The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (26 page)

In unison, the helmet camera images on the screens tipped down. The feathery grass was slowly curling over to embrace their boots. A thin mist was leaking out from the onion-shaped tips of every blade.

“Hell!” McClain Gilbert exclaimed. He quickly lifted one foot. The grass wasn’t strong enough to stop him. Blisters and bubbles were erupting on the top of the boot. The rest of the crew shouted in alarm, and began to pull their own boots clear.

“That’s some kind of acid,” Planetary Science said.

Oscar noticed all the creatures were hopping away from the humans at quite a speed.

“What sort of plant has acid for sap?” McClain Gilbert asked.

“Not a good one,” xenobiology said. “Sir, I recommend bringing them back in.”

“I concur,” emergency defense said. “If nothing else, we need to wash that acid off them before it eats through their soles.”

“I think they’re right, Mac,” Oscar said. “Get back into the environment chamber.”

“We’re coming.”

“Xenobiology, talk to me,” Oscar said.

“Interesting. The plants didn’t move until our team had been standing still for a little while, so I’m guessing they probably operate off a time/pressure trigger. I’m reminded of a Venus flytrap, except this is a lot more unpleasant, and the scale is larger. Any small animal that stops moving is likely to be trapped and dissolved.”

Oscar glanced back through the oval gateway. McClain Gilbert and his team had almost reached the rim. Behind them, there was no sign of the small not-squirrel creatures. “Those native animals never stood still,” he murmured.

“No, sir,” xenobiology said. “And their leg structure would be difficult for the grass to capture. I’d love to know what their scales are made of, it looked pretty tough. Anything that evolves here must be relatively acid resistant.”

“How widespread is this plant?” Oscar asked. “And is the rest of the vegetation going to be similar?”

“The images we’re getting from the low-orbit satellites indicate a comprehensive ground plant coverage,” sensors said. “If it’s not this particular grass-equivalent, it’s a close cousin.”

“Damnit,” Oscar hissed.

The forward crew hurried back into the alien environment confinement chamber. At the bottom of the ramp, decontamination shower cubicles had risen up out of the floor. They were designed to wash away spores or dangerous particles. But they’d be just as effective for this. The team members stood underneath the nozzles as the water jetted down.

“All right,” Oscar announced to everyone on the loop. “Our priority is to establish how widespread this grass variety is, and if the other plants are related. Sensors, get a marque 8 samplebot out there. I want to check out the nearest trees, and there are a few other kinds of plants in that grass-stuff. Mac, go through a complete decontamination, and desuit, I don’t think we’ll need you again today.”

Everyone in the control center watched anxiously as the samplebot trundled out across the red grass. It stopped several times to snip sections of leaf from clumps of other plants, then headed for the nearest tree a hundred fifty meters away. As it got closer, they could all see the jagged pattern of the branches as they forked at acute angles. There weren’t many leaves, just a few slender beige triangles clumped around the end of each twig. Black kernels similar to walnuts dangled down from almost every joint on every branch.

The samplebot stopped a meter from the waxy trunk, and gingerly extended an electromuscle arm. Every kernel on that half of the tree popped simultaneously. A torrent of liquid showered down over the surrounding ground and the samplebot. Its casing began to dissolve immediately. Acid started to leak through and the telemetry ended.

Oscar put his head in his hands and groaned. “Shit!”

By twenty-one hundred hours, they’d confirmed the planet’s plants shared a common biochemistry. Oscar had moved the wormhole exit eight times to different regions. Each one had subtle variants in the grass-equivalent, and no variance in their biochemical makeup.

He ordered the exit to be closed, and the gateway mechanism to be powered down to level two. It disheartened everyone, especially for a mission that had started so promisingly. Then there was the administration crap to deal with; the ground crew that was scheduled to take over exploration from prime had to be switched to a prep crew; everybody faced a mountain of reports to file.

The door of the control center closed behind Oscar. “Another day another star,” he murmured to himself. He was tired, disappointed, hungry. No way was he going to start in on the administration tonight. He told his e-butler to have the maidbots start a decent meal and open some wine to breathe. By the time he got home it should be ready.

Just as he started walking down the corridor, a number of people came out of the observation gallery door ahead of him. Dermet Shalar was there, the CST Merredin station director, and the last person Oscar wanted to see right now. He hesitated, putting his head down, hoping Dermet wouldn’t notice him.

“Oscar.”

“Ah, good evening, sir. Not a good day, I’m afraid.”

“No, indeed not. Still, astronomy has a huge list of possible targets. It’s not as if we’re short of new worlds.”

Oscar stopped listening to his boss; he’d just recognized the young-looking man in the expensive suit standing beside him. “Have you been watching today’s operation?”

“Yes,” Wilson Kime said. “I remember that kind of disappointment myself.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“But I was impressed by the way you ran things in there.”

“I see,” which was a dumb thing to say, but Oscar knew there were very few reasons for Kime to be here today. His fatigue suddenly vanished under a deluge of adrenaline. To be head-hunted for
this
CST exploration mission was the ultimate compliment.

As if he was mind reading, Wilson smiled. “I need somebody like you as my executive officer. Interested?”

Oscar glanced at Dermet Shalar, who kept his face carefully neutral. “Of course.”

“Good. It’s yours if you want it.”

“I want it.”

....

Two days later Oscar arrived at the Anshun starship project complex. He was given an office next to Wilson on the top floor in one of the three central glass towers, complete with a staff of three. Starting with their first official meeting that morning, he and Wilson had to put the crew selection problem at the top of the agenda. It was a hint of what was to come. Nigel Sheldon hadn’t been joking about the number of requests to join the mission. Tens of millions of people from all over the Commonwealth, endorsed by their government or some venerable respected institution, were hammering against CST’s filter programs for a berth on the starship. Right from the beginning, they decided on a policy of filling the science posts from the CST exploratory division wherever possible. The general crew would be assigned on a similar basis. Exceptions would be made for “outstanding achievers.” Both of them acknowledged that would mean geniuses with political clout.

“Anybody you owe a big favor?” Wilson asked. “We might as well get that out of the way to start with.”

“I’m sure there’ll be a whole bunch of people from this life and my first who are suddenly going to remember the five dollars they lent me. And just about everyone at the Merredin station managed to bump into me before I left and tell me how terrific they are. All I can say is, McClain Gilbert is the best forward crew leader I’ve worked with.”

“You want him for that duty on the
Second Chance
?”

Oscar took a moment. “It’s that easy?”

“We have to start somewhere, and we have to have some rationale for selection. After all, it’s how I chose you, I asked Sheldon who his best Operations Director was.”

Oscar had guessed it had been something like that: but who didn’t like hearing it firsthand? “Okay then, I’d like Mac. What about you? Do you have any preferences for the crew?”

“There’s fifty management types from Farndale I’d like to bring onto the construction side of the project to smooth out the current schedule, and I’ll probably do that. But as for anyone familiar with this kind of mission, no, not anymore.” They’d managed to track down two others from
Ulysses
. Nancy Kressmire, who had never left Earth again, was now the Ecological Commissioner for Northwest Asia, and hugely committed to the job—after all, she’d held it for a hundred fifty-eight years. She’d said no as soon as he reached her—not even waiting to say hello, or ask why he was calling after all these centuries.

“Are you sure?” Wilson had inquired.

“I can’t leave, Wilson. There’s so much here on this good Earth we still have to put right. How can we face aliens before we’ve cured the ills which beset our own people? Our moral obligation is clear.”

He didn’t argue, though there was much he wanted to say to her, and all her crusading kind for that matter. The Earth that the ultra-conservative Greens wanted had never existed in the past, it was an idealized dream of what Eden might be. Something not too dissimilar to York5, he thought to himself.

The only other old crew member Sheldon’s staff had located was Jane Orchiston. Wilson took one look at her file, and didn’t even bother placing that call. Call it prejudice or intuition—he didn’t really care which. He just knew it would be a waste of time. Two centuries ago, Orchiston had moved to Felicity, the women-only planet. Since then she’d been enthusiastically giving birth to daughters at the rate of almost one every three years.

All in all, he reflected, it wasn’t an outstanding record for a crew that was supposed to represent the best of humanity at that time. Three known survivors out of thirty-eight; one plutocrat, one bureaucrat, and one earth-mother.

The second half of the meeting was scheduled as a unisphere conference with James Timothy Halgarth, the director of the Research Institute on Far Away. “I’ll be interested in your opinion on what he has to say about the
Marie Celeste
and its crew,” Wilson told Oscar. “Tracking down alien knowledge is an aspect of our mission which I’m going to delegate to you.”

“You think it’s that important?”

“Yeah, we need to know what they know. Or don’t know. I’m determined that we cover every angle of approach on the Dyson Pair envelopment, not just the physical voyage. I was in training for the Mars mission for damn near a decade. I wound up knowing more than any college professor about its geology, its features, the geography, and even the books people had written on it—fact and fiction. Everything. I knew the myths as well as the truths. Just in case. We were ready for anything, any eventuality. And a fat lot of good that did us in the end.”

“Sheldon and Ozzie weren’t anything to do with Mars.”

Wilson grinned. “My point exactly. So … after this, arrange to see the Commonwealth xenocultural experts talking to the Silfen. Get out to the High Angel. Interview a Raiel. I simply don’t believe that none of our so-called allies know nothing about the Dyson Pair. Most of them have been around for a hell of a lot longer than us, certainly they all had starflight when it happened.”

“Why would they hold out on us?”

“God knows. But then there’s a great deal about this which doesn’t seem logical.”

“All right, I’ll add it to my list.”

Wilson’s e-butler announced that the wormhole connecting Half Way to Far Away had begun the ten-hour active phase of its cycle. The unisphere established a link to the small data network in Armstrong City. From there, a solitary landline carried the call to the Institute.

The big portal at the far end of Wilson’s study fizzed with multicolored static. It cleared to show Director James Timothy Halgarth sitting behind his desk, a fourth-generation member of the family that founded EdenBurg, which gave him a reasonable level of seniority within the dynasty.

He wore a simple pale blue suit of semiorganic fabric that stretched and contracted around his limbs whenever he moved, giving him unrestricted movement. His apparent age was mid-thirty, though he was completely bald, an unusual style in the Commonwealth. Small OCtattoos shimmered platinum and emerald on his cheeks.

“Captain Kime, finally,” the Director said with obvious enthusiasm. “I apologize for the delay in enabling this conference. The Guardians of Selfhood are annoyingly tenacious in their attacks on our landline. The current repairs were only completed three hours ago. No doubt we shall suffer our next cut within a few days.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Wilson said. “Wouldn’t you be better off with a satellite relay?”

“We used to have one. The Guardians shot it down, and its three replacements. It’s actually more cost-effective to have a landline and keep a repair crew permanently on the payroll. Fiber-optic cable is very cheap.”

“I didn’t realize the civil situation was quite so bad on Far Away.”

“It’s not. We’re the only ones suffering from assaults by the Guardians. They are deplorably xenophobic, not to mention violent.”

“I’m not too well briefed on their objectives; I never did pay much attention to conspiracy theories before. They think you’re helping an alien survivor from the arkship, don’t they?”

“Actually, they believe we transported the Starflyer into the Commonwealth, but that’s the general thrust of their argument, yes.”

“I see. They have been releasing a great deal of propaganda about how the Starflyer arranged for the whole
Second Chance
mission. What I really need to know, from the horse’s mouth as it were, is if it is in any way possible the
Marie Celeste
did come from the Dyson Pair. Does it have that kind of flight range?”

“In theory, yes. Once the ship accelerates to its flight velocity of point seven two lightspeed, its range is limited only by the amount of fuel it carries to power the force field generators, and indeed the lifetime of the generators themselves. However, our research determined that the actual flight time was five hundred and twenty years. The arkship didn’t come from, or even pass by, the Dyson Pair. It came from somewhere closer.”

“That could be a planet which didn’t have the kind of protective barrier the Dyson Pair possessed,” Oscar said. “They couldn’t defend themselves against whatever was threatening the Dyson aliens, so they left?”