Approaching Oblivion (Jezebel's Ladder Book 4) (24 page)

“No,
you need longer. I can argue for three, and Z will settle for two months. What
possessed you to switch from lightweight, insulated Kevlar to that tank? It
won’t matter if they can only see half of Herk because the aborigines will
hear
him coming. The scout design should be exclusively for the two operatives
slated for field duty: Oleander and Toby. If Herk deploys in combat armor, the
only way there won’t be evidence is if he kills all the witnesses.”

“Red
thought it was a good idea—”

“Stop.
One of my jobs in my old life was telling Red ‘next release,’ so the work
wouldn’t kill us all.”

Nadia
chuckled. “I work from six in the morning to midnight, and it is never enough.”

“Let
me take the management load from you. We can even get rid of the daily meeting
to free up more time. I manage by walking around and chatting.”

“It’s
easy for you,” Nadia said. “They all like you.”

“They
respect me because I let them do what they do best, and I only interfere when
it is a matter of safety. If we go to the surface with this design, the mission
is going to fail. Am I wrong?”

Sighing,
the chief scientist said, “I have no arguments.”

“It
would be better for everyone if the request to transition came from you. It
won’t damage your power base or your working relationship with the others as
much.”

“You’ve
done this before.”

“Yeah,
but I promise as soon as you’re on track again, I’ll move to panda-monitoring duty.
That way I can have Stu with me while I work.”

“You
are Yuki’s friend. I did not think you would be so nice,” Nadia said quietly.

“I
make it a point to make friends with whoever is getting picked on. At the
moment, that’s you. The people in there have a lot of great ideas. After you
make the announcement, I want to talk to each of them privately for an hour.”

Nadia
stepped inside and bellowed, “I begged and looked pathetic until she agreed.
Mercy is the new project manager. I am going home for nap while she meets with
each of you.”

Sojiro
bounced and clapped. Risa muttered a thanks to the Virgin in Spanish. Herk
volunteered to break the news to Lou and celebrate with a beer.

That
evening before dinner with the Parks, she haggled with Zeiss over the scope and
schedule of the project. She asserted, “Plate mail isn’t the best defense.
Sojiro’s idea of smaller, overlapping discs will make the armor flexible and
less detectable. Not to mention the protection that the Kevlar will provide
against any malfunction. We’re ninjas, not samurai.” She paused, giving her
final incentive. “Nadia already had a light that came on when the suit knew it
was being observed. When shimmer armor remains immobile, the camouflage effect
is much better. Herk calls this the
Predator
effect, based on this
violent movie he makes everybody watch. The idea was that when the light pops on,
the scout freezes until he can find what’s watching. With the array of smaller
discs, I can triangulate feedback from each disc to plot where an observer
might be. The system can also be utilized to self-test the armor, reporting
back any damaged panels that don’t detect the common point.”

“Okay,
sold,” Zeiss said, holding up his hands in surrender. “You’re a genius at
applying technology.”

“I
gave Nadia credit for the idea in the paper. We brainstormed it together. After
another taste of real science, she’s decided she hates managing.”

“That
message came across loud and clear.”

“Will
the team be able to meet my salary request for the consultation?”

Zeiss
wagged his hand. “Risa kicked in her spare bra. We really can’t spare the
fabric right now.” Mercy’s face sagged. She never was good at contracts. The
commander continued. “But . . . Nadia decided to step in and sweeten the pot
because she really enjoys working with you. When she leaves for Labyrinth,
she’s giving her house to your family.”

Mercy
blinked, unable to process the generosity.

The
commander smiled at her speechlessness. “Nadia says it’s too big for one
person. Since you’ll be holding down the fort for all of us here, you deserve
some kind of compensation—especially since you’re delaying your time with the
pandas and Stu.”

“I’d
be honored. I’ll ask Mr. Park at our get-together tonight what he wants for his
half. He helped build it, after all.”

“Already
covered. Mrs. Park says to tell you it’s karma.”

The extra two months in
the schedule gave everyone breathing room. Soon Stu was sleeping through the
night, and Mercy felt more human. Lou normally cared for his son during the
four hours a day Mercy interacted with engineers, although she sometimes
carried the baby with her near feeding time. Her husband also helped take up
the slack with laundry and bread duty. Fridays, she reported directly to Zeiss.
On her second lunch report to the commander in the Olympus dining room, she
summed up, “We fixed the last major technical problem in the prototype armor—that
dark fringe at the edge of each cut. Risa found a deposit of white sand behind
the waterfall that’s almost the same composition as the ceramic—with traces of
zirconium and calcium thrown in.”

“Coincidence?”
Zeiss asked.

“Probably
not. The sand is probably a supply depot for Magi robot repairs. When we melt the
sand into glass and apply it to the rough edges, the desired color can be
projected to the rim of each scale of armor. We can’t build our own panels yet,
but we can extend the illusion for what we captured.” She paused before raising
the final subject. “Now that I’m actually rested and have two brain cells to
rub together, I can spend less time herding the shimmer team and transition to
the pandas like we planned.”

Zeiss
sighed heavily. “About that . . . we could let you take the twenty-first shift
so that things divide evenly, but the other crew members have let me know that
giving you more monitor duty would be a mistake.”

Mercy’s
face drooped. “Is it about feeding Stu on duty? I promised Risa I wouldn’t do
it in front of Herk again, but I didn’t know anybody else cared.”

Zeiss
waved the idea away, drawing attention to the weights he wore strapped to his
wrists, ankles, and waist. “You don’t belong on that duty. You’re probably the
best people manager we have. We want to expand your managerial duties to the
panda project. Pratibha has her hands full optimizing the landing project. She
finally admitted that we were all playing chicken with the schedule, but everyone
else was afraid to swerve first. You made a good call.”

“I
thought Red was managing the pandas.”

“She’s
putting in a lot of hours on the flight simulators. The Labyrinth weather
patterns can be pretty extreme, and we’re going to be screaming out of the lens
when we leave here. She’s trying to find a safe way down with all the extra
cargo we keep adding. On our present orbit, it’s particularly hard to do
missions any closer than an L week apart.”

“I’ll
have to ask Lou.”

“Red
already did. He said he’ll sign up if you two get a date night every Friday,
starting tonight. He said you kept promising him a date after you took the last
job. This time, he’s writing it into the contract.”

Her
eyes sparkled as she smiled. “I had every intention. I even had a couple sitters
lined up. He wanted to walk to the Honeybee Meadow where we first kissed. It’s
just taken me a while to build up my endurance to the point where I can travel
that far. Being in a wheelchair for so long, combined with slicing those muscles,
took a while to recover from. Yvette and Oleander have both been pushing me to
exercise more. Hell, the trip up here once a week exhausts me.”

The
commander shrugged. “I’ve been in Olympus more than anyone but Toby. We all
need to work out daily to maintain bone density.”

“I
used to swim for that, but Lou and Stu can’t join me. Snowflake has also
discouraged my taking risks. I can’t run with these.” She pointed to her
breasts. “And I’m no good at fighting. I just don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“Well,
you’ll be coming here every day. You can carry the equipment from the
nanofabricators and the forge.”

“You’re
joking.”

“No.
Auckland gets too winded to carry them, and it’s a waste of Herk’s time to haul
little things for a couple-hour round trip.”

“We
really need to send the doctor out through the regeneration cycle as soon as
possible.”

“He’ll
meet us in the landing bay after Herk and the others are safely on Labyrinth.
He’ll be Toby’s replacement as the emergency medical staff during the final
phase.”

“Good.
I suppose I’m in. This is what we’re here for, after all.”

Zeiss
shook Mercy’s hand and called out to his wife in the other room. “Red will
brief you on what we’ve learned so far about the aborigines. I need to catch a
nap. I have graveyard shift tonight.”

Red
bounced into the dining room wearing the same weights as her husband to prepare
for the increased gravity on Labyrinth. “Where is that gorgeous little guy? I
haven’t seen him since he was born.”

“He’s
grown,” Mercy said.

They
chatted for a while before Red got down to business. “It’s a lull right now.
The L pandas prefer to work when the sun isn’t as bright. Concentrating on one
extended family group, we’re coordinating the satellite, lens, and rover cameras
to create three-dimensional images of the aliens.” The commander’s wife brought
up a picture on the central bubble in the control room. The close-up revealed
that the n
ose and nostril slits were part of the head slope, not
separate cartilage like humans. Molars were visible in the grimace, but the
menace of the canines dominated the picture. “The ears flatten back when
they’re angry.”

What really caught Mercy’s
attention were the eyes that gave the illusion of drooping.
“The aborigines have bright-green irises?”

“No.
That’s a reflection from some sort of membrane they have,” Red said.

“Like
flash photos of a cat. Why don’t you filter that out?”

“It’s
a very distinctive color, and Yuki trained the computer to use it to
differentiate abos from the other wildlife. It saves us a ton of time
investigating rover trigger events. This makes it easier for the rover to
travel in stealth mode. According to Toby,
even though they eat a lot of
vegetation, the L pandas are still carnivores. They eat mostly grasses, tubers,
berries, honey, eggs, and fruit. They prefer the bamboo analogue, but that’s
pretty rare in this jungle because they strip a patch bare when they find it. We’ve
also seen them eat fish, birds, rodents, and carrion. The L pandas can eat
anything that doesn’t eat them first. They’re just too lazy to catch meat most
of the time. Toby says it’s because the bulk of their diet doesn’t give them
enough energy.” She showed several still shots of aborigines eating a variety
of foods. “Here’s one of a young male eating the leftovers from some sort of
predator. You can tell he’s a male by the mane. Males have thicker hair in the
pubic areas, butt, and mane. Even young males have ear tufts, sideburns, and a
beard. The females have an extra nap of chest fur. They all seem to have extra
hair from the elbow to the back of the hand. This is their most simian feature.”

Mercy
was already on the comm to Sojiro. “Yeah, drop what you’re doing and conference
into Red’s managerial briefing. You need to see this code for the shimmer
project. Yuki has a program that can filter monkeys and iguanas from the real
deal. Sure, you can skip the dog-and-pony show and call her directly.”

Initially
annoyed at being ignored, Red said, “Wow, we should have caught that before. I
never considered reusing the code for another project. Nadia was right—you are
good.”

“Thanks.
Believe it or not, my sole goal in life hasn’t been to block your progress.”

“I
never thought . . . okay, maybe a little.”

“Never
mind. I want every person on this crew who will be landing on Labyrinth to
spend at least two shifts per week observing with you guys.” Mercy scribbled
notes on her computer pad.

“We
may pick up more synergies,” Red said with excitement.

“Maybe,
but I want everyone to have a sense of what they’re getting into. The
green-eyed monsters are more catlike than I thought and a lot more deadly. I’m
sorry I interrupted. What natural enemies do they have?”

“There
are big snakes but no crocodiles in the jungle. The water seems pretty tame.
We’ve seen a few small, fast mammals we call saber-toothed bobcats. Watching a
kill was like seeing that bunny in the Monty Python movie chew through all
those guys in armor, which is probably why the not-so-little green men sleep in
groups or up trees.”

“The
L pandas can climb?”

“Yeah,
and swim. Although, they just do everything in slow motion and rely on their
dappled colors to hide from predators. They’re hard to see when they don’t
move, which is the common case. We’ve seen fur in gold, brown, black, white,
and even a little green. Toby swears that’s from rubbing their backs against
trees to scratch and not a sign of natural chlorophyll.” Red showed a photo of
an aborigine with a green-streaked back crouching like a gorilla.

“That
does it,” Mercy said. “I’m code-naming this tribe the Greens. Abo is too
disrespectful, and L panda sounds like a Chinese wrestler or neurochemical.”

“Okay,”
Red agreed with a grin. “Like Earth pandas, the males aren’t monogamous and
don’t usually stick around to see the children raised. We haven’t seen them
hibernate or make permanent dens. In the days or L week it takes to strip a
given crop, they make nests of grass. In contrast to the Earth variety, the f
ace
is less elongated, but the brain pan is wider.
They also have no tails and shorter claws.”

“I
still wouldn’t want to face one in hand-to-panda combat. How does this mesh
with the roofs we saw by the lake?”

Red
jumped ahead several slides. She showed a photo of a panda digging up tubers
with a bamboo tool. “In the hills the aborigines pick berries. In the forest,
they forage fruit and nuts. On the flats they harvest grasses, and on the river
they trap crawdads. Once they have enough of any given staple, they build a
raft.” The next image showed a male on a log craft and females loading sheaves
of some grain.

“Why
ship it elsewhere?”

“The
lake area is sterilized. They have to send food in by boat. One of the males
accompanies the raft back, and more males join them over time. They stand guard
to watch for predators. We name them and program the computer to tag the men so
we’ll recognize them next time. The main one we call Bubba. They all look like
Buddha statues when they sit. We’ve named the one with big hair Elvis.” She
flipped through a range of images until they began to blur together. In one
image, pelts were stacked on a raft.

“A
hunter-gatherer society,” Mercy said.

“Now
that we know what to look for, we’re scanning other areas. We have a potential
tribe of almost twenty on the other side of the same river. The satellite
picked up evidence of another group near a stretch of exposed obsidian, which
matches the spearheads we found in the avalanche. Maybe we should call the
obsidian site the Black tribe.”

“This
is all so overwhelming.”

“Toby
is convinced that the similarities to Earth can’t be a coincidence. He thinks
someone has been playing Dr. Moreau with Earth samples and planted them here.”

“Maybe,”
Mercy said thoughtfully. “Or it’s the other way around. Perhaps the pandas on
our world started out this way and got too lazy because bamboo is so plentiful
there.”

When
Red completed her briefing about the monitoring project, she asked, “Any other
questions, manager?”

“Can
I use the showers here? I understand I have a date tonight, and I need to get
ready.”

****

When
Mercy returned to the house, Lou had everything ready for a private picnic in
the meadow. He was still adjusting to the new wooden structure, but Nadia was
happier sleeping in the bedroom next to the laboratory. Lou said, “I made it just
like the basket you packed for us on our first date,” he said.

“It
wasn’t really a date,” Mercy insisted.

“We
have different definitions. Any time I make a woman moan by touching her in a
secluded place, I call it a date.”

Stu
was down for a nap, so she wrapped her arms around her husband as she said, “I
have several places on my body that have been secluded for too long.”

Lou
actually pushed her away. “Not so fast. Make Stu a bottle, and when your
friends arrive, we have hours to do this right.”

Mercy
growled affectionately, but when Stu stirred, his cry made her milk leak out,
staining her shirt. The damp sensation and her need to unburden ruined the romantic
mood. “Maybe you’re right. I’ll feed Stewart now and leave them with the
diaper. I need to change anyway.”

After
she removed the shirt, she slipped into the lab coat. That way she would have
some discreet cover in case a man came in while she nursed. As she did so, Mercy
felt the weight in her lab-coat pocket. She’d forgotten about the cloak
detector she’d borrowed. Scooping the sock bunny into the same pocket, she
said, “We want you to have your favorite toy if you get fussy.”

When
Yvette and Oleander arrived to help, Mercy gave Yvette the lab coat with the
instructions, “Everything you need is on the changing stand or in that front
pocket. It’s very important for you to use that when you get in trouble.”