Approaching Oblivion (Jezebel's Ladder Book 4) (8 page)

The burst of
agricultural work ended, and a lot of people competed to do the handful of odd
jobs around the Hollow. Each weekend, Lou took two piloting shifts and two
stand-bys. Mostly, the shift gave Red some time off. Park was still a novice at
steering, requiring someone to be on-call at a moment’s notice. He could do the
basics, but any emergency left him paralyzed. An engineer at heart, the Korean
was too afraid of doing the wrong thing.

After
a month of waiting, Lou intentionally bumped into the two doctors in the dining
room. Auckland opened with, “How’s it hanging? How’s life in the Hollow?”

“The
crops aren’t doing as well as they did when Sensei did everything
automatically. We think the grapes aren’t getting enough water, but Rachael
won’t authorize more. I guess we’ll just grow raisins this year. Nothing’s
moving in that heat except our jaws,” Lou lamented. Rachael had even cracked
down on the amount of beer produced as a waste of resources. “If you need to
drain the lizard, I’ll watch the prisoner for you.”

“That
would be great. I’d also like to read an e-mail from my wife without someone
looking over my shoulder,” the Maori doctor said.

When
they were alone, Lou said, “Yo, TB, what can you tell me?”

“Wannamaker
is a god.”

“So
is Robert Fripp on a guitar,” Lou quipped. “I meant progress.”

“Those
files unlocked secrets of creation I never imagined.”

Lou
grabbed the man by the uniform and lifted. “Focus. Facts, not raving. Drooling
over the guy that had to be put down for atrocities will not earn you any love
around here.”

“Yeah,
Red said the same thing,” Toby admitted.

“You
told
her?” asked Lou.

“Yeah,
she wasn’t happy with you, captain.”

“Why
would you tell her?”

“She
asked me why I was singing a couple days ago, and it slipped out.”

“Why
were you singing?”

“I
figured out the missing part of the blocker. Wannamaker had the core solution,
but he didn’t have my talents. See, the final key is different for every woman.
You have to custom code it. I had the ability to discriminate DNA before Yvette
infected me, but with Empathy—a talent no one has ever wasted on a scientist
like me before—I can tell what that DNA
needs
.”

“English.”

“We
can navigate Mercy’s first trimester by suppressing their Active natures with
drugs,” Toby explained. “This should eliminate unwanted reactions from both
mother and child. For the third trimester, I would need to create a tailored
virus to temporarily rewrite the cell structures of key organs not to react to
the embryo. Between the two treatments, we can prevent Mercy from rejecting
your spawn for long enough for her to deliver. If you get her preggers again,
I’ll have to whip up a new batch. A condom would actually be most cost
effective and appreciated by fellow crew members. I can make them very thin
now.”

The
pence took a moment to drop. Lou swept the despicable man up in a hug. “You
actually did it!”

“Watch
it. I said I
can
. I didn’t get permission yet,” Toby warned. “Human
experimentation takes command authorization, and this will tie up the medical
nanofabricator as well as the stasis unit for months plus testing time. The
boss wants to talk to you about priorities.”

“Right,
but you didn’t stop your development efforts?”

“Hell,
no. This is science, man. I’m getting a Nobel Prize.”

“A
kiss or a cigar, which do you want?”

“Cigars
are illegal in space, not to mention carcinogenic.”

“Pucker
up, you wonderful mad scientist.”

“On
second thought, I could trade a cigar to Herk to get better treatment.”

“That’s
thinking like an inmate!” Lou said, clapping him on the back.

When
Auckland returned, he huffed from exertion and anger. “Lou, what did you do?”

“You’ll
have to be more specific,” Lou replied.

“Yuki
has been at the back of the queue for a couple months—it’s more efficient to do
all one type of job at once,” Auckland explained. “Now that there’s a lull, she
hit us with your little surprise.”

“Mercy
and I donated our allotments. So? She has three times the points saved up,” Lou
said with a shrug.

Toby
fed the flames. “The wording of the bylaw is
double
what she
contributes.”

Auckland
paced. “That comes to about twenty-nine sensors
worth. Are you trying to wreck our economy?”

“Ouch.
I’m just trying to help an old friend,” Lou said. “She’ll pay it back later.”

“Technically,
Mercy went absent without leave when she found you on that island. The
disciplinary committee hasn’t met about that yet,” Auckland threatened.

“Whoa.
Let’s keep this about people who are here to defend themselves. Yuki’s a team
player. If Pratibha hadn’t ignored her earlier, this wouldn’t have happened.”

“If
we allowed this loophole, she would monopolize the fabricator for a month!”

“I’m
not going to be the one to tell her you’re trying to change the rules after the
fact,” Lou said.

To
twist the knife, Toby added, “Should people in stasis collect allotment at all?
I didn’t. Red told me I didn’t get allotment because I was already benefiting
from another scarce resource.”

“Sounds
fair,” Auckland noted. “I’ll mention that during tonight’s meeting.”

“You
can’t write laws that are retroactive, dipshit,” Lou said, raising his voice.
“If you try, I will paint you like Fagin, stealing from orphans and the
handicapped to line your wife’s pockets.”

“Careful,
you’re making him turn purple,” Toby cackled.

“If
you don’t want to do the right thing, I’ll vote for Red’s motion.”

“Whoa!
What motion? I’m working tonight,” Lou objected.

“The
agenda for the meeting is posted on the community bulletin board,” Auckland said.

“But
nobody reads it to me when Mercy isn’t around. What does it say?”

After
a moment of silence, Toby poured the salt in the wound. “Red put forth a set of
standards for stasis. She proposes we kick hopeless cases out rather than
prolonging the inevitable because we’re tying up resources we might need if
someone we can help got seriously hurt. In this case, the rules will apply to
Mercy.”

“But
Mercy isn’t hopeless,” Lou objected.

“Her
child is,” said Auckland gravely, “and it’s endangering both her life and the
mission.”

“
Our
child, and Toby found a way to fix them. Tell him.”

“Sorry.
He’s not cleared.”

Lou
wanted to punch both men for different reasons. “Zeiss will stop this,” Lou
asserted, fleeing the room. Soon, he hovered and strapped himself in front of
the commander’s door. Oblivious to the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign taped to the top
of the oval, he pounded.

Odd
, he thought when he
smelled something burning.
Grilled cheese wasn’t on the menu for today.
When he figured out the scent was coming from the now-open door, he blurted,
“Red, sweetheart, I can explain.”

From
the “kiyai,” he could sense the crotch kick coming and twisted to take the blow
on his hip. Fortunately, in zero g, the equal and opposite reaction merely
launched him to the end of his tether.

“You
gave that pervert
my
medical information?” she shouted from a distance.

“Z!”
Lou bellowed. “Red’s about to violate . . . uh . . . me.”

Zeiss
said, “Dear, I thought we were going to do this together.”

“Fine,
you hold him down in our room. I can get better traction there for my kicks.”

Desperate,
Lou said, “Fine, you lunatic. I will let you break every bone in my body if you
tell everyone why you stabbed Mercy in the back with tonight’s council motion.
That girl let scientists stick her with needles her entire childhood so you
could live a better life. It’s like she’s the royal whipping girl.”

“That’s
not fair,” Red insisted.

Zeiss
reeled the safety line in. “She proposed those rules a while back to make
force-freezing a crime. Pratibha just brought it out of committee when it
suited her.”

Lou
wasn’t satisfied. “Why did you put a Hegelian measure like that on the ballot
to begin with? Tell me that, and I’ll apologize.”

“Captain,
let’s talk in our room,” Zeiss whispered. “We both have things to explain.”

When
the door closed, Lou sat in the only chair. The other two stood nearby. The
tactic was meant to be intimidating, but so many visual ploys are wasted on a
blind man. He warned, “Red, turn on your media scrambler. We don’t want any
record of this, however it falls out.”

He
heard a click and the whir of white noise as Red propped a metallic gadget
against the door.

“You
should have come to us first about the Wannamaker files,” Zeiss said.

Lou
smoothed his ruffled hair to give him time to consider. Friend or not, Zeiss
was the commander. “I might have if I thought I could trust you. Since we
diverted to Oblivion, I only hear from you when you need something, and Red’s
sneakier than the Mossad in Gaza.”

“You
trusted Toby?” asked Red.

“If
that man needed to grind up my spleen to feed it to Mercy, I would have done
it, but I didn’t have to. He might not have told you, but with a simple
injection, he can cure rejection of the multiple-talent child, the bane of
Active existence. That sociopath did it.”

“You
had no right to make this decision alone,” Red said.

Lou
folded his arms. “Tell me you wouldn’t have done the same to bring back your
three siblings.”

“I
. . . that’s different,” she said quietly. “Conrad, tell him why it’s wrong.”

“You’ve
let a terrible genie out of the bottle,” Zeiss said.

“So
use it!” Lou insisted.

“We
won’t be able to control it for long. When people analyze our logs, they’ll
know.”

“Who
cares? My kids will be healed. Yours will be healed.”

“We
decided to wait to have children until after the mission, up to a decade so we
won’t be distracted.”

“Fine.
I’m sure we’ll want those nonlethal vegetation defenses around the outpost on
Oblivion. Imagine thornbush barriers like the ones on
Sleeping Beauty
.
Hell, find a cure for Fortune syndrome. This is how the Magi meant us to use
their technology.”

“That’s
just it,” snapped Zeiss. “We think the Magi inflicted these limits on us to
minimize the damage we could do. Any attempt to tamper could trigger another
safeguard.”

That
made Yvette’s theories about the aliens seem pretty substantial, but Lou had
promised not to mention them in Olympus or in front of Red. “What could go
wrong? What’s worse than dead?”

Red
cleared her throat. “There are things not in those files. For example,
Wannamaker didn’t take very good care of the women he referred to as
broodmares. The prolonged fever from the experiments killed many of them. One
of the women dropped to an IQ of 82, but because it didn’t affect her ability
to carry the product, he didn’t care. Would you do that to Mercy? What if Toby
sets a tailored virus loose on all of us, one that makes us permanently happy
but stupid? That won’t violate the charter, but he could use it to take over
the ship.”

They
were tag-teaming him. Mercy was the one who could always take on Red; he needed
her. Lou tried to maintain a reasonable tone. “We’ll use safeguards here and
send Toby as fodder to the surface of Oblivion B4.”

“If
you lived on that planet, wouldn’t you consider that an act of war? We should
throw the book at you.”

“If
you can’t reveal any of this to the crew, how the hell would you manage that?”

“Dereliction.
You haven’t been pulling your weight since your accident. There’ve been a lot
of complaints—mostly from the women, mostly about your keeping men from doing
productive work.”

Lou
looked at the ceiling, pursing his lips like a coyote about to howl. “Oh,
that’s rich. Use your own enemies to crucify me. What I’ve been doing down
there is stuff you people should have been doing all along—our mission.
Instead, you’re hiding from your jobs in here. People with nothing to do are
turning on each other, but you two sit idle. I’ll make you a deal: if your
project trumps mine, I will voluntarily hand over my commission. What they hell
is so secret your second in command can’t know?”

Zeiss
sighed. “We’re trying to fix my mistake before anyone else finds it. I’ve
delayed and subdivided the water data as much as I can, but eventually Rachael
will figure out the atmospheric problem.”

“The
new cloud in the sky—Sundog? Everyone knows about that. It’s not your fault.”