The air outside was crisp and moist. A few stars adorned the sky. That nondescript one high in the northern quarter was Sol, if Zoe remembered her Isian constellations correctly. Cronos rode the hazy horizon.
Camp lights flared on, momentarily blinding her. She drew a deep breath. The filter of her excursion suit sterilized the ambient air but didn’t warm it. A breath of Isis cooled her throat.
She retrieved a tool kit from one of the damaged pack-mule tractibles and scrolled the machine’s telltales. Her corneal display listed multiple joint dysfunctions. A lubricant problem perhaps? She disassembled a ball-and-socket connector and found it fouled with what looked like mustard-yellow slime.
“Something got into the joint,” she told Hayes. “Something biological. It must be eating the teflons.”
There was no immediate answer. She wiped the joint clean with an absorbent cloth and locked it back into place. A temporary fix at best, but maybe she could patch one or two tractibles well enough to get herself and her essential equipment back to Yambuku…
“Heads up, Zoe.”
She looked up sharply.
The field lamps cast a searing white radiance all around her, a glow that faded into the dark of the forest beyond the meadow. She shaded her eyes and scanned the perimeter. Recognizable shapes began to disentangle themselves from the darkness.
Diggers had surrounded the clearing.
They stood at the perimeter of the meadow, spaced maybe five meters apart—twenty or more of them, some on four legs, some reared back on their hind pair. A few were armed with fire-hardened spears. Their black eyes glittered in the harsh light.
Her first reaction was fear. Her pulse ramped up and her palms began to sweat. These were animals, after all, like the Hons she had once seen in a Trust preserve, but larger and vastly more strange. Cunning, unpredictable. The hint of intelligence that had made them seem so nearly human was less endearing in this windy darkness. There was intelligence here, certainly, but also a host of instincts purely Isian, purely unfathomable.
Thank God, they weren’t advancing. Maybe the camp lights had attracted them. (Though what if those lights failed? What if a new set of malfunctions brought the full weight of the dark down on her?)
Or maybe these fears were a product of her thymostatic disorder. Systems failing inside and out, Zoe thought. But I was made for this. I was made for this. They’re aware of me now, as I am aware of them. We see each other.
Hayes’ voice erupted in her ear. “Stay still, Zoe, and we’ll send one of the surviving tractibles into the forest, maybe draw their attention away from you. We have remensors nearby but the wind is making it hard to keep them airborne.”
“No. No, Tam, don’t.”
“Excuse me?”
“They’re not hostile.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I’m not under attack. Something like this had to happen sooner or later.”
“But not tonight. And you’re coming home tomorrow.”
“Tam, I may not get another chance. This is their first real-life encounter with a human being. Most likely they’ll look me over for a while and just get bored. Keep the functioning tractibles ready, but don’t make enemies.”
“I’m not proposing to slaughter them, Zoe. Just—”
“Wait.”
Movement on the perimeter. Zoe turned her head. One of the diggers had stepped out of rank. Its gait was two-legged, forelimbs raised, a fight-or-flight posture. It carried a sturdy branch in one hand. It stepped closer to the polyplex shelter, until Zoe recognized the array of white whiskers around the animal’s muzzle. “It’s Old Man!”
“Zoe—”
“Quiet!”
The moment was fragile. Zoe stood slowly from the place where she had crouched beside the tractible and took an infinitesimal step of her own toward Old Man. What must he think I am? An animal, an enemy? A freakish reflection of himself?
She held out her arms—empty hands, weaponless and clawless.
Hayes must have had at least one remensor nearby, because he had seen the motion too. “Three meters, Zoe. Closer than that, I herd him away. If any of the rest of them move, I want you next to the shelter, where we can protect you. Understand?”
She understood too much. She understood that she had reached her destiny point, that time and the circumstances of her life had conspired to bring her to this place. For one ecstatic moment she was the axis on which the stars revolved.
She took several bold steps forward. The digger reared up like a startled centipede. Its black eyes rolled in their sockets. Zoe slowed but didn’t stop. She kept her hands in front of her, still a judicious distance from the animal.
But close enough to smell it. Close enough to see the steam rising from its warm underbelly into the night air. Four billion years of un-Earthly evolution had shaped this aggregate of cells, this beast. She looked at it. And, amazingly, it looked at her. An impossible distance from the planet of her birth, this miracle had happened: Clay had made life. Life regarded life. First light, Zoe thought.
The digger was very quick. It drew back the tree branch it was hefting before Zoe could begin to flinch.
No, not like this, she thought. It shouldn’t be like this—
“Zoe?”
Hayes’ voice was distant and irrelevant.
No time to step back, take shelter behind the tractibles. The tractibles had begun to move, but slowly. More systems failing? The digger raised its left upper forearm, the club secure in its gripping hand. She saw the downward swing of it with frozen clarity.
The impact blurred everything. She fell through the windy night.
SIXTEEN
Although he had prayed he would never have to do it, containing biological contamination aboard the Isis Orbital Station was the first task for which Kenyon Degrandpre had been trained. The crisis and its thousand details occupied all his attention. And that was infinitely better than allowing himself to consider the long-term consequences of the outbreak.
He summoned all five of the station’s senior managers, including Leander of Medical (replacing the quarantined Corbus Nefford) and Sullivan of Foodstuffs and Biota. They were a motley collation of Trust outriders—all of them competent managers, none of them Family except by the most distant and tenuous connection. Degrandpre himself had such a connection; his maternal greatgrandfather had been a Corbille. But the birth was unregistered and hence irrelevant.
His first order of business had been to contain the quarantine pod, and he had done that. Before today the IOS had been a sterile zone, isolated from Isis by the hard vacuum beyond its walls. Now the IOS was itself a breached environment, an apple into which a dangerous worm had gnawed.
The isolation ward had become a Level Five hot zone, contained on its perimeter by fiat Level Four zones—these were the exterior medical chambers, such as the one in which Corbus Nefford was currently trapped—and by Level One, Two, and Three precautionary zones beyond that, i.e., the engineering pod and a maintenance space where Turing assemblers were prepared for launch.
The problem was, there was very little redundancy aboard the IOS. The size and weight restrictions imposed by the mechanics of the Higgs launches narrowed the margin of error to a fine line. Even at peak efficiency, the IOS had always been one or two critical failures away from wholesale shutdown. Without the machine shop, and with access restricted to the Turing launchers—
But no; that was tomorrow’s problem.
Solen of Engineering said, “We’re looking at how to relocate critical functions as far as possible from the hot pod. The farms, thank God, are about as far from quarantine as you can get, a hundred eighty degrees of the circle. We’re setting up a temporary clinic for injuries outside the agriculture perimeter; disease cases, if any, go directly to the quarantine perimeter.”