He said mildly, “I’d like to go down there in person. No chance they’ll allow that. So servo’d is the only way I’ll see anything of Isis.”
Carlotta looked at Nikka and doubt crowded into her face. Nigel watched. It was best to keep well out of things now.
Carlotta had come out of the sun-streaked decaying barrios of Los Angeles, carapaced in executive competence. She skated with womanly grace over the myriad details of a systems-analyst universe.
Her career had involved collisions with managers and bosses, job switches and long hours. The natural drift in a technical career was to loft into contract manager, then program director, then division head, buoyant in the modern managerial morass. She resisted. She wanted to keep close to the work.
In time she got a reputation as a terrific trou bleshooter who suffered fools not at all, particularly if they were bosses. She had her own standards and they had made her unapproachable. Until Lancer departed Earth orbit and started trials, she had been bottled up inside herself. Nikka had liked her from the start, though, and along with Nigel had slowly developed connections, getting the three of them through the early, uneasy years, and onto a plateau of comfortable intimacy.
But any three-way dynamic was stressed, inevitably, if only by constant comparison with the conventional two-person model, which looked so bloody easy. How much loyalty did their snug harbor command? Nigel wondered as he watched Carlotta.
“I … I suppose I might … for a while. Only while we’re in Isis space, though.”
“Great! Knew you’d see the advantage of an old sod not having to explain every gimpy leg.”
He was being falsely jovial, and they all knew it, but it gave the women a chance to sit back and listen to him as he rattled on about the surface work. Nigel studied Carlotta’s pensive eyes as he talked. She smiled reflexively at his jokes, but she glanced at Nikka now and then tentatively, as if seeking approval. He saw that she had made this compromise more for Nikka than for him. Very well. He had gone begging and had gotten what he asked. Best not to fret over the reasons.
—we’re competing for him, she had said. Perhaps so. He had to admit that he rather enjoyed that, had always been open to this sort of arrangement, as far back as California, with Shirley and Alexandria—
He abruptly jerked his head, stopping the thought. The women flicked puzzled looks at him. He made his face become casual, distant.
He didn’t like to think of his previous three-way tie, and how it had ended. Letting the past filter into the present that way was a bad idea. He had to try to see Nikka and Carlotta as they were, above a calculus dictated by experience.
Still, he could not ignore the other side of the equation. In counterpoint to competing for him, they in the bargain competed with him … for each other.
It worked. He kept his own medical records and was able to disguise temporary injuries or stillness. That kept him on the roster but didn’t help him get jobs he wanted. It was weeks before a good servod surface mission came along, and Nigel didn’t make the squad.
The team went after an EM creature, intact. Alex had tracked thousands of them with the big radio antenna. In a valley system near the Eye, the EM signals had begun to ebb away. Then one winked out.
“Dead?” Nigel asked him.
“Prob’ly. Didn’t move for ten days. Then we lost its signal. Weak, for sure.”
“Does its body heat show up in the infrared?”
“Did. Doesn’t now.”
FIVE
It took a week to reach a shipwide consensus, then another to plan the raid. The all-volunteer party dropped down, grabbed the alien, and boosted up—all in less than two hours.
They brought the big polyflex sack into the sterilized bay. The EM creature lay in it like a Tinkertoy monster that had fallen on its side, legs at impossible angles. In the blazing uniform bay light the thing had no shadow. It did not move. The team of sixteen wheeled the specially made cart slowly, carefully, into position among the crowded banks of sensors and diagnostics and gleaming racks of surgical instruments.
Nigel watched intently through the big viewport. He could make out Nikka in a stark white sealsuit. She pulled at the roller platform on the cart and the thing inside slumped into a better position. They were all drilled and sure. They moved quickly to position the instruments around the EM creature. Then they sliced the bag.
As the scalpel went in, the sack exhaled a thin mist. The team drew back for an instant and then, sheepish, watched the dust settle to the deck. The bay air was Isis normal, but without the fine sulfur-rich haze. Nikka sawed away part of the sack and stepped back, handing the polyflex to an assistant behind her. I hope it doesn’t need that wind and dust to live, she said over General Comm.
This thing’s dead already, came from elsewhere in the bay. And the assembled specialists began. For years they had waited to see something like this, and now the waxy skin of the EM lay glistening under the piercing lights. A murmur came from them.
Nigel breathed deeply, not noticing the crowd around him. The air in this corridor was as flat and pure and dead as it was in the bay, BioSci had ordered a clean, positive-pressure balance all around the bay, just in case. He reached up and flicked the comm monitor perched on his ears, and tuned for all channels coming from the work zone.
Careful, careful there, Andreov, peel that back as though it were your daughter’s hymen.
thick-skinned isn’t the word look at that like shoe leather
X rays look good. Complicated bone structure I’d say.
Some kind of tripod spine running down into the underbelly see but what’s that big long thing up there, must be in the head
yeah that’s parabolic, Jeffreys said that on the boost-up, a longitudinal parabolic antenna fitted into the rectangular frame in the head, so it can pick up microwaves all along the long axis
must be what ’at bone’s for, housin’ the nerve endings for its radio sight, picks it all up an’ ’er’s a processor some’ere in ’ere to shape up the input for ’at funny-shaped brain
okay the spectral stuff is coming in on these tissues; nothing big so far pretty stringy stuff really
chem says the flash on that first sample is just plain ole oxy-binding iron hemoglobin wrapped up in a corpuscle blanket, same biochem patent the vertebrate line holds on Earth
this stuff’s chromatophores just like I said and McWilliams said was bullshit, remember but lookit it respond see
man look it jumps up like that from smooth to prickly must be papillae in the skin
maybe helps flick off the dust
it’s a reflex probably not conscious, just like shivering is for us
you keep ridin’ my ass ’bout that I’ll oh you think so huh look at that sked we don’t get to those incisions for half hour at least, so you can wait for your microspecs until Kovaldy makes his cut
I know we got to move fast can’t tell if this thing is clinically dead after all what’s it mean we’ve been through all that before only now looking at the goddamn thing jeezus it’s impressive so big the 3D doesn’t really make you feel it but still I think we ought to hold back until the superficial team is through we don’t know what sort of neural patterns we’re going to hit
