The Lawgivers: Gabriel (40 page)

Tessa frowned. Whatever it was that had
devastated this world, it did not seem to have been war--which
certainly supported the theory of an advanced race. They had not
found traces of a geological disaster, either natural or the result
of poor conservation. The atmosphere was clear--amazingly so
actually considering the estimated size of the population that had
once inhabited the world. But then, they had calculated that at
least ten years and possibly as much as fifteen to twenty, Earth
time, had passed since the disaster. If the devastation was the
result of a global cataclysm, there had been plenty of time for the
planet to stabilize.

It was the one thing about deep space
travel that had unnerved her about volunteering to make the
trip--the effect space travel had on time. Not that it made that
much difference to her, she supposed. She’d left no one behind--no
one on the mission had. It was one of the requisites, that they
have no close family ties, and probably the only reason she’d been
allowed to fill a slot. It was just too traumatic for those who
took the deep space missions to return and discover so many years
had passed in their absence, that their children had grown up,
their parents died, their spouse had grown old--two years out and
already ten to twenty years had passed on Earth, despite the speed
they were traveling. By the time they got back, most everyone
they’d known and worked with would have died.

Her irritation resurfaced. She’d given
up the world she’d known just for the chance of discovery, and now
it seemed she’d given it up for nothing!

She pushed the thought aside as Dr.
Boyd came to stand beside her. He was a tall man but bent slightly
now with age. Despite that, he had a kindly look about him and he
wasn’t nearly as testy as most of his colleagues. “Were you picked
for the first landing?”

“No,” she said, trying not to sound
sullen even though his obvious excitement exacerbated her feelings
of ill usage.

He scrubbed his hands together almost
gleefully. “I’ll be going.”

Tessa resisted the urge to roll her
eyes. As if she couldn’t have guessed! “No! Really? Well,
congratulations, Dr. Boyd.”

He turned to grin at her, as excited as
a kid, although he was probably sixty if he was a day, maybe older.
He joined them from the CDC--his job, naturally enough, to make
certain they didn’t pick up any deadly diseases to take home with
them.

In fact, except for herself and Dr.
Layla Lehman (or Lay-Leh as most everybody called her), who was
only four years her senior, the majority of the scientists aboard
the Meadowlark were middle aged or older.

It was one of the reasons, she knew,
that her opinion wasn’t precisely respected, despite her degree,
despite the years she’d spent paying her ‘dues’--she was still
under thirty and not seasoned enough.

The other, of course, was because she
hadn’t done any field work.

It began to seem unlikely that this was
going to be her chance for it.

Shaking her irritation, Tessa left Dr.
Boyd at the observation window and made her way down to the lab to
study the read outs from the probes. The atmosphere was a
reassuring balance of oxygen, hydrogen, etc., etc.--probably better
than the air they breathed on Earth despite the numerous scrubbers
that had been built to help to purify Earth’s air. She couldn’t see
that the planet, dubbed PIM9162 after their probes had discovered
it in the Claxton Galaxy--a galaxy previous believed to have no
livable planets--had changed radically from the pre-disaster
period.

The bacteria identified through earlier
probes had not changed significantly either--certainly not enough
to indicate that it might have had anything to do with the
devastation, but, as far as they’d been able to determine,
something had reduced the dominant species on the planet by
approximately ninety percent ten to fifteen planet years
earlier.

There were survivors, or at least there
had been as far as they could tell, but very likely finding the
scattered remains of the race would prove to be difficult, and what
were the odds that, even if they did, it would turn out to be
scientists?

She wasn’t interested in the
mathematical probability anyway.

Despite her disappointment, and her
envy of those who would be allowed to be among the first to land on
the surface of the planet, Tessa found she couldn’t resist going
down to the docking bay to see the landing crew off when they began
preparing for the first launch.

Lay-Leh was among those who would be
going down. The two of them had become friends since they’d left
Earth, despite the fact that they actually had very little in
common. Lay-Leh was a linguist. As intelligent as she was, she had
the sort of sparkling personality that made her seem more of a
social butterfly than a serious scientist--and it was that that had
initially put Tessa off--that and the fact that she had a rapier
wit and a tongue to match and could run circles around pretty much
anyone who was unwise enough to match ‘swords’ with her--especially
Tessa, who was more inclined to spill her guts the moment a thought
occurred to her than to consider before she spoke.

She liked Lay-Leh best when she was
giving one of the other scientists onboard a hard time.

“Tessa!”

Tessa smiled as Lay-Leh danced over to
her and gave her a hug. Lay-Leh ’s eyes were twinkling when she
pulled away. “I thought sure you’d be in your cabin enjoying your
misery and refuse to see me off.”

Tessa’s smile turned wry. “That
obvious, huh?”

Lay-Leh chuckled. “Don’t worry. Only to
me. The others are like kids at Christmas ... and not terribly
observant of others at the best of times.” She sighed. “Self
absorbed doesn’t even begin to describe this bunch. If it wasn’t
ingrained habit with them to dress when they got out of bed, I
suspect half of them would be walking around in the buff most of
the time.”

Tessa gave her a searching look.
“You’re not … the least bit anxious?”

Lay-Leh bit her lip wryly. “Scared
shitless! But I’m excited, too. Of course fate--or the law of
averages--being what it is, the chances are my services won’t even
be necessary and I’ll be stuck watching the lander, or something
equally boring, while everyone else runs around making exciting
discoveries.”

Tessa gave her a sympathetic
look.

“Of course,” Lay-Leh said thoughtfully,
“there’s always the possibility that I might be swept off my feet
by some gorgeous alien male!”

Tessa couldn’t help but chuckle, even
though she was more than a little horrified by Lay-Leh’s
preoccupation with the opposite sex. “You do realize we don’t know
what the dominant species of this world is like--other than that
they appear to be intellectually advanced? They could look
like--lizards for all we know--or something even less appealing.
And it’s very doubtful that we would be sexually
compatible.”

Lay-Leh leaned close. “After two years
on this tub with fifteen fifty to seventy year old men--scientists
who probably weren’t even exciting when they were young, if they
were ever young--if they’ve got the right kind of equipment down
below, they’ll look good. And I’m willing to try anything at least
once.”

“Serious--oh, you’re
joking!”

Lay-Leh’s smile vanished. “Not
altogether,” she said wryly. “I hate to admit it, but even the
droid crew is starting to look good to me. I’ve worn my toys out
and what’re the odds, you think, that they’ll have more here?
Anyway, I could always close my eyes and think good thoughts,” she
added, grinning.

Tessa felt a deep red blush climb all
the way to her hairline. “Lay-Leh! You can’t expect to be taken
seriously as a scientist if all you ever think about is
sex!”

Lay-Leh’s brows rose, but her eyes
twinkled with repressed laughter. “That’s not true! I think about
other things.”

“Like what?” Tessa asked
suspiciously.

Lay-Leh chuckled. “Men.”

Tessa gaped at her. Lay-Leh patted the
bottom of her chin, lifting her sagging jaw, and then patted her
cheek. “You take everything too seriously, Tessa! You’ve only got
one life. Live it, for god’s sake! Enjoy what you can--and try to
see if you can lose that guilt complex you carry around everywhere
you go. You spend way too much time around moldy
things.”

Tessa smiled with an effort. “I was
hoping I’d get the chance to study something a little ‘fresher’ on
this trip.”

Lay-Leh hugged her again. “You
will--see you in a few days.”

She waved back when Lay-Leh strode up
the gang plank and paused to wave jauntily at her, but inwardly she
didn’t feel the least bit unconcerned about the expedition. Lay-Leh
might be right. Maybe she did take things much too seriously, but
Lay-Leh didn’t seem to take anything seriously enough. There was no
telling what sort of dangers they might be facing, and yet Lay-Leh
acted as if she was going on a … lark without a care in the
world.

Unfortunately, she didn’t see Lay-Leh
in a few day’s time. They had one communication from the landing
group as they made several passes over the city they’d chosen,
describing what they could see from the air. The group checked in
as they reached the landing site and began their final landing
preparations. After that, they heard nothing. The landing party
ceased to communicate with the mother ship and all attempts to hail
them resulted in nothing but dead air.

“They’re in trouble,” Tessa said to the
group that had gathered around the conference table two days after
the group had left. “We need to organize a rescue
party.”

Sinclair, the head of the expedition,
frowned thoughtfully. “We don’t know that they’re in trouble. Their
communications are out. It could be anything--equipment
malfunction, adverse weather conditions, interference of some kind
on the ground….”

“Hostiles?”

Sinclair glared at Tessa. “We have no
reason to believe that we would be met with hostility. This is a
civilized world, very likely even more advanced than our
own.”

“Was,” Tessa corrected. “Whatever
happened here broke down the entire fabric of their civilization.
If there are survivors--they are survivors, and that means they’ve
almost certainly had to resort to survival by might. That also
means we’re dealing with an extremely intelligent race that is,
most likely, also barbaric now and considerably more dangerous than
mere primitives would be. We should have considered the possibility
that we might be met with a determination to take what we’ve got
for their own survival, rather than a welcoming
committee.”

Sinclair looked around the table at the
other scientists, his bushy white brows lifted questioningly. They
seemed to be more or less equally divided. Half of them were
considering her suggestions, the other half looked at her pretty
much the way Sinclair usually did, with a mixture of condescension
and amusement.

“Mathematically speaking, with a
civilization as advanced as this one appears to have been, the
percentile of survivors would almost certainly be made up of
rational beings.”

Tessa gave him a look. “Directly after
the catastrophe--you’re probably right. As conditions grew worse
from the break down, however, ‘rational’ could have boiled down to
who had what they needed to survive and who didn’t and whether the
‘haves’ were strong enough to beat the ‘have nots’ off of it--look,
I don’t really see a lot of point in sitting here, miles above the
planet, debating whether or not our landing party met with hostile
natives. We haven’t heard from them since the day they landed. They
were due back yesterday. Anything could have happened to them, and
I do mean anything. But we can’t help them from here. We’re going
to have to go down and see if we can pull them out.”

Sinclair glared at her. “We’re
scientists, not soldiers. We came to learn. We’ve virtually no
weapons, and none of us know how to use what we do
have.”

“How hard can it be to point and fire?”
Tessa demanded in exasperation.

His lips thinned. “You’re suggesting we
go down and attack anything that moves?”

“I’m not suggesting anything of the
kind! I’m only saying we go armed. If it looks like the landing
group was attacked and captured by hostile aliens, we do what we
have to to get them back.”

“Thank you for your input, Dr. Bergin,”
Sinclair said tightly. “We’ll take it under advisement. I’d like to
hear from the rest of you what your views on this are, and whether
or not we should delay the second landing….”

Tessa gaped at him in disbelief for
several moments and finally stormed out of the room. It was all
very well to say that they’d all known that there were risks
involved in taking on such a mission, but she at least, had assumed
that they would watch each other’s back since they couldn’t count
on rescue from any other quarter. She’d thought that was why they’d
taken the precaution of only sending part of the scientific team
down. Now, instead of immediately going to check out the danger of
the landing team, Dr. Sinclair had waited until they didn’t return
as expected and then called a meeting.

She was waiting impatiently in front of
the starboard viewing port when the meeting finally broke up and
the men began to emerge. She turned to study their faces, trying to
figure out what had been decided. Her stomach tightened when
Sinclair emerged, glanced at her and then pointedly turned in the
other direction and strode off toward his quarters. She realized
then that few of the men had actually met her questioning gaze at
all.