“Does that mean we’re all going to forget normal words like he has?” That was an alarming idea, and he felt a sudden surge of fear.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Ours is a lot less acute and it seems like our regular speech regions are not atrophying like his did. What I don’t understand is that there’s some degree of the condition present in Kiro and Shona.”
“If the language itself is causing it, they’d be less affected,” he said. “They haven’t learned much of the Shan Takhu language.”
“Other than a little by contact, no. Neither of them have done the intensive training the rest of us have,” she said. She tapped the screen and opened the rest of the scans she’d done on everybody. She dragged Alyx’s file into the center of the screen. “This is the only scan that came back without any TSD alteration.”
“So she hasn’t learned any of the language at all?”
“That’s what you’d assume, and in reality that’s what makes it interesting,” she said, shaking her head. “She’s picked up more of it second-hand than Kiro and Shona put together.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Why is she resistant to the TSD?”
“She’s the only one of us who’s never been inside the Tacra Un,” she said. “Shona and Kiro both went inside to see the message, but because of the limitations of her modified exosuit we haven’t wanted to take her in and have her power supply fail.”
“Do you think it’s something inside? Like a virus?”
“If it were she’d be as exposed as us by now,” she said. “We haven’t closed the doors on the airlocks since the first day. The air in the ship and the air in the archive have commingled since we walked home for the first time. If it’s contact based and not airborne … we walked home. So it would be all over us and all over the ship by now.”
“Then what else could it be?”
“It’s possible there’s some kind of response to seeing the shada Shan Takhu that opens the brain to respond in a different way,” she said. “If you think about it, after we saw the message that first time, there was a profound emotional shift in all of us. I know I could feel it as a tangible change in my mental state.”
“Me too,” he said. “I was a bit worried about mentioning it, but yah.”
“Kiro and Shona saw it, so the process started in them too.”
“That’s an interesting hypothesis,” he said. “Do you have a way to test it?”
She nodded. “I’d like to take Alyx in and record her brain activity while she watches the message. If we can see a change in real-time, it will nail it down right there.”
“Have you asked her if she’s willing to be a test subject?”
“She’s the one who pointed out the change in our collective stress levels. She wondered if I’d been slipping mood drugs into everyone’s food,” she said. “She suggested it, because she feels left out.”
“If it’s altering our moods, could that be dangerous?” he asked. “Psychotropic drugs are not something to mess with if I remember right.”
“I think it’s a result of our altered thinking process,” she said, opening Ian’s files. “There are no abnormal biochemical levels anywhere in his system. He responds like normal, but it’s like he has more synaptic pathways to choose from in dealing with challenges. He seems to think his way out of stress more effectively, if that makes sense.”
“His brain’s working better than ours?”
“Well maybe, but I meant differently,” she said. “I know that he’s retained one-hundred percent of every new word he’s encountered. When I tested everyone else, we were running in the sixty to eighty percent range.”
“He was a genius before he got redesigned by the Tacra Un.”
“Yah, but so is Chei,” she said, “and he only scored eighty-two.”
“So you don’t think there’s a risk in using Alyx to find out?” he asked.
“Little to none,” she said, closing down the screen and turning to face him.
“There’s also another reason to try it,” she said. “If it turns out the effect is quantifiable and repeatable, it might be a way to get Roja on our side in all this.”
Jeph grinned halfway. “All we have to do is convince her she needs to see it with her own eyes.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
VIP Quarters: FleetCom Lunar L-2 Shipyard: Lunar Lagrange Two:
Edison joined the Ladies Drake for dinner in the officer’s lounge for the first time since they’d arrived at L-2. He hadn’t been ducking them per se, but he’d wanted to avoid the perception of riding their VIP status. In public, they never discussed their situation, but this evening he hoped to go deeper into what Admiral Quintana had mentioned. So he was happy to join them in their suite for drinks and conversation after their meal.
Tana handed him a cognac and settled herself beside Saffia on the sofa across the sitting room. He examined the zero-g snifter curiously. He’d never had a formal drink while weightless and he wasn’t sure how it worked. Other than having a transparent diaphragm on the top, it looked very much like its gravity dependent counterpart.
“Squeeze the rim with your lip,” Saffia said, reading his uncertainty. “It’s pressurized and forces a sip up to the edge when the seal is pinched.”
He tried it and was surprised at how closely it simulated drinking in normal gravity. He grinned and swirled the cognac around inside the glass container.
“We got some good news,” Tana said, smiling as she watched him play with his drink.
“Kylla’s been released and she’s safe in the Underhive at New Hope,” Saf said.
“I’m surprised they let her go,” Edison said. “She had to be suspect number one in two homicides and an accomplice in four more, as well as the only lead they have in figuring out what happened.”
“We sent a hate-squad in to shake the security captain’s reality and they managed to get her popped out of the cage,” she said. “They’d set her up for a Brain Engram Scan, so it was close.”
“They didn’t get it?”
Tana shook her head.
“Depending on how deep they go, there’s no way to spoof one of those,” he said. “I’m sure there are things she knows beyond this situation that would have opened a can of poop you don’t want stinking up the air.”
“Truth in that,” Saf said. “But we’ve had to pull a couple alphas out of hot water before, so we know how to scare the locals pretty seriously if we need to.”
“I probably don’t need to know that,” he said, wondering just how far their genetic engineering program extended. “I have to say a brain scan is a pretty unusual level of interrogation. They reserve that kind of thing for when they have a certified pathological suspect.”
“I know, but she’s got skills that would have frustrated them,” Tana said.
“I’m sure it comes with her distracting smile,” he said. He leaned back and wrinkled his mouth to the side as he thought that through. “They wouldn’t go there unless she beat the biometrics. A BES is always the last resort since they have to get a legal binder and medical support to administer one.”
“Unless they’re willing to chuck the law,” Saf said.
He nodded. “But if the CO buckled to legal pressure, it sounds like he prefers working inside the lines.”
“Not necessarily. What cracked him was when one of the advisors we sent in, pointed out it took a special court dispensation to arm his units for lethal force. That made their use of projectile weapons a criminal offense, and whoever ordered it headed down a short river, sidewise,” she said. “He dropped a stack of sworn statements from witnesses to the incident on the guy’s desk and asked who he should talk to about who needed to be greased up for the hairy cluster that was about to ruin his reality.”
“I would bet that puckered him.” Edison laughed. “I’m sure the ones who gave the order are above the law, but he probably doesn’t share that privilege.”
“Although it was messier than
I’d have liked, Kylla’s safe for now,” Tana said. “And that closed the door behind us.”
“Four meatsicles in the park is hard to walk back,” Edison said.
He realized how strange it was that he felt little compassion for the six walking cops that didn’t come home, but something in his world had changed. He understood now, this wasn’t likely to be the last time people got caught between the wheels either.
“With no way home for you, where to now?” he asked, hoping to turn the conversation toward where he wanted to go.
“Summerhome,” Saf said, smiling. “You’ll love it there Eddy.”
“Where’s that?”
“Bradbury,” Tana said.
“Mars? You weren’t serious were you? There have to be better options,” he said. “Like maybe an asteroid mining station?”
“It’s not that bad,” Saf said, wrinkling her nose at him. “Really. It’s beautiful.”
“It’s a one-way trip,” he said, frowning. “And how would you know what it looks like?”
Saf glanced at Tana and he caught her slight nod. “I was born there,” Saf whispered. She sounded like she was letting him in on a huge secret. Which she was, if it were true.
He shook his head. “Nobody leaves Mars. There’s no way you’re an illegal.” He looked at Tana for a sign that this was all a big joke.
“She was born there,” she confirmed.
“He didn’t notice my redback when he saw me naked the first time,” she said, throwing an exaggerated wink at Tana.
“I wasn’t looking at your back at that moment,” he said, deciding not to let her get to him this time.
“Eddy! I’m shocked,” she said, slapping her hand over her mouth in mock indignation.
“Saf, be nice,” Tana said. “He’s trying to decide if you need a spanking or not.”
He blushed. “I think you both need one. You had me going there.”
Tana shook her head “We’re not yanking you. Saffia was born there, and it is beautiful.” She met his eyes, making sure he could tell she was serious. “I haven’t been home in a long time, but I know we’ll be safe if we can get there.”
“Home?” Edison asked. “You were born there too?”
“No, I was born on Luna, but I studied there,” she said. “It’s where my heart calls home.”
He shook his head. “I don’t believe you. I can’t. Nobody leaves Mars.”
Tana smiled, but her eyes were sad. “I know you want to think the quarantine of Mars is absolute. It’s convenient to let that belief stand because it keeps immigration down.”
He shook his head again.
“Let me explain,” she said, leaning forward and setting her drink down on the table between them. Its magnetic rim pulled it into place with a click. “Until Burroughs’ population outgrew its recycling capacity, the original three colonies had no problems on Mars. When they opened their system to indigenous water, a single microbe contaminated the biome. There were nearly twenty million inhabitants in a sealed dome and it took everyone so fast that the terror and the subsequent refugee crisis on Phobos and Deimos were far worse than the actual disease.”
“I know the history,” he said.
“What you don’t know is the Burroughs Epidemic stayed inside that one bottle and never spread anywhere else,” she said. “Because the microbe that causes the disease is exclusively a water-borne pathogen, and all three colonies had independent water recyclers, the other two colonies were never at risk of contamination.”
“Let’s skip ahead to the part where you claim to have been there to visit and somehow got out,” Edison said.
“A quarantine is a lot different from a blockade,” Saf said. “It’s not like they built a wall or patrol it with ships.”
“When they established the quarantine, the Union figured nobody would want to go there willingly because it was a death sentence.” Tana said. “The other side of that is they assumed when they dropped the refugees and took away all their space ships, they’d stay put.”
“Don’t they monitor it?”
“From Phobos and Deimos.” Saf nodded. “There are only two natural satellites and a few communications relays there, but the only people that routinely have eyeballs on Mars are the ones running the Twin Cities Colonies. We don’t flaunt it, but when the moons are not in the sky, we can come and go as we want.”
“At the least, traffic control should see ships coming and going,” he challenged.
“Sure,” Tana said. “Bradbury and Robinson were designed and outfitted to support twenty million colonists each, and the total population of Mars is still less than a million. With all that extra production and recycling capacity, how hard do you think it is to make sure the right people have a few luxury items so they’re willing to look the other way?”
“That’s too much to digest,” he said, looking back and forth between them. After several seconds he asked, “Why the hell did you tell me this? It’s not like I need to know, and it seems like a huge risk to even mention this to an outsider.”
“Saf and I thought long and hard about telling you,” Tana admitted. “But with what we’ve already been through together, we’re pretty sure we can trust you. You took a lot of risk onto yourself and as a result got into something way uglier than you realized. For that we owe you a lot.”
“The one thing we can offer you is security,” Saf said. “Now they’re hunting you too. The only place where they can’t get to you is on Mars.”
“Anywhere else Odysseus will eventually find you,” Tana added.
“That’s probably true,” he said, shocked he would even consider the possibility of joining them in exile. Or maybe it wasn’t exile?
“Look, if we’re going to trust each other fully, I have to throw one more question at you.” He bit his lip and waited for them to both nod. “Understand that I don’t want any details. I just want a yes or no answer.”
“Sure. We’ve already shared our deepest secret with you.”
“Do you know anything about Sentinel Group?”
“Why do you ask?” Tana said.
“Just yes or no. Please.”
Saf glanced at Tana and Edison saw his answer.
Obviously, there was another layer he hadn’t yet uncovered.
Jakob Waltz Fixed Base of Operations: L-4 Prime:
Jeph sat on a recumbent treadwheel pedaling slowly as he stared out the window. It was the best direct view of the outside world on the RecDeck, and the gym was more private than any place on the Waltz other than his room. Even with the pain meds Anju had finally convinced him to take, he couldn’t push weights because of his joint swelling. But he still felt the need to move and any exercise that didn’t make the damage worse, was a good thing. Pedaling was the only one he could do without screaming agony and the physical activity kept him from thinking of how bad his condition was.
Chei and Cori appeared behind him in the door and he felt their presence when the air shifted as they came in. “I’ll give you the room,” he said, letting the treadwheel coast to a stop and reaching for his towel.
“It’s not an issue,” Cori said. “We wanted to talk to you, not move metal.”
“I’m just used to jumping clear before I get crushed to death by you guys,” he said, winking and settling back onto the seat.
Cori turned back toward the door and leaned against the sill, not quite looking like he was paying attention to the outer room, but clearly keeping watch.
“What’s swinging?” Jeph asked, raising an eyebrow at the strange feeling the two of them were projecting.
Chei held out a gojuice to Jeph, and looking down, let the gravity haul him to the floor cross-legged. “Cori and I were talking about ways to give us more teeth when Roja gets here.”
“I’m listening,” he said, taking the drink and holding it unopened while he waited for Chei to go on.
“We know you’ve logged the paperwork to make this place formal, but it will only go so far in slowing
her down. We were talking about what we could do to force the chancellor to take you serious. As we see it, she’s used to pushing her officers around and it’s important that she gives you some respect.”
“Officially, I’m no longer one of her officers,” he said, shrugging. “Not that it matters, she’s also a politician.”
“Exactly,” Cori said.
“When we all talked the other day, we agreed it was important that we control the Tacra Un until the shit storm stops down-system,” Chei said, looking at his hands folded in his lap. “What do you think the chances are she’ll let us stay here and be gatekeepers?”
“Short-term it is a toss,” Jeph said. “We’ve got a strong legal case and it will at least make her think before she goes sidewise and boots us by force.”
“So what’s that, a week or two?”
“Yah maybe,” he said. “Might be more, if Anju’s right and we can get her down here to see the Shada Un Shan Takhu.”
“Do you honestly think Roja will do that?” Chei asked.
“I’d be surprised if her staff will let her take that kind of walkabout,” Cori added.
“You’re probably right,” Jeph said. “If we can get her cata Tacra Un, then who knows? Anju thinks there’s a physiological change that happens in the brain when someone sees the message.”
“Yah, she told me about it. It scans as almost metawoowoo, but from a theoretical perspective her argument sounds persuasive,” Chei said. “She has the science chits to back it up, so maybe she’s onto something.”
“Tomorrow she and Alyx are going inside to do a test,” Jeph said, nodding.
“Let’s say she pulls a win with this experiment, and it works like she’s thinking. That would make getting Roja down here to eyeball it the most important thing we could do. True beans?” he said.
“Sure, I’ll go with that.”
“Then we’d be thinking ahead to make sure we’ve got the squirrels to force her to dance.” Chei grinned. “Unfortunately, I don’t know if you or any of the others will like our idea to get that to happen.”
“Why not?” Jeph asked.
“Remember when you wanted me to convert some of the TICS to go boom?” Chei said. “It’s that same kind of ugly.”
Shan Takhu Legacy Box Set - With an Extra Bonus Story Page 50