Downtime (6 page)

“That’s
Old Blue-eyes and Tonto. They won’t come any closer until you leave,” Jason
said. “It takes them a while to get used to strangers.”

Calla
grunted and pulled out her field glasses from the pocket in her stellerator
vest. She held them up and looked at the danae. “It does have blue eyes,” she
said.

“Well,
two of them are. The other eye is green, the compound eye at the back of the . . .
ah, head.”

They
had no distinguishable head, just a face of sorts in what ought to be a belly,
but was not. “Tonto’s eyes are blue, too, but not quite so brilliant a blue,”
she said. “He’s just a babe, your reports said, yet he’s bigger than Old
Blue-eyes.”

“They
emerge full grown from the cocoon. Tonto won’t grow another centimeter.”

“You’re
sure about the three stages — egg, nymph, and adult?”

“Oh,
yes. Tonto is Old Blue-eyes’ egg from three years ago. I saw him hide it . . .
or her. They’re androgynous. And I tagged the nymph that emerged with a radio
implant. Tonto’s still got it somewhere in his gut. It doesn’t seem to bother
him any.”

“And
Tonto swims,” Calla said, finally taking the field glasses away to look at him.

Jason
chuckled and folded his arms over his chest. “Yes, Tonto swims. He’s a little
goofy, I’m afraid. It upsets Old Blue-eyes to no end. None of the other danae
swim.”

Calla
was glad to see him looking more cheerful than he was last night. She knew it
was only because he was talking about the danae, not that anything had changed
since last night. Jason used to be fond of horses, and his experience with them
had gotten him into the Praetorian guard in the first place, simply to fill out
a display team. Equestrians were difficult to find among old worlders. And now
he was fond of the danae; his affection for them came through even in his
supposedly objective reports.

“Do
you suppose,” Calla said, “that his swimming ability has something to do with
the fact that Tonto cocooned with a sea animal?”

Jason
smiled bemusedly. “Like the glowworm syndrome?”

He
shrugged. “About the only thing left of the victim after the cocooning stage is
the brain and bones. If traits were passed on, you would think it would be from
eating neural tissue.”

“Yes,
you would, wouldn’t you?” She raised the glasses again, took a last look at the
danae. They were staring at her from flat blue eyes, nictitating membranes down
against the sun’s onslaught. “Well, if that’s as close as they’ll come, I’ve
seen as much as I can see.” She put the field glasses in her pocket, then
shifted the stellerator vest, changing the pull of it across her shoulders. “Damn
stellerators are heavy.”

“And
hot,” he added. “But you’ll get used to it.”

She
nodded, but thought that she’d never get used to it, no more than she could
really become accustomed to walking around on rocks and dirt, nor to the pain
it caused. “That shuttle won’t unload itself. I’d better get back,” she said.

Jason’s
smile faded in the same way it used to fade when she reminded him it was time
to leave the apartment to go on duty. But back then he’d not been wearing the
silver moons of rank. That he nodded now suggested how he’d earned them, but
his face betrayed that he still did not like being reminded that duty could not
be put off for pastime.

“Here,”
he said, reaching into his stellerator pocket. He pulled out a survey plat. “The
as-built details of Red Rocks, at least as far as we’ve gotten. We have another
week’s work on the personnel quarters.”

“Yes,
I noticed. We slept in them last night anyhow, sort of staking out claims. They
look like they’ll be quite comfortable when they’re finished. Pretty, too, if
that rock polishes out. What kind is it?”

“Same
stuff you’re standing on, same formation, too. Limestone. You’ll see fossils if
we leave them unpolished. It’s up to you.”

“I
guess it would be unique to have walls decorated with fossils.” She tucked the
plat in her pocket with the field glasses.

“We’ll
just seal them,” Jason said, “to keep down the dust.”

Calla
nodded, and turning to go, found Jason walking beside her.

“I
read my orders last night. They confirmed everything you said. You forgot to
mention the bonus pay for not rotating us out. That will help.”

“Good.”

“And
that we’re sharing a second in command, a Praetorian officer of yours and not
one of my rangers.”

“Yes,
Marmion. He’s a good man, and sharing a second ensures good communication
between the two groups. We’ll be sharing a lot of equipment, too.”

“Especially
flyers. I notice all the zephyrs are now Praetorian supplies, along with almost
anything else that permits the least bit of mobility or that could be used for
communication.”

“Yes,
we have them. You can use them. Supply obviously didn’t want to duplicate
equipment.”

“Your
pilots or mine?” he asked.

“Mine,
of course. It will be a good opportunity for my people to get to know the
terrain.”

“Not
that they’ll ever really need to know the terrain,” he said, a bit of sarcasm
in his voice. “You people being researchers would have no interest in the lay
of the land. Cosmic radiation research is what they say you’ll be doing at Red
Rocks. Makes me wonder what they think we’ve been doing here for the past three
years.” He shook his head, neither getting nor expecting an answer from Calla. “If
you have a spy satellite up there in
Belden
Traveler
, we could use weather reports. We don’t like being caught out in
electrical storms with the stellerators on any more than you do.”

“You’re
not very happy about any of this, are you?”

“Hell,
no,” he said. “It would have been easier for me if they had just declared
martial law and put you in command to begin with instead of playing around with
my supplies and giving me a Praetorian second. If they want me dependent on
you, why fool around? It’s you wearing the damned gold anyhow.”

Calla
stopped in the trail, put her hands on her hips and looked up at Jason. “I’m
going to tell you once and only once, and I don’t want your thanks, or your
curses either. I just want you to know how it is. The Decemvirate would have
relieved you of your command here if I hadn’t objected. You would all have been
shipped back to the Hub to twiddle your thumbs until Timekeeper knows how long.
I didn’t think you’d want to wait until the war starts for your next
assignment, especially not when you could be useful here on Mutare.”

“Useful . . .
as a cover for your operations at Red Rocks,” he said disdainfully.

“And
to manage a planet I know nothing about. I probably won’t have time to learn
anything I should know to keep the situation under control. Like the civilian
population. I’d have gotten rid of them all if it were possible to do so
without suspicion, but I don’t even know how many there are.”

“Two
hundred and eleven that we know of. There could be more,” Jason admitted. “Mutare’s
big. All miners, though, so that limits their haunts. Even so, we probably
couldn’t locate half of them if we tried. They come and go as they please. Most
of them don’t even bother with an all-well check-in by radio. Backworld miners
tend to be iconoclasts.”

Calla started down the slope again, using her good right leg
to lead. “Crystallofragrantia,” she said. “That’s a mouthful. Why not aromatic
crystal or stink stone?”

“Survey
Ranger Charter requires that we use a dead language as the source for naming
geographical features, the flora and the fauna. That way the original meaning
doesn’t get bastardized by usage. A lot of the planets we service are pretty
far downtime, and a living language can change by the time we get back with the
information. I use Latin because it’s the language my first commander in the
rangers used, also the only one I know. So, that’s half the reason,” he said. “The
other half is because the Decemvirate doesn’t want individual rangers
immortalized in geographical features that might one day become important. You
know what I mean. They frown on names like Jason’s Crystal as much as stink
stone.”

“But
I’ve heard Amber Forest as much as Sylvan Amber,” Calla said. “And no one says
crystallofragrantia, do they?”

“No,
they just say crystal, and on Mutare everyone knows which crystal you mean. The
Decemvirate can’t control how people think. But my reports and official maps
say crystallofragrantia.”

“Have
you decided to increase the crystal limits? It would keep the civilian miners
from becoming a problem to Marmion, who would have to enforce the communication
and travel restrictions. If they were busy trying to find more crystal, they
wouldn’t be interested in talking about it or wanting to leave.”

“I
already told you that I’m not going to increase them,” Jason said, his face
darkening despite the bright sunlight. “I’ll find another way.”

“You
always were stubborn,” Calla muttered, but she didn’t think Jason heard, for he
abruptly stepped off the trail and went back toward Round House.

***

Even before checking, Calla knew that the cave the survey
rangers had hollowed out of a middle cretaceous sandstone ridge would meet to
the last detail the specifications the engineers had sent to Jason months ago.
Yet she had watched the perfection engineering unit set up the laser transit
and plumb in the main chamber and listened as they called out the numbers to a
clerk who fed them into a jar of jelly beans that had been downloaded with the
acceptance checks. Everything tallied. The troughs for feed and drain lines
were inclined perfectly, the entire cavern fired by a laser process that glazed
the exposed sandstone, which would make it possible for the engineers to seal
the cavern and control the atmospherics so that accidental contamination would
be impossible.

“Wouldn’t
have believed survey rangers could do things this well if I hadn’t seen it with
my own eyes,” said Chief of Perfection Engineers Marmion Andres. “I thought
they always shaved the regs here and there, and that after ten years of
backworld service they were useless at performing real legion work.”

Calla
grunted. “Perfectionists are always ready to believe the worst.”

“It’s
our job,” Marmion said, but he was smiling as he took the jelly bean jar from
the clerk and put his seal of approval on the data it contained. He handed the
jar to Calla, who gave it back to the clerk.

“Take
this over to the comm and upload to
Belden
Traveler
. When the cross-check comes down, tell Chief Tirzah I said she can
start installing the plumbing.”

“Yes,
Ma’am,” the clerk said, and started across the cavern to the ramp-tunnel that
led to the surface.

“Well,
if you’re not going to be here to tell Tirzah yourself, that must mean we’ve
some inspecting to do. What will it be, Calla?”

“The
sewers,” she said.

The
sewers were important for draining away the acids, solvents, and other
chemicals, each in its own pipe. There would be no problem with the lines’
isolation from one another; Jason understood how volatile the reactions could
be if the wrong two mixed. But disposal had been left to his discretion, since
the planet was for the most part uninhabited, and the usual regulations for
disposal wouldn’t apply on Mutare. They’d run undiluted into a nearby water
system, eventually be carried to the sea. Calla was concerned that the water
system be adequate to dilute all the contamination with the least amount of
disruption to the local flora and fauna. There’d be hell to pay from Jason if
he noticed anything amiss, for even though he’d put the finishing touches on
the sewer system himself, he couldn’t possibly have known how great the volume
of acids would be.

“The
governor’s already a bit touchy about exploitation levels on this planet,” she
said to Marmion. “He’s not going to be very happy if we put an acid bath in his
backyard.”

Marmion
nodded understandingly.

Calla
reached into her breast pocket for the surveyor’s plat Jason had given her and
unrolled the film. The jelly bean border wiggled a bit, then snapped into shape.
“Display sewer system,” she said softly, and the plat lines glowed as they
sequenced to bright orange along the outlines of the entire disposal system.
Most of the orange lines converged at the north, the farthest point from the
personnel quarters. “This way,” Calla said, stepping off to the north. Marmion
followed.

With
no data to think of while she walked, Calla noticed the many striations in the
glazed sandstone. Most of the sandstone must have been of fine-grained sand
from an ancient beach, which had glazed to a deep rusty red, blackened in
places where the laser had been used to smooth as well as melt. But there were
pink and white areas where the natural rust pigment had been removed by hot
solutions in some ancient epoch, and there were seams of silica-filled cracks
that glistened like diamonds when her lights hit them.

“Too
bad we’ll just about cover all of it with the equipment,” Marmion said,
apparently also noticing how pretty the chamber was. “What a shame the
personnel quarters aren’t in the same formation.”

“Look
closely at the walls. They’re limestone, and they’ll have a beauty of their
own. Fossils,” she said.

“Didn’t
notice,” Marmion said. “I’ll check again when we get back. I just figured he
was giving us the bum’s rush on the quarters. You know, no specs for that part,
just a head count. These ranger-types don’t like it when colonists come, let
alone something like this. But you said that you know this guy.”

“Yes,
I knew him. We were cadets in the guard together.”

“All
ten years? And he left? What is he? Crazy or something?”

Calla
felt a twinge of sadness. Until last night, it had always been joyful to
remember Jason. She’d always been able to dream that nothing had changed, that
he still loved her. But memories were deceitful. She still could picture the
Jason of thirty years ago, so quick to smile. He’d not smiled once last night.
He had made his choice thirty years ago, and now he was determined to protect
it from her. The damned planet. Damn Jason, she thought, as she remembered that
it was only ten years for him. There should have been some of the love left in
him after only ten years. How could there not be when it was so strong in her
after thirty?