Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  Would he return at all? Maybe he would decide that his own safety was more important than hers. He would go back to his work, risk no more discovery by Security and the punishment it would mete out to a traitor. She would have to hide for as long as she could manage, with no hope of escape from the base. Eventually they would find her. And her fate would be no different from what it would have been if she had remained within her cage.

  The silence in the maintenance shop was disturbed only by the rustle of a paper fragment stirred by the slightest of air currents. She could hear her own breath, her heartbeat, the hiss of cloth sliding over cloth, not the rustle of leaf on leaf, as she moved an arm against her side. She wished she were home, outdoors on First-Stop, no clothing, leaves exposed to sun and wind, watching a Rac scratch his muzzle and listening to his rough voice say, “Winter comes.”

  There really wasn’t any way, she told herself, that Anatol could find a better hiding place and hope to move her to it before night came again. Until then she would have to hide as best she could, just as she had promised him.

  The question was, where?

  She reentered the truck cab and began to search in earnest. The space beneath the bunk? It was large enough, but it was occupied by storage drawers. The toilet was hidden only by a curtain. There were no cupboards large enough to hold her.

  Eventually she thought to try the grille in the wall opposite the head of the bunk. To her surprise, it came free in her hand. When she looked at it closely, she found that it was held in place only by strip magnets. Screw heads were merely glued into their holes in the grille’s rim.

  She smiled at the picture of a smuggling trucker that sprang to her mind. A girl friend? “Slide in here, dear. It’s just till we’re out of the base, just in case of an inspection. We don’t want anyone catching you.” Or girls for the miners in the outer camps?

  Or could this be a route in and out of the base for Orbital agents or contraband? Then perhaps there could be a way for her to escape, if the base were not sealed and if the trucker could be found and if he did not think bots were agents of the devil.

  Sounds outside the truck announced that someone had just entered the maintenance shop. Pearl Angelica ducked reflexively away from the truck’s port before remembering that ports had sun-reflective coatings. No one could see her if she just stayed out of the line of sight through the airlock. Yet she could see outside the truck: Three men had entered the shop, each one carrying a large thermos. And they were walking toward the truck.

  She probed the heating duct behind the grille with one hand. There was a sharp bend and then a straight run beside the wall, extending as far as she could reach. She fitted her feet into the opening and twisted her body, pulling, pushing, straightening at last with a gasp of relief. She tugged the grille back into position and pushed herself a few feet down the duct.

  The clank of tools and rattle of voices came to her from outside the truck. No one entered the cab. She told herself that she should have taken some of the food in the fridge. She had had time. Perhaps she should even have stayed out of the duct. As long as she stayed away from the cab’s entrance no one would see her. She would have been safe. Would she have had time to hide if anyone had begun to enter the cab? No. She would have made noise too. She would have shaken the machine, as huge as it was. Someone would surely have noticed and found her, and then…

  She shuddered. She did not want to go back in her cage. Nor did she want to be killed.

  She wanted to stay free. She wanted to go home. She wanted to see her father, Frederick, one more time before he died. She wanted to see Aunt Lois and Uncle Renny and the Racs.

  She could feel the impact of tools on metal wherever her skin touched the interior of the duct. Scrapes and clangs, some soft, some loud, assaulted her ears.

  A voice was suddenly clear through the open airlock: “Motherless bastards! Gotta take the whole friggin’ thing apart to get at the one piece that ever fails, and then we don’t have it in stock.” After a pause while—she thought she could hear the sound—someone answered the speaker more quietly, he said, “Of course that’s why it’s out of stock! But at least it came in before they froze the landings.”

  Her heart leaped in her throat. They had the drive controller she and Anatol had thought was still on order. The truck would be repaired today. Then it would be put back in service. Or it would be parked outside, perhaps even under the same slab of roof she had seen from one of the base’s ports.

  Either way, she would be trapped in her hiding place, unable to leave the truck and cross the vacuum all around it because she had no suit, forced to surrender to the first Engineer who entered the cab.

  Could she overpower a driver and handle the truck herself? There would be only one man, his back to her as she crawled from her hiding place, and she had driven similar vehicles on First-Stop. But there were no guarantees. If a driver needed to know secret passwords or numbers to start the motor, like the number Hrecker had used to open the door to the Teller’s construction bay, she would be helpless.

  But if she wasn’t… She remembered the patched headset hanging from the console beneath the viewport. She grinned as she thought that once she was far enough away from the Engineers’ base, she might be able to use the radio to call the Orbitals. This was therefore the best of all possible hiding places.

  Yet if she escaped, she would never see Anatol again.

  Her grin vanished. She sighed. She lay her head on her arms and listened for hours to the muttering and swearing, the clanking and scraping. Eventually silence fell. She crawled from her hiding place, moving as cautiously as she could, and peered from the truck’s broad port. The workers were near the door to the shop’s small office, bent over a game of cribbage while eating their lunch.

  She continued to move cautiously, afraid that one of the men might look up just in time to see the truck quiver on its springs, while she found something to eat and used the toilet. She wasted a few minutes taking off her shirt and wig and letting the truck’s interior lights bathe her leaves. She sighed as a trickle of photosynthesized sugar reached her blood and brain. She wished it were more, the rush that proper light could give her when she was down. Finally, reluctantly, she covered herself once more and crawled back into the darkness of the heating duct.

  It was not long after lunch that she heard a satisfied grunt and a slam that might have been the lid of the truck’s motor compartment. The vehicle rocked as one man clambered into the cab, and then again as a second joined him.

  “Think it’ll start?”

  “It had mechin’ better.” This voice sounded older than the other, but there was no way Pearl Angelica could tell whether it belonged to the first man or the second to climb aboard.

  “And then what?”

  “We leave it right here.” The driver’s seat creaked, and the truck’s electric motor began to hum. The vehicle lurched and rolled. It turned in a tight circle. It backed up. “Works fine now.” It stopped. “Right here. They ain’t lettin’ ’em out and they ain’t lettin’ ’em in. So we’re a parkin’ lot for the duration. Goddam lockdown.”

  “They’ll find something for us to do.”

  “Probably give us a gun and put us on a search party. I hear they haven’t found that bot yet.” The voice wobbled as if the speaker were shaking his head. “Or that murderer. You think there is one?”

  Hot air began to move past Pearl Angelica’s feet and over her body toward the grille. She grimaced. It was too hot. Her leaves, already stifled inside her disguise, were wilting. But she told herself she wasn’t dying. She wasn’t in danger. She was only uncomfortable, and that she could stand as long as she had to. No one would discover her. She would not be trapped outside the base, caught by a driver she could not overpower, stuck in a vehicle she could not drive.

  She would see Anatol again.


  “She couldn’t have done it herself, could she? She’s just a plant.”

  * * * *

  After the workers left for the day and the shop was quiet once more, Pearl Angelica ate again. She wished she dared step out of the truck to stretch and walk and test the personnel door to see whether it were unlocked as it had been the night before. But she did not. She wanted Anatol to come through that door, but she knew that someone else—searching Security guards, or a stranger who would cry alarm—might precede him.

  She stayed in the truck, sitting in the driver’s comfortable seat, fingering the buttons and slides that controlled the vehicle. Her eyes moved between the view of the shop’s cavernous interior through the thick-paned port and the ever changing display of the truck’s heads-up clock. She was waiting as patiently as she could, though she cursed and shifted her weight more often as the hour grew later.

  Her breath froze in her throat. Was it opening at last? Was that a crack of light around the jamb? Yes, someone was coming in, but … Her heart hammered in her chest. Sweat sprang to her palms. Air rushed from her lungs and back again. She thought of being outside the truck, in full view, and she was glad she wasn’t standing up. Her legs would not have supported her.

  That wasn’t Anatol. A woman. Small. Grey-haired. Was she familiar? Had Pearl Angelica seen that round face in the concourse? Or … ?

  A hand appeared and pushed. A man came in behind the woman, turned, closed the door, and searched for a lock. Was that … ?

  The sigh that emptied her lungs marked her recognition of Anatol. But before she could get out of the truck driver’s seat, the door to the shop began to open once more.

  Her heart leaped. Her stomach rolled. Her mouth went dry. Her hands spasmed on the arms of the seat, and her leg muscles cramped. This time the man who appeared wore a Security uniform. But the woman moved close to Anatol, put her arms around his torso, and buried her face in his chest. Anatol shrugged at the guard. The guard scanned the interior of the shop, as devoid of hiding places as ever, winked, saluted, and turned away.

  The “fight or flight” reaction has two components, one coordinated by the nervous system and quick both to flood the body with a galvanizing energy and to drain away, leaving the muscles limp and the breath gasping. The other, managed by the adrenal glands and the hormone adrenaline, is slower to take effect and slower to leave, so that even in the post-crisis letdown, the heart may still pound and the mouth stay dry.

  “Angie!” called Anatol Rivkin. “Are you still here? Are you okay?”

  Pearl Angelica was still laughing when she was finally able to stand and walk toward the truck’s open airlock. By then, Anatol and his companion were already at the entrance. She looked down at them, focusing on the woman. She still seemed small, but now it was her brown skin that dominated the image she cast. The bot’s mind linked a flash of green to her face. “Now I remember you,” she said. “You were at that party.”

  “Cherilee Wright.” She looked far more worried than Pearl Angelica felt at the moment.

  “She can help,” said Anatol.

  “If we can get you to my greenhouse,” said the woman. When the bot looked puzzled, she added, “You have leaves, don’t you? They’re green? So if we surround you with greenery, you should blend right in. With a little luck, they’ll never notice you.”

  “If we can get you there,” Anatol repeated. “The room-to-room search is half done, and Security still hasn’t found you. They’re frustrated. They aren’t being nice to people anymore.”

  “But …” The bot descended to the floor and gestured past the two humans toward the door to the maintenance shop. “That one was.”

  “You should have heard what Doctor Wright said.”

  The woman blushed. “I told you before. I’m Cherilee.”

  Pearl Angelica made a sympathetic face. “It sounds like you’d better be. A ‘Doctor Wright’ would never say anything that embarrassed her.”

  “And if I would, he shouldn’t insist on being so formal.”

  Anatol indicated his embarrassment by turning away and clearing his throat. “As I was trying to say, they aren’t letting people pass them in the halls anymore. ID checks. They’re also making people take off their shirts to show they don’t have leaves.”

  “Then we’re stuck here?”

  “They’ll get around to searching it sooner or later. Probably as soon as that guard decides to be suspicious.”

  “I don’t think they’ll find me.”

  “They won’t be able to miss you,” said Anatol.

  “In a heating duct?” She explained where she had spent most of the day.

  “They’ll probably take the truck apart,” said Cherilee.

  “Even after they’ve just put it back together?”

  “You mean they fixed it?” asked Anatol.

  She nodded. “It works fine now.”

  * * * *

  The truck’s flatbed had a low curb or sill around its edge. As soon as Pearl Angelica had opened the maintenance shop’s large vehicle door, she clambered up the ladder on the back of the cab and threw herself flat behind the curb and beside Cherilee Wright.

  “Did you see anybody?”

  The bot shook her head and gripped two tie-down rings as the truck began to roll into the corridor outside the shop. Its electric motor was as quiet as when the workers had tested it. Most of the noise came from the limp tires, thudding as they flexed, grinding fragments of regolith into the pavement, hissing as they rubbed on the side of the door. “I hope he remembers where the brakes are.”

  “Brakes we don’t need. I want to see where we’re going.” The greenhouse manager raised her head as the truck straightened out. When Pearl Angelica rose on one elbow to pull her down again, she saw the shop’s door gaping behind them. Metal screeched against rock as the truck met the corridor’s far wall. “Shit!” said Cherilee as the sound brought a Security guard into view by the airlock.

  The guard had his gun in his hand. More guards were erupting beside him. “Get your head down!” cried the bot. She wished the curb that sheltered them were higher. As it was, she was all too aware that part of her was visible, a target.

  Shouts and flat reports punctuated her words. Bullets whined overhead and spanged off the truck. There was no sign of damage, for the truck, even its tires, had been designed to withstand occasional blows from small meteorites.

  Light and movement drew her gaze upward. A red laser beam was pointing at a tiny spot on the arched ceiling, and a Spider much like those she had seen on Earth was racing toward it. Projectile weapons, she thought, would be insane aboard a ship like the Quebec. The only thing that made them usable here, where despite even careful aim ricochets could puncture the barriers between air and vacuum, was instant repair.

  The women grunted as the truck lurched over the pots and planters that lined the corridor. The truck’s motor whined louder. They rocked around a curve. Pearl Angelica winced when Anatol scraped the side of the vehicle against the wall again. The tracks that had led them from the nearby airlock to the maintenance shop were what had given her the idea: The lunar base’s corridors were wide enough for the truck. Now she wished they were even wider.

  But neither rocky obstacles nor tight scrapes could stop them. The truck would protect them on their way to Cherilee’s greenhouse. It would distract the guards, draw them away from any post that might let them see its destination or interfere. It could even run them down if necessary. Then, when it passed the entrance, it would slow and the two women would jump off the flatbed.

  Now the shots came from ahead, stopping as the truck lurched to one side. There were shouts of alarm, a crunch, a thud, and Pearl Angelica risked raising her head just in time to see a guard stagger to his feet behind the truck. A short-barreled gun with a large grip and magazine lay t
wo meters from his outflung hand. The ruins of a planter and the shrubbery it had held were scattered near the wall.

  “Soft tires,” said Cherilee. “He’s only bruised.”

  “Then how … ?”

  “There shouldn’t be any guards. They’ll never see us get off.”

  The accelerating truck so nearly filled the corridor that it compressed the air ahead of it. What passed around the cab and under the flatbed whistled and screamed now, but not loudly enough to drown out the klaxons that announced emergency. Booming noises announced the slamming of pressure doors as Security tried to cut off their paths and trap them in some sealed compartment. They leaned into another curve, rising as the wheels rose over the planters, thumping down, and scraping, yes, again, a shriek of metal on rock. There were more guards, more shots, more shattered urns and spilled dirt, more flickering laser beams spotlighting punctures in the roof, and Cherilee said, “One more turn. If only they don’t …”

  The brakes almost made them lose their grips on the tiedowns. “Now!” she screamed, and she was rolling over the flatbed’s curb before the truck was nearly stopped. Pearl Angelica followed her, and the truck immediately accelerated again. It was barely two lengths away when a pressure door slammed shut behind it.

  Cherilee opened a door, snatched at the bot’s arm, and yanked her out of the corridor. “Will he get away?”

  “There aren’t as many pressure doors downstairs. If he can reach the elevator, he should be okay. If he can’t, well … You showed him that air duct. He has a chance. But now we need a hole for you.”

  Cherilee slammed the door. The bot saw that it was set in an oversized truck door just like the one in the maintenance shop. The room they were in, however, was smaller. Dominated by ranks of stacked crates and parked forklifts, it looked more like a warehouse than a greenhouse. Yet it did smell of fruits and vegetables.