Duty, Honor, Planet

professional disapproval on his face. “That fantastic nonsense about taking a DNA sample and producing a full- grown life-form. No, someone or something cloned each tissue individually and assembled them like a biological robot—I’d venture to guess they must have used some extensive nanotechnological manufacturing technique.”

“That’s pretty damned advanced compared to their weapons technology,” Shannon observed.

“Especially when you consider that the biomechs aren’t a hundred percent biological—most of their skeletal structure has been reinforced with artificial material, but nothing as sophisticated as what you might expect from the biological part of their construction.” He hunted around on a line of sample trays and came up with a swatch of shiny metal. “Nothing more advanced than corrugated aluminum.”

“You’re kidding,” Jason muttered.

“You might think so,” Mandila acknowledged, obviously pleased with his little presentation. “Also, there’s a microcomputer built into the communication centers of the things’ brains—we think as a method of remote control. Now, I’m about the furthest thing from a computer expert on this expedition, but I sent one of the units up to our technical crew, and they tell me the technology is at least fifty years behind what we have.”

“Curiouser and curiouser.” Shannon rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “Maybe that backs up your idea,” she told Jason, “about them being short on supplies. Maybe they’ve been scavenging whatever they could, no matter what level of technology it represented.”

“That’s one possibility,” Mandila said. “But that’s not the end of it. I was trying to tell you when you came in; we’ve completed our analysis of the biomech’s DNA—or rather, the DNA which was used to produce the creatures’ living tissue.” He hesitated dramatically, looking each of them in the eye in turn. “It’s human. Human right down to the last chromosome.”

* * *

“Oh, Captain McKay! Captain McKay!” Jason looked back and groaned inwardly as he saw the squat, hefty bulk of Dr. Andre Kovalev waddling down the corridor, his movements absurdly exaggerated in the half-gravity of the spinning tin can that was their temporary research base. The physicist was a pleasant enough man, but his penchant for long-windedness was as well-known among the mission’s staff as his love for loud, tasteless shirts.

“Hi, Dr. Kovalev.” McKay forced a smile. “What can I do for you?”

“Captain McKay, I have been looking for you since I heard you’d come back up from planetside,” Kovalev said, clapping his hands with delight. “I trust you found your visit with Rhajiv’s staff fruitful?”

McKay nodded. “Actually, Doc, I came back up because the Space team found something in orbit—I’m on my way to the docking bay right now, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh, wonderful, I’ll come with you!” Kovalev enthused. “I’ve been hoping we’d have some time to talk.”

Jason winced. He’d really wanted to use the walk to the bay to think—Mandila’s revelation had given him a lot to digest—and he couldn’t do much thinking if he had to engage in a tete-a-tete with the loquacious Dr. Kovalev. Only one thing to do, much as he hated the idea.

“So, Doc,” Jason said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you—could you explain to me one more time just how exactly the Eysselink drive works? I’ve never been too clear about it and I think a better understanding of it might help me figure out how our ships are being pirated.”

“Oh, certainly, certainly,” Kovalev assented cheerfully. More than anything else, the physicist loved to lecture—and getting him started on a monologue would give Jason time to think. “It’s an old idea, really—originated back in the 1980’s as a piece of scientific speculation called the ‘Alcubierre Spacetime Inflation Warp Drive.’ The original idea was to use strong, exotic fields with negative energy density to inflate the space behind a starship and deflate the space at its front…”

Jason let the man’s voice fade into a background drone as his thoughts travelled back to the conversation he’d had with Shannon on the way back to the city.

“You don’t really believe him, do you?” she’d asked him, a troubled look on her face.

He shook his head, glancing away from the dirt track for a moment. “Who? Dr. Mandila?”

“No,” she sighed. “Senator O’Keefe.”

“Oh.” He’d had the same troubling thoughts. “Well, there are other possibilities. If they are scavengers—well, a couple colony vessels were among the ships that disappeared. That could have afforded them access to human DNA.”

“But we don’t know that they’re scavengers,” she pointed out. “We don’t know that they’re behind the ship disappearances. All we know is that they, whoever they are, made those things out of human DNA.”

“Well, what other explanation is there?” He shrugged helplessly. “Even if I were to assume some rogue elements of our government were behind this, how would they have technology that our best biologist says is still at least fifty years away?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “All I’m saying is, we shouldn’t rule out anything at this point.”

“…but none of this would have been possible,” Kovalev’s voice crept through his reverie once again as they boarded a lift car, “without Adam Eysselink’s discovery of the gravimetic wavelength of energy, which made possible the use of gravimetic fields to produce the spacetime inflation effect. His detection of hyperphotonic particles in antimatter reactions back in ’41 was the true breakthrough…”

The lift car lurched upward, toward the station’s central core and his thoughts returned to Shannon’s words, and to the worry that gnawed unceasingly at his gut. What if O’Keefe were right? What if the government were behind all of this? Or the multicorporations? Certainly the multicorps had enough of a stake in the continued production of military hardware, and the big ones, like Republic Transportation, were almost part of the government.

Yet his logical mind rebelled at the idea of some vast government conspiracy. He’d heard so many of those cock-and-bull stories in the barracks from the Waco Cultists and the Elvis Worshippers, about how the government was controlled by socialist alien homosexuals, that he couldn’t buy it anymore. He knew Shannon didn’t seriously believe it, either, but she’d been unusually quiet during the drive back to Kennedy. They hadn’t quite made it back to the city when they’d gotten the call from Gunny Lambert, on the orbital research station. He hadn’t given them too many details, just told them the Space team had found something interesting in orbit and they might want to come up and take a look.

They’d docked in the station’s north lock and Shannon had gone on immediately to the bay at the opposite pole. He’d stayed back in the station’s control room long enough to contact the Patton and given Captain Patel an update on Mandila’s discovery, which had delayed him just enough to fall prey to Dr. Kovalev and his atomic mouth.

“…of course,” the physicist went on, his voice breaking slightly as the liftcar passed into zero gravity and the tip of his beard bounced playfully against his chest, “it took the work of Constance Decatur with the concept of electromagnetic lensing technology to focus the hyperphotons off the antimatter reaction into the drive field. Which left the problem of the tidal forces inherent in this kind of warping of the fabric of spacetime. While we can shape the Eysselink field to reduce these forces, we have not, as yet, been able to eliminate them altogether—the best we have been able to accomplish is to focus this tidal disruption into a straight-line acceleration analog proportional to the energy being pumped into the field. This necessitates the unfortunate inconvenience of the g-tanks, which I personally find…”

“Hey, here we are,” McKay interrupted, feeling the car come to a halt. “Thanks for the explanation, Doc, I really appreciate it. Maybe we can talk more later.”

“It was my pleasure, Captain,” the man assured him, beaming, as they kicked out of the lift and floated into the station’s auxiliary docking bay.

Shannon, he saw, was there already, along with Gunny Lambert and two of the orbital station’s department heads: Sandra Cerrano, a senior investigator for the Spaceflight Safety Commission, and Dr. Kwane Munfimi, the expedition’s chief xenobiologist—all gathered around a massive, dingy-white object, its semi-ovoid shape somehow familiar to McKay, but its outline oddly lumpy and irregular. It took Jason a moment to realize what the thing was: an unopened Invader drop-pod.

“Holy shit,” he murmured, slowly floating forward. “Where the hell did you find this thing?”

“Floating in high orbit,” Cerrano answered him. She was an unassuming, mousey young woman with black hair cut severely short. “There used to be a small rocket pack attached to the ass-end of the pod to kick it into the atmosphere; it apparently failed to ignite.”