To his surprise, the six identically masked speakers remained calm. The response from the individual on the far left was quietly appreciative.
“We are greatly relieved,” he said. “We intend no affront, but you of course understand that we will continue to monitor the Covenant project, to assure ourselves that you are a man of your word.”
“Of course.” Yutani hurriedly downed the rest of his drink. His hand was shaking. “Were I in your position, I would do no less. It is the only sensible thing to do.”
“Then we will leave you to the remainder of your late evening,” another speaker declared. “To reflect on what we have told you, what you have seen, and all that has been discussed.”
Yutani nodded vigorously. “Should you contact me again, for whatever reason, I promise you that from now on I will respond immediately, and without hesitation. Do not hesitate.”
The space between the wall projector and his couch went vacant. A moment of silence passed, then the broadcast he had been watching returned as if nothing had happened.
He did indeed respond as the last speaker had suggested, sitting and pondering everything he had seen. Of one thing he was convinced. Based on everything he had heard and seen, an immediate and significant response was required. He began to react, swiftly and with conviction.
The first thing he did was put down the towel he had held to his mouth—not to stifle a gasp of horror, but to hide the laughter he had fought hard to suppress. Next he checked to make certain that everything he had seen and heard had been properly recorded. Following that he turned off the heater, built into the couch, which had induced so much perspiration over the course of the exchange.
He made a note to fire the person in charge of his electronic security.
Then he called London. He had no doubt that the city was home to a wide array of psychiatric specialists. What he needed was someone who dealt with psychotic disorders. He would need to put one or more of them on the Weyland-Yutani payroll.
XXI
With every passing day, Daniels looked forward more and more to deepsleep. It seemed that for every item ticked off her pre-departure checklist, a dozen more appeared. Mundane containers of materials and supplies had to be repositioned within the main cargo hold in order to fit them within predetermined spaces.
That was easy, however, compared to inspecting the massive terraforming machines and their related support vehicles, each of which was a technical marvel unto itself. Everything they needed had to be there, stored in its proper space. Once the Covenant passed the moon, there would be no returning for spare parts. If they left something behind, they would have to do without.
There was one essential they wouldn’t need to haul, though, and that was dirt. She grinned to herself. Plowable soil for the farmers, refinable ore for the miners, and perpendicular rock for her vertically inclined husband. She wondered what he would do if Origae-6 turned out to be a desert world, composed of nothing but shifting dunes. Or more likely, something marvelously fertile but akin to the North American Great Plains or the Ukrainian steppe.
She forced herself to return to the work at hand. She was getting ahead of herself, imagining the surface of a world that from long-range survey was known to be livable, but whose topography was still a mystery. It had been determined that Origae-6 had land, oceans, near-terrestrial gravity, and a breathable atmosphere. Beyond that, it would be up to the colonists themselves to discover its finer details.
She and Jacob would be two of those doing the discovering. Once they were there, it would take years before every last piece of colonization equipment was unloaded, checked out, and put into service.
“You sleep with that comm unit more than you do with me.”
Turning away from the buzz of activity in the cargo hold, she wrapped both arms around the device and hugged it to her.
“It keeps me warm. You’re always in the head.”
Her husband’s expression turned doleful. “Ship food doesn’t always agree with me. It’ll be better in deepsleep. Nothing too hot to upset my stomach.”
Holding onto the comm unit with one hand, she poked him several times in the chest with a forefinger. “You’re always tired when you come to bed.”
“How would you know?” he countered. “You’re always asleep by the time I finish work.” His mouth arced into a playful smile. It was hard for anyone to resist that smile. It had charmed engineers, professors, politicians, Weyland-Yutani executives, and—when a certain moment had come—had charmed her into saying “yes.”
She sighed heavily. “There’s no free time on this job. Not until we go into deepsleep, and then it doesn’t matter.” Turning, she gestured to where an enormous excavator was being wheeled into position for transit, the task made slightly easier by the fact that the artificial gravity on the ship was set slightly less than Earth-normal. “Not only do I have to make sure everything that’s loaded is as described in the general manifest and in working order, but in the end it’s up to me to decide where it all should go.” She held up the comm unit. “It’s one thing to diagram it out nice and neat in an office, and something else when you’re expected to squeeze in an extra dirt marauder or two at the last minute.”
He nodded understandingly. “Funny how some jobs never change. You’re riding in Earth orbit, hundreds of kilometers above the surface, but you’re doing the same job as a clipper ship supercargo loading tea and porcelain in eighteenth-century Hong Kong. Fitting cargo into a hold.”
She coughed. The humidity, like every other component of life support on the Covenant, was supposedly set to an optimum level, but she intended to have a word with Mother about the on-board atmosphere. She found it too dry.
“I’ll be glad when the company stops trying to cram yet another load onto the ship.” She made a face. “That’s one thing that differs from your clipper ship. We can carry anything that will fit on board, without having to worry about sinking.” Her comm unit chimed softly and he waited while she attended to detail number 786 of the day’s thousand or so.
“What about you, Jacob?” she asked when she had signed off again. “How’s your day going?”
“That’s what I came to tell you.”
Feigning impatience, she gestured with the comm unit. “You could have just called.”
“I know.” That irresistible smile again, she marveled. “But then I’d miss out on one of the rare chances to interrupt you in person.” He turned serious. “We got another security update from Ground. Telling us to look out for this, warning us to be alert for that. More of the same, except with even greater urgency.”
She shook her head. Behind her, metal clanged on metal and she winced. She felt a personal sense of responsibility toward each and every piece of equipment that was being loaded.
“I don’t see the point of issuing warnings with ‘greater urgency.’ There isn’t anything we can do that we haven’t already done, and from what I understand, surface security has been locked down so tight that a Norway rat couldn’t get into a shuttle without showing three separate kinds of identification and having a retina scan run on its beady little eyes.”
“Nevertheless,” he replied firmly, “I have to go around and run a check on each and every station and crew member.”
“What, again?” The disbelief in her voice was palpable.
“Again.” He nodded.
So in order to comply with unbending company regulations, Jacob was forced to ask his wife a series of pointed questions. Some of her answers were suitable. The ones that were unprintable he modified so as not to shock the undoubtedly innocent proctors who would have to collate the results. When he had concluded the unavoidable interview he turned to leave, only to remember what he had really wanted to tell her in the first place.