The screen focuses in on the fourth planet from an “overhead” view (although of course, such nomenclature has no meaning in space.) A small red pimple rotates around the fourth planet.
“Any satellite is obscured from view from any given direction roughly fifty percent of the time. Coming at Endirii from a terrestrial perspective, the moon of Endirii-4 is obscured by its own planet half the time. And the other half of the time, it’s obscured by the geosynchronous orbit of its sister asteroid field. The only time the moon is visible is roughly every one hundred and thirty terrestrial years. This moon is our own little Brigadoon. It also happens to be Vilameen. The USA must have discovered it on one of the rare occasions when it was visible.
“This is two-dimensional thinking of the worst kind, ladies. If anyone had ever taken a pass at Endirii from another perspective - the so-called ‘overhead’ at a minimum – we could have discovered this gem years ago. But common wisdom said that Endirii was a useless chain of rocks, not even worth a second look. And yet it hides not just the biological and scientific find of a lifetime – a real fleshworld – but an archaeological treasure whose true value is beyond measure.
“So. My first standing guidance: no two-dimensional thinking. And no bowing to common wisdom,”
The same words appear on the screen.
“Now, because Vilameen is outside any corporate jurisdiction, we have no salvage rights, implied or otherwise, by showing up first. Showing up first is just as good as showing up last if someone with more firepower arrives. I don’t know who will be arriving in pursuit of us, but I am certain that they will outgun us. The Borgwardt is designed for speed. Not stealth, and not a brute fight. If we are challenged, we have essentially no choice but to back down.”
Helena shifts in her chair uncomfortably, causing a squeak that may or may not have been intentional.
“And this is no reflection on our brave security staff, as you’ve already seen. But opportunistic skin-wrappers are not going to be the same issue as the AginCorp super-dreadnaught that was docking at Yloft as we were leaving.”
There is some grumbling and at least one audible gasp. I never knew AginCorp had that kind of firepower arrayed against us. I certainly would’ve reconsidered taking this job if I had.
“But rest assured, ladies, I have no intention of having this prize stolen out from under us. That means we have to have this salvage complete – soup to nuts – in eighteen hours. If we receive word that we can extend, we will. Otherwise, I intend to depart at hour eighteen, regard of salvage status, well in advance of our competitors. That means we get what we can and we blow the rest.”
I look at Zanib. Her mouth is puckered as though she had just sucked on a lemon, but she doesn’t seem especially shocked. It seems that despite all of Diane’s high-minded speak about archaeological treasures, as a director her biggest concern is still the bottom line.
“Future generations may not look kindly on us for that. But my duty is not to posterity; it is to our shareholders. As is yours. Knowing my intention are any of you unable or unwilling to comply with an order to destroy The Manifest Destiny should the need arise?”
Seats shift and chair legs scrape against the deck. I never understood in old movies when the great hero drew a line in the sand and asked for volunteers why everyone always stepped across. Some high-minded ideal, or perhaps the implicit shame of friends, brethren, and onlookers always seemed to drive them to choose the hard right rather than the easy wrong. I always expected that encountering such a situation in real life, at least a few people would walk away, content to be live cowards rather than martyrs.
It seems some reversal of that supposed altruistic impulse is weaving its spell on those of us in this room. I have no doubt that every one of us here feels somehow in the pit of her stomach that destroying something that belongs to the ages is wrong, terribly wrong, in a way that few things are. And being asked to, shouldn’t we all stand up as one and pronounce, “Not I, and not her, either?”
But none of us do. Perhaps since it was posed to us as a test of loyalty, we all consider our greater honor on the line. Or perhaps that’s a load of horseshit, because that’s sure how I justify it to myself, but I really don’t see how loyalty to bad ideals is any kind of a moral good at all. I think the truth is we’re all scared, and maybe just waiting for one person to oppose, because if one, just one, said no, then we all could. But no one does so we all go along.
And for all that’s running through my head, it’s just the blink of an eye before Diane starts speaking again.
“Good. I’m glad to hear it. Now we’re going to have three six-hour phases. In the first phase, we’ll be exploring the ship and determining safety requirements. I’m going to want Paige, Zanib, and Helena on this trip. Helena, do you want any backup?”
Helena shakes her head.
“Not for the initial exploration. The fewer the better.”
I whisper in Zanib’s ear, “Don’t we get to request backup?”
“Quiet, virgin.”
“What was that?”
All eyes are riveted on us. Zanib clears her throat and rises, as though she intended to raise this question all along and had simply been waiting to be acknowledged.
“I was wondering what our exact parameters for safety were.”
“Well, that’s up to you to determine, Zanib. That’s your job after all, isn’t it? If any of the local fauna has infiltrated the seed ship, you let us know what we need to be safe in proceeding.”
“And what if it’s not safe?”
Diane doesn’t strike me as the type to grind her teeth, but she seems on the verge of it now.
“I’ve got a hold full of very expensive pesticides and poisons for almost every known biochemistry in the galaxy. We’re making this ship safe for salvage.”
Zanib seems to have something else to say, but wisely sits down.
“Ladies, any time you three can save us during the first pass will be worth your weight in gold. Literally, I suspect, if the promises the accountants have been making to me about bonuses are to be believed. But I can’t promise anyone anything right now that’s not in their contracts.
“That being said: if the first phase only takes two hours, we’ll be doing quite well. If it takes nine… I’m going to be very peevish. Which is not to say cut corners. Safety first, as always.
“In the second phase, Paige will be leading everyone except support staff and those with reasonable accommodations aboard the vessel. We will be stripping out everything that we can physically move as individuals. Now remember to wear back braces and gloves and boots and any other safety equipment that your team leads have indicated you should. During this same phase, you should be marking anything you can’t physically move but that is valuable and can be moved with the equipment we have on board.”
Diane motions for one of her flunkies, who brings over a non-aerosol paint splatter gun. Much to everyone’s delight, hers included, the director fires her gun across the room and a green X appears on Helena’s shoulder.
“Our security director is, of course, exceedingly valuable. Don’t worry, Helena, that’ll flake off in a few hours by itself.”
“I know, madam director.”
“Good, well try not to look so cross then.” Chuckles. “Now, in the final phase, Paige will be leading our heavy equipment crews in to remove whatever’s got a green X. I know my pushers and pullers, you love to look at everything as a challenge, but please, if you’ve spent more than a few minutes on a marked object, move on. We don’t want to get into any battles of wills with ancient terrestrial technology. The point is to get as much as possible, so when we blow it, we don’t all feel like Visigoths savaging ancient Rome.
“Now, then, are there any questions?”
Diane has covered everything so extensively that at this point, a question would’ve been nothing more than a nervous tic, or else you’d had to have your head so far up your own ass that…
“Yes?”
“Yes, I’ve been asking HR for a few weeks now to update my local taxes on my…”
The woman begins blathering on about a personal issue that affects literally no one other than her, while we all sit there in agonized silence. I have a sinking suspicion that it will not be the last stupid question of the day. Yes, they say no questions are stupid, but this is still a damn stupid question to be asking. Zanib leans in and whispers in my ear.
“Notice anything?”
I look her in the eye.
“The fact I’m on all three chalks?”
She punches me in the shoulder, and I nearly yell out, which would’ve interrupted Diane’s vain attempt to mollify the heavy lifter who should really have just gone to HR or talked to her supervisor.
Ten
The Borgwardt hangs suspended in mid-air, an improbably huge metal office complex in the sky. A hundred meters below, the suspensors which keep us hovering as though we’re lighter than air churn up the sticky red soup which makes up the surface of the planet. Doubtless we’re flying at hundreds of kilometers an hour through the atmosphere, but it feels like we’re standing still.
“How you feeling, virgin?”
I’m breathing into a paper bag, so I suspect the question is rhetorical. Zanib is fiddling with what has to be about a dozen different-sized cages, ranging from about a half-meter square to something big enough to hold a wildebeest. She brings her hand down heavily on my back, a sisterly gesture, but it doesn’t help my nausea.
“Here, I know what’ll help. A little honest work. Give me a hand with these rat traps.”
I gesture at the behemoth of the twelve.
“I’d hate to see the ‘rat’ you catch with that one.”
“Well, you know what they say, you want to catch a bigger rat, you’ve got to build a bigger rat trap.”
“Isn’t the saying ‘better’?”
“Eh, whatever. Help me toss these over the side.”
“That’s all? Just over the side? We don’t have to prime them or anything first?”
“Already primed.”
She hands me the one that’s no bigger than a breadbox. The cage is open and a chunk of some kind of rancid meat is attached to a simple device in the back.
“This bait reeks,” I say, tossing the first one over the side.
I watch as the cage plummets into the sticky red soup below with a satisfying squelch. It, and all of what Zanib calls the “rat traps” are attached to the undercarriage of the Borgwardt by lengths of hyper-strong, tensile elastic rope. Judging by how long the ropes are, I guess that the rattraps are not going to reach the floor of the blood ocean. They’ll bob along in it.
Zanib begins tossing hers over the side and I throw a few more. Together we force the biggest one over the side and it drops into the red gunk, which seems to devour it like a greedy beast. I glance down at my heavy rubber boots and bounce up and down a few times, making sure they stay on my feet.
“Are these going to get sucked off?”
“Relax. You’re never setting foot in that slush. We’re walking straight across this nice pretty umbilical and right into The Manifest Destiny.”
I pull up a real-time silhouette of The Manifest Destiny on my jotter. The seed ship had actually crashed in a relatively favorable position for a salvage operation. The sea of blood-like protoplasm is about thirty meters deep, before giving way to a spongy, flesh-like ocean bottom, the “cherry pit” of Zanib’s presentation. The central shaft of the seed ship is about eighty meters in length, and it had plunged in at about a sixty-degree angle.
None of the pods are entirely untouched by the ocean of blood, and the ones at four, five, and six o’clock are almost completely submerged, but the flip side of that mess is that the pods at eleven, twelve, and one are almost completely out of the goop. As long as the crew didn’t lock off any of the pods, they should all still be connected, so we can make ingress at the twelve o’clock pod and be able to salvage everything, even down to six o’clock. The only issue, of course, is if any of the pods had been breached, and were full of the organic gunk. The question of whether we should safely evacuate any breached pods was probably one that was up to Zanib.
“There she blows,” Helena mutters under her breath, as if not really caring whether we hear or not.
She lowers the binoculars from her eyes. I catch a glint on the horizon, the reflected sunlight of a shaft which has managed to sneak between the storms of blood which our operations section is now (rather adroitly, I have to admit) navigating us through.
I check the carabiner attached to the metal hook on my salvaging outfit. A length of rope which Zanib assured me was stronger than alloy is threaded through the carabiner and attached to the ship. The carabiner itself has a screwing mechanism which turns it into essentially a solid hoop. The weakest portion of the whole setup seems to be my overalls, however Zanib assured me they’re made of the same super-strong fibrous material as the rope. It’s all supposed to be foolproof, which just makes me worry how big of a fool I can make of myself.
In the seconds between me spotting the glint and checking my harness, the seed ship has grown into a recognizable shape, reinforcing to me the astonishing speed at which we were traveling. Repulsor technology is baffling and terrifying all at once.
We come to a genuine halt, though (I can tell because the seed ship has seemingly frozen in place) about a hundred kilometers from our destination. I look to the veterans.
“Now what?”
“Now we find out if the operations section is worth a damn,” Helena responds.
I turn to Zanib.
“Are they?”
She shrugs.
“They’re not the worst I’ve ever seen.”
“You know I can hear you,” a voice says through our jotters.
I nearly jump out of my skin, but from the looks on Zanib’s and Helena’s faces I can see they were expecting this.
“Hi, Kelly,” Helena says in the most playful tone I’ve yet heard from her.
“Hi, Helena,” Kelly, the operator on the other end says back. “Are you girls ready?”
“Ready as we’ll ever be,” Zanib responds.
“And Paige?”
“Yes? Um, yes?” I reply to the disembodied voice.
“Don’t worry. I’m the best.”
The Borgwardt becomes a partner in an intricate dance, played out over a tempestuous sea of blood rather than a faux wood tile-covered deck. The Manifest Destiny is stationary, true, but all around it the atmosphere and the ocean’s surface roils, as if defying us to approach. The length of bridge we stand on, which Zanib and the other vets called “the umbilicus,” isn’t straight, per se, but rather is made up of dozens of interlocking deck panels, so that it can weave in the air like a snake.
I understand why they can’t have a single, straight length of connecting tube. It would be so rigid it would snap in a storm like a twig, throwing any poor suckers like us who happen to be standing on it off into oblivion. But watching as Kelly attempts to control the trajectory of the Borgwardt and the spastic shimmies of the umbilicus so that it will connect with the seed ship we were attempting to salvage just about makes me sick.
Zanib pounds on my back to get my attention.
“Oh! They’re in love. They’re in love.”
I look out between my greenening gills and see what she meant. The umbilicus is waggling and brushing lightly against the bulkheads of the Manifest Destiny’s various pods and the dance resembles nothing so much as a pair of chaste, tentative lovers cooing and caressing. Then, almost as suddenly as it had begun, the cuddling ends as the far end of the umbilicus slams hard against the hull of the twelve o’clock pod, locking into place as the electromagnets ringing the far end of the umbilicus activate.
“You’re the best, Kelly,” Zanib says, “I’ve always said that.”
“Think nothing
of it.”
Helena grabs ahold of the can opener and turns to us.
“Come on, let’s go!”
Zanib already has her hand on the other handle of the can opener and starts running. I know I’m also supposed to help with the huge, circular device, but the two veterans manage to outpace me before I even start stumbling over my rubber overboots.
The can opener resembles a massive metal teacup, turned sideways. I finally catch up and grab hold of my handle when we’re about halfway across the umbilicus. I realize that I’m not really contributing much. The device is heavy, and Zanib and Helena were carrying it perfectly fine without me. I’m not even sure if I’m carrying my share of the load when we slam the rim of the “saucer” into the hull of the twelve o’clock pod. Like the end of the umbilicus, the can opener locks into place magnetically.
I crouch over, breathing heavily, hands on my thighs.
“Move, virgin!” Helena shouts, shoving me out of the way.
A loud shrieking sounds and sparks begin to fly from the back of the can opener, which are then replaced by a flame of exhaust. Had I remained crouched where I was, my face would’ve been melted off.
“Don’t tell me this stupid nickname is catching on,” I say, glaring at Zanib.
“That’s all right. Helena just knows what’s up.”
Zanib raises her fist over the can opener, but Helena just stares at the two of us rather than bumping it back.
“You two had better get your fucking game faces on. And you are lucky you didn’t just get a plasma blast to the face.”
I nod, the reality of the fact that this glowering woman had actually just saved my life, and not from anything exciting or unpredictable, but from my own stupidity, dawns on me.
The plasma exhaust begins sputtering and returning to fumes. When it finally stops, the can opener dings like a microwave going off. All three of us grab hold of our handles. There is no chatter or joking this time.
“Ready?” Helena asks.
We nod.
“On three. One. Two. Three.”
The Hematophages Page 9