—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 64
Decisions
"Opinions are like chili powder-best used in moderation."
-SOLOMON SHORT
Madness turned into mania.
It swept through the airship like a fever. Faces were flushed with excitement. We weren't just watching anymore. We were going to do something.
The children. Save the children. A rescue. We could make up for our failure with the missing flyer. We never found her or her aircraft. The jungle swallowed her up.
Or… something that lived in the jungle.
Rumors. Excitement. Frenzy. Purpose.
I understood the general better now. Her sudden emotional withdrawal. She had to let this happen. She didn't want to. But she knew. The alternative was worse. Too much anguish already. Too much hurt. How much before the whole thing snaps? It was all out of control. Everything. The momentum of events was pushing us relentlessly forward. The tidal wave of time. The seconds piled up in an avalanche of death.
The mission passed out of my hands. My mouth still moved. Opinions. Advice. But no authority. Trampled in the stampede. It was Siegel's job now. "Oh, are you still here?" Even Lizard sometimes-
I knew she didn't mean it. It still hurt. I went through the motions anyway. The monkeys swirled around me. Everybody's crazy. But knowing it doesn't change anything. Some of us showed it less than others. I moved from place to place. I spoke to faces. The world blurred and focused. I looked at pictures. I wrote my reports. I answered questions. I didn't ask. I went through the motions.
I stared at myself in the mirror, wondering how I'd gotten so old. Who am I, anyway? What do I put on my resume? Where do I go next? Everybody has a job, but me. Without a job, who am I? They took it away from me. So who am I now? Even Lizard sometimes doesn't know
Memories are always dead people. I'm the man who danced with worms. The herdwalker. The worm-lover. The renegade. The deserter. The loose cannon. The bearer of bad news. Alienated. Man without a flag. No colors on my sides. No stripes. No stars.
I orbited worlds, unable to land. My thoughts buzzed. Strange images tormented my waking moments. My sleep was dreamless and unrefreshing. Morning was a hallucinogenic after-daze. The pictures blurred and focused. The horror was a drug. I stumbled through the movements. They saw it in my face and hurried past me.
The Indian scout. Kicked upstairs. Forgotten. Fuck you very much. Too smart for his own good. The system survives. Deny the reality. Don't listen to him. The conversation in my head was an insanity that couldn't be switched off. All the reactions. All the nightmares. Bad pictures.
I just want to know who I am! What's my job here!
-and woke up in a strategy session, shaking my head. Captain Harbaugh. General Tirelli. Lieutenant Siegel. Sergeant Lopez. Dr. Shreiber, scowling unhappily. Dan Corrigan. Dwan Grodin. Clayton Johns. The rest of the SLAM team. Me. The conference room was filled with grim faces. Prepping for the mission.
"No, no, no—" Dr. Shreiber was saying. "Not after Coari. It's not possible. I don't see how you can do it. How are you going to drop a team down unnoticed into the middle of a nest? And then how are you going to retrieve them and thirty children?"
Lopez was shouting in her face, every bit as angry. "It'll work. We drop a perimeter of spiders. Half the team defends, the other half loads the pods. We load 'em, we launch 'em, the flyers catch 'em and bring 'em back. Ten pods, two spares. We pop one every thirty seconds. We're in and out, six minutes max."
"And what are the worms going to do during all this?" Johns asked. "Stand around with their thumbs up their asses?"
"Interesting image," I remarked. "Worms don't have thumbs or asses. And they don't stand." They all ignored me.
"We do it at night. The pods light up in the sky. That'll give the flyers a target and distract the worms on the ground."
"The worms are most active at night," I noted. Again, nobody noticed. I laid my pen down on the table and looked to Lizard. She was following the argument, letting it run its course. I wondered how long this would continue before I lost my temper.
"The w-weak l-link is the d-drop," said Dwan. "Th-there's no w-way to g-guarantee th-that you'll g-get th-the whole t-team into th-the c-corral."
Siegel answered that one. "SLAM parasails. The inflatables give us hovering time and maneuverability. Each member of the drop-team takes one spider and one launch pod down with him. We have twelve volunteers, they're running continual simulations in VR, but they're ready to go now. The first ones down will spray an aerogel containment around the corral. That'll buy us the time we need to position the spiders. By the time the spiders are overrun, we'll be gone."
"You're too confident," said Shreiber.
"Do you have a better idea?"
"Don't go. The worms are twitchy."
"How do you know that?" Siegel asked. "When did you become the worm expert?" He looked to me for support, but I glanced away. His shot was well intended, but badly aimed.
"Don't take my word for it," Shreiber said. "They know we're here."
Dwan spoke up then. "Sh-she's r-right. M-mostly. Th-the p-probes we've d-dropped have m-measured a v-very high level of agitation in th-the n-nest. W-we m-measure th-the amount of in-movement p-per acre. C-compared't-to wh-what we m-measured I-last m-month, th-the g-gastropedes s-seem c-close to p-panic. W-we d-don't know if it's b-because of th-the imminent g-growth ph-phase or if it has anything't-to d-do with us or wh-what ha-happened at Coari. Or m-maybe th-they know th-that th-the B-bosch is close to th-the m-mandala. B-but th-the g-gastropedes are d-d-definitely agitated."
Siegel didn't like the news. He wanted to shrug it away, but he couldn't. He looked to me. I nodded. It's true. "Shit," he said. But to give him credit, he remained on purpose. "Okay, we'll find another way to get in. Maybe a distraction to pull the worms away. Some kind of display-? Maybe we can put the flyers in the sky on the opposite side of the nest?" Again he looked to me.
I saw it only because I was looking in that direction. Lizard wasn't paying attention. Flight Engineer Harry Sameshima-he of the Japanese garden-had slipped in almost unnoticed and was waiting quietly at Captain Harbaugh's elbow, a clipboard in his hand. Lieutenant Siegel was still waiting for my answer. I waggled my hand in an iffy gesture. Maybe. We just didn't know. "We'd have to test it. Put some flyers out tonight, make some lights in the sky, monitor the worm reactions, go in tomorrow night." Nobody else saw it, they were still focused on Siegel and Lopez and Shreiber and me. Lizard glanced to Captain Harbaugh. Captain Harbaugh glanced to Sameshima. Sameshima shook his head no, a barely perceptible movement. He laid his clipboard down in front of Captain Harbaugh, who glanced at it briefly, then slid it over in front of General Tirelli, who also glanced at it briefly. She spoke softly. "I don't think we have the time."
It brought the discussion to an instant halt. Everybody looked to her.
She looked uncomfortable. "It's a… a matter of ballast. Keeping a ship like this aloft is a constant juggling act of ballast versus helium. We're reaching the end of our operating range. We have to drop the rest of our monitors and pull out no later than noon tomorrow."
She was lying.
When the Bosch had been refitted, her operational range had been expanded to twenty-one days. She carried additional helium in her tanks to keep her aloft for a week beyond that. Something was wrong.