Robert Wilson - Bios

“I’ve worked in clean environments all my life. I’m a Family physician! I maintain health! I don’t perform autopsies! I’m not accustomed to this degree of, of…”

Nefford trailed off, swiping his forehead on his sleeve. The managing physician was sick.

With fear.

Let it be fear, Degrandpre thought. For once, he envied his father’s stubborn faith. A prophet to pray to. Here, there was no prophet, no Mecca, no Jerusalem. No paradise or forgiveness, no margin of error. Only a devil. And the devil was fecund, the devil was alive.

The evacuation of Marburg took a day and a half. The field station was a twin of Yambuku, set deep in the Lesser Boreal Continent’s temperate forest. Like Yambuku, it was situated in a cleared perimeter, its rigorously sterile core contained inside layers of increasing biohazard. Its biologically hot outer walls were scrubbed daily by maintenance tractibles, or should have been—lately the tractibles had begun to malfunction; the bays were full of machinery demanding maintenance, and bacterial films had compromised three of the station’s exit locks. When the shuttle dock seals began to show similar wear, the station man-Shoe Clan virologist named Weber, called for general evac.

The call was not well-received by the IOS. Apparently Marburg’s shuttle would be routed to a secondary bay that was being set up for prolonged quarantine. Weber ascribed this to Terrestrial paranoia, though he feared it might signal something worse.

But there was no postponing the evac. Weber loved Isis and had worked hard to make Marburg a going concern. But he was also a realist. Postpone the evacuation much longer and people would begin to die.

The Oceanic Station had already collapsed. The Isis Polar Station, anchored in the glacial wasteland of the planet’s northern ice cap, reported no significant problems and continued to operate on a day-to-day basis.

Yambuku, however, was on the brink of total breakdown.

Avrion Theophilus burst through the shuttle-bay doors from de-con, brushed aside his courtesy detail, and marched direcdy to Yambuku’s remote-ops room.

His full-dress Devices and Personnel uniform drew a few stares from the otherwise distracted downstation crew. He was accustomed to that, at least from the Kuiper-born. In civilization it would have been considered ridiculously gauche, the peasant’s impulse to stare. But Yambuku wasn’t civilization.

He found the station manager, Tam Hayes, coming off a long remensor session. Hayes looked groggy, unshaven. Theophilus took him aside. “We need a place to talk.”

I gather she’s injured,” Theophilus said.

“It looks that way.”

“Out of contact.”

“Verbal contact, certainly. We’re still getting some telemetry, but it’s intermittent. The fault may be with our antenna array. Remensors are down, too, and the excursion tractibles are dead. All of them.”

“But Zoe is not.”

“No. To the best of our knowledge, Zoe is not.” “We have good telemetry up to the point at which she was attacked?”

“Yes.”

“Forwarded to Earth?”

“Forwarded to the IOS, at least. Degrandpre bottlenecks traffic to Earth.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that.”

Hayes blinked. “Believe me, that’s not what I’m worried about.”

“Have the satellites located her?”

“To within a meter of the digger colony, but the atmosphere’s too cloudy for any kind of visual confirmation.” “Not good enough,” Theophilus said.

They had come to the small shuttle-control chamber above the core. It was occupied only during launches—a good place for a private conversation. Hayes was in a hurry to get back to the remote-ops room; Zoe was alive, and he meant to bring her back to Yambuku. Right now Avrion Theophilus was only an obstacle, and the man’s peremptory manner made Hayes clench his fists.

He said, “Are you worried about Zoe or about her excursion technology?”

“The technology has already proven itself, don’t you think? The fact that she might yet be alive despite a wild-animal attack is evidence of that.”

“Because if it’s Zoe you’re worried about, it might be best if you let me get back to the business of bringing her home.”

“Not all the novel technology is in her excursion suit, Dr. Hayes.”

“Excuse me?”

“She’s a package. It isn’t just the interface. She’s augmented internally, do you understand? She has an entirely artificial immune system riding on top of her natural immunity. Microscopic nano-factories stapled to her abdominal aorta. If the suit is breached, we need to know that. There’s much more we can learn from her even if she dies in the field.”

“You’re saying she might survive even if the suit is breached?”

“For a time, at least. It might be difficult to retrieve her body, given the situation here. But if we can—”

“Fuck you,” Hayes said.

He didn’t want to retrieve Zoe’s body. He had a better plan.

Dieter Franklin came into the staging bay as Hayes was suiting up.

Hayes’ standard bioarmor was clumsy and immense compared to the gear Zoe had worn. A sterile core wrapped in steel and flexiglass and nanofilters. Hayes had just sealed the massive leggings when the inner door slid open.

“You can’t be serious,” Franklin said. “Lee Reisman said you were raving about an emergency excursion. I told her you were smarter than that. Tell me I wasn’t lying.”

“I’m bringing her back.”

“Slow down a fucking minute and think about this! You’re planning to cross the Copper River in a suit of armor that can sustain you for, what, two days maximum?—when it’s working properly. And at a time when every piece of machinery we’ve sent into the field is either dead or failing and we can’t even keep our own seals intact.”

“She’s alive, maybe injured.”

“If she’s alive, she needs a functioning ground station to come home to. You’re more useful to her here. Not out in the mud with a hot servomotor, or worse, dividing everybody’s attention and costing us resources we can’t afford.”

“I owe her—”

“Nothing you owe her is worth suicide. And that’s what this is, you know it. Odds are, you’ll end up as a few kilograms of compost inside a broken steel shell. And Zoe will end up right where she is.”

Hayes wound a layer of insulation around his waist, forcing himself to slow down, do it right. “She was a fucking test platform, Dieter. D-and-P doesn’t give a shit about the diggers. Zoe thought she was here to do social studies, but she was a test platform.”

Dieter Franklin nodded slowly. “For the excursion suit. Elam suspected as much.”

“Elam suspected. But I knew.”

Franklin said nothing. Hayes tried to focus his attention on his armor, working the procedures, sealing bands of pneumostatic plastic over his rib cage. He wished Elam were here to read him his checklist.

“You knew?”

“I saw all the D-and-P memos. Little communiques to the Yambuku manager. No details, but enough that I should have realized it was her gear that mattered. She was a nicking test platform, Dieter, and I let her walk out there in all her glorious ignorance.”

“You need to think about this. She has good gear, but it’s not breach-proof. “We can’t be sure she’s still alive.”

Next, the soft inner helmet. “She has more than the suit. She’s been internally modified. She has a heavily augmented immune system. Even if her suit’s damaged, she might survive long enough for us to get her back here. Maybe long enough to save her life.”