She told him then about the finger and the lack of a body-scan. Like Dr. Demikhov, he quickly became interested.
“Cloning,” he said. “It’s the only tool you have. You’ll have to grow a body from the DNA of the freshest, least damaged cell you have. Then, you’ll have to build up a slurry of stem cells to recreate a simulacrum.”
“A what?” I asked.
“A false life,” Jianskui explained, “a body that never existed before, but which has a basis in genetics. Excuse me, what is your medical specialty?”
The ghostly head was looking at me, and he didn’t look happy. Maybe he’d sensed my total incompetence.
“Uh… I’m sort of a specimen-gatherer.”
“I see. A field assistant?”
“That’s right.”
After giving me an up-down glance of disdain, he turned back to Floramel. “I have described the best medium for rapid growth and accelerated gene-transcription. It is in my archives.”
“Of course, Doctor. But could you go over all that again with me now—from memory?”
He looked almost as annoyed with her as he had with my lame ass a moment before. But finally, he was cajoled into cooperating. He gave Floramel a vomit-load of big words, which I didn’t follow at all. Most of it was chemical formulas and such-like. I soon grew bored and went back to poking at random tanks.
“I have it, James,” Floramel said a few minutes later. “I think we can do this, but we must talk to one more person.”
“Who’s that?”
“A man who’s done things like this recently. A man Central has been tracking closely for years—the Investigator.”
“Huh? The Investigator? He’s out on Dust World still, isn’t he? Don’t tell me Etta’s grandpa died, and you put his head in one of these tanks. She’ll be pissed.”
She rolled her eyes at me. “No, he’s still on Dust World. Could you… introduce us? Etta has always refused to do so in the past.”
“Uh… I guess so.”
We exited the spooky vault after that. I don’t mind telling you I was a glad to leave its long-dead, slimy occupants behind.
-13-
We spent the next hour or so stuffing Raash’s claw in a vacuum-sealed specimen jar. It was pretty cool—literally. It had its own refrigeration unit and dehumidifier built in.
With the remains secured as best we could, we headed to Dust World. These days such an interstellar trip wasn’t quite the ordeal it had been in the past. Rather than paying out your lifesavings for a ticket on a star transport, all you had to do was head for the right set of gateway posts.
Central had more than one Gray Deck—areas reserved for teleportation and the like. In one of them, they had set up permanent gateways that led to every planet under our direct protection. The posts and the power they used were expensive, but they were far cheaper than the fuel a starship sucked up when it went from one planet to another. All-in-all, gateways were a huge money-saver for Hegemony.
After a half-dozen hogs spent a solid hour trying to stop us, we managed to get approval to walk through the posts that were labeled Zeta Herculis. This shortcut took us straight to Dust World, landing us in the middle of a big square inside one of their largest cities. Correction: one of their largest towns. Dust World didn’t really have any habitations that could qualify as a true city.
There were a few hogs guarding the arrival spot. They startled badly when we arrived. Their guns were up and aimed at us, a full circle of four of them. They seemed more than jumpy.
“Oh good, you’re human,” said the head honcho hog. “What a relief. What can we do for you two?”
Frowning, Floramel and I both looked at him in confusion.
“Why wouldn’t we be human?” I asked. “This is the gateway to Earth, right?”
“It’s supposed to be. Just look at what walked out of those posts a few hours ago, over there in the pit.”
I walked over to the pit he’d indicated. It was sort of a garbage dump. Dust Worlders handled their refuse differently than we did on Earth. They tended to put it all into a big hole, sprinkle it with deadly flesh-eating nanites, then cover it over. Nature would then do its work, with a little help from technology.
What we saw in the bottom of that oozing, slimy pit was surprising. It could only be the corpse of giant space-squid.
“A Cephalopod? How did he get here?”
“We don’t know, Centurion. It just popped out of the gateway posts yesterday, and it came at us. We shot it down, as it wasn’t one of ours. It was a wild squid—a renegade.”
“We still have those? I thought all the squids were tame now.”
“Apparently not all of them got that memo.”
I couldn’t argue with him, and I was concerned.
Floramel came near and spoke to me softly. “Come on, James. Let’s get out of here. Take me to see the Investigator.”
“All right.”
Together, we crossed the dusty town into the dusty wilderness on the far side. Soon darkness fell. The town—like all human settlements on Dust World—was located deep inside a vast pit of its own. It was really a canyon more than a kilometer deep.
The open surface of the planet was too hot to survive on. For the most part, it was all one vast desert, but there were a few oasis spots like this one. They came in the form of sinkholes in the crust of the planet—a natural phenomenon which allowed cooler climates to exist at the gloomy bottom.
Sand from the endless, raging dust-storms above us often sifted down into these deep, wet holes, but the direct sunlight never made it down here. That was a very good thing, as the plants and animals below couldn’t afford to be hit by
