Maris’s first thought was that one of Barrett’s drones had spotted them working around Alice’s nest. She hunched over the com, sweat popping over her body. Her pulse beat heavily in her temples. She said, “If this is about why we’re still behind-”
“Of course it is. And I’m very disappointed.”
“The vacuum organism caused a bigger problem than we anticipated.”
“All you have to do is cut through it,” Barrett said scornfully. “Cut through it, scorch it off, deal with it.”
“Can you tell me about the shuttle’s cargo, Barrett? What was it carrying?”
Barrett gave her a sharp, bright look. “Why do you want to know?”
“Perhaps the vacuum organism was part of the cargo. If we know what it is, we can deal with it more easily.”
“The V.O. was checked out when the cargo pods were detached. It’s nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Don’t you have more specific information? The ship was recovered five months ago. Symbiosis must know what was in the cargo pods by now.”
“That’s none of your business, Delgado. Your business is to render down that shuttle, and your gang is a whole ten hours behind. You have to understand that Symbiosis wrote up these work schedules with generous margins-”
Relief that Barrett didn’t seem to know about Alice made Maris bold. She said, “The schedules weren’t drawn up with vacuum organism contamination in mind.”
“Please don’t interrupt me again,” Barrett said, all frosty rectitude. “The margins are there, and you’ve overrun them. You know the contract regs as well as I, Delgado. What else can I do?”
“Okay, fine, take off ten hours pay.”
“A day’s pay plus penalties. The contract is quite specific.”
“Okay.”
“What’s wrong, Delgado? Talk to me. Are you having trouble maintaining discipline?” Barrett suddenly mock-solicitous, leaning so close to the camera that his face looked like a pockmarked moon, his silly little braid wagging on his chin.
“T here’s no problem,” Maris said, snapping off the com and instantly regretting it. It was a sign of weakness, and the one skill that Barrett had honed to perfection was sniffing out weaknesses in others.
She waited five minutes in case he called back, then sculled back to the living quarters. Ty and Alice were watching a TV sheet floating in the air. Both were chewing gum. Bruno and Somerset broke off a whispered conversation, and Somerset told Maris, “I have found out where she came from.”
The Saturn infonet had been badly damaged during the Quiet War, but after running Alice’s name through half a dozen clandestine search engines, Somerset had discovered that the shuttle’s cargo and passenger had both originated in Hawaiki, an agricultural settlement on the great dark plains of Iapetus’s Cassini Regio.
“I discovered something else, too,” Somerset said. “The settlement was designed by Avernus.”
The name of the woman who had been the Outer System’s most famous gene wizard, and was now its most wanted so-called war criminal, hung in the air for a moment.
“Man,” Ty said, “I knew our Alice was something special. Didn’t I say she was special?”
“Avernus was famous for the totality of her designs,” Somerset said. “She tailored both ecospheres and their inhabitants. Given her appearance and what she did to survive, it seems quite likely that our guest benefited from Avernus’s art.”
Alice smiled at them all, seemingly quite happy to be the center of their attention.
“It doesn’t mean that she’s a monster,” Maris said forthrightly, although she had to admit that Somerset’s discovery was disquieting. Avernus had dedicated her considerable skills to pushing the envelope of humanity’s range. Some of her commissions-a sect in which adults lost the use of their limbs and eyes and grew leathery, involuted integuments stained purple with photosynthetic pigment, becoming sessile eremites devoted to praising God; a community with a completely closed ecosystem, the bellies of its citizens swollen with sacs of symbiotic bacteria-had tested even the generously inclusive tolerance of the outers.
“Aw, hell,” Ty said, “according to the flatlanders, we’re all monsters. And you know what? It’s true. We’re all tweaks, and we’re all proud to be tweaks! Flatlanders need drugs and nanotech to live here, but we’re gengineered for low-gravity. Maybe Avernus gave Alice a few extra special abilities, but so what?”
Maris asked Somerset, “Can we get in touch with Alice’s home?”
“Hawaiki no longer exists,” Somerset said. “It was captured and destroyed during the war.”
“There must be survivors,” Maris said.
“They were probably put in a camp,” Bruno said darkly. “One of those experimental camps.”
“Hey,” Ty said, “not in front of Alice.”
“The TPA must know,” Somerset said, “but there are no records that I can access.”
“One thing is certain,” Maris said. “We were absolutely right not to tell Barrett about Alice.”
She remembered with a chill the supervisor’s sudden bright look when she had asked about the shuttle’s cargo, and knew that he knew all about the shuttle’. passenger, knew that she was valuable.
“You’re going to stay here,” Ty told the golden-eyed little girl. “Stay here with us, until we find a way of getting you back to your family.”
“I would like to know,” Somerset said, “how we can keep Barrett from finding out about her.”
“We just don’t tell him,” Maris said.
“I’m relieved to see that you have thought it through,” Somerset said.
Bruno said, “The boss is right, Somerset. Barrett hardly ever leaves his ship. If we don’t tell him about Alice, he’ll never know.”
“This isn’t like playing around in your garden,” Ty said. “This is for real.”
“My garden has nothing to do with this,” Somerset said.
“Ty didn’t mean anything by it,” Maris said.
“I meant,” Ty said doggedly, “that this is the real world, where what you do has real consequences for real people. We rescued Alice, Somerset, so it’s up to us to look after her.”
“I believe that we have all agreed that Barrett would almost certainly kill Alice if he found out about her,” Somerset said, with acid patience. “It follows that the only morally correct course of action is to assume responsibility for her care. I merely point out that it is also a very dangerous course of action.”
“Nevertheless, we’re all in this together,” Maris said.
Everyone looked at everyone else. Everyone said yes. Alice smiled.
Maris, strung out by anxiety and the physical exhaustion of zero-gravity work, fell asleep almost as soon as she wriggled into her sleeping bag. She slept deeply and easily, and when she woke in the middle of the night, it took her a little while to realize what was wrong.
The spavined rattle and bone-deep thrum of the air conditioning was gone.
Maris pushed up her mask, hitched out of the sleeping bag, and ducked through her privacy curtain. Ty and Bruno hung in midair, watching Alice mime something in the soft red light of the hab-module’s sleep-cycle illumination. Ty spun around as Maris caught a rung. He was chewing gum and grinning from ear to ear. “She fixed the air conditioning,” he said.
“You mean she broke it.”
“She fixed it,” Ty insisted. “Listen.”
Ty and Bruno and Alice watched as Maris concentrated on nothing but the sound of her own ragged breath… and heard, at the very edge of audibility, a soft pulsing hum, a whisper of moving air.
Somerset shot through its privacy curtain, caught a rung, reversed. Its crest of white hair was all askew. It said, “What did she do?”
Bruno said, “She altered the rate of spin of every fan in the system, tuning them to a single harmonic. No more vibration.”
“Alice knows machines,” Ty said proudly.
“ It seems she does not sleep,” Bruno said. “So, while we slept, she fixed the air conditioning.”
Swaddling,” Somerset said. “Or a tether. I am serious. Suppose she meddles with something else? We do not know what she can do.”