But once again Arkasha wasn’t willing to follow the script.
“I say we land,” he announced, tossing the naked proposal out like a duelist flinging his glove at an opponent’s feet. “Enough probes and flybys and extrapolations. We need a good dose of ground truth. And trust me, if the question is whether or not Bella’s DVI numbers are right, we’ll know that the minute we open the airlock.”
“Unacceptable,” By-the-Book Ahmed snapped. Why did he always have to sound as if he were lecturing children when he was talking to the mission specialists? “Too much risk involved.”
“Too much risk to the mission?” Arkasha retorted, “or too much risk that you can’t cover your ass if things go wrong?”
“I’m responsible for the safety of this ship and crew,” Ahmed said sententiously. “I’m not willing to put us down on a planet youcan’t even give me reliable numbers on.”
Arkasha opened his mouth and shut it again. He and the other Rostovs had all bridled under Ahmed’s heavy-handed assertions of authority ever since the mission started. But what could they do, really? The Ahmeds were the ship’s pilots. There might be arguments once they were all planetside about relative authority, but as long as they were in space they were essentially captives.
“I see Arkasha’s point though,” Laid-back Ahmed said, tactfully directing his comment as much to his sib as to Arkasha. “Perhaps we can find a middle ground? What if we agree to spend a predetermined amount of time check—uh, redoing the DVI, and then meet again and make a firm decision on how to proceed? That’ll give us a deadline for one thing, so the DVI doesn’t turn into too much of a time sink.”
Arkasha shrugged—but this time the movement had none of the dismissive quality with which he’d mocked By-the-Book Ahmed before.
“It’s just a question of minimizing the uncertainties, really. Does that make sense to everyone?”
Nods all around the table.
“Would a week be enough time to minimize the uncertainties? What do you all think? I know it’s a tight schedule for some of you, but does a week work for everyone?”
It seemed a week did work for everyone.
“Arkady, would you work with Arkasha and Aurelia to put together a plan of attack?”
“Absolutely.” Arkady accepted for all three of them before Arkasha or Aurelia could stir up any more trouble.
“Is tomorrow evening too soon for us to look over your plan together? No? Good. I’ll look to go over it with you tomorrow evening. And then I’ll go around and get feedback from the individual teams before we finalize the schedule.”
It was neatly done, Arkady realized, with a newfound admiration for the big Aziz A. A potential conflict had been avoided. Everyone’s opinion had been solicited, but in a way that gave no one the chance to complain about his or her colleagues or foment bad feeling. The main dissenter had been co-opted by being put in charge of administering the very decision that had been taken over his head. Arkady had been inserted into the vendetta between Arkasha and Bella so that there was no reason for the two of them to have to deal with each other until they cooled off a bit. And all potential for conflict had been siphoned off into “individual consultations” in which Ahmed’s considerable charm could be deployed to head off any potential acrimony.
But underneath the neat managerial tricks, Arkady had the sense that he’d just watched a tectonic realignment of continents. Bella, who had been jockeying with the equally assertive Aurelias for social dominance, had been publicly shamed. By-the-Book Ahmed had broken fast out of the gate, then fallen behind in the backstretch. Laid-back Ahmed, despite his easygoing affability, had emerged as the real leader of the expedition. And though he clearly neither wanted nor sought the role, Arkasha had replaced By-the-Book Ahmed as the unacknowledged second-in-command.
As the rest of the team stretched and shuffled their papers and began getting back to the real business of the day, Arkady glanced at Bella. She was still in her chair, sitting up quite straight, with her hands resting in her lap and her beautiful face set into a mask of nobly wounded dignity. But her violet eyes were fixed on Arkasha as if he were the only other person in the room. And one look at their expression left no doubt in Arkady’s mind that his sib had just earned an implacable enemy.
Night cycle.
No moon lit the sky. Novalis loomed overhead, visible only as a darker blackness in the surrounding void.
A brush fire raged across the invisible curve of the northern continent’s central grasslands. On the ground the killing fields must cover thousands of kilometers, but from here the fire was just a pinprick in the surrounding blackness: a reminder that life itself was fire, and that all life devoured other life just as surely as the flames licking across Novalis’s gravid belly.
Arkady’s feelings toward the planet had changed subtly over the last few days. His impatient excitement had given way to an apprehension bordering on fear. Eve of battle nerves, he told himself, brought to an uncomfortably high pitch by that distasteful nonsense over the DVI numbers. But a voice inside him whispered that he could die down there, and if he died Novalis would eat his flesh and mulch his bones, and not one molecule of the water or volatiles or trace metals he was made of would ever go home to RostovSyndicate. He stared up at the planet, desperately homesick, and asked himself if he was strong enough to face thatground truth. The only answer was the swirl and flicker of the flames.
He shuddered and turned back into the bright cocoon of the ship. The bridge seemed safe and familiar, a last glimpse of home before the long fall into the gravity well. Status chimes rang soothingly. In the kitchen alcove off the navigator’s station the hum of the refrigerator competed with the splutter of the coffeemaker.
Arkady floated over to the table, feeling liquefied with exhaustion and privately cursing whoever had drunk all the coffee and left the machine empty. He watched the drops of coffee seep into the spherical carafe and wander around until they finally bumped into the container’s viruglass shell and stuck there like caffeinated amoebas. Which he supposed made him what? A decaffeinated amoeba? That sounded about right.
The main bridge door cycled open.
“Oh, good,” the newcomer said. “Coffee’s on.”
Bella. But which Bella? He squinted at her and decided with a distinct lowering of spirits that it was Bossy Bella.
“What a week!” She sighed, settling next to Arkady in a flowing rustle of orbsilk. Arkady repressed the urge to move away from her. When the coffee finally spluttered to the end of its cycle he pushed off with alacrity. “Can I get you some?”
“Thanks,” she said. She made no effort to track down milk or sugar.
“Just look at that sink,” she said. “What a mess! But of course everyone’s too busy and important to do the dishes around here.”
This was pretty rich considering that Bella was undoubtedly the least busy person on board. Which gave her plenty of time to poke her sharp little nose into other people’s private lives, Arkady thought, and then repressed the thought as petty.
“Don’t you agree with me?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said, settling cravenly for the path of least resistance.
“I blame the Ahmeds,” she continued. “We would never have allowed things to go this far in myhome crèche. They’re too soft, too inexperienced—”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.”
“ Ido. I may not be an A, but I do know enough to see when things need to be put back on track. A little constructive criticism—”
“I hardly think it’s worth calling a group critique session over a few dirty dishes, Bella.”
“Well…no…of course not. But it’s the idea,you understand.”
Arkady gave the Motai B a sideways glance, wondering once more what it would do to a person to grow up under MotaiSyndicate’s harsh normalization regimes. He tried to count up the crèchemates from his own year—very few of them, it had to be said in Rostov’s defense—who had mysteriously vanished after fifth- and eighth-year norm testing. It wasn’t easy. The docents firmly discouraged any discussion of culled crèchemates. And as always when you tried to separate the individual from the geneline, names became cumbersome. But he remembered his feelings about culled crèchemates with painful clarity. Fear. Insecurity. Gratitude to the docents who had approved and promoted and protected him. The panicky need to believe that the vanished children were deviants, and that he could avoid their fate if he just worked a little harder at being normal and well-adjusted. And, worst of all, the first dark suspicion that while most people soon learned to hate the suffering that came with culls and critique sessions, others learned that enforcing “normality” could be a source of pleasure and power.