The Seeds of Time (50 page)

Hocking said, “Perhaps from … one of our people … in the pay of the Nians?”

“Yes,” Tandy acknowledged. “Perhaps someone in their pay. If any of us can imagine being in the pay of an alien threat to Earth and this vessel.”

“If it
is
a Nian, who’s to say they even look human?” Clio asked.

“They might very well,” Licht said. “We already know their morphology is humanlike.” He noted her confusion. “Their ship, from the configuration of living quarters and seats, is built for humanoid creatures. No little green men or what have you.”

Tandy nodded. “Exactly. I believe it’s very possible that our Nianist—or traitor—will strike again on this ship, or will infiltrate into our ranks for the ground mission. He—or it—may target me and the other officers, or, in league with cohorts on Niang, undermine our mission from within. But it will strike again, and against our most vulnerable and key operations. And it will do so secretly, for as long as it can. Bear in mind that there may be more than one.”

Licht had perked up. “Who’s to say we aren’t riddled with these aliens?”

A trickle of sweat left Captain Hocking’s nose and dripped into his lap.

“Not practical,” Tandy said. “Think of the difficulty of penetrating this crew list. Crew and army contingent did not volunteer. They are an extremely select group, known to their officers or Biotime for years. To position yourself for selection to the
Galactique
would take years, and even then is a matter of chance. Same for my select infantry unit. No raw recruits here. All personally known by me or my officers. If someone has managed to infiltrate us, they’ve taken years to set up.”

Licht said: “With Dive, they might have planted themselves in Biotime or army a decade ago, worked their way
into position slowly. Could have quite a lot of them, hoping that one of them would succeed in making the team.”

Tandy looked at Licht with new interest. “Yes … a determined, patient foe.”

“We must warn the crew,” Hocking said.

“Ah, sir …” Clio said.

Hocking looked up at her.

“Sir, begging your pardon, but you tell a bunch of stressed-out spacers in this rabbit warren of a rig that we got an alien looking to cut up his next human and you’re gonna set off a panic. Not pretty on a ship two million years out from port.”

Tandy raised an eyebrow at the captain.

“That may be a point,” Hocking said.

“Alert the officers, captain,” Tandy said. “Tell them everything we surmise and tell them to be watchful over everyone. Meanwhile we will continue our preparations for the ground mission.”

They dismissed Clio. Back on the bridge, her thoughts in a stew, she tuned out Voris’ chatter, trying to lose herself in routines of systems checks. Meanwhile, one by one, the crew from first and second shift traipsed up from mid-decks to the officers’ mess for questioning.

When she was nearly punchy from lack of sleep, Singh excused her, and she went to check on Petya before hitting her bunk.

Day after tomorrow was ground mission. Not ready, by God. Mission was under sabotage, rotten from within. Crazy to go ahead, but Tandy would never turn back, that much was clear. Mission was going sour, just like the last time. Niang will make you nuts … Jesus, girl, got to get some sleep.

But first, she ducked into botany—no sign of Ashe—and sat with Petya while as he took apart the mechanism on a power-distribution switch.

His patient, methodical probing with the computer lead calmed her nerves and she began to breathe again, relaxing. Though they hadn’t said a word to each other, she felt this time together with a sweetness from the old days, when she
would watch Petya in fascination as he reassembled a dead alarm clock, in all its mechanical mysteries, there at the kitchen table—with the smallest screws lost in the maze of squiggles in the gold-flecked formica. Somehow to Petya, they were never lost. He reached with his big Angers and plucked each one from the table, and Clio would rest her chin in her hands and lose herself in the quiet certainty of mechanical things.

As she stood to return to her cabin, the lights surged down and back again. For a full—seemed like a years-long—second, she saw the room filled with streaks and smudges of yellow-orange phosphorescence, glowing strongest on the stack of paperbacks Timothy Ashe had been thumbing for the last seventy-five days of their voyage.

“Timothy makes smudges?” Petya remarked, turning back to the distribution switch mechanism. “They glow, when the lights go off,” he said, tightening the switch plate screw with a microdriver.

The landing-pod hatches clanged shut and the sound of locking bolts reverberated through the hull as
Sun Spot
prepared to disengage from the ship, now orbiting 320 kilometers above the planet.

“Acknowledge,
Galactique
,” Voris said, and rested her hand just above the onboard computer’s firing key. She looked over at Clio. “Ready?” Like they were heading down a hill on a toboggan.

“Yeah, hit it,” Clio said.

Voris engaged the thrusters to move out from the
Galactique
. Immediately behind Clio and Voris sat Colonel Tandy; his second-in-command, Captain Pequot; and six Biotime crew, including Timothy Ashe. Behind them, forty-two army special unit fighting men and women huddled in the transport section, clutching their duffels and assorted weapons.

“Somebody forgot my parachute,” one of them said.

Then another, “Yeah, and the sandwiches your mother packed.”

“Too bad she couldn’t smuggle them out of the state pen, Reiner.”

Voris hit the main engines and
Sun Spot
dropped away from the ship in a fast deorbit burn toward Niang’s atmosphere.

“Whooee!” someone said from the back. “My stomach feel like it flew up to the ceiling. And stuck, you know?”

“Man, you so full of antibiotics and orals you don’t
got
a stomach no more.”

“That why I been shitting bricks?”

Ship rumbled like a hundred skate boards clattered over the hull.

“We are in communications blackout,” Voris said. They were in entry interface, with heat building up outside to 1500 degrees centigrade and ionization blocking all communications for a few minutes. The acrid smell of passengers crowded in too tight and scared despite their jokes, came to Clio’s nostrils.
Pushing it
, she thought. The mission is pushing it, too damn many passengers. Maybe not so many on the return trip. The thought made her stomach clench up worse than it already was, watching Voris—merely a kid by Biotime standards—pilot the lander. Thinking of Timothy Ashe sitting among them: possibly ship’s saboteur, and possibly something else as well, something too ugly to think about, maybe too ugly to believe. The sheer unbelievability of it must have been what kept her from alerting Tandy that Ashe’s skin left a strange residue that traced him to the hold of the ship where he had no business, no
loyal
business, being.

Voris switched to aerocontrols and executed banking maneuvers to control the descent, and they were headed in for landing in Niang’s central plateau region. The heads-up display over the viewport projected
Sun Spot
’s speed and altitude, and Voris piloted by instrumentation and sight, moving down across the blue forest in a steep glidepath, finally zeroing in on the old
Babyhawk
clearing, until now invisible in the jungle mass. Finally positioning
Sun Spot
for the landing burn, she executed a flawless touchdown with a soft bump of the landing struts.

“Contact,” Voris said.

As they lined up for debarking through the plastic quarantine airlock, Clio found herself standing next to Ashe. He began to crouch down to exit through the outer hatch, when he noticed her looking at him. He stopped in midcrouch. Looked at her as people do when you fix them with an overlit stare, and a small frown of curiosity flicked across his face—which he would have pursued had it not been his turn to cycle through. By the time Clio came out and held
the flap for Lieutenant Imanishi behind her, the moment had gone and he sauntered off toward the circle of crew gathered around Colonel Tandy.

Tandy had decided to occupy the old
Starhawk
camp. The clearing was the only one near enough to the alien ship, and big enough. Therefore, as Clio and the ground-mission crew emerged from the airlock they were greeted with the cast-off remains of the
Starhawk
mission, as well as the press of Niang’s atmosphere, like the sweaty hand of a mother pushing a fevered child back into bed on a hot summer day.

Despite the 1.1 g and the tropical heat, the most pervasive impression Niang made was the overpowering sugary aroma that hit your nostrils like a cotton-candy tent at a county fair, and settled on your skin in a microscopic layer of stickiness. Clio was instantly drenched in sweat, her upper arms clinging to her breasts and pulling away with a slight gluey rip as she moved.

Forty kilometers away on all sides of their position, the soaring trees of Niang huddled together, leaning into the clearing as though straining to hear Tandy’s words as he issued orders. Behind the front line of trees, the noise of the jungle ruptured the air with the billion screaming creatures of the woods, each with a voice, and each caught, it seemed, in midsentence by the gross entrance of
Sun Spot
and its stalky, two-legged occupants.

A buzz crackled in the air as the advance unit tested the new perimeter wire, strung up along the old perimeter posts, and now re-forming the nervewire first defense against the hostile Nians and unlucky flying insects that seemed attracted to their doom.

Clio surveyed the ruins of the old mission. Mess tent, hygiene stall, med tent, and botany tent partially collapsed, semibiotized struts jutting out like broken bones, and the thready remains of yellow nylon tenting, fluttering in the mild Niang wind like November leaves.

The cleanup army team struck the old tents, piling usable items in the compound’s center: those things not
stolen or broken by the Niang monkeys or Teeg, if he still lived.

Ashe crossed the compound to stand beside Clio. “Daydreaming?” he asked.

Clio sidled a fraction of an inch farther away from him. “No.”

“Must be a tough time for you.”

Clio looked into his face. The scar bisecting his right eyebrow pointed to his cranium as though trying to tell her something, lead her to something.

“Where’d you get the scar?”

Ashe looked carefully at her, puzzled, maybe. “Hit with one of my brothers’ skis when I was twelve.”

Clio looked away from the dark eyes, wondering how she could have found him appealing.

“Something wrong, Clio?”

She punched up a smile. “Just trying to keep my mind off some bad memories.”

Across the yard, Captain Pequot emerged from the newly erected command tent and gestured at them.

“We’re wanted,” Clio said. Ashe’s eyes had flattened suddenly, taking on a serious cast. He followed her across the compound, just behind her. Outside Tandy’s tent, Ashe said in a low voice, “I need to talk to you, Clio.”

They entered the command tent where Tandy’s officers waited around a small table with a light suspended above it, creating a pool of illumination, where now Tandy was leaning forward searching a map stretched out before them.

He looked up as they entered. “Ah, Clio. Ashe.” He stood upright, surveying the group, and beckoning Clio and Ashe forward. “Since we’re all here, then.” He took in the others in a slow sweep of his gaze. There was Pequot, second in command, and a Lieutenant Ginny McCrae. On Biotime’s side, Voris, Imanishi, and the assistant engineer Randy Ellis, and Robert Richardson on astronomy. Finally, Ashe on botany and Clio.

“We set out as soon as it’s full light tomorrow,” Tandy began. “Finn, you’ve located, in as near a guess as you can, the probable location of the ship.” He pointed to the topo
map, and a red X. Ashe moved closer to the table, elbowing in slightly to see where Tandy pointed, then withdrew to the relative shadow surrounding the map. Clio noticed that he touched nothing.