Putting Up Roots

Chapter Thirteen

Brewster had no intention of letting anyone rest. He was giving orders almost before the cargo aircar had touched down. There was no time for planning return trips to the Barbican Hills, or anything else. Josh was ordered to report to the communications and computer center in five minutes and help Winnie Carlson. That gave him just long enough to drop off his gear in his bedroom cubicle. He was throwing his bag on the floor and shoving it under the bed when he noticed a slight difference in the way his clothes and personal belongings were laid out on the little cabinet at the end of the bed. It wasn’t much, and no one else would have seen it, but Josh had become very precise in the years-long wandering with his mother. In their monthly—sometimes weekly—moves from one apartment or hotel to another, the layout of his own possessions was one of the few constants of life.

Not now. The little framed image of his mother in the role of Titania was facing slightly away from the head of the bed. His spare toilet kit lay between his socks and his shirts, instead of behind them. His pants were not folded quite as usual.

But who in his right mind would come in and fiddle with pictures and toothbrushes? He suspected Rick and Hag, but he couldn’t see how or why.

Josh rearranged his things as they ought to be and puzzled over them, until he realized that five minutes and more must have passed. He rushed to the building that housed the communication center and hurried inside.

Winnie Carlson was not in the room, but Rick and Hag Lasker were. By the time Josh realized they were the only people present, the twins were moving between him and the door.

They didn’t say a word to him or to each other, but they worked together as if by instinct to cut off his retreat.

Josh didn’t waste time on speech, either. He had never thought he would be thankful for all those lonely hours on the streets when he could not face a lonely apartment, but that experience might pay off now. He had been a bystander to plenty of gang action, and he knew a threatening move when he saw one.

He didn’t turn or take his eyes off them, but retreated as fast as he could until his back was against a blank part of the wall. Maybe they were just out to humiliate him and smack him around a bit to show who was boss. And maybe they wanted to go a lot further than that.

He stood and waited. They would have learned a lot, too, in four months on the streets. Everything could be a weapon, fists and feet and knees and skull and teeth. The best thing Josh had going for him was that he had seen all that, but they didn’t know it. In their eyes he was a farm hick.

They came in together, as he had expected. Rick swung a punch at Josh’s head, at the same time as Hag tried a kick. They didn’t think he’d be able to handle both at once, and they were right. Josh turned, so that Rick’s fist just brushed the side of his head; but Hag got in a solid boot high on his left thigh.

It hurt, but that wasn’t the worst part. Josh felt his leg muscle stiffen and his knee go wobbly. One more kick like that on either of his legs and he’d be as rigid as a tree. They would chop him down at their leisure.

As Hag kicked again, Josh hopped to one side and grabbed the leg as it swung wide of him. He twisted as hard as he could, but at the same moment Rick put an armlock on his neck. All three were off balance. No one let go and they staggered sideways together, to run into and knock over a tall blue cabinet standing along the wall a few feet away. Still locked together, they all fell squarely onto the overturned unit. There was a sound of breaking plastic and twisting metal.

They let go of each other, scrambled free, and stared at the flattened mess they had left behind.

“Schiitz! We’re in trouble now.” Rick turned to Josh. “It’s your fault, you brainless turd. You pulled us over onto it.”

“Me! Get screwed. If you hadn’t started on me in the first place we wouldn’t have been near it.”

“You’re as much a retard as your idiot bimbo cousin.”

“You leave Dawn out of this. At least she knows how to sing. Give us a tune, Alberich—if you can.”

“Our m-mother didn’t d-dump us.” Rick turned white, and he could hardly speak. “She didn’t abandon us with s-some whore of an aunt—”

“—who couldn’t stand you, either,” Hag added. “So she shipped your fat hide out here.”

They had been getting louder. Fists were clenched and they were all set to go at it again when Winnie Carlson walked in.

She took one look at the wreckage on the floor. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Nothing.” They all spoke in unison.

“Fine. Then you won’t mind if I go and get Brewster, to show him what happens when you do nothing.”

The three exchanged grimaces, suddenly in agreement. “No need for that,” Josh said, and Hag added, “We were just fooling around. We didn’t mean to smash anything. You don’t have to tell Brewster, do you?”

“We’ll see. I must say, I’d rather not bring him in if I don’t have to. He’ll blame me for getting here late. First things first. Is anyone hurt?”

“No.”

“No.”

“Oh, no.” The denials were prompt and vigorous. Rick stopped rubbing his shoulder, while Josh tried to stand naturally on his bruised leg. Hag muttered, “We can fix the damage.”

Winnie moved to examine the squashed case. “Don’t bet on it. This unit has had its day. The big question is, what have we lost from the system?”

She went across to the main console and began to call up system components, one after another. The others could only watch her facial expressions and hope that she knew what she was doing.

At first they were encouraged. Winnie said, “You may be lucky. That whole unit was only second-level backup. We haven’t lost anything.” But then she began to frown. “I don’t understand this. Whole segments of memory have been wiped clean, and half the system modules are sending failure messages. Were you fooling around at the console before you started to fight?”

Josh hadn’t been present, but Rick and Hag’s surprise and instant denial seemed genuine. “We didn’t touch anything over here,” Hag said.

“Cross our hearts,” added Rick.

“Well, someone certainly did.” Winnie called up a display. “See these? None of the units shown is working. And it’s not just processor failure. Here’s another list. These are databases—nothing to do with the ones you damaged, these are supposed to be in primary storage. We should be able to access data from any of them. But we can’t. Actually, I’m being told the data themselves don’t even exist.”

The list didn’t mean anything to Josh. It had uninteresting labels, like ROSTER OF SOLFERINO PERSONNEL, PERSONNEL MEDICAL RECORDS, PERSONNEL TRAVEL RECORDS, and SOLFERINO PERSONNEL ASSIGNMENT AND DUTIES. Even less relevant to anything were entries named Foodlines charter for the exploration and DEVELOPMENT OF SOLFERINO: TERMS AND CONDITIONS, and one Called LEGAL INTERFACES AND INTERCORPORATE AGREEMENTS CONCERNING CONGLOMERATE RIGHTS AND RESTRICTIONS IN THE GRISEL STELLAR SYSTEM. Attached to every item on the list was a notation: DATA FILE CORRESPONDING TO THIS LABEL DOES NOT EXIST.

Winnie Carlson did not seem to share Josh’s view as to what was important. She was making a note of places where data tables were missing.

“It’s worse than it looks,” she said. “I can’t reach the backup files, either. Those data are just plain vanished.”

“Did we do that?” Hag asked.

“No, you didn’t. Those were different files entirely. And it’s impossible to ruin a whole system by smashing a piece of peripheral storage hardware.” Winnie was puzzling again over the list that she had made. “But why are there no backup files? Normally, everything has a second copy in case the original is accidentally destroyed. Not this time. It’s unbelievably bad luck to lose processor capacity and data files, all at once. In fact, it’s such unbelievably bad luck that I don’t believe it.”

She stood, staring vacantly at the list, until Hag said, “Do you have to tell Brewster?”

“Soon. But not yet.” Winnie came out of her trance. She pointed to the ruined data unit. “You get that out of the way. Dump it where Brewster won’t see it. I’ll reconfigure the system to operate without it, make a backup copy of the data, and see what else is out of action. For the moment, you say nothing to Brewster. All right?”

It was more than all right. Josh felt the same relief as he saw on Rick and Hag’s faces, at the same time as a part of his brain asked a question of its own: Why was Winnie Carlson doing this? Was it just to protect them from Brewster’s anger?

That didn’t seem plausible; but he could think of no better answer as he and the Lasker twins packed the broken unit into a big trash bag. While they waited for Winnie to tell them they could take it away—she was still messing around at the computer console—he massaged his sore thigh.

Rick saw him doing it. “We got you good, eh?”

“No, it’s nothing. How’s your shoulder?”

“What shoulder?”

“That will do.” Winnie swung around in her seat. “Whatever it was, the three of you have had it out with each other. If you want me to forget this, you’d better do the same.”

“It’s forgot already,” Hag said. He lifted the bag with the broken storage unit inside it. “We can put this outside the fence, far enough away so nobody’s going to find it. But what if Brewster sees us going and asks what we got?”

“He won’t.” Winnie stood up. “I’ll make sure I have his attention while you get out of the way. Give me three minutes, then you can head out of here. Beyond the fence is fine, but make sure you stash it in a place where nobody will find it. I want you back in half an hour. There’s real work for you to do here. Smashing things doesn’t count.”

She left. “I had her wrong,” Rick said. “I was sure she’s so scared of Brewster, she’d run right off and tell him what we did.”

“She doesn’t seem as afraid of him as she was.” Hag hefted the bag. “Maybe she’s changed.”

That was Josh’s opinion, too. He even thought he knew the exact moment that the change took place. It was at the camp, when Amethyst said they had seen a Unimine ship—not near the far-off mining world of Cauldron, but in low orbit around Solferino.

But what was the big deal about that? Even though Foodlines had exclusive development rights for Solferino, surely other ships were free to orbit the planet.

“Three minutes.” Hag interrupted Josh’s thoughts. “She said, give her three minutes. Is it that long yet?”

“Must be.” Rick moved to the door and looked out, to check that no one would be watching when they ran for the fence. “Come on. Let’s go.”

No one seemed to be around, but they all felt edgy until they were at the gate and Josh could swing it closed behind them.

“How far?” Hag asked. “She didn’t say how far.”

“She said put it where nobody will find it,” Rick said. “Hey, I know. The unit would sink in water if it wasn’t in that bag. Let’s put it in the bodger pool.”

“Great.”

The twins glanced at Josh to see if he agreed.

He nodded. “Perfect place. Only trouble is, it’s way over on the other side of the compound.”

“Think we should go back through?” asked Hag.

“Are you crazy?” Rick started to walk, following the line of the fence as closely as he could. “Winnie didn’t say she could hold Brewster forever. We’ll go round.”

It sounded easier than it was. The umbrella trees, fighting for sunlight, pushed their stalks to within half a foot of the fence. Something in the soil, or a field projected by the fence itself, prevented them from growing closer. However, as Rick and Josh quickly proved, a human, even one without a trash bag full of equipment, could not squeeze between the fence and the rigid tree stems.

They had to move farther out into the forest and make a much bigger circuit around the compound. There was no chance of getting lost, because the fence was always visible on their right. There was also no danger that they would overshoot, since they must eventually reach the second gate. But Josh, struggling along in purple gloom through the wilderness of trees, realized that without the guiding fence it would be easy to become completely lost within fifty yards of the compound.

With that thought came another. Sig had suggested two alternatives: Either make another trip to the Barbican Hills, or find a smart rupert close to home.

The first idea seemed completely impossible. It meant stealing the aircar, flying it (which none of them knew how to do) back to the campsite, and locating a rupert in a forest where everyone except Dawn seemed to get lost in the first five minutes.

Now he realized that the second idea was just as bad. Not because there was no such thing as an intelligent rupert. He still believed the evidence of what Dawn had drawn, and he was more and more convinced that no matter what Brewster might tell them, humans didn’t know one thousandth of what there was to know about Solferino. This was a whole world, and humans had been here for only three years.

And not because there were no smart ruperts in this area. The odds were the other way round. If their party could plop itself down at a random place in the Barbican Hills and meet smart ruperts on their first outing in the forest, they must be in many places. They might be shy, and they might be nocturnal, so they had not been discovered in the planetary surveys. Maybe only a few of them were intelligent. But you had to find a rupert, before you could know any of that.

The difficulty was a practical one. In their spare time—and Brewster had made it clear how little of that there was going to be—they had to explore far from the compound without becoming lost; they had to discover a colony of smart ruperts; and they had to return with a specimen. It all must be done secretly, without Sol Brewster or Winnie Carlson having any idea what was going on.

Josh didn’t see how it could happen.

And then, suddenly, he did. But before anything could be done he would have to find Sapphire, and obtain her permission. And to get that—Josh was learning—he would first have to convince Sig Lasker. Saph trusted Sig’s judgment. Any way you looked at this, it wasn’t going to be easy.

Josh was blundering along, deep in his own thoughts, following Rick and Hag and relying on them to know where they were going. He stopped when they did—suddenly—and stared around him. “Is this the place?”

“You tell us.” Hag had dropped the sack. “We passed the gate all right, and it looks like the same cleared area down there, though the plants have started to grow back. But there’s no sign of the bodger.”

“It must have wandered away,” said Josh. “You didn’t leave it tied up.”

“I know. But where’s the lean-to?”

They walked together into the clearing. Josh found an upright tree stalk in the right place, with chafe marks from a rope around it; but the leaves and stems of the tent like lean-to had been scattered far and wide.

“Do you think animals did it?” asked Rick.

“Nah.” Hag was on hands and knees, inspecting the ground. “Not unless they could untie knots. The rope has gone, and it was artificial fiber—not the sort anything could chew through. Look at this, though.” He stood up holding a piece of rope about six inches long, frayed at one end but severed cleanly at the other. “Someone did that with a knife.”

“Brewster,” Rick said. “Has to be. But why would he come down here and take the place apart?”

“Looking for something?” Josh suggested. “I noticed that somebody had been rummaging through my stuff, back in the compound. I thought it might have been one of you.”

“Not guilty,” said Hag, and they went on down the slope to the stagnant purple pool. Hag hurled the broken data unit into the middle and they watched it sink out of sight.

“Nothing makes sense anymore,” Rick said morosely. “You know what I think? Winnie Carlson didn’t send us out here to get rid of that thing because she wanted to help us. She did it because she wanted us out of the way, so she could do something by herself in the computer center.”

“Like what? “asked Josh.

Rick shook his head and they headed back up the slope. “I have no idea. I’m just saying, I don’t trust her to do us favors, any more than I trust Sol Brewster.”

At the gate they paused.

“You worry too much,” Hag said to his brother. “So here’s one more thing for you to worry about. What do we tell Brewster we’ve been doing, if we go through—and he’s waiting for us on the other side?”

They opened the gate cautiously and slipped through. As soon as they were within the compound they found that they could not see Brewster—but they could hear him. He was angry, and he didn’t mind who knew it.

Rick was ready to head right back through the gate, but Josh grabbed his arm. “Not us,” he said. “Listen.”

“You incompetent, flat-faced halfwit.” The roar blew across the compound at gale force. “You present yourself as a qualified maintenance technician—something I never asked to be sent—and you ruin the first thing you put your fat soft hands on. If you don’t know what you’re doing, the least you can do is leave things alone.”

“He’s chewing out Winnie,” Josh said softly. “We’d better stay clear.”

But they found themselves edging toward the computer center anyway, as though an invisible string was quietly pulling them along. The other members of the training group were already there, listening in fascinated silence. Josh moved to stand next to Topaz.

“What did she do?” he whispered.

“Shhh.” She put a finger to her lips. “You’ll hear.”

“Sir, I was not the cause of the computer problems.” Winnie’s voice was polite and lifeless. All trace of personality seemed to vanish from her when she faced Sol Brewster. “Also, I cannot understand how such a situation could possibly have occurred.”

Rick and Hag stared at each other, but Josh shook his head. “We’re all right,” he said softly. “She’s not going to say anything about us.”

“I am simply reporting,” Winnie continued woodenly, “on a situation which I feel you need to know about. I have here a complete list of hardware component failures.”

“I don’t want a damned list. I’m no data technician. I want to know the effects of what you’ve done.”

“I did not do it, sir. But I can tell you the consequences of what has happened. We have lost a great deal of data. I believe that copies of most of it will exist back at Sol-side headquarters, but the equipment loss is more worrying. Our long-distance communication modules are out of action.”

Josh and the others stirred uneasily, but Brewster simply said, “Rubbish!”

“I’m afraid it’s true, sir. We can still send messages to an aircar or an orbiter, but we will not have through-node contact until the next Foodlines vessel arrives at Solferino from Earth. Do you wish to confirm that for yourself?”

The group outside the communications building waited tensely for Brewster’s reply. Instead, he was suddenly looming before them in the doorway.

“Are you all enjoying your vacation?” He surveyed them angrily. “I heard you muttering out here. It was my impression that you had been given assignments. If you think differently, stay here and I’ll give you more than you bargained for. Otherwise, get the hell out of the way and stop listening to what’s none of your business.”

It was the tone, even more than the words. They scattered like nervous rabbits.

“What about us?” Hag said as they hurried away. “Our duties are supposed to be in there with Winnie Carlson.”

“And it is our business, what he’s talking about with Winnie,” added Rick. “It’s all our businesses if off-world communications are out.”

“Fine,” Josh panted. They were moving as fast as anyone could, without actually running. “Go back, then, and tell him that. Be my guest.”

It was no surprise that neither Rick nor Hag accepted his invitation.