Hal let out a long wheezy groan. His jaw started to move, chewing on air. When Hal had come round after Lawrence's ragtag medical team installed the biomech heart he'd lost all sensation and movement down his right side. Since then, feeling had been returning slowly, as with a recovering stroke victim. If that was his only complication Lawrence would have been happy. But despite the superoxygenated blood in his brain, there had been some starvation damage. The kid's thoughts were slow and muddled, coupled with memory lapses. With the paralyzed muscles and the difficulty he had putting words together, watching him try to speak was painful. Most of the time he knew what he wanted to say, but grew angry with himself when the words refused to form. Sometimes the anger would cause him to punch the arm of the chair with his good arm, tears of frustration leaking down his cheeks.
"Thank. You. Sarge," he grunted out. Tendons stood proud from his throat with the effort of forming three words.
"That's what I'm here for, Hal." Lawrence glanced around at the other faces in the room, trying to judge the collective mood. They were all quietly expectant, curious what he'd brought them together for. Since the court-martial and the firing squad they'd been directing their shock and anger at Z-B in the form of Captain Bryant and Ebrey Zhang. Resentment and the sense of betrayal hadn't manifested in any coherent form, but they'd become difficult to command. Not that the rest of the platoons in Memu Bay were any more disciplined right now. But with a ruined Hal to rally round and help, 435NK9 retained a degree of internal cohesion. They did what Lawrence told them, not because they were orders from Bryant, but because Lawrence wanted them carried out.
He couldn't have asked for a group of men more suited to help achieve his personal goal.
Funny how things work out.
"The reason I have a contact at Durrell is something I was going to share with you at some time anyway. Might as well be now. I think there's a big asset out in the hinterland that Z-B doesn't know about. I want to collect that asset."
"For Z-B?" Karl asked quickly.
Lawrence smiled without humor. "Not a chance."
Lewis clapped his hands together. "Fucking-a."
"More like it."
"What kind of asset?" Amersy asked. He sounded more cautious than curious.
Lawrence pulled out a desktop pearl. Its pane unfolded and began to display a satellite image of the plateau behind Memu Bay. "This is Arnoon Province. I went up there last time I was on Thallspring, a patrol that was sent on a sweep through the hinterlands. According to Memu Bay's official records, the people living up there harvest willow webs in the forest and turn the stuff into sweaters and blankets, crap like that. What we found when we got there was a nice little village in the woods, with a very decent standard of living. It was like a five-star holiday resort. I've seen the same kind of isolated community on several worlds. No big deal. But there were a few things wrong about this one. You'll have to take my word on this, but there's no way they could afford the standard of living I saw by just selling blankets. Every house was crammed full of gadgets and electronics, all of it top-of-the-range gear. There were a lot of people living there as well, more than Memu Bay knew about, and too many for their community income to support. And none of them were ill, either. I'm not talking about hospital cases. I didn't even see a kid with a runny nose. They were the healthiest group of people I've known."
"So you're saying they've got another source of income?" Amersy said. "Lawrence, I've seen communities like this, too. They'll have some kind of illegal scam running up there in the forest, away from the city police and, more important, the taxman. It won't be anything we can take home."
"No, they have money on a scale that goes way beyond anything like that. I'm talking orders of magnitude, here. They're probably the richest people on this planet"
"How do you figure that?"
"It took me a while to realize, because they've used the best camouflage there is: put your biggest secret in plain sight. I thought they were Regressors that first time. I saw them eating fruit from a tree." He smiled softly at the platoon.
"So?" Lewis asked. "They are Regressors. Nobody else does that kind of thing. It's filthy. Decent people eat protein cell food."
Lawrence chuckled. "Which just proves my point. You can't see it either. Willow webs are a local plant. The forest up there in the hills is indigenous. Arnoon Province wasn't gamma soaked."
"No way," Dennis said sharply. "Terrestrial plants won't grow in alien environments. For a start, the soil bacteria is all wrong. That's why you have to gamma soak the land and re-seed it with our own bacteria."
"Exactly," Lawrence said. "But I saw it. I saw them pluck fruit from a bush and eat it. From what I remember, it wasn't even a terrestrial bush."
"Then you didn't see it, Sarge. Sorry, but humans don't have a biochemistry that is compatible with this planet's indigenous organisms. I might have flunked my degree, but I did manage to take in stuff that basic."
"I know. But I've seen this happen on one other planet as well. You weren't with us then." Lawrence cocked an eyebrow at Amersy. "You remember Calandrinia?"
"Hardly likely to forget her."
"She was a new-native on Santa Chico," Lawrence told the others. "They ate fruit that was growing on trees. I called them Regressors, too. But I was wrong there as well. Calandrinia told us that the biotechnology experts who emigrated from California eventually worked out how to blend the terrestrial and alien gene pools. It made Calandrinia's generation what they were, and it gave them food the old-fashioned way, so they weren't dependent on food refineries. That was a big part of their philosophy, liberating themselves from machinery. So it is possible."
Dennis pulled a face. "Maybe. On Santa Chico I could believe it. But here, on Thallspring? Christ, Sarge, the most advanced thing ever to come out of Memu Bay is a new shape for a windsurfing board."
"Yeah. And according to Calandrinia it took decades for Santa Chico to develop the gene blend. Decades of work by hundreds of the greatest geneticists and biotechnicians Earth ever had. Yet here we are, in the middle of the hinterlands on a planet thirty-seven light-years from Santa Chico, and I see the same thing. How do you explain that, Dennis?"
"You think they bought the genetic blending technology from Santa Chico. Don't you?" Amersy asked.
"There's nowhere else it could have come from. And it would have taken a lot of money. You'd have to travel from here to Santa Chico carrying a complete range of Thallspring botanical and bacterial samples. Then you'd have to employ a team of geneticists to adapt the techniques. That takes serious money. Billions in anyone's currency."