Susan nodded approvingly. “Very good, PFC. You just earned a seat at the Captain’s Table for dinner. Okuda, bring up the DC team. We have work to do.”
SEVENTEEN
Tyson sat in a corner booth across a small, round, antique burlwood table from Dr. Elsa Spaulding and exhaled weeks’ worth of dread and anxiety in one long, exasperated, thoroughly satisfying sigh.
“That is the first bit of good news I’ve heard in more than a month.” He lifted his drink to clink her nearly empty glass. “Cheers!”
They both leaned back into the circular leather bench of the “privacy” booth. While they could look out on the rest of the patrons of Vicars, their conversations were reduced to static by overlapping fields of ultrasonic interference at the mouth of the booth. Tyson wouldn’t repeat his mistake from Chili’s.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Mr. Abington.”
“Tyson.”
“Fine, Tyson. It’s a trial phase, there’s no guarantee it will work across all—”
Tyson waved her off. “I’m confident your team will close the gaps. Loosen up, celebrate your accomplishment. You’re running low, would you like another?”
“Actually, I think I’d like to switch to beer.”
“By all means. They have an excellent Flemish sour on tap here.”
“A what?”
“A sour beer.” Tyson’s eyebrow inched toward the ceiling. “Where did you grow up, Elsa?”
“Persephone. On the equatorial belt, like almost everyone. Except the miners and the people up in the orbitals, of course. We called it the racetrack. Two thousand kilometers across in most places and wrapped all the way around the globe.”
“Persephone is pretty dry, right? I’ve never been.” Tyson entered the beer order into the table’s menu.
“Let’s just say lakeside property is at a premium. I lived in the twelves. We had a ‘lake’ you could wade across, and it was man-made.”
“That doesn’t mean a great deal to me, I’m afraid.”
“Sorry. Without large, interconnected oceans, there aren’t recognizable continents, so the equatorial belt is divided up into forty-four thousand-kilometer-long sections and one shorter section that acts as the end point of the belt, as mapped by the original surveyors. I lived in the twelfth section.”
“Seems a bit impersonal.”
“Persephone is a bit impersonal, and that’s when she isn’t actively trying to kill you. This place”—she waved around an arm to encompass the totality of Lazarus—“is like the planet’s brightest vacation spots by comparison.”
“It was hotter than Lazarus?” Tyson said. “I find that hard to believe.”
“Not on average. Persephone sits right near the edge of the liquid water zone of Proxima, but it’s dry, the winds spin up to several hundred kilometers per hour, a sudden solar flare can give even gene-spliced skin a third-degree sunburn in under five minutes, and when a pressure front from the sunward or nightward side pushes into the racetrack, the temperature can rise or fall by forty degrees in less than an hour. Which could happen at any time, because there are no seasons on a tidally locked planet.”
Tyson grimaced as the automated waiter rolled up to the table to deliver the beer. “Makes it hard to know how to dress for a picnic, I imagine.”
Elsa took the stein from the small platform and thanked it out of habit. “We didn’t leave the house without a goody bag.”
“Goody bag?”
“Sorry. It’s like a cross between a sleeping bag and a small tent. You could have it inflated and be inside in ten seconds, which we practiced. Its shell would reflect the worst radiation of a flare, and it was insulated well enough to keep you alive for several hours in either extreme heat or cold. And the second it inflated, a built-in burst transmitter started screaming to everyone within two hundred kilometers to come get you. Goody bags saved a lot of people over the last couple centuries. Anyone caught outside without one is pretty well written off as too stupid to be worth saving in the first place.”
“It’s a miracle it was ever colonized in the first place.”
“It was our very first extra-solar colony, back in the days before the Alcubierre breakthrough. The first ships to get there were a joint ESA/NASA project using good old antimatter rockets. It took thirty years just to get there at a time when we weren’t sure going any further into space would ever be practical. So, the first colonists were pretty strongly motivated to make it work. I doubt developers today would give a marginal case like Persephone a second glance, but still, she persisted. Even today, Persephone hasn’t repaid its original investment in materials or manufacturing. But it’s more than made up for it by cranking out generation after generation of tough bitches and the institutional knowledge of how to terraform even the most disagreeable planets.”
Tyson smiled. “You take pride in that obstinacy?”
Elsa blushed. “Maybe a little. Is that silly?”
“Not at all. It’s admirable even, if put to appropriate use.” Tyson took another swill of his whiskey and soda. “Speaking of uses…”
Elsa’s eyebrow inched up. “Yes?”
“I have received a report from, well, from a very strange woman whose analysis I trust nonetheless, that our investigations should take a particular look at Tau Ceti and Barnard’s Starbased operations. Anyone on your list of potentials for our bacteria builder work out of those systems, either currently or recently?”
Elsa chewed over the question for a moment, then unrolled a screen from her pocket. “A few,” she said after a brief review. “But it thins the herd significantly.”
“That’s good. Anyone jump out at you?”
She gently bit her lower lip as she scrolled through the candidates. Tyson’s hindbrain pinged and sparked at the visual, but he ignored it. She was an employee. Never mind that damned near everyone on this bloody planet was an employee except his immediate family. There were lines one didn’t cross at his level of play.
She sneered. “Oh, yesss…”
“That sounds decisive.”
Elsa turned the privacy curtain off on the screen so the image in
