Lindy smiled. “I don’t think it’s in you to be rude. Is it true that World has no war, no violence?”
“No wars, no, although there were some small ones back in history. Violence, yes, sometimes. Quarrels, personal fights. We are human, you know.”
“Of course. But… no, that’s too complicated to ask in a moving FiVee. If we ever actually move, of course.” She made a funny face.
“Where do—Oh, we move now!”
The back of the FiVee slammed closed, the hillside opened, and the truck tore out at tremendous speed. Jane rose to her knees to look through the forward window, which seemed to be made of something thicker and cloudier than glass.
“Lindy, what is the window stuff?”
“Plastic. Bulletproof. This whole vehicle is heavily armored.”
Through the plastic, Jane watched trees slide past as the FiVee lurched and rolled. She grabbed a metal protrusion and hung on. So many trees! The road wasn’t really a road at all, just a rough track through the trees, mostly hidden by leaves overhead and plant life underneath. There was no place on World, not even in the central mountains kept for hiking, this wild.
“It looks like… like Ranger Kandiss’s weapons.”
Lindy smiled. “Dangerous?”
“Yes.” Another new word.
“It is dangerous. The wilderness has rushed back. So has its wildlife, bears and cougars and all kinds of rodents that—”
Something hard smashed into the FiVee’s front plastic window. Belok^ cried out. Jane clutched her bench and said, “Was that a weapon?”
“No. A bird.”
A long dark smear ran diagonally down the window. The FiVee did not slow. Jane translated for the others. To Lindy she said, “Belok^ thought it is something dangerous.”
“It is,” Lindy said. “That sparrow is the most dangerous thing on Earth.”
Zack said quietly to Claire over the roar of the FiVee’s engine, “Will Marianne be all right?” He remembered, all too painfully, losing his wife and two sons to RSA. Marianne’s daughter was only presumed dead, but still… if he ever lost Caitlin…
Claire said, “Marianne is the toughest person I’ve ever known. You wouldn’t believe what she’s survived. The best thing is to get her back to work.” She grimaced. Small and delicately made, with skin the color of wet sand, she looked spun of silk, but Zack suspected that Claire Patel had survived just as many horrors as Marianne. Spider silk, strand for strand, was stronger than steel.
She said, “The virophage destroys R. sporii, and it does it fast. The two seemed to have coevolved. All of us from World are carrying it, asymptomatically. It’s unusually easy to culture from blood samples. On the ship, we used a culture of leelee tissue—”
“Of what?”
“A native mammal. But, Dr. McKay—”
“Zack, please.”
“Zack, I doubt the phage will be effective against this weaponized version of R. sporii, not with all the genemods you told me about.”
“No, probably not. But there might be something in the virophage genome we can use.”
“Use to do what? What are you trying to do?”
“Later. It’s complicated, and we’re here.” Zack wasn’t sure how much he was supposed to reveal. This was classified work, after all. Toni wouldn’t have hesitated, but Zack had more respect for Jenner’s orders. Slightly more, anyway.
The FiVee drove into Lab Dome’s vehicle airlock, a tight fit, and everybody climbed out to go through decon. Zack had only been here a few times before; this quadrant was Army, tightly restricted. Soldiers called it the armory. It held FiVees, three low-flying quadcopters, tanklike things that Zack didn’t know the name of, and huge, e-locked, reinforced metal containers. Some probably held ammunition. Zack didn’t know what was in the rest and wasn’t sure he wanted to know. The Army drones were elsewhere, off base, although they were launched and controlled from Enclave Dome’s command post. Everything stood around the walls, leaving an open space for drills or calisthenics or whatever else the soldiers did here.
One of the things that made life so difficult at Monterey Base was the prefab, unchangeable design of the domes, inherited from—whom? Apparently not, as everyone had believed until today, from technologically advanced humans on World. If Claire and Marianne could be believed (and Zack did), World had received these plans from some other, long-gone “super race”—even thinking the words made Zack feel unreal. But the domes were real enough, with their prefab forms that Jenner, and everyone else, had to work around.
Each dome was divided by internal, unchangeable, alien-energy walls into three sections, one taking up half of the dome and the other two one-quarter each. Internal airlocks connected them. This was undoubtedly a safety measure. On the Embassy, for instance, thirty-eight years ago, Worlders had lived in their own section, with their own air, emerging only in esuits. Now, however, the internal airlocks were a nuisance, standing open most of the time except to the restricted-area armory that Zack walked through, escorted by armed soldiers as if they were royalty, or prisoners. The five star-farers still wore their esuits, shimmering faintly and looking exhausted except for Jane, who looked around so eagerly that her head might have been mounted on a swivel gun.
The other smaller quadrant—the name had stuck even though there were three sections, not four, go figure—housed living quarters, the Army mess, and a kitchen. Some scientists were quartered here and some soldiers; Jenner wanted a military presence in both domes. The large quadrant held the labs that were Monterey Base’s initial reason for existence.
Enclave Dome was similarly divided into more living quarters, the main kitchen and mess, communal showers, and nonmilitary storerooms. The large “quadrant” included a common area that was supposed to be an open, airy relief from the crowding everywhere else, a sort of park with no plants. But partitions were always being put up for one reason or another. Big pieces of equipment that there was no room for anyplace else littered the area; some of the equipment no longer even worked but was kept for the scrap metal.
To complicate matters even more, Jenner’s command post was located at the top of Enclave Dome, not Lab Dome, although the armory was in Lab Dome. This arrangement was the result of pre-Collapse plans, presumably to allow two effective areas of command in case of attack. Or something; military matters didn’t interest Zack much. He had his own worries. He could, however, imagine the difficulties that Jenner encountered in getting orders from the command post to Lab Dome when no electromagnetic radiation could penetrate either, although sound could. There was an underground tunnel running from one subterranean cave to another, but it was not part of the dome design. Dug by an Army borer, it wouldn’t be usable by anyone who hadn’t either survived RSA or donned an esuit. RSA spores were everywhere, long lived, and deadly, except where kept out by alien energy shields.
As Zack emerged from the armory airlock, Toni pounced on him. “Well? What are our star-farers like?”
“Christ, Toni, you’re a vulture.”
“Are they… okay, here they come. Exotic. What advanced tech are they bringing us?”
“None.”
For once, he had surprised her. It was a mean-spirited surprise, but Zack was already tired. He didn’t feel up to explaining that the Worlders were behind Terrans in science, not ahead, and that they didn’t know who had given their planet the ships and e-shields that Earth had inherited from them secondhand. Third hand. Whatever. Let someone else give the details to Toni.
He said, “We need blood samples from each of them before they’re given any treatments. Lindy will do that. She’s going to take all nine to quarantine and give them the pills to adjust their microbial signatures to ours. She says they can sleep through it. Apparently when their microbiomes were adjusted on World, it was a horrendous process.”