Spinneret (4 page)

Meredith nodded, glancing over the first page of the printout. His eyeballs ached their continual reminder that three hours of sleep was inadequate for a man his age. “How's the landing strip holding out?” he asked.

“Pretty well, actually. Those repulsers the Ctencri sell are pretty hot, but because the shuttles use a smaller chunk of runway for both land and lift there's actually less overall wear and tear on the permcrete. It'll need some patching, of course, but we've got three weeks before the
Celeritas
arrives on its supply run.”

“Good. Do we have enough room to let the flyers lift?”

“Oh, sure. They don't need much more than their own length if you crank the repulsers up full.”

“I know, but I'd rather not run them any higher than necessary. You never know what the half-life of a chunk of technology is going to be.”

“The Ctencri numbers—”

“Were provided by the Ctencri equivalent of a sales rep. Need I say more?”

Brown harumphed. “Well, they should still have no trouble. It's mostly the center of the runway that's torn up, and the flyers can easily fit on either side.”

“Fine.” Meredith raised his wrist phone and keyed a number.

“Martello hangar; Greenburg,” the device responded.

“Colonel Meredith. Have the flyers been checked out yet?”

“Two are ready to go, sir. The third'll be another hour or so.”

“Okay. Have the first two teams head out—alert the tower to monitor and record all data.”

“Yes, sir.”

Meredith disconnected and returned his attention to Brown. “Planting get started on schedule?”

“Mostly. The fields at Crosse were still too low in zinc and manganese this morning, and Dr. Haversham ordered another layer of fertilizer laid down. His guess was that the rivers bordering the fields cause a faster than normal ground water exchange that siphons off the extra minerals. Or something like that.”

“Great. Well, if that's the worst goof the engineers made when they laid out this place, I guess we can live with it.”

“At least we've
got
the fertilizer to spare.” Brown was looking curious. “You expecting to find Captain Kidd's treasure or something hidden in the hinterlands?”

“What? Oh—the flyers? No, I just thought we should do some low-level surveys of the territory around the settlement.”

Brown shrugged. “We've got cartography-quality photos for about a hundred kilometers around us. What more are we likely to need?”

There was a faint whistling noise, and Meredith looked out the window in time to see the two sleek flyers shoot by and head east toward the cone of Mt. Olympus in the distance. He'd fought the budgeteers tooth and claw to get a half dozen of the Ctencri-built craft assigned to Astra, and considered himself fortunate they'd only whittled the number down to three. Though primarily for blue-sky use—their plasma jets utilized atmospheric oxygen in burning the fuel to preplasma temperatures—the flyers were equipped with a self-contained oxygen supply that enabled them to reach low orbit, which meant they could serve as extra shuttles in an emergency. “Suppose,” he said to Brown, “that there are colonies of spores or something out there, dormant now but ready to grow if and when the soil's metal content should jump—say, if one of those asteroids circling a million kilometers away comes down. Some of our fertilizer's bound to be blown off the fields, and if it starts something growing I want to have some ‘before' pictures available.”

Brown whistled under his breath. “I never thought about that,” he admitted. “I guess that's why I'm in charge of runways and spaceports. Straightforward stuff.”

“Actually, I can't take credit for the idea, either—it was the biology people who came up with it. When you think about it, the situation's analogous to desert ecology, except that here it's trace metals instead of water that's missing.” Meredith paused as the faint sound of a sonic boom wafted in through the window. “Sounds like that last shuttle's coming in.”

Brown hauled himself to his feet. “Yeah. I'd better take a quick look at how the unloading's going and hurry all the hovercraft back to Martello. If your terminals are on-line by the time we've got the inventory list I'll send it through; otherwise, I'll bring you a hard copy later.”

“Fine. Make damn sure we've got everything before you let the
Aurora
leave.”

“Right.” Brown saluted and was gone.

Picking up the top printout, Meredith turned to the last page and scanned the loss/breakage list. Not too bad: a small amount of laboratory glassware broken and several bags of the metal-enriched fertilizer split. One item made him grimace—one of the broken dishes was a critical part of the apparatus for combining the fish ova and sperm they'd brought to Astra. There were spares, of course, but not enough to satisfy either Meredith or the scientists.
Idiots,
he thought harshly.
They give me a job to do, and then make sure I've got the absolute minimum I need to do it with.
Which wasn't entirely fair, he knew. President Allerton was a hundred percent solid behind the colony and always had been; but it was a handful of shortsighted congressmen who held Astra's umbilical. They obviously considered the whole thing a UN plot to drain the United States of manpower and resources and had adjusted the colony's budget accordingly.

Laying the printout aside, Meredith picked up the next one from the pile. The months of logic, persuasion, and arm-bending were behind him now, and there was nothing more to do but get Astra running just as fast and as well as he possibly could. Uncle Sam's honor—not to mention his own chance of ever making brigadier general—was on the line here. The scoffers
would
be proved wrong.

And with that settled once again in his mind, he got to work.

It was just over an hour later when his phone buzzed with bad news. “Flyer Two has gone down, Colonel,” a tense-sounding lieutenant reported. “Somewhere south-southwest of Mt. Olympus, we think.”

Meredith felt a shiver go up his back. Near the volcano? He threw a quick look out the window as he headed across the room, but there was no sign of any smoke rising from the distant cone. “What happened?” he asked, throwing open the door and hand-signaling his aide to get the car.

“We're not sure, sir. We got just a fragment of something about the repulsers going crazy, and then they were cut off.”

Damn unreliable alien technology.
“Are any of the normal planes in service yet?”

“One of them is, sir.”

“Put a medical team aboard and get it in the air. Have them pick me up east of Unie—they can land on the Unie-Crosse road. Where's Flyer One?”

“Heading toward Olympus, sir. It was over the Kaf Mountains south of here when Two went down.”

“Cancel that. Have One return to base immediately.”

“Yes, sir.” The phone went dead for a few seconds: the lieutenant on another line. “The Cessna's being wheeled out now, Colonel. They'll be leaving in five minutes or less.”

Lieutenant Andrews already had the car running as Meredith slid inside. “Good. We'll be waiting a couple hundred meters outside town. Let me know immediately if Two makes any response.”

The medical team, it turned out, was unnecessary. Both of the flyer's crewmen were already dead.

Meredith walked carefully over the crash site, his stomach sore with the ache of tight muscles. The flyer had gouged a furrow perhaps a hundred meters long, scattering pieces of itself along the entire length, before coming to rest as a mangled pile of metal and plastic. The crewmen, similarly mangled, were discovered still in their cockpit.

It was midafternoon before the crash specialists finished their survey and returned to Martello Base. “Near as we can tell, Colonel, all the repulsers just seemed to quit at once,” the captain in charge of the team told Meredith. “We'll know more when the electronics people finish with the stuff we brought back.”

Meredith nodded, gazing past the man as the Cessna was wheeled back into the hangar. He'd come here with the medical men and bodies earlier in the day, knowing he would simply be in the way at the crash site and hoping he could get some work done while the experts sifted through the rubble. The tactic had been only half successful; his mind had understandably refused to concentrate on inventories. “Any ideas as to why the repulsers should do that?”

“None, sir. I'd go so far as to say it
should
be impossible. They ran off of three completely independent systems.”

“The radar showed they were going pretty slow when it happened. If just the underside repulsers went out, would they have had time to switch to forward motion?”

“They should have—they were high enough and that maneuver's programmed into the on-board. And if they
had
tried that and simply not made it up to speed in time, they would have hit a lot harder than they did.” The captain shook his head.

“All right,” Meredith said after a moment. “Get busy on that analysis; I'm grounding the other two flyers until you find out what went wrong.”

“Yes, sir. I'm … sorry, Colonel.” Saluting, the captain strode off toward the hangar.

I'm sorry, too,
Meredith thought as he turned and trudged toward the docks. Their first full day on Astra, and already he'd lost two men.
That's really showing the scoffers, Meredith. For an encore, maybe I could shoot myself in the foot.

Three of the five hovercraft were bobbing gently beside the dock; Meredith passed them up in favor of a small motorboat. Casting off, he headed at half throttle toward the narrow entrance to Splayfoot Bay. By now the death certificates would be waiting on his terminal at Unie, and his stomach tightened anew at the thought of filling them out. He'd never been able to stoically accept death in his commands, not even as a line officer in the Honduras conflict where he'd faced it every other day. His years of desk riding, he was now discovering, hadn't made him any better at seeing human beings as faceless numbers.
Damn the Ctencri, anyway,
he thought, twisting the tiller hard as he steered around a half-submerged rock.
If it turns out to be a manufacturing fault, I'll twist their silly crests together.

He was just turning into the five-kilometer-long inlet leading to Unie when his phone buzzed. “Meredith,” he answered.

“Colonel, this is Major Dunlop,” the caller said, his voice barely audible over the engine noise. “I think we've got a riot brewing here in Ceres.”

Meredith cut back the throttle. “Explain.”

“About a hundred of the Hispanic field workers have gathered in front of the admin building and are yelling something about better housing and recreation facilities. I've got my men in riot-control position, but I haven't got nearly enough of them if things turn ugly. Can you possibly send me another thirty or so troops?”

“Have you tried talking to them?” Meredith countered.

“Sir, if I open the door, they're likely to pour in before we can stop them.”

Meredith grimaced, but the reply was not unexpected. Dunlop was a competent administrator, but the finer points of diplomacy and compromise were far beyond him. Spraying the crowd with stunner fire would be much more his style, and that was the last thing Meredith needed right now. “All right, then, just stay put,” he told the other. “I'm a few minutes out from Unie; I'll have a team waiting and we'll drive up there as soon as I get in. Do
not
attempt riot procedures unless there is an
immediate
threat to life or safety—got that?”

“Got it, sir. I recommend you hurry with those reinforcements.”

“Noted. Out.”

Almost savagely, Meredith yanked the throttle back to full power.
Reinforcements, my eye,
he thought as the boat leaped forward. What Dunlop needed was a negotiating team—and that was precisely what he was going to get. Preferably one whose members spoke at least halfway fluent Spanish.
First the flyer crash, and now this. Murphy's Law is really riding high today.

Raising his phone, he keyed for Lieutenant Andrews and began giving orders.

“Three to an apartment, we got—sometimes even
four,
” Matro Rodriguez's bullfrog voice bellowed out, clearly audible even over the other shouts and the loud background muttering of the crowd. Standing to one side, Cristobal Perez alternately gave his attention to the mob and to the squat adobe building they faced. The building's windows were empty of official faces, but Perez knew they were watching. Sooner or later they would decide they'd been under siege long enough and do something about it.
Idiots,
he thought, his eyes flicking back to the crowd, watching as some of the men began waving clenched fists over their heads.
All they're going to do is get the major's back up and force him to take action.
They had as yet no real economic power and certainly no political power. All they had was numbers and the threat of violence, and that only worked if those in authority were hesitant about shooting. The soldiers, Perez knew, would be under no such handicap.

A flicker from one of the dark windows caught Perez's eye: someone moving up to what could only be firing position. Cursing under his breath, Perez stepped forward, heading for the front of the crowd. He'd hoped Dunlop would hold off a while longer, give the mob time to blow off their steam and maybe leave peacefully. But moving troops to the windows could only mean he'd decided to have it out right now.

Nobody seemed to notice Perez as he strode to Rodriguez's side directly opposite the admin building's door; only a few looked quizzically at him as he raised his hand for quiet. “Friends!” he called … but his voice didn't have anything like Rodriguez's carrying power. He was inhaling for a second try when, as if by delayed action, an expectant hush swept up the hubbub.