the crowd of refugees, the smoke and flame of forest fire far too close, too close by far, the bursts of shellfire, the Engineers’ troops strung out along the roads that bent around this patch of forest. The fire was closest to the refugees there. He aimed his hammer blows of thrust at the heart of the fire and slammed flat the trees, smothered the flames. He lowered, let the ship drift, used more blasts of plasma to clear away long lanes of fuel. He winced when he saw the flying debris burst into flame from the heat of his exhaust and tried to angle his thrust to throw the burning twigs and leaves and vines toward the larger fire the Engineers had set. His jaws parted grimly when he saw refugees seizing whatever flew the other way, toward virgin fuel and toward the crowd, and hurling it toward and across his fire lanes. He picked a landing spot a safe distance from the crowd—most of them were green, he saw, bots as flower-topped as Donna Rose, and among them the paler figures of human beings—and set down.
The drive quieted, and he groaned with pain. He could hear the crackle of flames. He told the computer to open the hatch to the passenger compartment and let down the ladder. Then, ignoring the microphone and loudspeaker he could have used to speak to those outside, he unstrapped and opened his own hatch.
Hot wind, heated by frictioned hull and blazing flames, pummeled his face. The hull rang as a spent bullet glanced off its metal. The refugees—bots, humans, a pair of greenskins—were flowing toward him like water returning to fill the hole left by a falling rock. Someone was in the garden beyond, digging up a computer. Others were moving young bots, too young to walk on their own, into tubs and pots and buckets. They knew what he was there for, and it did not bother them a bit that his head in the hatchway was not that of a human being.
He sighed. He took a deep breath. He shouted, “Come on! Let’s go! But I can’t take you all this trip.”
They stood quietly aside while the computer and the children were carried aboard. Then, almost as if they had established a diplomatically formal protocol in advance, they filed aboard, bots and humans alternating, until the ship was full. Well over half the initial crowd of refugees remained on the ground, still bots and humans, the greenskins to one side.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” called Renny. He shook his head sadly as he closed the hatch. He hoped that would be soon enough.
* * * *
As soon as the Quincy was in free fall and he had recovered from the renewed agony of gee-pressure on his broken tailbones, Renny called Nexus Station in low Earth orbit, much, much closer than Probe Station.
“Yes,” they said. “We can take them, for a while at least.”
“Just transfer them to the Quentin. I’ll take the last load all the way to Probe myself,” said Renny. His voice tailed off into a low whine.
“You sound… Is anything the matter?”
“You might have a medic meet me.”
“Will do.”
When he finally opened the short passageway between his cabin and the passenger compartment and pulled himself through, he was met by silence. Green bots and fleshy humans, all alike suspended in the nets, held there by rootlets, hooked fingers, toes, stared at him as if they were one.
“We’ll stop at Nexus Station,” he said. “They’ll sort you out and ship you on. I have to get back down there.”
“You’re going back? You’ll get the rest?” Renny did not recognize the human who pushed forward, though his smell seemed familiar.
“As soon as I can,” said the dog. “And I’ll try, if the Engineers haven’t…”
“I’m Duncan. Jeremy Duncan. Andy’s still down there. I hope…” He paused and swallowed. “Is Freddy…?”
He was interrupted by a gentle chime from the controls behind the pilot. “Excuse me,” said Renny. His tail tried to wag once, involuntarily, within his suit. He winced at the pain, said, “Yes, he’s here. Out at Probe Station,” and turned abruptly away.
Minutes later, a passageway had snugged over the passenger hatch and the refugees were filing into Nexus Station’s receiving area. A medic was carefully inserting a needle into Renny’s lower back and saying, “This will kill the pain. I’d rather put you to bed.”
“Uh-uh. I’ve got to…” Renny was staring out his port toward the Quentin. It had arrived safely. It had the dust pod with it. But…
“I know.” She was young, pale blonde, boyishly slender, clad in a lime-green coverall. “You’ll need a lot more than this when you get home.”
“I’ll cut it off.”
“You bang it up much more, and that’ll be your only choice.”
A voice from the Nexus com center was saying, “We have them on the spysats. They’re surrounded, and they can’t run. The fires are spreading. The troops are firing more heavily. The farmhouse is in ruins and burning. You’ll have to hurry.”
“Quentin? Buran? Stacey? Where’s my dust?”
“We’ve got some trouble here. Those workers… They want to talk to you. Chuck?”
Static crackled on the com line. “We’re on strike.”
“Say again?” said Renny.
“One load of those mechin’ bots is more than enough. We don’t need any more.”
Renny snarled and hit the keys to focus his screen on the pod to which the Quentin was attached. The three workers were visible. He snarled again, louder, baring his fangs even though he knew they could not see them. “I’ll rip your suits,” he said.
The Nexus com tech’s voice broke in. “Why don’t you just take them back to Earth. Drop them right in the middle of a labor camp. We’ll get a crew out there to handle the hoses.”
“Wait a minute!”
“He needs that fuel now! If he gets there too late…”
Renny watched as the three workers finally began to move, freeing a long hose from the side of the pod and snaking it in his direction. There was a clang as it hit the side of the Quincy, and he winced. There were more noises, the hum of the pumps came on, and the gauges began to indicate his tanks were filling.
What had Buran called one of them? Chuck, and they had met a Chuck on their first visit to Probe Station’s dining hall. The two were surely one, for that first Chuck had not wanted to share space with bots either. Renny wrinkled his nose as if smelling something foul. He had met no other examples of that sentiment on the Station, but they plainly existed. There were three out there, and all had tried to strike. There had been no sign of disagreement.
* * * *
The Engineer troops had actually withdrawn in the face of the forest fire they had set to raging, but they were still within artillery range of the refugee encampment, or what was left of it. Puffs of smoke issued from the mouths of what Renny could now see were antique mortars and field guns, museum pieces from another age. Explosions cratered the earth. The farmhouse was flaming rubble. The bots and their human companions huddled in small groups in the open. As he watched, a shell landed in the midst of one such group. The bodies flew.
Renny clenched his teeth and ignored the pain in his tail. The medic’s spinal block had worked for a while but that second round of heavy gees… The anesthetic had settled out
or been flushed by accelerated blood flow. Or the area was now so abused that anesthetic was not enough.
The fires had leaped the lanes he had swept before. They were nearing the refugees, while the hammerblows of shells came faster, eager to prevent escape, perhaps to destroy his ship.
He swore and swept his plasma tail across the troops and their artillery. He swept again and forced the fires back, at least for a moment. He landed, popped the hatches, and screamed for the refugees to board. They ran and climbed and entered, humans, greenskins, bots.
Then the ship was full, and there were still refugees on the ground. They stared at him, silently, bleakly. He said, “I’m sorry. There won’t be time for…”
A bot with soot-streaked orange blossoms raised one hand. “Thank you,” she said.
As he lifted off for the last time, a mushroom cloud of flame and greasy smoke was lifting skyward not far away. The fire had reached a grove of oil trees, and their sap had burst into flame all at once.
Chapter Twenty
A beam of filtered, reflected sunlight came through the small porthole in the wall of the compartment Frederick Suida and Donna Rose shared, illuminating the trough of soil in which she spent much of her time. She was kneeling before it, patting dirt into place around the roots of a small shoot of honeysuckle. “Someone brought it with them,” she said. “Someone took the time to pull it up and tuck it in their leaves and keep it safe.”
On Earth, Frederick had lived and worked in old-fashioned buildings of masonry and steel. But he had been surrounded by living things as well. There had been trees and grass outside, honeysuckle vines around the windows, potted plants inside, bioform computers and snackbushes and a myriad more. Here the walls were as hard as ever. They had to be, steel walls and ceiling, steel floor beneath the carpet, all to keep the vacuum at bay and contain the air and warmth that living things required. There were none of the curves and softnesses of Earth’s organic reality except in the people that surrounded him and in the few fragments of Earth they had brought with them. Plants existed only in pots and… He stood behind Donna Rose, a bot, half plant, half human. He stretched out one hand and gently touched the yellow blossoms of her scalp.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 90