Ammonite

“I don’t—”

“Just listen. All those things I said before, about isolation, about spending time somewhere unspecified before going home… that’s not what really happens.”

Marghe listened to her heart kicking under her ribs. She breathed, seeking calm. Never refuse information, her mother had taught her when she was just six years old, you never know what you might need. But her mother was dead. She managed a Go ongesture.

“If you leave the airlock, if you take the vaccine, you’ll never go home. Not ever. I had a… a good friend. On the planet. Was one of the initial batch taken off Jeep for study. She promised to be in touch. I think someone else wrote her mail.”

“How could you tell?”

“It felt all wrong.”

“If she’d been ill—”

“No. Just listen. It seemed fine at first. I assumed she just wasn’t feeling good. Decon’s not pleasant. Anyway, I didn’t pay close attention. But once when I wrote back I put in a private joke we’d shared for a long time. A very long time. When I got her response, I knew. It wasn’t her.”

Marghe said nothing. She wished she had just taken that last step, not listened to Hiam—this new Hiam. The real one?

Hiam watched Marghe intently, then laughed, a short, hard bark. “You don’t believe me.”

“I’m wondering why you didn’t tell me this before. Why you let me get this far.”

Hiam stepped right up to the glass, close enough for Marghe to see the pleats of her irises. “Because I couldn’t decide whether to trust you. But, Marghe… this is real, and somebody has to know. I can’t prove any of it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. You seemed… I just thought…”She laughed again. “I should have saved my breath.”

Marghe did not know what to say. “You and Sigrid and Nyo have all been up here a long time. I know that must—”

“Don’t patronize me,” Hiam said wearily. “If you don’t want to believe me, then that’s your privilege, but don’t patronize me.”

Marghe shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

Silence.

To go down to Grenchstom’s Planet—GP, Jeep—would be the culmination of years of study that had started when she was just a child, first with her mother, then her father, had continued at Universities, and as assistant SEC rep on Gallipoli, then Beaver. This was the reason she had swallowed her pride and set aside her misgivings about Company, why she had recontracted with SEC alter they had betrayed her, why she had traveled vast distances, literally and metaphorically: to come to Jeep and study over a million people who had been out of contact with humanity for two or three hundred years. There would never be another chance like this, never.

“Sara, I have to do this.”

Hiam turned away abruptly. “Then you’d better go ahead and do it.”

Marghe looked at Hiam’s thin back, hesitated. “I’m sorry,” she said again, then tongued off the comm channel and turned slowly to face the flaring red panel. Red for danger.

The known dangers she had prepared for, as far as humanly possible. The vaccine would be waiting for her in D Section.

As for the unknown dangers… Well, they were unknown. Nothing she could do about them.

She stretched out her hand, clumsy in the gauntlet, and tapped out the sequence slowly and carefully. The red panel blinked off and the lights around the door flared green.

The door slid open.

B Section was silent and dark. Ice glimmered in the dim sodium glow of the emergency floor lights. Marghe stepped over the sill and the door closed behind her. It was done.

The lights ran like runway flares down a narrow corridor between stripped, bare beds, each with its entertainment hookup coiled neatly at the head. Marghe’s boots glowed orange as she walked. Her breathing was loud. She felt utterly alone.

She was the first person who had walked here for five years; five years since the glittering dumbbell shape that was Estradehad been hurriedly converted from an orbital monitoring and communications station to a research and decontamination facility. Five years since the station crew had taken refuge in Section A, leaving Sections D and C for the decontamination of occasional Jeep personnel. B Section, and the long corridor beyond—the shaft of the dumbbell—was the crew’s insurance, their buffer zone, with movement allowed one way only: to the dirty sections.

Marghe watched her boots rise and fall through the orange glow; there was no dust.

The lights at the airlock blinked a reassuring green. The door opened and the wall display told her to blank her visor and hold out her arms; she keyed in the sequence on the next door, stepped through.

The corridor seemed a mile long. The familiar orange running lights gleamed on unsheathed metal and exposed wiring. Gravity decreased rapidly as she approached the center of the shaft; her suit automatically activated the electromagnets in her boots and she had to slide her feet instead of striding.