“No. It’s no surprise. We got off lightly with the last front.”
Another staffer arrived, carrying her cup–Regan Chiles dropped onto a bench opposite, scavenger‑wise spotting a body in authority and descending with every indication of problems. “Got a little difficulty,” she said. “Tape machines are down. It’s this salt air and the humidity. We pulled the most delicate parts and put them into seal; but we’re going to have to take the machines apart and clean them; and we’re really not set up for that.”
“You’ll do the best you can.” He really did not want to hear this. He looked about him desperately, found fewer people in the dome than he had expected, which distracted him with wondering why. Chiles went on talking, handing him her problems, and he nodded and tried to take them in, the overload Education was putting on Computer Maintenance, because inexpert personnel had exposed some of the portable units to the conditions outside. Because Education had programs behind schedule…and shifted blame.
“Look,” he said finally, “your chain of command runs through Maj. Gallin. All this ought to go to him.”
A pursed lip, a nod, an inwardness of the eyes. Something was amiss.
“What answer did Gallin give you?”
“Gallin just told us to fix it and to cooperate.”
“Well, you don’t go over Gallin’s head, lieutenant. You hear me.”
“Sir,” Chiles muttered, clenched her square jaw and took another breath. “But begging the colonel’s pardon, sir–my people are going shift and shift and others are idle.”
“That’s because your department has something wrong, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll talk to the other departments.” He was conscious of Bilas at his elbow, witness to it all. “I stand by Gallin, you hear. I won’t have this bypassing channels.–Drink the tea, lieutenant; both of you. If we have any problems like that, then you keep to chain of command.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sir,” Bilas murmured.
He stayed there, sipping the tea, himself and Chiles and Bilas; and soon others came up the table to intimate their troubles to him, so that his stomach knotted up again in all the discomfort he had left his quarters to avoid.
And finally after he had drunk several cups of tea and had to go out to avail himself of the latrine in back of the dome, he headed back to his own quarters with his collar turned up and an ache in his bones that felt like dull needles. An ariel slithered through a puddle in his path, miniature mariner, swimming for a moment, more intent on direction than convenience, which was the habit of ariels.
A siren disturbed the air. He looked about him in the pale gray haze, tried to get location on it, and thought it was coming from somewhere near the fields.
vii
Day 58 CR
They brought Ada Beaumont back in a sheet with the blood and the rain soaking it, and Bob Davies following along after the litter with his clothes soaked and stained with mud and blood, and that look in his eyes that was nowhere, and nowhen, as if he had backed away from life.
Conn came out into the rain and looked down at the smallish bundle on the stretcher–stared confusedly, because it was always ridiculous how something as large across life as Ada, a special op who had survived Fargone and the war and the Rising, who had been wiry and cagy and full of every trick the enemy never expected–could come down to an object so small and diminished. Men and women stood with their eyes hazed with tears, in the fog and the mist, but Bob Davies just stared in shock, his face gone ghastly pale; and Conn put his hands in his pockets and felt a panic and a hollowness in his gut.
“It was a caliban burrow,” Pete Gallin said, wiped the water out of his eyes with a bloody, abraded hand. “Andresson–saw it happen.”
“Andresson.” Conn looked at the man, a thin and wispy fellow with distracted eyes.
“We were fixing that washout up there and she was talking to me on the rig when the ground behind her feet just–went. This big crawler behind her, parked, nobody on it–just started tipping for no cause. She went under it; and we had to get the winch, sir–we got another crawler turned and got the winch on it, but it was one of those lizard burrows, like–like three, four meters down; and in that soft ground, the crawler on it–the whole thing just dissolved…”
“Take precautions,” Conn said; and then thought that they were all expecting him to grieve over Beaumont, and they would hate him because he was like this. “We can’t have another.” There was a dire silence, and the bearers of the litter just stood there in the rain shifting the poles in their hands because of the weight. Their cropped heads shed beads of water, and red seeped through the thin sheeting and ran down into the puddles. “We bury in the earth,” he said, his mind darting irrecoverably to practical matters, for stationers, who were not used to that. “Over by the sea, I think, where there’s no building planned.”
He walked away–like that, in silence. He did not realize either the silence or his desertion until he was too far away to make it good. He walked to his own quarters and shut the door behind him, shed his wet jacket and flung it down on the bench.
Then he cried, standing there in the center of the room, and shivered in the cold and knew that there was nothing in Pete Gallin or in any of the others which would help him. Old as he was getting and sick as he was getting, the desertion was all on Ada’s side.
He was remarkably lucid in his shock. He knew, for instance, that the burrowing beyond the perimeters was worse news than Ada’s death. It threw into doubt all their blueprints for coexistence with the calibans. It spelled conflict. It altered the future of the world–because they had to cope with it with only the machines and the resources in their hands. When the weather cleared they would have to sit down and draw new plans, and somehow he had to pull things into a coherency that would survive. That would save forty thousand human lives.
Promotions had to be done. Gallin had to be brought up to co‑governor: Gallin–a good supervisor and a decent man and no help at all. Maybe a civ like Gutierrez–Gutierrez was the brightest of the division chiefs, in more than bio; but there was no way to jump Gutierrez over others with more seniority. Or Sedgewick–a legal mind with rank but no decisiveness.
He wiped his eyes, found his hand trembling uncontrollably.
Someone splashed up to the door, opened it without a by your leave, a sudden noise of rain and gust of cold. He looked about. It was Dean, of the medical staff.
“You all right, sir?”
He straightened his shoulders. “Quite. How’s Bob?”
“Under sedation. Are you sure, sir?”
“I’ll be changing my clothes. I’ll be over in the main dome in a minute. Just let me be.”
“Yes, sir.” A lingering look. Dean left. Conn turned to the strung clothesline which was his closet and his laundry, and picked the warmest clothes he had, still slightly damp. He wanted a drink. He wanted it very badly.
But he went and set things right in the dome instead–met with the staff, laid out plans, unable finally to go out to the burial because of the chill, because he began to shiver and the chief surgeon laid down the law–which was only what he wanted.
Tired people came back, wet, and shivering and sallow‑faced. Davies was prostrate in sickbay, under heavier sedation after the burial–had broken down entirely, hysterical and loud, which Ada had never been. Ever. Gallin sat with shadowed eyes and held a steaming cup in front of him at table. “You’re going to have to survey the area,” Conn said to him, with others at the table, because there was no privacy, “and you’re going to have to keep surveying, to find out if there’s more undermining.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ruffles, on her stack of boxes, flicked her tongue. Conn regarded her balefully past Gallin’s slumped shoulder and bowed head. “It was an accident,” he said. “That’s all there is to say about it. We just don’t intend to have another one.”
“Sir,” Gallin said, “that caliban mound on this side of the river… I’d like to break that up.”