“Tell me what happened, in your
own words.”
Mara sat in the middle of the
room. She'd never been in this room before, set at the very deepest
end of the underground habitat, lined with racks of servers and file
cabinets. MuniPrin Lee Ludei and his trimind companion sat behind a
desk, while Ermon stood in front of her, questioning her.
“I was beginning my
reexamination of the latest Mercury imagery,” she began.
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
“Why did you flag this pic?”
Ermon demanded.
“Infrared spike on the crater
rim-”
“That's sunlight, you
psyching moron. The terminator's only a few klicks from the crater;
the top of the wall's illuminated. For spirit's sake, a
pre-prentice wouldn't make this kind of mistake.”
“Sorry sir-”
“Shut up. Just shut
up. Spirit help me, if you think you can test for the
Sensologists when you make this kind of screwup! Check them again,
the whole thing.” And with that he stomped out of the
viewing cubicle.
Mara waited a minute for her
heart beat to come back to normal. The blue glow from the
false-color image on the big screen made her face seem ghostly in the
subterranean darkness of the viewing room. She deflagged it and
clicked back to the list of images she was supposed to screen for
anomalies.
She sighed and leaned her head on
the monitor. Rechecking the entire list would be the work of many
hours, and she didn't have time to do that, not with everything else
she had to do.
Then she heard the first scream.
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
“Were you aware that
Academician Pol was in the viewing room at this time?” Ermon
demanded.
“No sir.”
“Before entering the viewing
room, did you check if the 'no entry' light was on?”
“Yes, sir, I did. It was
off.”
“Are you sure?”
“Enough,” MuniPrin Ludei
growled. “It doesn't matter. Go on.”
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
It was unintelligible, no words,
simply a horrible cry of anguish. She bolted upright – it was
coming from one of the cubicles next to her – started towards the
cubicle exit – and then the words started –
“Oh Spirit! He sees me!
That great burning eye!”
It was coming from cubicle #3 –
she ran towards it, wondering where everyone else was – the scream
died to a keening moan, a whine of infinite anguish –
Academician Pol Vigili was curled
up in the fetal position, foam flecking the edge of his mouth, his
fists pounding the stone floor ineffectually. She caught a
momentary glimpse of something horrible and vast on the monitor, but
some instinct shut her eyes and she reached for the power button,
groping along the screen until she found it.
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
“You closed your eyes, then
turned the monitor off?”
“Yes sir.”
“Did you see anything on the
screen before you closed your eyes?”
“I saw something out of the
corner of my eye. Something... big. I can't really describe it.”
“Try.”
“I... I really don't want
to.”
Ermon humphed. The MuniPrin
coughed. “Just go on.”
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
She opened her eyes. Someone
outside hit the overhead lights, and she could see again. She
crouched next to the Academician, who was still pounding the floor
and keening. “Sir? Sir!” she shouted, but he paid her no
heed.
Dee was at the cubicle's
entrance. Mara looked up, into her eyes big as saucers. “Get
the first aid kit!” she shouted, and Dee vanished around the
corner, leaving her alone with the sobbing scientist.
There was a book on the desk, she
realized, an antique made of paper, a thick thing the size of a
tablet with a title written in careful print – Observations of
Earth – and her blood ran cold, realizing in an instant what it
meant. Acting on instinct, she stood and stuffed it behind the
viewing cubicle's screen.
She felt hands on her legs, and
looked down to see him staring up at her, his eyes wild but
momentarily clear. “Run,” he hissed, his voice hoarse and raw.
“Run, before He sees you too.”
Then Dee was back, with the
medical kit, already pulling the sedative hypo out, and Ermon behind
her. Dee knelt and jabbed the stick into the Academician's neck,
and he went limp.
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
“Why did you conceal the book?”
“It is contrary to our
charter,” she said, picking her words carefully, “to make
observations of the Earth-Moon system.”
“Did you read any of its
contents?”
“No sir.”
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
“We do not need a telescope
to see what must be done. Earth can be seen with the naked eye, a
jewel hanging in the void. It was ours once, and it will be again.”
Mara lay in her bunk in the
Orphans' quarters, the blue glow from the tablet making her face
ghost-like in the darkness. She had read the text – Preliminary
Observations of the Solar System, by MuniPrin Lee Ludei –
three times by now, the conclusion perhaps forty or fifty. The
words were burned into her memory, but she reread them almost every
night.
It was late, and there was no
shortage of work tomorrow; she needed to sleep. She flicked the
tablet off, stowed it under her pillow, and turned to sleep. But,
before she drifted off, a voice from under her bunk broke the
silence.
“Mara? Are you awake?”
Yat hissed.
“Yeah. What?”
“You're on the scope crew.”
“Yeah.”
“Is what we're doing...
dangerous?”
“What do you mean?”
“Last week” – they'd had a
furlough last week, gone back to Elysium for a few days – “I saw
Jehn, from my creche. He said people were mad, since that text was
pubbed, about the telescope. Said we might call Them” – no need
to specify who – “down on us, if they see us looking. Might
bring Them here.”
Mara thought. Yat, she felt,
deserved an honest answer. “I don't think it's dangerous,” she
said carefully. “I don't know for sure, but I trust the MuniPrin.
He's a wise man. And I do know that it's important, what
we're doing.”
Yat didn't reply for a minute.
Then: “Do you think... Do you think we'll ever take back Earth?”
“Someday,” Mara whispered.
“Someday.”
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