Marianne seized Isabelle’s arm. “Where is it? The device to call back the ship—does it still work? Where is it?”
“Nobody knows,” Isabelle said. “It’s gone. Buried somewhere in the mountains. Mining out the original tablets with starship plans…. they’d been there for 140,000 years! Getting them free took explosives. Caves collapsed, tunnels closed up, the ground shifted. Nothing but the coming spore cloud crisis could have led the Mothers to cause that much environmental disturbance. But Ree^ka told me that the call-back device is described in the tablets but wasn’t with the drive or the plans.
“It’s lost, and nobody knows where.”
CHAPTER 16
At every slight rise in the ground, Austin expected to see someone coming after him: Noah or Isabelle or Leo or maybe one of the McGuires, whom he’d only seen a few times in his life but remembered vividly. Big, silent, scary. Although why would the McGuires come after Austin? They didn’t care about anything but their mines. No, it would be Noah or Isabelle or Leo. Maybe all three. All three would be a problem. Austin had a stolen pipe gun, but he didn’t think he could shoot Noah or Isabelle, and Leo would probably shoot him first. Certainly Lieutenant Lamont would.
He’d dragged Claire into a sort of cover made of bushes, so he could rest. Rain pattered on the dark leaves above them as Austin sat cross-legged and ate a piece of makfruit from his pocket. It was dotted with lint. He ungagged Claire—they were far enough away that no one in the compound could hear her—and held out part of the fruit.
She ignored it. “What are you doing? Untie me!”
She didn’t sound groggy at all. Maybe he didn’t give her enough knockout drug. On the other hand, maybe it was good that she wasn’t groggy—if she could walk, he wouldn’t have to drag her. He launched into the speech he’d rehearsed.
“Dr. Patel—Claire—I’m taking you someplace safe. It’s called Haven. There is food and water and safety from the collapse of civilization when the spore cloud comes. My mother is already there, and Graa^lok—do you remember my friend Graa^lok? Also two other Terrans and, soon, some Kindred. We’re all going to rebuild civilization after the looters and other desperate people are dead, and you’re going to be part of the rebuilding!”
Claire’s mouth fell open. Raindrops dripped inside and she closed it again. Austin had always liked her pretty, lilting voice, but now she sounded almost like Isabelle. “Are you insane? We’re trying to prevent the ‘collapse of civilization’! Untie me immediately and take me back to the compound.”
“I can’t do that, Claire.” There—that sounded definite and mature. Austin improved on it. “I’m sorry I can’t do that, but I have the greater good to think of.”
Claire tugged at the ropes around her wrists. They didn’t give. She screamed. “Help! Help! Help me!”
What if someone was following them; could they hear her? But if anyone was following, they’d find Austin anyway; dragging Claire this far had left a clear muddy trail. Austin held his breath and waited.
No one came. When Claire finally stopped yelling, he stood up. How would Leo do this? Kind but steely. “Claire, we can do this two ways. You can walk with me holding that rope, or I can knock you out again and drag you, the way I did before. But your legs are all muddy and the back part of your wrap is nearly worn through and exposing your… uh… you.”
He felt himself blushing.
Claire stared at him a long time. Then she crawled out from under the bushes, stretching the rope to its limit, and twisted her body with its bound feet in a complete circle. Austin, crawling out after her, knew what she saw: nothing. Empty, rocky fields in the rain, with the mountains rising abruptly ahead.
“We’re going on now,” Austin said. He wished that his voice was as deep as Leo’s.
“Who was killed at the compound?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is the whole camp rioting?”
“I don’t know. Yes. No. Not all of it.”
“You are an idiot.”
Austin didn’t deign to answer that. He strode forward, tugging her to her feet and then pulling on her rope, and Claire was forced to follow. She stubbed her toe on a rock and cried out.
“Oh, sorry, here’s your other shoe!” He fished it out of his pocket and handed it to her.
She couldn’t put it on with her hands tied like that. Austin bent and tugged the sandal onto her foot, untied her ankles, and straightened. He hadn’t known that small, pretty face could look so scornful.
Claire was a much better walker than Kayla. In another few hours, they reached the tunnel opening. Austin, who’d been a little deflated by her angry silence, felt better. They’d made it without being captured! Now she would see what her rescue was all about!
“I’m going to crawl in there and you’re going to stay here until I tug on the rope. Don’t be afraid, Claire, inside Haven is much different from the first tunnel.”
“I’m not afraid. I’m furious.”
Well, Austin could see that. He dropped to hands and knees, crawled to the grate, and rang the bell. When Tony appeared, he said, “I’ve got her. Dr. Patel. She’s with me now.”
Tony grinned. “Hey! Good man! Come on in, both of you!”
He unlocked the grate and helped Austin down the drop. Austin tugged on the rope until Claire appeared, her tiny body with space all around her in the tunnel, her rain-streaked face distorted by contempt.
Tony said, “Welcome, Doctor.”
Claire said, “When the Rangers come after me, you are finished.”
Austin said, “No, Claire, you don’t understand. This place is impregnable.”
“The boy is right,” Tony said. “We made sure of that. Here, let me lift you down. Just beyond that farther door is Haven. Are you hungry?”
“Finished,” Claire said. “All of you.”
“If only we had a gene sequencer,” Branch said.
“Stop saying that,” Marianne said. She added, “Please.”
They sat on pallets in the leelee room. It was the only room in the clinic not crowded with people, but it was filled nonetheless. With equipment, with the safe, with live and dead leelees, the dead and infected ones in their negative-pressure cages. That spared Marianne the smell of putrefaction; the live ones smelled bad enough. They chattered; the signals that Branch kept replaying from the colony ship chattered; Marianne felt her mind chattering and stuttering from going over the same limited data in her memory.
Much of the lab equipment had been destroyed by the bomb, but Marianne’s laptop had been in the clinic, not in Big Lab. There wasn’t anything on her laptop about virophages; she hadn’t expected to deal with them on Kindred, and of course she’d expected to have access to the digital library on the Friendship. Virophages reproduced only inside their host viruses, like Russian nesting dolls, each smaller than the one that contained it. That required a host large enough, as viruses go. Also, the virophage had to be very small. The first one discovered was only fifty nanometers in size and had only twenty-one genes, thirteen of no known origin. It also contained a genetic segment of its host, which implied a genetic transfer between virus and virophage. To examine a virophage was to look at the earliest type of evolution, a trip back in time that made the fourteen-year jump from Earth to World insignificant. R. sporii might contain a similar segment of the virophage on the colony ship from some eons-ago encounter, so that when the two encountered each other again, the virophage moved in and set up housekeeping.