The hatch snapped open suddenly, and Slake stumbled inside with a stupid grin on his face. In the corridor beyond, people were shouting with excitement.
“Hey, there’s been a fuckin’ shootout in the hangar,” Slake said. “C’mon, man, let’s check it out!”
Edie started to rise, but Finn touched her arm.
“There’s nothing we can do about it,” he murmured.
Their lack of enthusiasm couldn’t diminish Slake’s, and he loped outside again to find out what was going on.
“You should get back,” Finn said. “If they do connect me with this…if they come for me, I don’t want you here.”
“What about Valari and Cat?”
“We’ll find out soon enough. Don’t ask about it. Just stay out of it. I guess we’ll be going dirtside, right? Maybe this will all blow over while we’re on the surface.”
Edie hoped it was true. She got up to leave. “I meant what I said about the children—I know you tried because of me, but it’s too risky. Next time your chance comes, just take it.” He opened his mouth and she knew what he was about to say, and preempted him. “I trust you to come back for me, Finn. Bring the cavalry if you want to—but first, you need to get safely away where Natesa can’t follow you.”
He looked like he was restraining himself from arguing with her. Instead, he stood and reached out to run his fingers down her bare arm. She shivered, wishing she could lock the door and go to him, even in this god-awful hovel. He kissed her—once, lightly, a quick brush of warm lips, as if sealing a promise—and she left.
The skiff plummeted through the atmosphere and hit the storms. Edie clung to her harness and listened to the engines scream. She was seated close enough to the cockpit to hear the pilot’s calm, professional voice and it was the only reassuring thing about the flight to Prisca’s surface.
After the excitement of the previous evening, she’d been woken up three hours early by Natesa, still in the green party dress, and told to report to the hangar immediately because the schedule had been moved up. Natesa’s reason was neither welcome nor entirely unexpected.
“The Weapons Research Division just sent the order to transfer you immediately into the custody of Captain Fox of the
Fortitude
, for reassignment to Scarabaeus. Obviously I cannot allow that. Theron seems to think he can pull apart Ardra at the seams. He’ll never get away with it. I need time to sort this out while you’re safely out of the way on Prisca.”
So Theron was finally throwing his weight around and Natesa’s chosen option was to hide Edie away. Unless Natesa’s friends in high places really were as powerful as she seemed to think, she was putting her career in serious jeopardy.
Edie had given Finn one more chance to back out. After
all, he was only coming dirtside because no one knew the leash was cut.
“I’d rather keep an eye on you,” was his response.
Now he sat three rows back with Winnie and two other meckies assigned to the mission. In truth, Edie was glad he wanted to come. She wanted to keep an eye on him, too—the farther he was from Natesa, the better. They’d exchanged a grim look as they entered the hangar and saw the
Molly Mei
in the bay next to the skiff, two milits at the main hatch and another patrolling the hangar. All they knew about what had happened last night was that the
Molly Mei
’s crew was confined inside the ship.
Sheeting rain outside the skiff’s small windows made it impossible to see much of the compound as they landed on Prisca. Once they breached the barrier of the perimeter shield, the atmosphere cleared. Fifty meters from the landing pad stood the compound buildings—a cluster of half a dozen prefabs connected by walkways.
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 the 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.”