Buried Deep Part 26

"I don't think they're thinking," Flint said. "So that means they're getting into s.h.i.+ps with no planning or preparation. They may initially be heading to Amoma or somewhere in the Disty home system, but they'll soon discover they don't have enough fuel or a s.h.i.+p with the right distance capabilities, or enough food or anything. And that means-"

"They'll come here. Got it." DeRicci leaned her forehead on the thick plastic. It was as warm as she was. "Thanks for the heads-up, Miles."

"Thought you needed to know," he said, and signed off.

Thought she needed to know. DeRicci sighed. As if she could do anything about it. She had a t.i.tle and no powers. She couldn't even shut down Armstrong's ports.

If Flint was right, someone would have to act. DeRicci would just have to figure out who that someone was.

37.

The conversation with DeRicci left Flint disturbed. She had sounded odd. And it wasn't like her to lose focus as she had in the first part of the conversation.

Still, he had done all he could. Someone had to be warned about the impending disaster, and the only someone he could guarantee would pay attention to him was Noelle DeRicci.

For better or for worse.

Flint shut off his external links again and continued researching on his center screen. The coding information scrolled on the screens beside him. He set up yet another security perimeter in his networks, figuring someone might have monitored his conversation with DeRicci, no matter how hard he worked to keep it quiet.

He shut off his wall screens, preferring not to see the crisis unfold. He set up his interior links so that he would only get breaking news, and he made sure the news was filtered, so that it would only be the real stuff, not the things the reporters made up for attention.

Then he got to work.

He had a list of survivors' names from the lawsuit they had filed against Mary Sue Jrgen Meister. The names came with addresses and identification codes, but all of that information was more than fifty years old. He couldn't immediately get a listing of the survivors' ages, but he would have guessed that most of them were-at the youngest-thirty- to forty-year-old adults at the time of the filing.

Humans lived more than a hundred and fifty years on average now, but that was a true average. Some died quite young; others lived an extra fifty years beyond that.

He had no idea if the survivors who filed that suit were still alive, or if they had children.

And then there was the issue of the Outlying Colonies.

The Outlying Colonies had acquired the name long ago, when the name had been accurate. Since then, the known universe had grown around them. The Outlying Colonies probably should have been renamed the Center of the Known Universe, but not only was that pretentious, it also didn't give an adequate picture of the colonies themselves.

And now he had to search ancient data files to see if he could find anything from those places. Such a search could take weeks and a lot of credits, paid to a variety of people who claimed to have knowledge, some of whom wouldn't have any. He had to make that same search in the s.p.a.ce of hours, maybe even minutes.

He would have to outthink the colonies-and outthink the survivors, many of whom probably went there in order to escape whatever it was that had gotten the rest of their families killed.

Some of the survivors had to be nearby. Someone had even returned to Mars, if indeed one of the survivors had killed Jrgen. There had to be some survivors in this solar system.

He just had to find them.

He just wished all of this wasn't placed on him. And he wasn't even sure if his work would be valuable. No one had talked to the Disty since this crisis began. Scott-Olson was guessing that the survivor ritual would work, just like Flint was guessing.

He was shooting in the dark. And he couldn't quite shake the feeling that even if he succeeded, he would be doing too little much too late.

38.

Roderick Jefferson was dreaming of Tahiti, sun beating on sand, the ocean lapping against his feet, warm and inviting. Tahiti and some cold pineapple drink, and a woman he didn't know on his arm. A soft woman, a beautiful woman, a woman who- Suddenly, he was being dragged across the carpeted floor of his apartment, people-humans?-holding his arms, pulling him into the bathroom and tossing him into an ice-cold shower. It took him a moment to realize this wasn't part of the dream. He was awake, he was naked, and he was freezing.

"You've been summoned, Mr. Jefferson," a man the size of a gorilla said from outside the shower. Barely outside. Two men stood in the bathroom, blocking Jefferson's exit. But they hadn't closed the gla.s.s shower door either.

They were staring at him as if they'd never seen a naked diplomat before.

He had a headache, his mouth tasted of sour beer, and his message storage links were pinging. With a single thought, he shut off that internal sound. But the pinging continued.

Emergency links? He shut those down too. He'd given instructions, and no one was paying attention. Dammit.

With one fist, he slammed off the shower, then rubbed the water off his face.

"I told everyone that I was taking the next two weeks off. I was not to be disturbed. I'm leaving in"-he checked his internal network-"four hours. I'm going somewhere warm and tropical with lots of naked women."

He had no idea where these two thugs had come from or how they managed to get into his apartment, but they had no purpose here, no matter what they were told.

"Sir, there's a crisis-"

"There's always a crisis. And this time, Layne Naher can handle it. I need time off."

Doctor's orders, in fact. Jefferson had been working too hard. His own psyche was breaking down with all of the internal communications, the stress, the sheer make-or-break att.i.tude of dealing with aliens, aliens, aliens-always different, and always dangerous.

"We were told to bring you, sir, no matter what. We will arrest you if we must."

Jefferson stared at both men, then realized there were at least three more in the bedroom. They were wearing black, the standard outfit of human security in the Alliance.

"Who the h.e.l.l are you?" Jefferson snapped, realizing in all of his confusion, he hadn't asked. They both touched the backs of their wrists, and the ID tattoos in their cheeks lit up. They were Alliance Security.

Something was seriously wrong.

He sighed and grabbed a warm towel from one of the racks. His head felt like it had had a run-in with a wall. What brand of idiocy had made him think that an old-fas.h.i.+oned hangover would be fun?

With his tongue he pressed the chip on the roof of his mouth, sending endorphins into his system. He followed those with a mild painkiller and some detoxing agents. Then he had his links purify the oxygen in the room, making it just a little richer.

All the tricks a high-level amba.s.sador learned so that he could stay awake and alert, no matter what the crisis.

"How long do I have?" he asked.

"You need to be there in"- the security man paused, as his own links informed him of the time-"in less than three minutes, sir."

"What the h.e.l.l?" Jefferson snapped. "Someone want to explain to me what's going on?"

He toweled off as quickly as he could, then pushed past the men to his bedroom. It was dark, and the bed was rumpled. He longed to climb back in it, but he made himself turn toward his closet. The three other men moved toward the living room, still watching.

"Someone want to answer me?" Jefferson asked, wondering if these men could talk and move at the same time.

"Sir, you have a message from Chief Protocol Officer Ogden. She suggests you download it and place it into your speed-enhanced learning system. You have quite a bit to catch up on."

Speed-enhance. He hadn't used that since the Ssachuss had joined the Alliance two years before. The system had left him full of Ssachuss customs and language, and with a headache that hadn't broken for three days.

Wonderful. Speed-enhance, an emergency, and a hangover. Could things get any worse?

"At least tell me what I'm dressing for," he said.

"A meeting with the Disty in the council chamber," one of the men said.

Jefferson leaned his head against the closet doors, feeling the wood gouge into his skin. He shouldn't even have had that thought. Things could get worse. They just did.

He loathed the Disty. All their rituals, the stupid table sitting, their horrible superiority and unwillingness to listen.

And they loathed him too, believing him the worst kind of human-stubborn, small-minded, and weak.

"This is bad, isn't it?" he mumbled into the door.

"Yes, sir," one of the men said. "Chief Protocol Officer Ogden said to tell you, if you weren't moving quickly enough, that right now, the Disty are a half a heartbeat away from declaring war."

39.

Sharyn Scott-Olson sat at her desk, her fingers playing the screen in front of her as if it were a musical instrument. She had gone through the files the Retrieval Artist from the Moon-Flint-had sent her, finding them shocking in their lack of concrete information.

But at least they were a place to start.

She had moved her desk so that it faced the door to the lab. Her a.s.sistants were still cleaning, preparing for the onslaught that they knew would begin.

Scott-Olson had stopped monitoring the wall screens. In fact, she had shut hers off when some Dome camera showed a pile of bodies at the doorway of one of the Disty's buildings. The bodies were Disty, but not a kind she'd seen often.

Hatchlings. They'd tried to get out of the building, but had either been trampled as the regular Disty went through the doorway, or had died from some other means. Scott-Olson had heard that the Disty had ways of dealing with hatchlings in a crisis. At one of the M.E. conventions in Noachian Dome One, one crusty old doctor who had claimed to have seen everything said the Disty had installed some sort of poison in the hatchlings that would be released if they were ever threatened.

She had ignored the story then, but seeing those small bodies, their limbs twisted and mangled, she wondered at its truth now. And then she had to turn away, feeling the full impact of the day for the first time.

In the main lab, she could still hear the cacophony of voices as various announcers tried to make sense of everything. Her lab a.s.sistants were also contributing to the noise, their tone slightly shrill, as if they couldn't control their own panic.

She was trying not to think of hers. She already knew the various options the Disty had. Once some Disty in some faraway place came to its senses, all of Mars would change.

And Sahara Dome would go first.

She s.h.i.+vered and returned to her research. The ma.s.sacre made no sense to her. She wasn't sure how it had stayed out of the history texts.

But it seemed to. When she had done her initial research, before she had heard from this Flint, she and her a.s.sistants had looked for ma.s.sacres, ma.s.s graves, cemeteries, anything in the history that would tell her what had happened. She had found nothing.

So she didn't duplicate that work again. Instead, she looked up the names of the families that Flint had given her, and was surprised to find none of them in Sahara Dome and, indeed, none on Mars itself.

She sat back, blinked, and thought about it, her fingers off the screen for the first time in hours. Of course it made sense: If these people were survivors of a ma.s.sacre, they would go as far from Mars as they possibly could. They would leave nothing to chance, and if they returned, they would do so under false names.

If she had time, she would have looked through other databases to see if there were unexplained murders, maybe in groups or of groups. But she didn't have that kind of time.

Instead, she searched through historical files for the entire solar system, and looked by name. Perhaps these survivors wrote accounts of their experiences. Or maybe recorded something or produced some sort of entertainment based on it.

To go through that much data required time, which she didn't have. She couldn't eyeball everything, so she had to trust her system to do it.

She set up her search perimeters, then started searches in several windows on the network. The system scrolled through information so quickly that the various windows became a blur of activity.

For a few minutes, at least, she had a reprieve. She stood, stretched her arms, and walked into the lab.

It was always clean, but it had never sparkled before. Her a.s.sistants had scrubbed everything down. They had moved in nearly a dozen tables, so the room seemed cramped. The back storage area had been cleared out, and information pads had been placed with the other equipment near the first three autopsy tables.

Her a.s.sistants were leaving nothing to chance. Even though they would all visually record the autopsies they did, there was always the risk of recording failure. With the pads there, the a.s.sistants had provided for an automatic backup.

"I'm not sure what we're going to do," Nigel said. He looked small and lost as he leaned against one of the counter-tops. In his work as an intern, he had had trouble with routine cases. Shortly, this day would become anything but routine.

"We'll just do the work," Scott-Olson said.

Nigel nodded at one of the wall screens. "Someone just said there were at least two hundred casualties at the eastern exit to the Dome."

"And that's human human casualties," said Mona Browning. She was Scott-Olson's most experienced a.s.sistant. Scott-Olson relied on her now to keep everyone else calm. "We have no idea how many Disty." casualties," said Mona Browning. She was Scott-Olson's most experienced a.s.sistant. Scott-Olson relied on her now to keep everyone else calm. "We have no idea how many Disty."

"I think we should deal with the humans first," Evan s.h.i.+rkov said. He was always organized, but sometimes he missed the interpersonal parts of the job.

"How would you propose to do that?" Scott-Olson asked. "If these bodies are truly trampled, we're not going to be able to tell where some begin and others end."

Nigel grimaced. "Maybe we shouldn't do any autopsies.

Maybe we should just take names and identifiers, and leave the bodies for later, when we know what's going to happen."

Scott-Olson stared at him. Nigel's cheeks grew red.

"What?" he asked after a moment. "Isn't that practical? I mean, it might end up that no one'll care what we do."

The team looked at Scott-Olson. Apparently, no one else wanted to respond to that. She didn't either.

"There's that chance," she said quietly. "But what if everyone's dying of something we can't see? A toxin in the air, or something that drives the Disty insane? What if it shows up in our scans and tests? We might be able to do something useful, and maybe even stop this thing."

"You don't think that's what's going on?" Nigel asked, with just a thread of hope in his voice.