For two days, she'd been entirely happy — able to smile again, able to feel safe again. Able to walk under an open sky without a respirator mask, without a z-suit chafing against her skin…feeling little hands clutch tight in hers.
On the third day, she'd come down sick. The rest of her vacation was spent shivering in bed, overcome with a succession of illnesses — flu, a cold, a sore throat, pneumonia and a racking cough. For three hundred and twenty days she'd lived and worked under terrible conditions at Polaris, never suffering any kind of sickness. Not so much as a sniffle. Then everything had caught up with her at once.
"I need," the geologist said, staring fixedly at Gretchen, "to get back to work."
"Of course," Anderssen said, nodding. "There are just a few things…were there more of the cylinder-shaped objects where you found the piece of limestone you gave Doctor McCue? Or just the two?"
"If," Russovsky said, in an inflectionless voice, "Clarkson wants me to do something useful, then he should let me do my work. I need to get back in the air."
Gretchen forced herself to remain standing at the edge of the examining table. She looked over to the nurses' station and was greatly heartened to see Bandao and Magdalena watching her with uneasy expressions. "Maggie, can you fire up the diagnostics on this table? Thanks."
"Gagarin could use more fuel," Russovsky said, as if to herself. "I'll top him up before I leave."
Gretchen turned back to the geologist, watching her intently, as if the woman were a particularly fragile artifact dredged from the bottom of a deep trench. "Victoria? Do you know where you are?"
Russovsky looked up sharply, her eyes glittering. The strange anger Gretchen had seen in her eyes down in the hangar returned, and now the lean old face was tight with fury. "Here's your geld for the water, Master Clarkson, and I hope you've the talent to find a return on your investment!"
The woman's arm blurred up as if tossing something away. Anderssen tried to jerk herself back, but a cupped hand smashed her head to one side. Gretchen flew into the bulkhead with a crash, and then fell heavily to the deck. Russovsky stood abruptly, her face in shadow as she stepped out of the light over the table. "I'll top up," she said in a conversational voice, turning toward the door. "And be on my way."
"Stop!" Bandao was in the doorway, the flat metallic shape of his automatic gleaming in the dim light. "No farther."
Russovsky stared at him, puzzled, hands hanging limply at her side again.
Gretchen blinked, stunned, then tested her jaw. Not broken! "Maggie, what is it?"
There was a long moan of a hrrrwwwt from the Hesht. Magdalena looked up from the display surface of the nurse's station, ears napped against her skull, the short hairs on her shoulders and back raised in a stiff triangular ruff. "Not human," she growled, shaking her head in confusion. "Something else…like a…living crystal."
Bandao took two steps back, his thumb flipping some kind of switch on the side of his gun. There was an answering beep! "The thing in the sand Sinclair was talking about?"
"The microfauna?" Gretchen stood uneasily, swaying slightly. Her medband hissed cold at her wrist. The woman, or the thing which looked so much like a woman, did not react, remaining as still as a statue. "But why…and how? Maggie, does she have bones, blood vessels, internal organs?"
"Yess…" Magdalena hissed, her claws skittering across the unfamiliar medical display. "The shapes of things are there — but body temperature is even throughout — there are no fluids — no movement. It's nothing more than a cold copy."
Gretchen's lips parted, her entire attention focused on the marvelous creature poised on the far side of the table. "But she can walk, speak — she remembers bits and pieces of her life… The duplication must be at almost a cellular level!"
"They ate her," Bandao said, his voice tight with fear. The automatic in his hands was steady as a stone itself, but the gunner's face had grown paler by degrees. "They caught her somewhere — maybe she was sleeping and they came at night — and they ate her up, cell by cell. Like she was fossilized all at once."
"Mister Bandao," Gretchen's voice echoed his fear with a harsh tone. Sweat beaded her face. "Lower the gun and get out of the doorway. Maggie, cycle the isolation door closed."
"Sister, you're still in there!" Despite her outcry, a single claw stabbed the emergency isolation glyph and Bandao had to skip back to avoid being caught in the swift rush of the glass-and-steel door. A dull thump signaled the room sealing. "What are you doing?"
"I was out at night, in the dig." Gretchen said, circling the immobile Russovsky and climbing onto the examining table. "The ground is alive, you know, filled with tiny life… Sinclair has video of them reproducing, expanding, building their geometric hives. Am I infected?"
"What?" Magdalena stared through the heavy isolation glass. "What are you talking about?"
Bandao stepped to her side, quick brown eyes sweeping across the medical display. "I can't tell," he muttered. "It's been too long since I used one of these… Wait, Magdalena, load up her medical record from Company files. Then we can compare." The gunner looked up, mouth tight. "What about the scientists from base camp?"
"Oh, crap!" Gretchen stiffened, then tapped her comm. "Parker, where are you? The bridge? No, I'm not mad at you anymore — listen to me! Seal the ship, we need pressure lock between each ring right now! Then get on the surveillance cam and find all the scientists we just brought up from the surface. Yes, all of them, even in the showers." Gretchen keyed another channel open with shaking fingers. "Fitzsimmons, Deckard — we've got a problem."
In his dim cocoon of glowing displays and quietly chuckling comps, Hummingbird reacted immediately to the events in the Medical bay. His fingers slashed across the main input panel. There was a questioning chirp. "Four Jaguar," he said in a relaxed, unaffected voice. "Four Jaguar."
Palenque main comp immediately locked out every panel and sub-comp on the entire ship. In some areas, like Engineering, a low hooting alarm went off, signaling a communications failure. At the same time, a direct channel to the Cornuelle unfolded on Hummingbird's main panel. Captain Hadeishi stared out in surprise, his private cabin silhouetted behind him, a cup of steaming tea held in one hand, a paperbound book in the other. His mouth moved, surprised, but Hummingbird heard nothing — the channel was only one-way at the moment.
A tiny image of an outraged Parker jumped in one corner of the secondary panel. Hummingbird ignored him as well, lips tight, his eyes fixed on the v-feed from Medical. A preset routine spun through the civilian ship — even as the two Marines herded a gaggle of frightened, outraged scientists into the hab ring — closing hatches and ventilation ducts, sealing airlocks, isolating each section of the ship with brisk, invisible efficiency. Another preset shifted nearly sixty percent of Palenque main comp to flinging the data flowing from the examining table in Medical into a broad-spectrum search against the databanks in both Hummingbird's Smoke-class comp and the navy system aboard the Cornuelle. If those sources failed — the blue pyramid, which was shining softly in a golden nest of whisker-thin wires, stood ready as well.
The tlamatinime's thumb was poised over a sturdy red glyph — this was Four Wind — the sign of the Second Sun which had been destroyed so long ago, when all living men were swept away by terrible winds and gales, leaving only monkeys as their descendants.