Double Helix 03_ Red Sector - Diane Carey [33]
Zevon gazed at him with ‘all the fascination and confusion of a child looking into a kaleidoscope. “How can we?”
“By making sure that things are different because we’re here.” Stiles hitched himself up to a better position, still holding firmly to Zevon’s arm. “When they pull us out of this hole, we’re going to still be alive. Then we’re going to go to work. We’re gonna pay back the universe for all the goofs and gaffs we’ve made before. We’re not going to think about escaping or fighting. This is our planet now. We have a lot to do before the next Constrictor hits.”
Mystified, perhaps wondering if his companion were delirious, Zevon narrowed his eyes. “What?”
Heartened by his own words and by the new determination welling in his heart, Stiles willed his conscience into line and saw the future as a clear tunnel of purpose.
‘I’ll tell you what;’ he said. “We’re going to save a billion people.”
Chapter Seven
Four Years Later, Federation Standard Time
“ZEVON, I THINK WE’VE GOT something this time! Look at this!”
“If I’d had the right equipment, this could’ve been found months ago.”
“It reads like a Richter scale! We’re actually picking up spaceborne disruption. Watch this.”
“But not focused. No way to tell if we have minutes or hours, or even days.” “But we know this time that it’s coming. That’s something!” “There hasn’t been a Constrictor in more than two years. We’ve predicted it twice before. The first time we predicted the Constrictor would come in three weeks. It came in three hours. The second time, nothing happened at all” “But we learned from those mistakes!” “They won’t believe us, Eric.” “But this time we know!” “They won’t believe us.”
The lab smelled of a burning circuit. Off to Stiles’s right, in the comer, the tired dust collector clacked and whirred, creating a sense of action where in fact there was little. His taxed back muscles shuddered as he sank back in his chair. “How can we convince them? What do you think we should do? It’s not like we can threaten Orsova, and he’s got the keys to all the telephones.”
Beside him in the only other chair, Zevon seemed more troubled than vindicated by their good work today and the breakthrough they’d been waiting for, which now blinked before them on the overworked spectrometer, its flickering screen data reflected in the cold contents of their two soupbowls.
“You need to eat,” Zevon said, his voice a rasp of fatigue and frustration.
Only now did Stiles realize that his partner was looking not at the glimmering jewels on the screen, but at the filmy soup.
Stiles pressed back and stretched his arms. “Four years of horse-drool soup. So I skip it once in a while. So what? Limosh t’ rui maloor.” Zevon looked at him. “Telosh li cliah maheth.”
Stiles felt abruptly selfconscious and guilty about his appearance. He almost never looked in the mirror over the sink back in their cell anymore-he even trimmed his beard without looking. If he didn’t look, he could convince himself from moment to moment that his cheeks were not so sunken beneath the scruffy yellow beard he’d allowed to grow there, his eyes not dull, he could imagine the fullness of youth and the sheen of health he had once possessed and not even noticed in those days. He could ignore the bruises on his temples mid the black blotches under the sleeves of his sweater. At least they’d given him a sweater.
He’d stopped looking in mirrors a long time ago, right about when the beard had stopped helping him hide his deteriorating physical condition. All he could tell from the beard was that he was still blond and hadn’t gone prematurely gray from the daily stress and struggle.
Over the past four years the Pojjana behavior had been frequently baffling, inconsistent, sometimes maddening, sometimes