Dragonsdawn (27 page)

Ongola was not feeling exactly top of the mark the next morning when he arrived for his watch at the met tower. In fact, he had called in first at the infirmary, where the pharmacist had given him a hangover tablet and assured him that he was one of many. But her comment about disturbing casualties during that Threadfall had only made his headache worse.

The report that awaited him at the met tower was a shock and a surprise. One sled had been totaled and its crew of three killed; a second sled had been badly crumpled, the starboard gunner killed, and pilot and port gunner badly injured in the midair head-on collision. Someone had not been obeying the altitude restrictions. Ongola groaned involuntarily as he read the casualty list: Becky Nielson, mining apprentice just back from Big Island—she had been safer after all with Avril; Bart Nilwan, a very promising young mechanic; and Ben Jepson. Ongola rubbed his eyes to clear the blur. Bob Jepson was the other dead pilot. Two in the same family. Those twins! Farting around in break-ass fashion instead of following orders! Stinkin’ air! What could he say to their parents? A minor Fall with a party to come back to, and they died!

Ongola put his hand on the comm unit, about to dial administration. Then he heard someone tapping hesitantly at the door.

“Come!” he called.

Catherine Radelin-Doyle stood there, her eyes round, her face pale.

“Yes, Cathy?”

“Sir, Mr. Ongola . . .”

“Either will do.” He mustered an encouraging smile. Considering the amount of trouble Cathy could get into, from stumbling into caves at an early age, to marrying the most feckless joat on the planet, he wondered at her shy demeanor. She was, poor child, just one of those people to whom events tended to occur with no connivance from themselves at all.

“Sir, I’ve found a cave.”

“Yes?” he encouraged when she hesitated. She was constantly finding caves.

“It wasn’t empty.”

Ongola sat up straight. “It had a lot of fuel sacks in it?” he asked. If Catherine had found it, would Avril? No, Avril did not have the same sort of luck Catherine had.

“However did you know, Mr. Ongola?” She looked faint with relief.

“Possibly because I know they’re there.”

“You do? They are? I mean, they weren’t put there by ‘them’?”

“No, by us.” He wanted to make as little fuss about Kenjo’s hoard as possible. He had been counting the dwindling numbers and wondering why Kenjo seemed so complacent after each trip. Ongola flicked a glance at the corner of the shadowed shelving where the guidance chips were hidden in the dark-foam case.

Catherine suddenly sank to the nearest chair. “Oh, sir, you don’t know what a fright it gave me. Thinking that someone else was here, because everyone
knows
there’s so little fuel left. And then to see . . .”

“But you saw nothing, Catherine,” Ongola told her crisply. “Nothing whatever. There’s no cave worth noticing down that particular crevasse and you won’t say a thing about it to anyone else. I will personally tell the admiral. But you will tell no one.”

“Oh no, sir.”

“This information cannot—I repeat,
cannot
—be divulged to any other person.”

“That’s right, Mr. Ongola.” She nodded solemnly several times. Then she smiled winsomely. “Shall I keep on looking?”

“Yes, I think you’d better. And find something!”

“Oh, but I have, Mr. Ongola, and Joel Lilienkamp says they’re going to be excellent storage space.” Her face clouded briefly. “But he didn’t say for what.”

“Go, Cathy, and find something . . . else.”

She left, and Ongola had barely returned to brooding over the first serious losses to their defense when Tarvi came storming up the stairs.

“It’s been staring us in the face, Zi,” he said, swinging his arms in one of his expansive gestures. His face was alight with enthusiasm, although his skin looked a bit gray from the excesses of the night before.

“What?” Ongola was in no mood for puzzles.

“Them! There!” Tarvi gestured extravagantly out the northern windows. “All the time.”

It was probably the headache, Ongola thought, but he had no idea what Tarvi was talking about.

“What do you mean?”

“All this time we have been slavering away at mining ore, refining, molding it, adding weeks to our labors, when all the time we’ve had what we need in front of us.”

“No puzzles, Tarvi.”

Tarvi’s expressive eyes widened in surprise and consternation. “I give you no puzzles, Zi, my friend, but the source of much valuable metals and materials. The shuttles, Zi, the shuttles can be dismantled and their components used for our specific purposes here and now. Theirs is done. Why let them slowly decay on the meadow?” Tarvi emphasized each new sentence with a flick of long fingers out the window and then, exasperated with Ongola’s incomprehension, he hauled the man to his feet and pointed a very long, slightly dirty forefinger directly at the tail fins of the old shuttles. “There. We’ll use them. Hundreds of relays, miles of the proper flex and tubing, six small mountains of recyclable material. Have you any idea of how much is in them?” In an instant, all the exuberance drained from the volatile geologist. He put both hands on Ongola’s shoulders. “We can replace the sled we lost today even if we cannot replace those marvelous young lives or comfort their stricken families. The parts make a new whole.”

Work dulled the edge of the sorrow that hung over Landing at the loss of four young people. The two survivors reluctantly admitted that the Jepson twins, toward the end of that Fall, had indulged in some fatal foolery. Ben’s sled had been scheduled for servicing after the Fall because its previous pilot had reported a sluggish reaction on port side turns. The sled had been considered safe enough for what should have been a monitoring flight.

Rather than prevent other such collisions, the next few Falls saw a rash of them even as Tarvi’s crew began to strip the first shuttle and Fulmar’s teams began to service and replace from the bonanza of salvage.

The longest hours were still put in at Kitti Ping’s laboratory, monitoring the development of the specimens for any signs of aberration from the program.

“Patience,” was Kitti’s response to all queries. “All proceeds vigorously.”

Three days after the midair collision, Wind Blossom discovered her grandmother still at the electronic microscope, apparently peering at yet another slide. But when Wind Blossom touched Kitti’s arm, the movement produced an unexpected result. The dainty fingers slipped from their relaxed position on the keyboard, and the body slumped forward, only kept upright by the brace that held her to the stool for her long sessions at the microscope. Wind Blossom let out a moan and dropped to her knees, holding one tiny cold hand to her forehead.

Bay heard her disconsolate weeping and came to see what had happened. Instantly she called to Pol and Kwan, then phoned for a doctor. Once Wind Blossom had followed the gurney carrying her grandmother’s body out of the room, Bay straightened her plump shoulders and stood at the console. She asked the computer if it had finished its program.

PROGRAM COMPLETED
flashed on the screen—almost indignantly, Bay thought in the portion of her mind that was not sorrowing. She tapped out an information query. The screen displayed a dazzling series of computations and ended with
REMOVE UNIT! DANGER IF UNIT IS NOT IMMEDIATELY REMOVED!

Astonished, Bay recognized the paraphernalia on the workspace beside the electronic microscope. Kitti Ping had been manipulating gene patterns again, a complicated process that Bay found as daunting as Wind Blossom did, despite Kitti Ping’s encouragements. So Kitti had made those infinitesimal alterations in the chromosomes. Bay felt the chill of a terrible apprehension sweep through her plump body. She pressed her lips together. That moment was not the time to panic. They must not lose what Kitti Ping had been making of the raw material of Pern.

With hands that were not quite steady, she unlocked the microcylinder, removed the tiny gel-encapsulated unit, and placed it in the culture dish that Kitti had readied. An agony as severe as a knife stab almost doubled Bay up, but she fought the grief and the knowledge that Kit Ping Yung had died to produce that altered egg cell. The label was even prepared:
Trial 2684/16/M: nucleus #22A
,
mentasynth Generation B2
,
boron/silicon system 4
,
size 2H; 16.204.8.

Walking as fast as her shaky legs would permit and gradually recovering her composure, Bay took the final legacy of the brilliant technician to the gestation chamber and put it carefully beside the forty-one similar units that held the hopes of Pern.

“
That
was the second probe to malfunction,” Ezra told Paul and Emily, his quiet voice ragged with disappointment. “When the first one blew up, or whatever, I thought it a mischance. Even vacuum isn’t perfect insulation against decay. Probe motors could misfire, their recording device clog somehow or other. So I refined the program for the second one. It got exactly as far as the first one, and then every light went red. Either that atmosphere is so corrosive even our probe enamels melt, or the garage on the
Yokohama
has somehow been damaged, and the probes, too. I dunno, guys.”

Ezra was not much given to agitated gestures but he paced up and down Paul’s office, strutting and waving his arms about him like a scarecrow in a high wind. The last few days had wearied and aged him. Paul and Emily exchanged concerned glances. Kitti Ping’s death had been such a shock, following so closely on the sled collision disaster. The geneticist had seemed so indestructible, despite the fact that everyone knew of her physical frailty. She had exuded a quality of immortality, however false that had proved.

“Whose theory was it that we were being bombarded from outer space to reduce us to submission?” Ezra asked, stopping suddenly in his tracks and staring at the two leaders.

“Ah, c’mon now, Ezra!” Paul was bluntly derisive. “Think a minute, man. We’re all under a strain, but not one that makes us lose our wits. We all know that there are atmospheres that can and have melted probes. Furthermore—” He halted, not certain what would suffice to reassure Ezra, and himself.

“Furthermore, the organism attacking us,” Emily went on with superb composure, “is hydrocarbon based, and if it comes from that planet, its atmosphere is not corrosive. I favor malfunction.”

“My opinion, too,” Paul said, nodding his head vigorously. “Fardles, Ezra, let’s not talk ourselves into more problems than we’ve got.”

“We’ve
got
”—Ezra brought both fists down on the desk—“to probe that planet, or we won’t know enough to combat the stuff. Half the settlers want to know the source and destroy it so we can get back to our lives. Rake up the debris and forget all this.”

“What aren’t you telling us, Ezra?” Emily asked, cocking her head slightly and regarding the captain with an unflinching gaze.

Ezra stared back at her for a very long moment, then straightened from his half crouch over the desk and began to smile wryly.

“You’ve been sitting in the interface booth long hours, Ezra, and you weren’t playing tiddlywinks while the programs were running,” Emily went on.

“My calculations are frightening,” he said in a low voice, glancing over each shoulder. “If the program is in any way accurate, and I’ve run it five times now from start to finish, we have to put up with Thread for long after that red planet crosses out of the inner system.”

“How long will that be?” Paul felt his fingers gripping the arm rests and made a conscious effort to relax them while he tried to recall some reassuring facet of planetary orbits.

“I get between forty and fifty years!”

Emily grimaced, her mouth forming an O of surprise be-fore she slowly exhaled. “Forty or fifty years, you say.”

“If,” Ezra added grimly, “the menace originated from that planet.”

Paul caught his eyes and saw the ineffably weary and discouraged look in them. “If? There is another alternative?”

“I have discerned a haze about the planet, irrespective of its atmospheric envelope. A haze that spreads backward in this system and swirls along the eccentric’s path. I cannot refine that telescope enough to tell more. It could be space debris, a nebulosity, the remnants of a cometary tail, a whole bunch of things that are harmless.”

“But if it should be harmful?” Emily asked.

“That tail would take nearly fifty years to diffuse out of Pern’s orbit, some into Rukbat—the rest, who knows?”

There was a long moment of silence.

“Any suggestions?” Paul asked finally.

“Yes,” Ezra said, straightening his shoulders with a wrench. He held up two fingers. “Take a trip to the
Yokohama
, find out what’s bugging the probes, and send two of ’em down to the planet to gather as much information as we can. Send the other two along the line of that cometary dust and use the
Yoko
’s more powerful space scope with no planetary interference to see if we can identify its source and components.” Ezra then locked his fingers together and cracked his knuckles, a habit that always made Emily shudder. “Sorry, Em.”

“At least you can recommend some positive action,” Paul went on.

“The big question is, Paul, is there enough fuel to get someone to the
Yoko
and back? Kenjo’s already made more trips than I thought possible.”

“Good pilot,” Paul said discreetly. “There’s enough for what we need now. Kenjo will pilot, and did you wish to go with him?”

Ezra shook his head slowly. “Avril Bitra has the training for the job.”

“Avril?” Paul gave a harsh bark and then shook his head, grinning sourly. “Avril’s the last person I’d put on the
Mariposa
for any reason. Even if we knew where she is.”

“Really?” Ezra looked at Emily for an explanation, but she shrugged. “Well, then, Kenjo can double. No,” he corrected himself. “If something’s wrong with the probes, we’d need a good technician. Stev Kimmer. He’s back, isn’t he?”

“Who else?” Paul jotted down names rather than worry Ezra with more suspicions.