“Actually, we’ve discussed our plans with the Council in considerable detail,” he said. “In fact, they’re the ones who suggested a solution—a compromise that will allow you to continue your investigation, while the superintendent here gets on with the business of delivering the raw materials the Fleet needs to continue our mission.”
“What compromise?” Liz asked warily.
The advocate’s smile brightened. “You’ll be please to learn that the Council has negotiated an arrangement with the Consortium to transport a representative sample of these… creatures… to a suitable location, where you and Dr. Tobias can spend as much time with them as you like.”
Tobias leaned forward, his bushy eyebrows tightening. “Transport them where?”
“Paradise,” Superintendent Cantrell said. “We’re going to ship the whole lot of you back to Paradise.”
“Paradise!” Liz exclaimed. “You sucked the life out of that planet months ago. There’s nothing left.”
Paradise was a blue ocean world that the Consortium had mined for heavy metals as the Fleet passed by a few months before. The Consortium claimed that the indigenous life forms would regenerate the environment—at some undefined point in the future—but at the time they left, human beings couldn’t even descend to the surface without breathing masks.
“Hey, it’s no worse than Slag,” Cantrell said. “In case you don’t remember, the air down there is full of hydrogen sulfide.”
“Yeah, well, the air on Paradise is full of sulfur dioxide, now that you’re through with it,” Liz said. “And in case you don’t remember, that’s different from hydrogen sulfide. Every time it rains, you end up taking a bath in sulfuric acid.”
Cantrell shrugged. “Toxic chemicals are toxic chemicals. What difference does it make?”
“The difference is that the Anunnaki didn’t re-engineer the worms to survive on Paradise,” Tobias said. “The environment there could kill them.”
Cantrell laughed. “Yeah? Well, that’s the best offer you’re going to get. If you’re smart you’ll take it while you can get it.”
Liz’s jaw tightened and her eyes narrowed as she leaned forward, preparing to tell Cantrell where he could stick his compromise, but then she felt Tobias’ hand on her arm, restraining her.
“Look,” he said, nodding toward the tank at the far end of the table.
The colony of worms that Liz had come to think of as Glimmer was again flashing. Bright pastel waves flowed over the intertwined bundle.
“What is it?” she said to Tobias. “What’s he saying?”
Tobias pointed his mission assistant at the tank. It processed for a moment, recording the waves of light. Then a voice droned from the small speaker in an emotionless monotone.
“We agree…” it said.
“Agree…?” Liz said. “Agree to what?”
“To Cantrell’s offer,” Tobias said. “They agree to Cantrell’s offer.”
“But they can’t—” She turned toward Glimmer. “You’d be condemning thousand of your own kind to die. Tens of thousands.” For all she knew there could be millions of worms in the lakes and tunnels under the ice sheet.
“We agree…” the voice repeated. “The offer is acceptable.”
“But you don’t know what you’re saying…” she protested. “You don’t understand…” She tried to think of some way to explain, but they were worms. They couldn’t understand.
“Hey, if you’re so worried, you can ride along with them,” Superintendent Cantrell snorted. “How’s that for an offer? You can get down there in the hold and grovel around in all the worm slime you want.” He turned to Advocate Lassiter. “It’ll be the chance of a lifetime, right, Advocate?”
Advocate Lassiter smiled at Liz, the mindless grin of a man who was right with his world.
Liz glared back at the pair of them. If she’d had any kind of weapon in her hands—a knife, a gun, anything—she would have killed them both on the spot. But there was nothing she could do. The worms had sealed their fate.
“I don’t trust them,” Liz said to Tobias after the meeting broke up. “Cantrell is up to something.”
“There’s no question about that,” Tobias said, nodding. “The Consortium isn’t going to offer up a transport ship for a bunch of worms—not if it doesn’t put money in their pockets.”
They were still seated at the table in the conference room. The wreckage of the Anunnaki ship drifted five miles off their bow, the shards of metal glinting in Slag’s pale orange glow. They could also see two of the four mining transports that Cantrell had ordered in. They hung in the darkness like predatory insects, waiting for their chance to suck the life out of the moon below.
“I don’t understand why Glimmer would agree with Cantrell,” Liz said. She glanced down the table at Glimmer’s tank, where the worms had again disbursed. “Why would he want to go along with something this crazy? They’ll all be killed.”
Tobias shook his head. “He doesn’t know what he’s getting himself into. Like Cantrell says, he’s only a bunch of worms.”
Liz and Tobias watched the loading operation through the wide curved window of the Arrow’s mess. First, one of the large transport ships lumbered into position above Slag’s surface. It hung motionless for a moment, the struts and protuberances along its underside opening outward like segmented limbs preparing to grasp its prey. Then a tight red beam shot down from the ship’s forward end, knifing down through the thin atmosphere to carve a steaming circular hole in the ice sheet. As the ice melted away, the beam gouged a bubbling orange pit more than five hundred feet deep out of the underlying crust. Water from beneath the ice sheet roared into the pit, cooling the magma as it carried thousands of worms out of the surrounding crevasses and tunnels. As the pit filled, a tractor beam engaged, sucking up a thick column of gray water. The beam maintained the integrity of the column itself, but as the water rose, it pulled along a torrent of greenish-gray foam that spilled thousands of additional worms out into the vacuum of space.
“I don’t understand how the Council could allow something like this to happen,” Liz said. She gazed out at the scene with an anguished grimace. “These creatures were created by the Anunnaki. They’re…” She looked up at Tobias. “They’re just as entitled to life as we are.”
“There was probably a time when the Council felt that way,” Tobias said. He turned, looking back at the foam of worms falling away from the rising column of water. “But I’m afraid that time is long gone.”
Once the transport ship had filled its hold, it spun up its FTL drive for the long haul back to Paradise. During their shuttle ride from the Arrow to the larger vessel, Liz and Tobias learned that Superintendent Cantrell would be accompanying them. Both the Council and the Consortium were apparently pleased with the manner in which he’d resolved the issue with the worms, and he was being offered a promotion. Which meant that they would be making a detour back to the Fleet to drop the superintendent off before they continued on to their final destination.
As soon as their shuttle docked, Liz and Tobias took Glimmer down to the hold to join the new worms that had been uploaded from Slag.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” she asked Glimmer as she and Tobias set his tank on the catwalk just above the murky water that now filled the hold.
The catwalk ran from the small hatch through which they’d entered to the far bulkhead. The hold itself was nothing more than a rectangular cargo container, roughly sixty yards long and twenty yards across—one of twenty locked onto the underbelly of the transport ship’s superstructure. The other nineteen containers, which Liz had assumed would be filled with worms, were in fact filled with ore that had been sucked up from deeper in Slag’s interior after the crew had finished loading the worms.