Читать книгу Those of My Blood - Jacqueline Lichtenberg - Страница 11

CHAPTER FIVE

Titus knew that besting Abbot was a fantasy, but he nursed it like a potent drink as he made his way toward the locks leading out to the alien ship. Abbot had been playing this game for too long. But on the other hand, there was something to be said for youth, flexibility, and desperation. Not Inea. He’s not going to get Inea.

He had to think. In the day he’d been at the station, Titus had spent no more than four hours in his room. In six hours, he had to be back at the lab, and then they’d be after him for his physical and to log time in the gym. For all he knew, that might be as necessary for his kind as for humans, in order to return to Earth with any bone left.

If he went to the alien craft now, someone might notice that he never rested. They wouldn’t make anything of it immediately. Everyone here was an eager volunteer. But dedication was one thing, superhuman performance something else. So he didn’t dare approach the alien craft openly.

He loitered at an intersection until the corridor was clear, then cloaked himself with Influence. He’d found that surveillance cameras were located only where emergency crowd control was needed. He evaded them and found the locker room, where there was a locker with his name on it containing a customized spacesuit. He waited until the room was empty, then suited up in haste, using Influence to repel anyone from the door. Abbot could suit up in plain sight of half a dozen people and keep them from noticing! thought Titus, ruing his own lack of practice.

Thought of Abbot’s mastery of Influence reminded him that he’d have to find some way of keeping the Tourist out of the lab and away from Inea. Just throwing him out of the lab in a fury as he’d done earlier wouldn’t be enough. He’d have to work on Colby somehow, get it made an order.

Dressed, Titus tagged along with a group going on shift. There were three engineers, two electricians, a physicist, a chemist, and a metallurgist. Their chatter was strewn with references to the alien craft’s design. But one thing was clear: not a tenth of what they had been doing and thinking had yet been reported on Earth, even at top security levels.

Furthermore, nobody yet understood the craft’s engines or power source. Speculation was running wild, however. Titus followed the group into the docking bay where the surface truck would pick them up, listening attentively.

“I tell you, that thing has to be FTL. It works on some principle we’ve never imagined. There’s no power source!”

“Look, maybe it lost its sails. Maybe it’s not supposed to come this close to a star. Maybe they left their engines out beyond Neptune. That could be why we can’t analyze the propulsion—because this module doesn’t have any!”

“Maybe this is only a lifeboat detached from a larger ship that suffered a disaster.” The third engineer was the youngest. She was also the smallest of the group, dark-haired and comely, with a musical voice. “We can’t rule anything out, even though we wouldn’t build a lifeboat with such a huge cargo bay.”

“If it’s a lifeboat,” argued the first engineer, “it would have propulsion and power for life-support and communications. Maybe it’s just a cargo ‘crane’?”

One of the others spoke up. “You know, I think you’ve got something there. A power module left way out in solar orbit. Makes sense. The ship didn’t explode on impact. It could be they came in on battery power. We ought to get one of the observatories searching far orbits tangent to the ship’s line of approach. Might find their sails.”

“It can’t be a new idea,” said someone else. “I’ll bet they’re doing a search already.”

“And what if they aren’t? I’m going to write it into my daily report, and we’ll see what happens. That’s what they want us to do, you know, think independently so if we all come to the same conclusions, they’ll figure we got it.”

Titus didn’t know if a module of this ship was missing, but according to Abbot, the ship their ancestors had come to Earth in had been faster than light, and it hadn’t exploded on impact, either. Titus had always accepted that some mishap had forced that ship down on Earth, but he’d often wondered where they had been going and why. Had they been explorers, colonists, traders, or even tourists? Was this new ship of the same sort, or different?

“There’s our ride,” called one of the men.

The docking bay’s pressure doors stood open, and now a truck churned silently up onto the glazed flooring of the bay. It was an open framework built over two tracks, and it maneuvered quite nimbly though soundlessly in the vacuum.

Titus felt the vibration as the truck scraped the dock. He followed the others, climbing onto the struts and grabbing a cargo strap. The driver was seated on a bench before an array of levers which she manipulated with finesse. “All set?” Without turning to look, she added, “Here we go!”

The truck lurched away from the dock and lumbered out the door into the starry night, kicking up a cloud of dust. The sun was not visible at the moment, for which Titus was thankful. Even though his suit would protect him as nothing he could wear on Earth, he still didn’t wholly trust it. It had been designed by humans, with human tolerances in mind.

But his anxieties melted away as they rounded the corner of the bay doors and came into full view of the wreck.

Pieces of it that had scattered during the crash had been dragged up beside the main fragment before the station was built around it. The main section was mangled, torn, and half-buried. Floodlights cast sharply defined cones of illumination, stripping away any glamour or drama. The ship looked like heaps of trash in a wrecking yard. But he could see something now that he hadn’t seen in the photos taken with instruments tuned to human vision.

Suddenly mindful of the cameras perpetually aimed at the wreck, he moved to shield his suit identification as he squinted against the floodlights. He could just make out markings on the ship’s hull; dark rust against darker rust color. Had the humans missed the markings because their eyes didn’t register the distinction? It was faint to him, but his eyes were not luren eyes. They were human eyes affected by luren genes.

Perhaps to luren eyes, the markings stood out brightly. He made a mental note to Influence someone to do a spectral analysis of the whole hull. It might hold a clue to the luren eye, and thus to the luren sun.

Part of the inscription was torn away and part was buried in the moon dust. But Titus could read the script. Imagining the missing parts of letters, he transliterated it to English, trying to sound the word, for he didn’t know what it meant. Kylyd. “Kailaid?”

Possibly this was a word in a different language from that preserved among Earth’s luren. Or it might simply be a name, a word that had lost meaning eons ago.

As they approached the rent in the side of the main section being used for an entryway, Titus felt a prickly surge of excitement. Suddenly, the wreck wasn’t just a heap of twisted metal any more. It was a starship. It had an identity, a history, a proud name, and a loyal crew.

Titus skinned through the security check in the shadow of one of the engineers, and found himself free inside the wreck. Nothing had prepared him for this.

Twisted and distorted though it was, the shape of the space the aliens had carved struck a deep nerve in Titus, a human nerve. This place was subtly wrong. It was alien.

Titus had traveled all over the world, and had felt the vague unease in foreign buildings, a negligible component of culture-stress syndrome. But this was different. This fairly shouted wrong!

He shuddered and ducked aside through an airlock that had been wrenched and buckled at impact. Here floodlights had been strung up since they hadn’t yet conquered the ship’s systems. The ship’s lighting, when they found it, ought to provide Titus with a vital clue to the home star.

Crossbreeds such as Titus usually had an infrared sensitivity peak as well as a much greater ultraviolet peak along with the usual three human peaks of sensitivity. But what of purebred luren?

Not far beyond the twisted hatch, he came upon two workstations set in wide places at either side of the corridor. There were dark stains on the light buff furnishings. Blood.

He examined a chair set low and pitched so the occupant would be half reclining, looking at an overhead panel. Now the panel was just a dark red oval patch on the ceiling, but the darkness had depth, as if he were looking into a tank. He tried to imagine what the display would be like, but he had no idea what was done at this station.

The controls were on the arms of the chair, which were broad and dotted with bits of the same deep dark substance that formed the screen above. Perhaps, with the power on, the display on the chair arms would identify each control’s function. That would be necessary if the functions of the controls could be changed.

He was thinking like a human, and he knew it. He wasn’t sure anyone on the Project had the imagination to understand luren controls. He regarded the workstation with some awe. It was unexpectedly humbling, for he’d always subconsciously assumed he would understand luren artifacts on sight.

Casting about with all his senses, he determined that he was alone. Sitting down, he put his hands on the controls and gazed up into the monitor...if that’s what it was. Opening himself, he tried to feel what this place was.

But it only baffled him. There’s a lesson. Raised human, schooled by humans, I am human. He wished everyone who subscribed to the Tourist philosophy could sit here and feel this. It would end their callous treatment of humans.

Suddenly, the last of the unacknowledged doubts that had depressed him since his skirmish with Abbot in the men’s room on Goddard Station vanished. It might be futile to delay the moment the luren found Earth, but it had to be done. With time to study this, humans just might be able to hold their own.

Something whispered at the edge of perception.

Influence! Abbot!

He sprang out of the chair and crouched, muffling his own Influence as much as he dared. Back the way he’d come, through the twisted hatch, Titus saw Abbot stop, hunker down, and open an access panel. He worked within, concentrating, Influence keeping him invisible to the humans who passed.

Titus backed along the hall away from Abbot, searching for a place to hide. Nearby, he found an undamaged door. Eyes focused on Abbot, he put one hand behind him, groping with gloved fingers for the control. His grip fell naturally onto a panel, and before he knew it he was inside the room.

It was a chamber about seven feet by eight feet. As he sensed Abbot move toward him, he worked frantically to shut the door. It slid closed just as Abbot eased through the twisted hatch. Before utter blackness enclosed him, Titus glimpsed Abbot’s hand gripping a recording device.

Dispelling his own Influence, Titus leaned against the door, eyes closed, concentrating on Abbot’s moves. He couldn’t discern the faint vibration that Abbot’s feet must be making. The whole ship pulsed with human movement. But that keener sense that accompanied Influence tracked Abbot to the work stations Titus had examined.

Abbot stopped there and Titus sensed the older vampire’s intense concentration cloaked under precisely disciplined Influence. Titus didn’t dare move. He hardly breathed. He just waited, observing Abbot working.

At last, Abbot moved on past the room where Titus hid, and was gone. When the last whiff of his Influence had faded, Titus heaved a tremendous sigh. Then it hit him. He had spied on Abbot, and had not been noticed. Titus grinned ferociously. He wasn’t helpless before an all-powerful master. It was a real contest now.

Titus heaved himself away from the wall, and saw absolute, total darkness.

Activating his suit light, he peered about in the shaft of illumination and found a Westinghouse cable feeding overhead lights. He found the switch and turned them on.

In the center of the bare room, a lucite cylinder about six-feet long lay atop a dark rectangular block.

And inside...inside lay a man.

No! A luren!

The supine figure was unclothed. The skin had the white pigmentation that had turned Titus from the dusky skin color of Southern India to that of a deeply tanned Caucasian in the grave. The abdomen was concave, indicating the shrunken abdominal organs and sparse body fat of the typical Earth-bred luren. His face was long and gaunt.

The only differences were those of degree. This individual was whiter than anyone Titus knew. He was more emaciated. His hair was not gray or white but metallic silver. Titus supposed his eyes would be pale, too.

He seemed “alien” because there was no Oriental, Hispanic, Caucasian, Indian, or Black cast to his features. It was nothing specific. His nose wasn’t too prominent, his eyes weren’t too odd, his lips were not especially different, and his cheekbones seemed normal. His ears were reasonably shaped and placed. Even his haircut wasn’t so exotic. It was in the summation of these things that the difference lay.

The body showed no sign of explosive decompression. One side of the chest was depressed. A blow had broken ribs and ruptured organs: minor damage but enough to induce dormancy in a luren or to kill a human. The skull seemed intact.

The protective cylinder had gauges for air pressure, temperature, and radiation. The gauges were attached to a remote-monitored telemetry device.

Inferences leaped through Titus’s mind. There had been no hint on Earth that they’d found anything but cell-damaged corpses. This intact specimen was being preserved—probably in pure sterile nitrogen—for cloning! It had to be for cloning!

It hadn’t been done yet for lack of budget, but they’d do it eventually. All they needed was one perfect germ cell.

What the humans didn’t know was that this “corpse” was not dead. His spine and brain were intact. Given a benign environment, he’d revive. But the humans didn’t suspect that. Despite, or perhaps because of, all the horror movies ever made, they’d never suspect that.

Suddenly, he realized what he’d done. Turning on the lights had signaled security. They had to be on their way.

He flicked the lights off and fumbled at the door. It resisted. Calm down. It has to be unlocked or how’d I get in? It gave, spilling him into the hall, and he took off in the direction Abbot had gone. Behind him, a security officer squeezed through the twisted hatch and headed for the room where the sleeper lay.

Titus rounded a bend, chose a branching corridor, and stopped, lost. He knew he was facing what they had labeled the stern. It was connected to the medical research dome by a pressurized, high-security tunnel. Very likely Abbot had gone that way, for the only other way back into the station was via the surface, past the security checkpoint.

Heart pounding, Titus set off astern, cloaked heavily in Influence. Visualizing the consequences of being caught and connected to the security breach, he sidled through groups of workers. The Project openly sponsored some fifteen hundred investigations underway, both on the alien vessel and in the station’s labs. But Titus’s mind was on the sleeper. Could he allow the humans to vivisect a helpless luren? If they knew, would they do it anyway? They could have their cloning specimen without destroying the man. But knowing what he did of biologists, Titus was sure they’d do a total autopsy, which would include removing the brain, fatal even for a luren. If they knew he was alive, would they let him wake?

Was it even up to Titus to decide what they should allow the humans to do to the sleeper? Maybe Abbot didn’t know about the sleeper yet. Titus had to get word to Connie.

That meant rebuilding his computer, hoping the parts shipment from Earth would include a new black box. Had Abbot destroyed the black box on purpose? Did he even know about it? More to the point, could Titus slip a replacement communicator box into the rebuilt computer without Abbot knowing? Was Abbot in direct touch with his Tourists?

Had Connie received and understood Titus’s cryptic message buried in the requisition that Carol Colby had sent to Earth? And could Connie’s agents smuggle him a communicator? Unlike Abbot, Titus didn’t have the skill to build one.

Titus came to an unguarded airlock fitted into a docking port of the luren craft by profligate use of flexible gasket material. The portal was plastered with a frightening array of DayGlo quarantine signs, but the green light above it was on. He leaned against the bulkhead beside it, trying to concentrate on what was on the other side.

At length, he held his breath and eased into the airlock. Casting a pall of Influence to divert the attention of the guards, he hoped no one would notice what appeared to be an empty lock cycling. After a nerve-wracking interval, he emerged in the Biomed research section where the alien bodies were being studied. It was one area Titus’s clearance didn’t authorize him to enter.

He would need their results, but he had been banned from their lab. Why? Because they planned a cloning? It seemed so reasonable, and then he remembered Mihelich. If he was connected with cloning....

The airlock opened into a corridor where everyone was dressed in bio-isolation suits, the labs opening off it doubly sealed. Through the next airlock, precautions eased and there was one open lab where glass vessels climbed poles up to the ceiling next to one lined with incubator ovens filled with specimen dishes. Two other rooms down the hall held the main biocomputer.

Further on, he found a power and life support substation capable of maintaining this dome independently of the central systems of the station. Of course Abbot would oversee the operation of that unit, and thus be cleared for this area.

Titus was sorely tempted to linger, to listen and try to find out if cloning capability was being installed here. But it was too dangerous. He had already inadvertently tripped one of security’s traps. No more today.

He headed back to his room.

* * * * * * *

Titus spent the next couple of days organizing the repairs. Shimon proved to be a genius, and Inea became invaluable. Though she was no computer hardware expert, she was a wizard at troubleshooting and better with her hands than others.

At his first department heads meeting, Titus Influenced one of the engineers to do a refractory study of the ship’s hull. He led the man to believe it would be useful if the military had to detect hostile ships.

When not attending obligatory meetings, sitting on committees, or reading reports of meetings he wasn’t supposed to attend, Titus prowled the storerooms. He found eight vital components that had disappeared from inventory...Abbot’s work, no doubt. Each time he returned with one of these treasures, Inea would study him thoughtfully.

During working hours, she treated him in a professional manner. There were only a few moments when she would pause to weigh something he said or did, and he would feel he was being judged. Indeed, he felt that all luren were being judged.

He hadn’t visited her again. It was not because he spent most of his off hours trying to crack security seals to get at background on the biomed staff, but because, each evening when they parted, she would say goodnight in a final tone.

At first he thought it was an act designed to tell everyone there was nothing between them, protecting his cover. But when he caught up with her in the lift, she brushed him off. He was alarmed at how much it hurt to watch her retreating form. But he didn’t dare push her.

On the fourth day, Carol Colby called. Titus took it in his office. “Titus, I have good news and bad news. Which do you want first?”

“I’ll take the bad first.”

“We’ve got an appropriations fight on our hands. We may not get all the parts you ordered. And we may not get them by special shipment. They’re telling me the budget won’t cover it. When I told them they had to ship the parts, or at least squirt us a copy of your star catalogue, they laughed at me. It would cost too much to squirt it, they tell me.”

“It would,” agreed Titus. “It would take hours, and there’d be errors. Sunspot activity is making hash of all data from the far orbital instruments. We’re on repeaters.”

At least part of his operation had been functioning well. He was getting some raw data from the far observatories searching the Taurus region along the vessel’s approach path. The others hadn’t found anything as useful as a jettisoned power module, but he was monitoring a particle-counting array deployed on the surface of Deimos. If the luren drive had left a particle trail, they might find it. But not until the computer was up again.

Titus hoped Colby’s good news was that they had regained contact with the probe that had tracked the alien in, then ceased talking before dumping its data. Unmanned probes often righted themselves. There were a dozen good people working on the problem, but Titus needed the data soon, for the probe had seen the approach from a different angle.

“Well then,” he said heartily, “your good news is that Wild Goose has finally reported in?”

“No, my good news isn’t that good. Abbot Nandoha has agreed—after considerable persuasion on my part—to help with your repairs. He’s technically hired to run our power plant, but his dossier shows he’s also a computer architect. I hope he can redesign your system and put you back on line with the parts we have and will be getting soon.”

Oh, God. “I’ll bet that took some persuasion.”

“Now, Titus, I am aware of the, uh, friction you’ve generated with Nandoha. I don’t expect such behavior from my department heads. You’ll make an effort. Am I understood?”

“Yes.” She couldn’t fire him because nobody else had spent the last ten years identifying stars with planets. A few decades ago, the search had been the main occupation of astronomers. But the grant money had dried up. Now, Titus had the only complete catalogue of such stars, and heaps of unpublished papers. The lack of public interest had forced Titus to make his living teaching. “I will make the effort, Dr. Colby. And in the future, I will take care not to allow fatigue to erode my temper. Please accept my apology.”

“Now don’t take it too hard, Titus. We’re all human. We make mistakes. If I hear nothing more of it, it won’t go on your record, your pay won’t be docked, and I won’t need to bring in a lesser manager for your department.”

“Thank you, Dr. Colby.”

“Carol, remember?”

Titus forced himself to relax visibly. But this was a message from Abbot. At will, his father could remove him from the project just by creating “friction.”

“Look, Carol, I’m not sure it’s necessary to take such a vitally needed man off life support. Shimon is a genius in his own right, and has been diligent—”

“Don’t argue with me, Titus. I’m giving you Nandoha for a week. In four days, I’ll want your list of what still must be brought from Earth. Don’t despair. I’ll get it for you somehow. But only what Abbot can’t do without. Good day.”

Titus sat back and stared at the blank screen. Maybe the anti-Project humans are blocking appropriations because somebody knows about the sleeper. If they knew, Connie might know by now, too. But he couldn’t assume that. He had to get a message out to Connie. He needed blood concentrate. He needed someone who could stand up to Abbot. And he had to know what to do about the sleeper.

Before he could report, he had to verify his suspicions about cloning. Mihelich was no orderly. His file was locked behind highest security. Even queries for his published papers were blocked. And while Titus had been wasting time on Mihelich’s files, Abbot had outflanked him, Influencing Colby. He’ll control the whole Project before I figure out what’s really happening.

“Titus?”

Inea peeked around the office door.

With an incredible effort, Titus rearranged his face into a welcoming smile. “Come in. What can I do for you?”

She ventured into the room. “What’s wrong?”

What could he say? That another vampire was coming to joust with him for possession of her? “Nothing new.”

“Titus,” she warned.

“Carol says we’re not getting our scheduled parts shipment. No appropriation.”

“Bad. But it’s more than that.”

“Shimon’s going to blow his Israeli stack when he discovers what Carol has done.”

She almost bit at that one, but instead of asking what Carol had done, she shook her head. “More.”

Titus wondered how he could be so transparent to a human. “All right,” he confessed, as if surrendering. “I’m worried. I can’t figure out how to tell you...something.”

“Just tell.”

“You may never speak to me again. I couldn’t stand that. It’s been bad enough the last few days, with you stalking off every night without a word.”

She frowned at him, studying him in that way that made him so nervous. “I’m not ready to talk yet,” she said. “Later. I promise.”

“Okay. Look, meanwhile could you do me a favor?”

“Like?”

He thought fast. “You’ve turned out to be very talented with circuitry. When the few components we can get finally do arrive, we won’t have time to fool with them. I’m going to send you over to Ernie Natches in Electronics for some quick training. That way you’ll be more help when we really need you.”

“What precisely do I have to learn?” she challenged.

“Let Ernie decide. He’s got benches full of our components he’s trying to repair. You can help.”

She studied him again, weighing. “You’re making this up as you go along.”

Diabolical woman. He recalled thinking that in a monotonous undertone during the years he’d been going with her. “Inea, I’ve got a lot of problems. I have to create solutions on the spot.”

“What problem is getting rid of me a solution to?”

“Trying to get my computer repaired and keep my ass out of the fire. The worst part is that I spend all my time filling out forms, writing reports, and going to meetings rather than doing physics. I’m becoming a frustrated administrator.”

“You’re evading again.”

“Consider it a favor. I’ll owe you. Report to Ernie in the morning, okay?”

“It’s not okay, but I’ll do it. What do I tell him, that I’m still on your payroll?”

“Of course. He’s doing me a favor. Training you.”

She went to the door. “What you owe me in return is a complete explanation.”

“Okay. As soon as we get back to Earth.”

“Titus!”

He shrugged.

“You have the best woebegone look of anyone I know. All right, but I get my explanation on the Quito landing pad.”

“No deal. The ‘port restaurant.” He’d never forget that scorching sun.

“Don’t quibble!” She left.

Watching her, he noted that it was hard to flounce on the moon. It definitely crimped her style.

The moment she was out the door, he got Ernie on the vidcom. He had only met the man on his odyssey through the stockrooms, but he had been extraordinarily helpful. He owed Ernie several favors and here he was asking for another.

Worse yet, as soon as he finished with Ernie, he had to convince Shimon to rotate to the night shift. With Abbot being brought in as if Shimon couldn’t handle his job, there was no way the two would get along.

And still worse, Titus had to face Abbot after publicly expelling him from the lab.