Dominant Species Volume Three -- Acquired Traits (28 page)

North of
the machine was a power station. It looked like the one at the settlement, but
this one was brand new. An elevated tray filled with a row of thick, silvery
conduits ran from the power station and into the monolith through a meter-wide
round hole bored in its side. Sunlight reflected from one of the panels in its
metallic dome and hit John square in the face. He turned away from the assault.

“Christ,
it’s hot.”
 

* * *

The
clean, spacious chamber they had once occupied was now a jumble of boxes, containers
and equipment of every conceivable kind. Heavy power cables crisscrossed the
smooth floor. A mix of transportation workers, technicians and tradesmen
kneaded the clutter. Stacking it here and moving it there, the space was a mass
of activity. John saw a couple of faces he knew, and Rachel said, “Oh, hi” to a
woman splicing two pieces of thick black cable together. The woman gave a
half-hearted hi back and eyed their prisoner’s entourage with a long and somber
gaze. Rachel could read something else in the woman’s face—a fear unspoken,
perhaps. It was there, just beneath the worried look. Rachel could almost hear
it trying to get out and craned her neck around as she went by, waiting for
it.
 
But it never came.

Donna
slowed down and tried to get a look at the manifests on some of the new
containers.

“Keep
moving up there,” Mahoney said.

“Don’t
push me,” Donna said right back. She turned around to face Rachel and spoke
walking backwards. “It looks like half this shit is scientific equipment.”

“Yeah,”
Rachel replied. “I saw a gas chromatograph back there and a portable SEM.”
 
Then she nodded in a direction over Donna’s
shoulder. “Wow. Look,” she said, oddly animated. “That’s a full-sized Barne’s
MAD.”

“I’ve
heard of them, but never seen one,” Donna said. “They use the same technology
as my medical scanner, right?”

“Right,
but they’re far more sophisticated,” Rachel said.

“What is
it?” John asked, looking at the huge two-meter-tall cabinet standing on the
floor. The glassed-in part was high enough for a man to stand in and wide
enough to lie in. A table-like affair was mounted to the wall inside it. The
remaining third of the machine was all control panels and displays. Except for
the clear glass, it was clean, satin-finished gray and quite a work of art.

“Multiple
Analytical Device,” Rachel said its name. “You can use it to tell almost
anything about the physical and chemical properties of a sample. You can see
right in it and tell precisely how it’s made and of what. You can weigh it,
image it, test its density or molecular structure, plot processes inside it,
almost anything—all at the same time. The best thing is that it’s
nondestructive. The sample comes out just like it went in. We had an old one at
school that cost a fortune. That one’s new. It might be a hundred times the
cost of the one we had. I wonder what the heck they’re doing with it?”

“Cut the
crap up there,” Mahoney said.

Donna
said under her breath, “Blow me.”

John was
beginning to fear for Rachel. Sometimes the signs were subtle and sometimes
not, but he’d come to recognize nearly all of them—even the most subtle one of
all—swift changes in mood. Sometimes the biggest, most violent ones were
preceded by just such signs. Deep in her brain, patterns of thought and
non-thought were shifting rapidly, changing places. Reason and emotion were
playing musical chairs. He could sense it.

The way
he figured it, she’d been damned lucky not to have killed or injured herself
during her seizures so far. Prior to capture, the most dangerous object she’d been
likely to collide with was the soft ground itself. During the long, motionless
days of captivity, she would move slowly to the bedroom and lie down just
before a seizure. “I have to lie down,” she’d say and Donna or John would sit
at her side while the storm racked her. But now, she was walking through a
literal maze of hard-edged equipment and cutting surfaces with a big one
building steam. He wished he was closer to her. He wished his hands were free
to catch her.

“So
anyways, that’s what it is,” she said cheerfully over her shoulder and wiggled
her butt. Donna, still walking backwards, must have sensed it, too. Her eyes
opened wide at John as a signal. John mouthed the words “Watch her.”

“Where
are you taking us?” Rachel asked loudly, happily. Then she stepped in a circle
so everyone could hear and added in sing-song, “I hope you’re not taking us
where I think you’re taking us. I wouldn’t want to go thaaaaay errrrr . . .”

That was
it. John moved up a step and was prepared to throw his body in front of
hers—anything—to protect her, but he didn’t have the chance.

Rachel
turned and looked at John as if he were standing on a precipice from which she
had just fallen. Her eyes rolled and before he could get to her, she was
falling like a tree, sideways into a crooked stack of boxed labware, half of
the boxes opened—the worst of all possible targets. There was a sound of
smashing and crunching glass as her seizure-stiffened body crushed through the
stack on the way to the floor.

“Rachel!”

John and
Donna were at her side in seconds, but there was nothing they could do with
their hands bound behind them except squat and look horrified. Lying face down,
Rachel twitched and pounded against the shattered glass. They could hear the
grinding sound.

“Help
her!” Donna screamed.

“What’s
wrong with her?” Mahoney asked, his brow tight.

“She’s
having a seizure, you dumb bastard! Get her off the glass!”

Mahoney
just stood there looking at her, unsure if he wanted to touch her. “What kind
of seizure? From what?”

“Step
back!” the younger said and slung his rifle. Moving quickly, he took up a
gather of Rachel’s cottons at the shoulder and behind her knee. “Help me,
Mahoney. We don’t want this one damaged.”

Together
they lifted her off the glass by her clothes like a sack. Donna saw the trail
of blood that rained down from her and worried that so much blood so fast could
only mean a serious wound, perhaps a severed artery. They deposited her face
down a few meters away.

“Turn her
over, you idiots!” Donna yelled.

Bothered
by the order, Mahoney rolled her, still twitching, onto her back. A piece of
glass the size of a finger was stuck in her cheek and she was bleeding from
wounds to her chest, neck, and legs.

“Shit!”
Donna said. “Untie my hands! I’m a nurse!”

Still
gun-shy from the last experience of untying hands, Mahoney was unsure what to
do. He stared at her. “No,” he said. “She ain’t hurt that bad.”

“Yes, she
is! Untie me!”

“No.”

“It might
be okay,” the younger said.

“Forget
it,” Mahoney said, unwilling to bend.

“What’s
going on here?” a strange voice said.

They
turned to see a blue-robed Council member standing behind them. He looked tall
and scholarly. A wisp of a blond mustache framed his thin upper lip. The
mercenaries came to attention.

“This
one’s having some kind of fit, sir,” Mahoney said.

Council
Member Ryder took a step closer and looked down at Rachel’s face. “Is this the
woman?” he asked Mahoney. His voice was smooth and confident. He gave Donna the
willies.

“I
believe so, sir. Yes,” Mahoney answered. “We were just taking her in when she
fell over into those glass articles there.”

“I see.”

“Should I
go for help?” the young soldier asked.

Donna
said, “I’m all the goddamned help she needs if you’d just take these things off
me.”

Ryder
considered her. “Not just yet,” he said. Then to the soldier, “Go. And hurry.”

The
soldier was gone like a shot, sprinting full speed through the jumble, dodging
equipment and crates. Donna watched him go and thought to herself that here was
the quintessential drone; a real soldier’s soldier, and shook her head. What a
shame.

“Language
like that could get you in very deep trouble around here,” Ryder said easily to
Donna.

“So?”

“So I
thought you might like to consider not using it. Especially in the presence of
a Council Member.”

“I’ve
been using it ever since I landed on this ball. Maybe it’s something in the
water. I don’t know.”

“Maybe
it’s just your sinful nature. I don’t know, either.”
 
Donna chuckled and shot Ryder her wry grin
and let her eye flash. “Oh, I’m sinful all right. But that’s not news to you,
now is it?”

“No. I
know all about your little outlaw group. Tell me. How does it feel to be
prisoners of the righteous?”

“Just
about how it feels to have a big, unwelcome stick up my ass.”

Ryder
drew a long breath through his nose. “You lack prudence in addition to being
sinful.”

“Well,
the way I figure it is, you’re going to do whatever you want to me. There’s
nothing I can do about it, and I’ve got very little to lose.”

“You’re
wrong there—quite wrong,” Ryder said.

“Really?
The worst you can do is kill me.”

Ryder
sniffed and let the word out through a slack mouth that barely moved. “Really?”
he said.

The
soldier ran back carrying a folding stretcher followed by a youngish doctor in
a gray lab coat. Rachel had lapsed into her sleep state after the seizure and
was now limp and motionless. The doctor cut her cottons with scissors where the
bleeding was the most profuse and applied compresses to the cuts, taping the
pads down or tying them. Donna could see that none of the wounds were life
threatening and felt somewhat better. He left the glass piece that had
penetrated her cheek in place, he said, until he could take it out in the
clinic. They wasted no time getting her on the stretcher; then the soldier and
the doctor carried her off.

“Take
good care of her, doctor,” Ryder said after them.

“What
about us?” Donna asked. “Don’t you want to take good care of us, too?”

Ryder
smiled. When he did, his mouth formed a peculiar hole with teeth in it. “Take
these two to the impound,” he ordered Mahoney.

“Get
moving,” Mahoney said in a too-loud voice.

As John
watched them carrying Rachel away, he had the overpowering urge to follow them.
He let it go and started to move under the mean little nudge of Mahoney’s
rifle.

* * *

The
interior of the monolith had been transformed. Its smooth and sensual walls and
floors were still there, but the beauty in them had been lost. The space had
been transmuted into a strange blend of organic forms overlaid with manmade
fixtures, and the natural beauty had been scratched and scribbled out by man’s
idiosyncratic pencil. Angular steel doors had been installed over the gentle
oval portals leading to the interior chambers. Cables stretched and sagged overhead.
Some made raised black scars on undulating walls. Lifts that ran here and there
over the smooth floor left dark rubber smudges in crazy quilt patterns
throughout. The oddly pleasant scent they had come to love when they lived
there—though no doubt still present—had been masked by the smell of plastic,
rubber and human bodies. High capacity halogens hung from hundreds of fixtures
casting harsh, irregular light over the entire interior.

“I hardly
recognize the place,” John said to Donna’s back.

He desperately
wanted to know where they’d taken Rachel. The grim thought occurred to him that
he might not ever see her again. The weight of that horrid idea felt like a
heavy stone on his chest. A step or two later he felt panic and fear beginning
to twitch deep down inside. The panic part was starting to loosen his normally
steadfast grip on reality.

He
stopped cold and turned. “Where are you taking us?” he blurted at Mahoney.
“I’ve got a right to know.”

“You’ve
got shit,” Mahoney said. “Get moving!”