Up Against It - M. J. Locke [144]
Jane suppressed a shudder. As always, the notion of being used as a doll in other peoples’ inwave fantasies gave her a case of the grues. “Could you poke around some of those sites and see if you can find any downloaded video/audio recordings made before the disaster—as close as possible to when the event took place?”
He seemed perplexed. “But they will be much lower quality, and there is a possibility of their having been hacked in some way.”
“For my purposes, that won’t matter. Do what you can.”
Harbaugh was in a chamber down the way, with Thondu. Jane paused at the door. They stood at a computer and had not yet noticed Jane’s presence. Thondu was looking down at the clusters of biocrystals that made up the computer bank, and hir hand rested on hir belly.
“Will it be OK? If anything were to happen to me—”
“Don’t worry.” Harbaugh rested a hand on Thondu’s shoulder. “We’ll keep the backup safe. If your experimental version fails to thrive, you’ll still have the genetic map, too, which can be decoded and reconstituted in digital form on one of our servers, once you are back on Earth.”
“But it’s untested tech.”
Jane cleared her throat. Both started. Thondu looked aghast at the sight of her, but Harbaugh shook his head. “It’s all right. We have an arrangement.”
Jane looked at the glittering crystals and tubes. “So this is it, eh?” Harbaugh nodded.
Jane thought of her dream, and the fetus trapped in the crystal. She realized that this was the moment the Voice had warned her of. Are you done with me so soon? she thought, and felt relieved, and a bit sad.
So be it; she was glad to shed the role of prophet. She said to Harbaugh, “I have more research to do before I can provide you with that information we spoke of,” she said. “I’ll get it to you as soon as I have it.”
* * *
On their return to Heavitown, Sarah was excruciatingly monosyllabic. Jane realized she was still angry over Jane’s scene with Obyx. They reached the Promenade, and she said a curt good-bye. Jane touched her arm. “I’m sorry for surprising you like that.”
Sarah frowned. “OK, here’s the deal. Next time you want my help, I need to know what you are up to ahead of time. With an opportunity for me to advise you on the legal ramifications—and even decide whether I want to be involved!”
Jane winced. “You’re right. I screwed up. I should have told you. But it’s not that simple.” She sought for a way to explain. “I’m operating on instinct, Sarah. I didn’t know quite what I wanted to say to Obyx till I had hir in front of me. I just knew I needed to talk to hir, and there you were with a way to reach hir. Perhaps I shouldn’t have involved you. But I didn’t see any other way. Nor any way to explain it that would have made sense.”
Sarah sighed. After a pause, she said, “It was good that I was there. Ze’ll trust you better, because ze knows ze can trust me.” She slugged Jane lightly. “Just keep me in the loop.”
Jane made an X over her heart. “I will. I promise.”
25
The ship’s engines kicked in: deceleration had begun. Xuan had maybe another twenty minutes before they touched down. While he waited, Xuan studied the stroid’s stats from the original claim.
The original prospector had extensively surveyed it. The stroid was primarily metal ore. It was a big one: about three by three by ten kilometers in size, roughly barbell-shaped. Its albedo was high—typical for nickel-iron rocks. Its mean density had been 5.8 grams per cubic centimeter—nearly three times Phocaea’s. One end of the barbell consisted of a big lump of crumbly silicates; the result of a collision with a silica rock sometime in the distant past. But the bulk of the stroid was high-grade ore.
When the claim was first filed, a hundred fifty years ago, the stroid’s mass was 16,300 gigatons. Its gravitational pull had been a little less than a thousandth of a gee back then, comparable to that of larger but less