Scardown-Jenny Casey-2 by Elizabeth Bear Read Free Book Online

cycle over there, rather than straight canned air.”
    They couldn't see each other, Paul Perry and Charlie. A waste of bandwidth on the scrambled channel when they were just talking. But Charlie knew Paul well enough to pick up the worry even from the tinny, digitally compressed tone. “There's no chance it's a bioagent?”
    “PanChinese sabotage?” Charlie shrugged. “Possible but unlikely. They're not above bioweapons, but if I were going to wipe out a space station's crew complement, I'd go with . . . dunno, what do you think? Legionnaire's?”
    “Influenza,” Paul answered, after a pause that was half lag and half thought. “Engineered influenza. An incapacitating one, high fever, nausea, death in say, thirty-six hours after a seven-day incubation?” He sighed audibly. “It would be doable, too. I'll see that screening protocols are instituted immediately. I wonder what else we haven't thought of.”
    “Whatever the one that gets us is,” Charlie answered bitterly. “If that's dealt with, I still want to talk to you about Mars—”
    Lag. “Listening.”
    “I had another thought.”
    “Most scientists are satisfied with three or four unprovable hypotheses in a career, Chuck.”
    “Instead of three or four a week?”
    Paul's laughter. Charlie got up to microwave his face cloth again. The steam did help. He pulled another cloth out of the plasti-foil pack while he was up, and heated that one to lay across his scalp and the back of his neck, where it could ease aching muscles. God, for a steaming-hot, old-fashioned dirt-side shower— “Do you want to hear this or not?”
    “Sure,” Paul said, easy and relaxed. Before he'd become Riel's science adviser, Paul Perry had been a number of things. One of which was a consultant on the government side of the joint Canadian/Unitek Mars mission that had discovered the two vessels buried under the red planet's wind- and water-scarred surface. “Tell me your crackpot theory, Mr. Bigshot Xenobiologist.”
    “There's an ejecta layer over the craft on Mars.”
    “There's an ejecta layer over most of Mars. And isn't it several ejecta layers? I know your dating of the ships relies heavily on the geology.”
    Charlie breathed in through steam, bending double to cough as the glop on the back of his throat peeled loose. “Good—God,” he gasped, tasting sour-sweet metal through even the camphor reek of the cloth. He sat down on the stool bolted in front of his secondary interface. “I think my dating was wrong.”
    “Wrong how?”
    “I said the ships had been there about two, three million years. Which would put it very close to the development of sentience on Earth.”
    “Close, geologically speaking.”
    “But now I think it's closer to sixteen million years.”
    Dead silence through the link. Charlie smiled. “You see why I called you?”
    “Why do sixteen million years and Mars sound familiar—” Paul's fingers were moving rapidly enough over his interface that Charlie could pick out the sound of the
enter
contact being depressed. “You're talking about ALH84001.”
    “I'm talking about life on Mars. Above the microbial level.”
    “That doesn't make any sense, Charlie. Why ground a ship on Mars—wait. Presumably you're assuming that the—that
they
were using their derelict ships in somewhat the same way the Americans used Viking or the old Soviet Union did Venera—”
    “Space probes. Sure, why not? If they needed an FTL drive to get here anyway, and they were junking the ships—”
    “Spoken like a Yankee, Chuck. Do you have a box in your garage labeled ‘pieces of string too small to save'?”
    “If I had a garage, I probably would. As it is, I travel light.” The cloths had cooled; Charlie didn't have the energy to get up and microwave them again.
Memo to me,
he thought.
Invent a cold cloth with an integral heating circuit. Why hasn't anybody thought of that?
    Maybe the microwave manufacturers get kickbacks—
    “But why Mars? We've got