Blake wasn’t proud of that, either. He had just wanted to see Rikki looking other than green around the gills. And when he saw her in the yard, keeping an eye on the healthy kids at play, he’d told Marvin he had all he needed.
Ignoring Dana’s disapproving glance, Blake replayed the short vid clip. When it stopped, he left the final image open on an aux display.
They handled the next asteroid encounter with minimal words, and the all too familiar failure. And the asteroid after that. And the two co-orbiting rocks after that. Blake began counting the minutes until Antonio would relieve him.
“Will you please take down that vid?” Dana asked. “Rikki is fine. You have a problem.”
“I can’t put my finger on it, but I know. I’m certain. Something is wrong. We need to go back.”
“When we have what we came—”
“An interesting thing,” Antonio said from the hatchway. Blake hadn’t heard him coming. “Did you—”
“Not now,” Blake and Dana snapped in unison.
“Yes…now.”
Something in Antonio’s voice made Blake turn and look. Antonio was craning his neck, staring past Blake at the playground scene.
“See the…two moons?”
Two moons, daylight pale, glimmered above the childcare center. The larger body was at half phase; the smaller was only a crescent. By their sizes, Aristophanes and Aeschylus.
“Uh-huh,” Blake said. “What about them?”
Antonio reached over Blake’s shoulder, extending a fingertip into the holo. “The timestamp shows today’s date. The positions and phases of the moons are from twelve days ago.”
Before Rikki fell ill! Before they left! Blake said, “We have to head back. ASAP. Li and Carlos are lying.”
“It could be an honest discrepancy,” Dana said hesitantly.
Blake shook his head. “AIs don’t make mistakes like that. Not on their own. Li or Carlos is using Marvin to hide something.”
“I see another possibility.” Dana took a deep breath. “Blake, you won’t like this. Maybe the medical situation is more serious than they’ve admitted to us.”
“And Rikki is….” Blake couldn’t finish the thought aloud. “You think they’re keeping it secret lest we come charging home without what they need.”
“It’s possible. Sorry, Blake.”
“You think they’d lie, compel Marvin to lie, all because they don’t trust us to do the right thing?”
Dana shrugged.
“They’d have told you, wouldn’t they? Made sure you knew the urgency?” And to Antonio, who had jammed himself between pilot and copilot seats to poke at a console, Blake snarled, “Can’t that wait?”
Dana said, “But they didn’t. I’d have told you.”
And she would have. Blake was certain. “Li and Carlos are hiding something.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I can’t prove it, but—”
“But I can,” Antonio said. “Look.”
The playground was gone, vanquished by a long-range surveillance image of Dark. On the shore of the Darwin Sea, the settlement was little more than a dot.
“From station beta on Aristophanes.” Antonio reached into the holo to indicate a faint oval smudge, darkest around the settlement. “See that? It’s most visible in infrared wavelengths.”
Smoke? Precious little on Dark could burn, apart from the ethanol they produced. Blake banished insane notions of medieval plagues, of criers calling to bring out the dead, of mass funerary bonfires.
Dana must have had the same thoughts. “A dietary deficiency can’t be contagious. What are they burning?”
Antonio shook his head. “That’s not smoke. Area temperature readings are normal. We must be seeing dust. From major construction or…destruction.”
“Amid a health crisis?” Blake said. “They are lying to us, and they’re not letting Rikki communicate. Dana, we have to go back.”
“You’re right,” she said. “Buckle up, guys.”
They were deep within the local asteroid belt and almost a quarter of the way around the sun from Dark. Over the course of their search, they had built up considerable speed. Blake reached for his datasheet to do the math.
“Three and a half days,” Antonio said. “More or less. That’s with the DED running wide open.”
Two gees all the way.
Blake said, “Let’s get going.”
36
As jails went, Rikki’s accommodations weren’t bad. She had windows (too small and high to wriggle through, even if she had had the strength), a padded bench on which to rest, a toilet and sink, even a shower. The room was clean. At night, the ceiling glow panel gave more than ample light. Prisoners in stories paced out the dimensions of their cells, so she had. Call it four meters by five.
When the nausea and vomiting returned she saw the silver lining to being locked inside a bathroom.
After the nausea passed and she could stop hugging the toilet, she attacked the exterior wall with a spoon, the only utensil provided with her—untouched—food tray. She scraped long enough to confirm she’d need geological time to dig through the concrete. The shallow scratch, if anyone asked, was to mark Day One. In stories, prisoners also kept calendars.
From afar, every so often, she heard engine roars, and rasping, and deep whooshing rumbles. She remembered Carlos on the backhoe-loader—could it have been only that morning?—and wondered how it could have anything to do with Li’s…insurrection.
When Rikki called at a window (oddly dusty) for help, the children ran.
Damn that horrible video! Damn Li!
Do I instinctively fear snakes? Rikki wondered. Does everyone? Maybe I only learned the fear growing up. Grandma Betty had had a thing about snakes.
But none of that mattered. The morphing faces and jarring music were surely terrifying enough.
Just as the children’s dread of her was clear enough.
Out of sight, around a corner of the childcare center, the sounds of play soon resumed. Every happy shriek was like a knife twisting in Rikki’s gut.
There was nothing left to do but remember, and that was the most painful of all.
Her datasheet! Straight from her pocket, still folded, she whispered into it, “Marvin, unlock the bathroom door.”
Silence.
She pushed on the door and it would not budge. Maybe the lock’s wireless interface had been disabled. She tapped out an email warning to Blake. Li’s gone nuts. Come back at once!
Rather than an acknowledgment when she tapped Send,
