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Chapter 1
“Nora, you’ve got to get Keren back to 8055. Now. Yesterday! Or you’re going to lose her.”
In all my 56 years of living, I can’t remember when I heard words that scared me more than those ones did. Go back to Planet 8055, from which I and my survey team mates escaped (damn near miraculously) ten years earlier? Go back there on purpose, to a world where a post-menopausal woman like me is under an automatic death sentence-where the Ast and their almost equally mysterious (and ruthless) allies rule-and the human inhabitants are doomed to extinction, as soon as the current generation dies off? All that would have been bad enough to contemplate, but Dr. Reiko Ballantine was telling me I must take my nine-year-old daughter with me.
“Are you sure there’s nothing you can do to help her?” I asked my old team mate Rudy Tasker’s wife, who also happened to be the best pediatric endocrinologist in the business. She’d come all the way to Rigel 5, home to me (and for the past decade, to my husband and our daughter, too) to try to diagnose Keren-Happuch Mira Cranshaw Falconi’s curious malaise, that approaching puberty seemed to be worsening…and that, Reiko had just let me know, heralded a much worse problem.
Marc, my team mate throughout my long career as a planetary survey leader and my husband ever since we returned from 8055, sat beside me in the office Reiko had borrowed at Rigel 5’s best pediatric hospital. He reached out for my hand, because we no longer had to act like colleagues now that we were both retired. Retired in mutual disgrace, because of how our careers ended…but that’s another story. A long one, called Regs. Maybe you’ve read it? But if you haven’t, don’t worry. I’ll make sure you can understand this one, without doing that first.
“Yes, I’m sure.” Reiko nodded, and then sighed. “Whatever those ‘Others,’ as you and Rudy always call them, did that made all of 8055’s women sterile except you…and made you fertile again, somehow, at the same time!…also affected Keren. While she was in utero. That’s my best hypothesis, anyway, since what’s happening to her is definitely a function of her body preparing itself for menarche. What I’m sure about is that we’ll never find the answer here. You’ve got to get her back to where you conceived her, and-oh, hell, Rudy’s going to kill me when I tell him this, but there’s no help for it! I’ll have to come with you.”
She made it sound so simple. Which, of course, it was. But “simple” is not at all the same thing as “easy,” and unfortunately she’d made it sound that way, too. So I asked again, not believing I was doing so when my little girl’s welfare surely depended on this woman’s continued willingness to go far beyond the call of medical duty, “Reiko, are you sure she won’t survive if she stays here?”
“Yes. I’m afraid I am. If Keren goes on deteriorating at her present rate, she may celebrate her tenth birthday-but she’ll never make it to her eleventh. Not even with any palliative treatments I might be forced to prescribe, if you’re refusing to try the one thing that I believe can actually work.”
Once again, Dr. Ballantine had no idea what she was saying. Despite being married to a survey op, she was clueless about the impossibility of getting our hands on a ship capable of making the passage from here to 8055-taking it, unnoticed, down to the planet’s surface (assuming neither our own forces nor the Ast had stopped us from crossing the interstellar border)-blending into the population there for long enough so Reiko could determine the exact cause of Keren’s condition-and then getting back into space, and safely across the border in the opposite direction. Nor did she realize, I felt sure now, what getting stranded on that world would mean.
Especially for women. Surely Rudy had been honest with his wife about our last sojourn there? Technically a survey op wasn’t supposed to tell outsiders about his experiences on a world like 8055, but most of us made exceptions for our nearest and dearest.
Then again, not many ops managed to maintain such long-term relationships as those words implied. I’d had Grandmum, and no one else of any significance, waiting back home during my first decade as an op, and I was pretty typical in my scarcity of personal ties. After the old girl died-in a “recreational mishap,” which was how the local university described it when their Mathematics Department Chair Creature fell into a crevasse while chaperoning a Mountaineering Club outing-I had no one left at all. That was about the same time Marc parted company with the mother of his first child, after which we turned to each other for something more than the comradely friendship we already shared.
You had to expect it would be like that, when you chose a survey op’s life. You just couldn’t get home often enough, or stay there for long enough at a stretch, to be of much use to a spouse. Not when your life’s work required spending time (sometimes long stretches of it) on a succession of alien worlds that had populations which Survey Central deemed worthy of study. People to whom their families mattered a lot usually didn’t last longer than a mission or two-if they made it through op training in the first place, which they often didn’t. And that, of course, was a damn good thing.
Did I dare to open my yap now and ask Reiko a series of blunt questions, until I was sure she knew enough about 8055 to make an informed decision about going there? Or should I just be glad she was so willing, and start making travel plans?
“Good thing Rudy’s still on active duty,” Marc said from beside me, in the tone he always uses when he’s waited long enough and finally decides I must want him to take the point (conversationally speaking). “He’ll have to find us transportation, you know. We’re not poor, Reiko, but chartering a long-range shuttle’s beyond us. Even if we used every credit we’ve got, plus everything we could borrow.”
“It would have to be a charter flight, wouldn’t it? Or you’d have to buy a ship outright. I guess I’m too used to just getting myself a ticket and then hopping aboard a liner, and winding up anywhere I’ve ever wanted to travel. So I didn’t think about how we’d be getting to 8055 in the first place.” Ballantine looked at us both, not just Marc, with the beginnings of wisdom (otherwise known, sometimes, as fear) in those dark eyes with their vestigial hint of Terra’s Orient. One of her parents-it would have to be her father, since “Ballantine” must be her mother’s surname-had bequeathed to her characteristics seldom seen on the faces of today’s homogenized humans. But back on Terra, which was Reiko’s home just as Rigel 5 was mine, some regions still had populations that exhibited their ancestors’ racial traits. You could identify such people on sight as “Anglo,” “African,” “Hispanic,” or “Oriental”-although Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and so on, were harder to guess. They’d managed to retain their identities, genetically as well as culturally, by keeping determinedly to themselves on their own segments of the home-world’s surface.
Those of us whose forebears headed outward to the stars, who established homes for themselves and their offspring on other planets, lost those distinctions long ago. Marc and Tasker and I were (and of course still are) all typical examples of our kind; with skin tones in varying shades of brown, eyes that can be any color, and hair that can be brown, black, or deep auburn. Seldom will you see blondes among us, and almost never what a native Terran would call a “redhead.”
Did Reiko Ballantine’s ancestral-world upbringing, and privileged adult life, contribute to her obvious naivete about the mission for which she was volunteering? Perhaps. But most civilians were pretty damn clueless, so she probably wasn’t that much worse than the rest. I’d been expecting more from Rudy Tasker’s wife, that was all.
Anyway, Marc had just administered a first dose of reality therapy to our well-meaning friend; and I was grateful. He’d administered enough of that unpleasant tonic to me, after all, during the years of our professional association-which started when Survey Central put him on the first team I ever “bossed,” expressly to serve as my nursemaid.
Sometimes he still plays that role in my life, all these years later. I squeezed his hand, since I was still holding it, and I said, “Good thing Rudy’s not off on a mission. At least he’s available so he can lend us a hand! How about giving him a call, Reiko? And then hauling him in here, so we can get this caper planned while Keren’s big ears aren’t listening?”
* * *
“I had an idea it’d come to this.” Rudolf Tasker was well past thirty now. His wife, Reiko, I knew to be slightly older; but you couldn’t see it by looking at them together. He’d lost his boyishness long ago, and I could remember exactly where and how. That was when he lost his first wife, the 8055 colonist/modern human hybrid girl in whose honor I gave Keren-Happuch Mira Cranshaw Falconi the second of her given names. Her first, of course, being that of both my Mum and Grandmum.
“So what’ve you got in mind?” I asked him, as he stood at the window of the hotel room he and Reiko shared. We’d had to get out of the borrowed office at the hospital when its regular tenant wanted it back. But Keren, who’d been strong enough to go to school today, wouldn’t need someone to welcome her home for hours yet; so the change of scene shouldn’t be a problem. And if she got sick, as she often did part-way through the school day, her teacher could find us anywhere. As long as we wanted to be found.
“I’m on transition leave right now, so going with you’s not a problem. I can get us a long-range shuttle, and supplies for it, too. Nothing’s really that hard, when you’re an incoming sector boss.” Tasker turned slightly, just enough so he could look at the rest of us over his shoulder. “The rest of us” defined as Marc, and me; because Reiko hadn’t arrived from the hospital yet. She’d been hauled into an emergency consultation, the kind that a physician’s oath precludes turning down, just as we were all trying to get out through the door.
“Rudy! Congratulations, that’s wonderful!” I turned him around so I could hug him. I was fond of this man, in the way that a human woman is fond of younger siblings if she has them-which I never did, in a natural sense. But eight months of being stranded together on 8055 had forged bonds among the three of us, Cranshaw and Tasker and me, that went far beyond a team’s normal comradeship.
I meant that it was wonderful for him, of course, since he must want it or he wouldn’t have applied. I’d never had the slightest interest in becoming a sector boss, or anything else that was higher on the food chain than team leader. Even that title my beloved Marc hadn’t cared to wear except once, temporarily and disastrously-so being elevated to the role of “team leaders’ boss” had never entered my husband’s mind, most likely. But Marc was an anthropologist by training, not an ex-Marine like me or a former military pilot like Tasker. So even leading the team had, to him, been nothing but a distraction. He’d become an op so he could study alien (and estranged human) cultures. He didn’t give a damn about anything else, and he’d adjusted so nicely to retirement only because my Grandmum’s old university gladly took him on as a member of its faculty, soon after I dragged him home with me.
I wished I could say I’d settled in just as fast and just as well, but for me it was a whole lot harder. There wasn’t much for me to do at first except finish gestating Keren. And after that (of course!) bear her, suckle her, and mother her, during the early years when caring for a small human can easily manage to be an adult’s full-time job. I’d had a tough time letting go of my daughter, to my chagrin, when she got big enough so that she needed to spend much of every day at school.
I finally went to work teaching classes in both self-defense and wilderness survival, for a privately run “organized recreation” school. I found it satisfying, because I realized my work might spare other people’s loved ones from getting the kind of news I’d received after Grandmum’s fatal climbing mishap. But the job really wasn’t enough to fill all the places in my life that Marc and Keren didn’t occupy.
Okay. Time to be honest! I hated why I was about to leave my life on Rigel 5 behind, but part of me couldn’t help feeling relieved and excited about it. Even though I must go back, instead, to 8055-taking along every single fellow being about whom I cared, into a setting where I knew we would be in constant danger-I still wanted to do this. Now that I’d got past the first shock of realizing it could happen, I was growing fiercely glad that it must.
“Yeah. I suppose it’s wonderful.” Tasker’s arms came up to return my embrace, but he did it perfunctorily. I’d hugged him in spontaneous joy on other occasions, so I knew how to read his reaction today. After a few seconds he held me at arm’s length instead, and stared into my face while he said what he’d been wanting to all along. “I didn’t volunteer to go upstairs, Nora. The higher-ups kicked me there, and I had to either accept it or get done.”
“Why?” Marc asked the question before I got my mouth open again.
“Same reason I’ve been told to take a nice, long rest. The last mission I led…well, it broke me. That’s also why Reiko’s on leave from her practice.” Rudy’s full lips twisted as he answered Marc, but went right on staring into my eyes. “Don’t get me wrong. She wanted to come out here and take a look at your daughter, and help Keren if she could. But if I wasn’t an official basket case right now, at a rank that lets the service keep me on payroll because they’re having a hell of a time finding enough experienced ops to replace retiring sector bosses these days, Reiko wouldn’t be free to do any of this. And neither, of course, would I.”
* * *
“It’s that bad, huh?” Marc spoke again, into the hotel room’s quiet. “They’re starting to recruit Big Bosses, are they? Not taking volunteers only, now that it’s been ten years since the military stopped allowing people like you and Nora to transfer over to the Corps before their 20 years are up?”
“That sums it up pretty well.” Tasker nodded, and sounded relieved that he wasn’t going to have to explain all that to us. After which he folded me into his arms again, like a little kid hugging a stuffed toy for comfort, and of course I let him do it. Just as I’d once allowed him to hold me in his arms through most of an impossibly dark night on 8055; so he could fall asleep and stay asleep, after he’d been forced to watch while a gang of drunken men raped his young half-native wife. Over and over until she died, her body literally torn apart by their brutality. I’d wondered then if he would ever be the same.
Well, not the same, of course. It would be ridiculous to expect anyone to come through that horror unchanged. But I had wondered whether he would be able, afterward, to go on living an op’s life and doing an op’s job. If the experience would harden him, temper him, or break him; because I knew from my own long seasoning in our strange profession that it was sure to do one of those three things.
I’d thought he came out on the other side tempered. Made stronger, without losing his compassion or his flexibility. But now he had endured some other horror, which did to him what Mira Alcorn’s death hadn’t managed; and I suspected that the only reason he was on temporary instead of terminal leave right now was that Survey Central (with its back to the wall personnel-wise) preferred experienced leaders to undamaged ones.
“How do you feel about that, Rudy?” Marc asked the next question gently. As if he were talking to me, during an off-duty moment; or even to our daughter.
“Rotten. If they can’t trust me to do my job on the ground anymore, how the hell am I supposed to trust myself to boss people who have to go there?” My old friend shuddered in my arms, and his hold on me tightened convulsively. “Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut, because now you may not want to go anywhere with me. Especially not back to 8055, with your kid in tow! But both of you were always honest with me, and I-well-thought you had a right to know.”
“You’ve told them now, anyway.” A different voice, Reiko’s voice, came from the hotel room’s far side. I’d heard the door slide open, quietly though such fixtures moved in this luxurious place, but I’d paid it no heed because I knew Marc was there and watching my back. So my old reflexes, the self-protective ones a former survey op never loses, hadn’t kicked in. And as for Reiko seeing me held close in her husband’s arms, well-tough, if she found the sight puzzling or offensive. If the four of us (or five, counting Keren) were going to head out together on the most dangerous mission any of us had ever tackled, then Reiko would damned well have to get used to how the team of Falconi, Cranshaw, and Tasker functioned.
Because it sure as hell did look like that long disbanded team was back in business. As of right now; this very minute. |
