Ell Donsaii 13: DNA (4 page)

“Uh, sure,” Vanessa said, her mind having caught up with what the boy was saying. “Your parents are okay with this?”

“Well… I
haven’t
talked to my dad about it yet, but I’m sure he’ll be fine with it. I’ll get him to call you, okay?”

“There’ll… be some costs associated with running the sequencer. You’d probably better make sure your dad knows what you’re wanting to do and is willing to pay for it?”

“They’re spending a lot of money to send me to some fancy school. I’m pretty sure they’ll be willing to pay for this too.”

“If they’re paying for an expensive school, they might not have that much left over. You’d better be
sure
you check with them!”

“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that.” The kid said, sounding a little concerned. “I’ll check, but, I think it’ll be okay.”

Vanessa hung up, her head whirling—like it usually was after she talked to the Kinrais kid.

An hour later Vanessa got a message from Zage on her AI. Attached, it had an edited version of the paper she and Dr. Turner had written. The kid had corrected a math error, suggested citing five additional papers, rewritten several sentences to make them clearer, and suggested another paragraph for the end of the discussion. That new paragraph concisely laid out additional work that could be undertaken with the new methods.

Vanessa glanced towards Dr. Turner’s office as she wondered how she was going to bring
this
up.

***

Jamieson sighed and stretched. He’d been watching the Donsaii farm from under some large bushes in the yard of one of the houses on the farm’s eastern border. It being the weekend, he’d thought surely he’d see Donsaii out walking around. He’d seen Bridget Spalding, the woman that lived with Donsaii, out jogging and working in a garden. Of course, the security team made its rounds regularly, so he saw them. But, if he hadn’t
known
that Donsaii lived here, he certainly wouldn’t have been able to tell it from his observations.

He’d been under the damned bush since early in the morning and now it was a little after midnight.

Three days and three evenings with no joy.

Deciding once again that there was virtually no chance she’d leave the house at this hour of night, he packed his rucksack and got ready to leave.
Tomorrow I’ll try the southern side of the farm,
he thought. He’d started with the northern side where the road passed, then done the western side. The southern side would be his final scouting.

By now, he certainly knew his way around the farm and he absolutely understood the security team’s routine. Even though they tried to vary when and how they made their rounds, they couldn’t help getting into
some
ruts.

Jamieson had purchased some of that new port conditioned outerwear that was all the rage. A little testing had confirmed that if he blew cool air through the clothing, he became practically invisible to infrared night vision goggles. With Jamieson’s understanding of the layout of the farm and of the security team’s strategies, he felt almost certain he could make his way into the house, snatch Donsaii, and make it back out undetected. He’d need to drug her and put her in her own cooled bag while he carried her out, but Wang had said he could source the drugs.

It was a huge pain in the ass being so careful when he really thought he could have carried this out weeks ago without such extensive preparation. The wide-ranging prep was because the downside of getting caught kidnapping was pretty huge and the enormous payday Wang had promised made it worthwhile.

Jamieson just had a couple of niggling worries:

First, he kept thinking about how gotten his ass busted when he’d first met her. Although he kept reminding himself that he’d been going easy to keep from hurting her, and telling himself that they’d just caught him by surprise, he also kept remembering that he’d been pretty angry toward the end. He’d gone after her and she’d bopped him a couple of times. Then he’d gone after the head of her security team pretty hard, but
Jamieson
was the one who wound up in the emergency room.
Her whole team must have jumped me,
he told himself once again, but somewhere deep inside he had a feeling that
Donsaii
was the one who put him there.

Second, even though he’d seen her drive in and out of this place on her way to work, he just couldn’t get over the feeling that she didn’t actually
live
on the farm. He shook his head
, I see her come back from work in the evening and she doesn’t leave till morning, she
has
to live here.

Those two unsettling thoughts kept coming back and were a big part of the reason that he’d committed so much time and effort to his extensive scouting program. He did
not
want to be caught by surprise.

***

Ell sighed, “And you’re sure this was Jamieson, the same guy we interviewed for a job on the security team back in Boston?”

Steve shrugged, “About as sure as I can be without trying to get some kind of a DNA match. The fake ‘reporter’ ID he showed us doesn’t match his face.” Steve murmured to his AI for a second, “Here are images and sound clips of Jamieson from his interview back when we talked to him in Boston, and,” he murmured again, “here are images and clips from the first night. That’s the time he actually came on the grounds and we stopped him.”

Ell watched both of the video images and listened to the clips. She shook her head, “He looks older of course, but I agree it’s got to be the same guy. What do you think he’s doing? Working some kind of revenge because I didn’t hire him a decade ago?”

Steve shrugged again, “I have no idea. It’s hard to believe that if he wanted retaliation, he didn’t seek it right away. But, if he’s
really
the kind of guy who could hold a grudge that long, I could imagine he waited so long in hopes we might not recognize him. If Mary hadn’t said she thought it was him I might not have figured it out.”

“Why didn’t you tell me as soon as it happened?”

“Didn’t want to come to you clueless. I’ve spent the past few days trying to get information about what he’s been doing for the past ten years, but his name’s common enough that searching the net just brought me a lot of garbage about other people with that name.”

Ell’s eyes narrowed, “I can put Allan on it. He can find stuff that standard AIs can’t, but it would help to know what you think we’re looking for?”

“I don’t know,” Steve said. “If he’s been living around here, that might suggest he really has been stalking you. If he’s been working a steady job at a respectable company, that’d be different than if he’s been working a series of shifty jobs.” Steve tilted his head, “Of course, if he’s been working the kind of disreputable jobs I’m worried about, it’ll be pretty hard to find a record of them.” He lifted an eyebrow, “Unless he’s gotten caught doing stuff that’s given him a prison record.”

“Well, I’ll see what Allan can find. Sometimes he doesn’t uncover anything another AI couldn’t have found, sometimes…” Ell shrugged, not elucidating Allan’s successes. She looked out around the farm grounds, “Since then, you say he’s been hanging around the periphery of the farm?”

Steve nodded, “He carefully stays off your property so it’d be hard to justify going after him. I’ve considered contacting the homeowners whose land he’s actually been on. I could suggest they call the police?”

There was a moment of silence while Ell thought about it. “If we leave it like it is, we’ll know what he’s doing. If we have the police hassle him he might start using tactics we
can’t
detect.”

“If the police hassle him, maybe he’ll decide it’s not worth the trouble.”

“I don’t know,” Ell said musingly. “You guys went out and got in his face that first night and it didn’t dissuade him. My impression of him, even if that impression’s ten years old, is that he thinks he’s God’s gift to guerrilla warrior stuff. He’ll probably be even less impressed with the police than he was by you guys… since he
thinks
he’s invincible.”

“Are you saying we should prove to him that he’s
not
invincible?”

“No, I don’t want to smack him down until he’s done something that justifies being smacked. Could be hard to explain to the police.” She turned her intense gaze on Steve, “On the other hand, I’d like you guys to be completely ready to deal with him if and when he does. Come up with contingency plans, do some drills, buy equipment if you need to…”

“If we’re doing drills while he’s out there watching us, he’s going to know what we’re planning.”

“Do ‘em while he’s not watching.”

“He might have hidden cameras we don’t know about.”

“Do your drills on paper. Any physical things that need to be practiced, go do them somewhere else.” She gave him a little bit of an impatient look, “This is
your
thing Steve. It’s what I hired you for.
You’re
supposed to figure it out, not me.”

Steve drew himself up, though it was barely visible, “Yes ma’am.”

Ell snorted a laugh, “Don’t you go ‘yes ma’aming’ me!”

Steve grinned back at her, “Sorry, I do know it’s
my
job. Bouncing things off of you was helping me figure it out, but I’ll admit it was kind of lazy.”

“Yeah, I shouldn’t be so grumpy. Bouncing them off of me lets me give you guidance on what I think the parameters of your response should be.” She paused for a second, then said, “When you’ve figured out what you’re going to do, tell me about it so I can be sure I’m comfortable with your plan.”

***

Ell felt pretty odd as she walked into the meeting with Team Teecee. She was going to be giving them exciting news, but withholding a secret that, to her and she was sure to them, would be even more thrilling. They were only meeting about once every three to six months now, having gradually cut back from the weekly meetings they’d had back when the aliens on Tau Ceti were a brand-new finding.

Still, it was good to see her old friends. Although the team had expanded and subsequently had some turnover since it had originally gotten started, Wheat, Piscova and Norris were all still active members. As they happily greeted one another, Ell found it hard to believe that the team had first formed to study the aliens on Tau Ceti nearly 9 years ago.

Goldie, Silver, their kids and their tribe all seemed to be doing fairly well at their new location. Dr. Wheat reported concern about what the volcanic ash occluding the upper atmosphere was doing to the vegetation. The parabolic reflectors D5R had put up in the region around the Yetany tribe’s new location were doing a good job of greening up the vegetation in that area and were probably even keeping the temperatures a little warmer. However, this wasn’t helping the rest of the continent where global cooling induced by the dust in the stratosphere was making the plants, and therefore the animals higher in that food chain, somewhat sick.

They argued for a while about whether they should bring in more parabolic reflectors to help a bigger area or whether they should interfere at all in a change that Mother Nature had wrought. This led to a disagreement about whether they should try to establish a system to warn against or even prevent asteroid impacts in the future.

Ell mostly listened, but when things had calmed down a little, she cleared her throat and said, “I’ve got some news…”

Most of the people in the room turned to look curiously at her, but Harold Wheat’s head turned sharply and his eyes widened with excitement, “Another living planet!”

Ell nodded, still feeling guilty that she’d never told them about the sigmas. “The fourth planet around Beta Canum Venaticorum.”

Piscova brightened, “Do they speak?”

“No, sorry. No signs of intelligent life that I’ve seen. Let me tell you what I do know.” As she spoke Allan put up some of the video clips she’d prepared showing the riotous jungle greenery of BC4. “The atmosphere sounds breathable at sixteen percent oxygen, seventy-five percent nitrogen, and five percent argon, but carbon dioxide’s too high at four percent. Unfortunately the pressure is about 188 times that of Earth, so we couldn’t
possibly
live there in anything but an extremely hard shelled suit or an indoor environment. The gravity’s 0.78 G so it’d be comfortable if it weren’t for the density and CO
2
concentration of the atmosphere.

The animals,” here Allan began putting up images of the fauna, “are quite a lot like we imagine the dinosaurs to have been. Well, except for the fact they don’t have a head and neck separate from their body. Their mouthparts are right on the trunk like a crab’s. They’re immense and they have some huge flyers,” she waved at the big screen where an enormous flyer sailed across, “this particularly big one’s ten meters, wingtip to wingtip.

“As with Tau Ceti and Alpha Centauri, the biome is DNA-based, giving further support to the panspermia hypothesis…”

Ell weathered a storm of questions, though the people in the room had a hard time tearing their eyes away from the screen. When the queries started to die down, she said, “So, I was wondering if you guys would like to take over investigating BC4, or, whether you’d like for me to try to find a new group to study this place.”