They stared at each other for a long time, and Senkovi wondered if Lante or Lortisse were watching on the cameras and killing themselves with laughter. Or unable to believe his bad taste. But if you couldn’t laugh, what could you do?
‘You . . .’ Baltiel’s voice had a shake to it, at the start, but the man clamped down and made it sound strong. ‘What happened?’ A suspicious squint started about Baltiel’s eyes, and Senkovi could hold the grin back no longer. Seeing the boss about to beat him to the punch, Senkovi ripped the beard off, and began peeling away the skullcap and wrinkled skin sections, snickering to himself.
Baltiel must have interrogated the ship by then and found out that he’d been under for eleven years, in the increasingly meaningless way the ship told time. ‘How long did you . . .?’ he asked.
‘Thirty-four days.’ Senkovi picked at one stubborn scrap of fake wrinkle. ‘The skin was the easy bit. Getting the workshops to spin a realistic beard was remarkably difficult.’
‘You’ve amused yourself sufficiently?’ Baltiel obviously wanted to shout at him but was restraining himself masterfully.
‘I’m amused. Aren’t you amused?’
‘In hysterics.’ The boss rubbed at his neck and rolled his shoulders – things that shouldn’t have been necessary, but they were relying too much on the cold sleep and it was beginning to show. ‘I assume you had some real reason for dredging me up, beyond trying to kill me with shock?’
‘Well, several things have accumulated that probably need a command decision or two,’ Senkovi admitted. ‘Lante wants to talk to you, certainly. She’s got a whole . . . thing going on.’ He saw Baltiel’s face change as the man accessed the initial files on Lante’s ‘thing’. Lante and Baltiel were going to have an argument soon. Senkovi had warned her it would be a hard sell to the boss. Still, none of his business, and when the main debate had been raging between Lante and Rani about broaching the thing with Baltiel, Senkovi had been deep in designing his beard. ‘Oh, and there’s the module, that needs a decision.’
‘How’s the refit proceeding?’ And even as he asked the question Baltiel was hunting the answers through the system, doubtless tutting over the fact that, in his absence, nobody put data back quite where it should be.
‘Yes, well,’ Senkovi said, wringing his beard. ‘Nobody wants to trust it even though the virus has been flushed out. Floating in a tin can and all that. On the plus side the Nod expedition is mostly good to go, they told me. Even got the cold-sleep system set up planetside if you want to do a longitudinal study or two.’
Senkovi got an alert to tell him Baltiel was querying the progress on Damascus. At least he had good news there, he felt. Everything proceeding apace, oxygenated zones spreading, and a microbial ecosystem established and apparently stable. He even had a working elevator cable, because the thought of dropping living things from orbit into the sea made him shake and sweat, no matter how he tried to tell himself it wasn’t the same. He couldn’t even airdrop a bacterium these days.
‘I’d better speak to the others,’ Baltiel said grimly.
‘Everyone’s up and waiting for you, boss,’ Senkovi told him. It was a breach of Baltiel’s rules, of course, to have them all awake at the same time, but not as much as what was about to be proposed.
***
Baltiel could see Lante was ready for a fight, and the body language of Rani and Lortisse suggested the three of them were committedly all in it together. The brief walk from the sleep pods to the crew room had been long enough for him to absorb just what extended treachery had been going on while he had been out of it, but Lante had obviously done all the convincing in person rather than conveniently producing a manifesto. If he had time he could trawl the internal sensor suite and maybe find recordings of some of the conversations, but he’d just have to hear it from Lante herself and deal with it on the fly.
But first things first, and so he was urbane mildness personified as they talked over what had been reinstalled in the orbital module, whether they needed to do anything to stop it falling into Nod’s gravity well, whether they were going to set up shop there or not. Lante subsided and Rani took over with the technical details. Baltiel rubber-stamped all the various proposals, command decisions barely worthy of the name. ‘Now,’ he said, that disposed of. ‘You’ve been busy.’
For a moment the tension in the room was almost overtly mutinous. He wondered how far they would go.
‘Nobody’s come,’ Lante told him. ‘I mean, yes, they could still be on the way. They could have set off late. They could be in ships without the same acceleration as the Aegean. Or something. And maybe the reason we’ve not had any comms from them asking if we can put them up and find a bunk for them is because they’re super-paranoid after the viral weapon, or assume we’re paranoid. Or assume we’re dead. But we’ve been sending signals home-ways, and there’s nothing. There’s been . . .’ her hand waved away accuracy, ‘time for those signals to get all the way to Earth and for Earth to call us back. Nothing. We don’t think anyone’s coming.’ And it didn’t prove anything, just as she said. Survivors could be creeping their way between stars under radio silence. Except Lante didn’t think so. She was nailing her colours to: We don’t think anybody made it. What really brought it home was that he knew they’d all stopped counting. The Aegean was technically still running a clock on how long it had been since the Silence and the last words of Earth, but Baltiel could see from the records how long it had been since anyone had even queried it. Their jaunts in and out of cold sleep had given time a rough edge that had finally sawed through their last connections to their home planet. If he asked them now, not one of them would be able to say how long it had been.
And now this.
‘And so you . . .’ Baltiel was about to say, decided to play God, but that meshed too neatly with his own viewpoint, or maybe the damned religious memes Senkovi had infected him with, and he resorted to plain science. ‘So you co-opted the genetics lab.’
‘In my spare time, of which we’ve had rather a lot.’ And Lante was looking visibly older. Not old, because they all had the kind of cleaned-up genome that lent itself to extended healthy lifespans, but she’d plainly been putting the hours in, and the days and years. ‘We have genetic samples from most of the crew in store anyway, in case of mishap. It’s all established science.’
‘Banned science.’ For most of a century, long before the anti-science mob became a real danger. The creation of artificial human beings had been forbidden for a number of reasons, from divine prerogative through to fending off the return of slavery.
Lante shrugged. ‘We all know the arguments, almost none of which apply. Yusuf, you want to study Nod, fine. Senkovi wants to breed his pets and terraform Damascus, also fine. Feel free to add to the store of human knowledge. I – we – want to ensure that human knowledge has a future.’
‘I notice that you’ve sequenced several modified genomes. Not quite the human standard.’
Lante squared her shoulders. ‘Adaptation to a low oxygen environment is within human standard range. Originally in high altitude areas, but it will suit Nod well. And I know what you said – you don’t want a bunch of colonists to turn up and ruin the ecosystem there. But these won’t be colonists. They’ll be our people. We can guide them, teach them. We can make a human reservation, Yusuf. Just one part of the planet.’
And it would never stay that way, not over the generations, not forever, and the purist in him reared its head and bellowed, while the man, the vain man he acknowledged himself to be, thought about that perpetuation of human knowledge, new histories that knew his name.
‘And the rest,’ he prompted Lante gently. ‘Or are gills also human standard somehow?’