The Seeds of Time (51 page)

Tandy went on: “We will penetrate the jungle directly opposite the new med tent and stay together as one unit, with half the escort in front and half in back of the science team. In case of attack, the fighting unit will surround the civilians and assume a defensive posture of three hundred sixty degrees. No matter which direction the initial assault originates from.” He looked to his officers.

McCrae nodded and leaned forward, hand on table, other hand pointing. “This is reportedly thick vegetation, sir. If we hit it with scatter shell first, we could deprive them of cover from the outset.”

Tandy shook his head. “No. Deprive
us
of cover as well. Furthermore, and more importantly, we do not have the exact location of the ship and there is danger of damage.”

“I agree,” Imanishi said, stepping close to the flood of light. “We don’t know how delicate this mechanism is that we’ll have to deengineer.”

Pequot fixed her with a hard stare. “This is a military mission, Lieutenant. You’ll have nothing to decode if they rip out our throats before we find the ship.”

“That was my point, Captain,” Imanishi said.

Tandy held up his hands, calling for quiet. “We each have our job to do. Let’s each do what we do best. Imanishi, we’ll be counting on you more than anyone to determine what mechanism and programs to retrieve from the alien ship. Richardson, you’ll ID those star charts, especially if they’re too fragile to remove from the ship.” He looked up at Pequot. “Your job is to see that she and Ellis get there in one piece. That’s priority one. Priority two is getting the FTL out of there and safely back to the compound.” Turning to Ashe, he said, “Your job, Ashe, is to help Imanishi. This ship has been sitting in the jungle a long time. Finn tells us its metal parts are decaying rapidly. You’ll help the engineering staff in systems ID, separating biologicals from mechanicals.”

Clio spoke up: “It’s not decay, sir. It’s more of a replacement. A botanical replacement of metal.”

Tandy glanced at her. “Yes. Metal to leaf and vine. Exactly. Hell of an ID problem. Which are ship’s systems, which are Niang overgrowths. It’s all coming to the same thing in this jungle. That’s why you’re along, Ashe.”

From the deep shadows, a deeper voice responded, “Yessir.”

“Voris,” Tandy added, “you’re in camp. Stay alert for the need for emergency evacuation.”

Voris nodded bleakly.

Tandy turned to Clio. “Finn, your job is to lead us to the ship. Retrace your steps. For this reason, you’ll be in radio contact with Lieutenant McCrae on point. You’ll travel in mid ranks with the crew.”

Clio nodded. She looked at the topo map and thought how clean and orderly maps always were, how unlike where they’d be, how utterly unlike.

The meeting broke up, and Clio started to follow the group out the tent flap, then at the last moment turned back to Tandy, who still stood looking down at the map.

“Colonel. Could I speak with you a moment?”

He looked up, nodded. Tandy was leaning forward, both hands pressed on the table, his shoulders tilted slightly forward, allowing the light to catch his colonel’s bars. Clio squinted against the slicing light.

Tandy was waiting. “Yes, Clio?”

Clio stumbled past her preplanned opening. “About the Nian, sir, among us.”

Tandy’s eyes snapped alert.

“He could pick us off on the trail.”

“If he’s among our retrieval team, you mean?”

“Yessir.”

“Do you think he
is
among our team?”

Clio heard herself say, “Nosir.”

“But you’re
afraid
he is? Or she?”

“Yessir.”

Tandy stood up, out of the light, rubbing his eyes. “Is that something that you or I have control of, Clio?”

Clio shook her head, slowly, feeling sick.

“Then we will do our best to react swiftly and skillfully should that prove to be the case.” A brief smile. “Won’t we.” He went back to his perusal of the map.

“Yessir.” Clio’s voice came small and weak from the part of her throat that was not swollen shut. “Thank you, sir.”

When she made no move to leave, Tandy looked up again, this time, with a piercing gaze. The exhaustion of the last twenty-four hours showed in the circles under his eyes, accentuated by the glare of the overhead light. “What is it, Clio?” he asked.

“If the Nians oppose this mission,” she said, “wouldn’t their best ploy have been to kill the Dive pilot? To try to kill me, not you? The mission can’t get home without a Dive pilot.”

Tandy walked around to her side of the table, leaned against it. Spoke softly: “I’ve been wondering the same thing, Clio.”

Something about the way he said that. Clio tried to clear her thoughts, tried to figure out what to do, to say. Tried to figure out what the hell was going on. Then a slow crawl of nausea up the front of her body, like a slimy creature reaching for her throat. Jesus God. Tandy suspected
her
. She opened her mouth to protest, shut it, realizing that the guilty always protest their innocence.

Tandy broke the silence. “Why do you suppose we traveled secretly, leaving the quarry? We expected attempts on your life.” He pushed away from the table, came up to her, searching her eyes with his own. “But not a one, Clio. Not a one.”

“Why sir?”

“I don’t know. It appears that you are of value to them in some way.”

“Value?”

“Can you think why that might be?”

Clio swallowed, but no saliva left. Mouth like glue. “Nosir.”

Tandy shrugged, moved back to the map, then glanced
around at her. “I think you can rest easy now, Clio,” he said. “If they were going to threaten your life, they would have by now. But don’t let your guard down. And neither will I.”

“Yessir,” she said. Nodded to him with a head too full of thoughts, like a water balloon, all wobbly and ready to crash to the floor.

She left him standing there in the tent, staggered into the hot blue light of midafternoon Niang.

At the compound’s edge, armed infantry patrolled along the perimeter wires, their attention as watchful inside the camp as outside. At intervals the special-unit forces had set up cells where small artillery emplacements were prepared for a concerted attack from the jungle.

Ashe, who had been watching for her outside the mess tent, met Clio halfway across the camp.

“You don’t look well, Clio,” he said, all his attention focused on her.

Clio made her way to the hygiene tent, where she might have an excuse to be alone. She stopped for a moment outside the privy. “Tell me something, Ashe.”

He watched her, waiting.

“Is this whole mission as crazy to you as it is to me?”

“It always has been crazy to me, Clio.” Very serious he was, black eyes drawing her in.

“Does it figure that the enemy, whoever they are, would kill off the two previous missions, keeping folks away from this stupid ship, like some galactic game of King of the Hill? If they don’t want us to find their FTL drive, why don’t they just destroy it?”

“If it was me, it’s what I’d do,” he said, expressionless.

“If it was you.”

“Yeah, I would.”

She looked him square in the face. “I don’t owe you anything, Ashe.”

His eyebrows closed in on a frown. “No, I never thought you did. But you think you owe
army?
What’d you ever get from army but murder, death, and loss?”

“What’s this mission headed for out there, Ashe?” She nodded at the leaning forest. “Murder, death, loss? Isn’t that
right? What I end up with, either way.” She backed away from him. “Keep this in mind, Ashe: I’m gonna be watching you. I don’t like your attitude. You got a real bad attitude. Colonel might like to know about that.”

“Colonel’s watching you, too, Clio. Just be careful.”

“He needs me to get home. I don’t worry about army.”

“Worry. You worry, Clio. Tandy doesn’t need you to get home.”

That got her attention.

“Think about it, Clio. They can head that big slop bucket into Dive and coast home, hoping like hell they don’t run into anything. Maybe nine chances in ten they’ll be lucky. Pretty good odds. Odds they’d rather not take, maybe. But don’t assume Tandy needs you. He’s a ruthless pragmatist. A side you’ve never seen, maybe, or have you had glimpses, now and then?”

She pushed past him. “Get out of my way.”

He stepped back, and she entered the privy, where the familiar stench held some comfort against the candied press of Niang air and the sudden confusion and reversals of the three-month ride from Earth, where she’d been just as miserable as now but at least certain of who was who.

She braced her elbows on her knees and held her head, trying to find peace in the darkness of the palms of her hands.

The mission team wound into the jungle. Through the cloud cover, bluish light leaked into the undergrowth, a slow sedimentation, barely reaching their boots. Slick trunks of the trees emitted the sticky-sweetness that clung to their nostrils and fatigues. As wet as they were from humidity and sweat, they barely took notice when a slight drizzle began, cascading from layer to layer of the canopy above them, splattering on the undergrowth silently, drowned out by the depths of chittering, screaming jungle voices.

When possible, they walked double to shorten their exposed flanks, but usually it was not possible, with the
undergrowth pressing on both sides of the path they beat before themselves.

In three positions along their line, they carried the pulse guns, shoulder-launching artillery that could lay down a quick burn on either side of its main discharge. The remainder of the unit wore visors on infrared with peripheral enhancers, and carried their weapons slung at half ready on shoulder straps. The science team was unarmed, to Clio’s chagrin. Leave the fighting to army, Tandy said.

He walked a few paces behind of her, speaking, by his head movements, to Captain Pequot, but silently, over headphones. Her own channel crackled. “We’ll bear to the left here, Clio, is that your sense?”

“Yessir. In this vicinity.” In truth, the terrain was all the same, and the plants in their endless variety had a sameness too, with their strange fleshiness and tubular shoots probing the mission team’s flanks, perhaps drawn to their warmth.

Tandy turned to acknowledge her. A turquoise glint off his visor substituted for eye contact.

They had been trekking for nearly an hour when, down the line, one of the soldiers swiveled and drew down on a swaying vine. The hairy ropes hung from the canopy in masses, like the long roots of lily pads where, above, their flowers might unfold in the true light. The soldier moved on, twitching now and then at his too-keen peripheral vision.

Another crackle on the headphones. “A Niang monkey on the right. No, three, several, stacked on a vine.” It was Ashe. “They’ve seen us now, and I think they’ve frozen. Yes. Harmless.” No need to point them out. Two pulse guns were trained on the hairy, spiderlike herbivores, finally panned away. The line continued its march. In the center clump of mission specialists, Clio was followed by Imanishi and her assistant, then the astronomer Richardson, with Ashe tending toward the rear, his big frame easy to pick out though everyone wore camouflage fatigues and visor helmets. She looked back from time to time, and he seemed often to be watching her, perhaps even as Tandy watched
her, and as the soldiers seemed to watch them all, hands upon their rifles.

Clio loosened her shirt, tied it halter-style around her midriff, inviting a breeze. A deeper rattling on the canopy announced heavy rain. It washed over them in a blur of light and water, forcing Clio to tuck in her shirt again, and sending chilling trickles down her pants.

“Damn rain,” Imanishi said, off mike. “Can you see anything?”

“We won’t see anything,” Clio said. “If they come, we’ll just hear them.”

“I can’t hear a damn thing,” Imanishi said. “Not a damn thing.”

“They can probably hear
you
just fine,” Clio said.

Imanishi looked over at her, lifting her chin to peer at Clio from under her visor.

“Directional sound amplifiers,” Clio said. “If
we’ve
got them, I’m sure
they
do.”

“Shut up back there,” over the earphones.

Clio’s right boot was leaking, filling her sock with the warm recycled water of her tread. Wished to goddamn hell the other one leaked too, even them up, as they slogged on and on through endless forest.

Off to the side, on a bush with a full head of tubular stalks, a small creature with a face like a plate balanced on the end of one of the stalks, which teetered up and down as the rain struck. The creature cocked its head at her, looking surprised. As she passed, she noted that it was being devoured from behind by the open, sucking ends of a tube leaf.

A rifle shot thudded and the line ahead fell into a crouch.

“Down!” somebody yelled

Clio scrambled to get her body low, slipped on a woody tendril, regained her footing, as other shots sluiced through the wetness. “Our fire, our fire,” Pequot yelled. “Hold your fire until you sight a target.”

Several moments passed and nothing, then, “A goddamn bandanna,” someone said on mike.

The lead grunt with the pulse rifle waved a red kerchief from the barrel of the gun, where it flopped soggily like a piece of raw liver. “It’s a bandanna, ripped to shreds, but its one of ours,” Lieutenant McCrae said, on mike.

“A warning?” This from Pequot.

A garbled pulse of static from the front of the line.

“Say again, McCrae?”

The static squawked and faded, squawked again. Clio heard, “…  on a bush. Can’t say for sure.”

“Front and rear guard, pull skkkkkkskkk,” managed to emerge from the earphones before they exploded with noise. Clio couldn’t tell if it was the earphones or the drumming of rain on her visor hat, but sounds flooded together in a common deluge of noise, momentarily camouflaging the gunfire that now erupted unmistakably in the rear of the column, joined by screams.

Somehow Clio found herself splayed out on her stomach with a mouthful of mud, as someone behind her shoved into her and pushed her chin along the muddy side of a small torrent running next to the path.