Jungle colony book 2, p.61
Jungle (Colony Book 2), page 61
He nodded. “What about your armor? Has it still been giving you problems?”
Almost immediately the heavy look vanished from the mercenary’s face, replaced instead by one of annoyance. “Yes,” she said, her brow sinking low as she took another sip of water. “Worse, I think I messed it up by trying to fix it with the parts on hand. The right arm still has issues coming disconnected from the rest of the suit, I still have to hold the one piece on with tape, and my right hip dock still doesn’t acknowledge my draw half of the time. It’s functional, but it brings to mind some of the jury-rigging I saw on deployment in the Dragon Bloc. If I had another, better option, I wouldn’t even be wearing it.”
“Worse,” she continued, her fingers tightening around her cup. “I’m pretty sure I’ve damaged it permanently with some of those patches. I’m going to have to buy a whole new set of plate when I get back.”
“Ooh …” Jake said, letting out a whistle. “What is that going to cost?”
“About fifty million,” Anna said, scowling. “Given what we’ve been paid for all of this, affordable, so at least I won’t be in debt for the next few years, but even so …” She took a quick gulp of water, almost all signs of fatigue gone from her face. “You know I’ve worn this same set of armor since I was augmented? Well,” she added quickly, “that and since I stopped growing. Augments sped that up a little, though.”
“Sounds like you got your money’s worth out of it,” he replied. “Did you ever upgrade it?”
“All the time,” she said. “Piece by piece. I guess that technically means it’s not the same set, you know, kind of like the ship of Theseus.”
“Ship of who?” Jake asked, pausing.
“You’ve not heard of that?” Anna asked. He shook his head.
“It’s an old thought experiment.” Anna leaned back, one finger tapping the side of her glass. “Some philosopher somewhere thought it up. The idea was that if you have a ship—I guess they called it Theseus or something—and you use it, so eventually parts need to be replaced. So you do that. The question was, if you eventually replace every single piece, is it still the same ship anymore? Or is it a new ship you’re just giving the same name?”
“Interesting question.”
“Yeah,” she said with a small shrug. “Mostly it’s just to make you think. Personally, I think it’s down to the familiarity we assign to something. Like my armor. Technically, I’ve replaced it three—four? No, hang on.” She tilted her head back, mouthing and softly wording a count—as well as a few other things—in Span-Portuguese.
“Eight times?” she said, her head snapping back forward. Then she frowned in apparent confusion. “Wait, no … There was that firefight off of the Italian coast …”
Jake began to laugh, the humor boiling up within him and momentarily overriding all sense of worry and fear. For a moment Anna’s look of confusion deepened, but then the corner of her mouth perked upwards, and then she too was laughing, the rich sound of their mirth echoing through the hab. They both laughed together, giggling as they looked at one another and then laughing again.
“Yeah,” Anna said as their mirth began to at last subside. The room felt … refreshed, almost like their shared laughter had stripped away the pall that had been hanging over both of them. “Okay, that does sound pretty ridiculous now that I try to count it out loud. The armor’s been replaced at least ten times. Maybe more.”
“The difference though,” she said, her tone back to normal, though the faint smile stayed on her face as she spoke. “It’s kind of the same thing that ship is all about. Before I’ve replaced it piece by piece, you know? The rest of the armor was still mine, still familiar. This time?” She shook her head. “The whole thing needs to go.”
“Even the skinsuit?” Jake asked.
She frowned, and he felt a momentary pang of disappointment at the disappearance of her smile. Still, the sense of renewal in the room stayed, along with his own lighter expression.
“I don’t know,” she said, turning her head slightly in the direction of the armory. “Technically, no. The skinsuit I have should be compatible with newer armor sets and systems. But it does have to be replaced from time to time—I’ve had new suits before. It would at least be worth looking into what sort of advantages a new skinsuit would offer, since I’ll have to replace everything else anyway.”
From somewhere deep within the hab there came a loud bang, that cut off anything else Anna was about to say, echoing off of the walls. Anna lifted one eyebrow, glancing at Jake, and then he turned, both of them putting their eyes on the entryway through which the sound had come. A moment later the sound of someone approaching the entryway echoed after, heavy steps mixed with faint muttering Jake couldn’t make out. Jane stepped around the entryway, her face set in furious stone and her fists clenched at her sides. She stalked past the table, a trail of rapid-fire Span-Portuguese spoken far too quickly for Jake to have a hope of deciphering it echoing in her wake. She paid neither of them any recognition, stomping into the kitchen and throwing a meal into the pulse oven hard enough that it bounced off of the back wall with a thud. Jake glanced at Anna, who returned his curious look with one of her own. I wonder what they’re fighting over now, he thought as Jane’s quiet tirade continued, whispering through the common area.
“Silva again?” Anna asked, taking the initiative, and Jane’s eyes locked on the mercenary, her mouth opening in what Jake could only assume was going to be an angry retort before she caught herself.
“Sí,” she said instead, followed by a rapid-fire blast of angry Span-Portuguese that rolled past Jake like a tidal wave. She punctuated her words by slamming her fist down on the counter, another metal bang echoing through the common area.
“I take it that’s a yes?” Jake asked, glancing at Anna, and Jane let out a sigh.
“Lo—” she began, pressing her fingers to the bridge of her nose and closing her eyes before letting out a sigh. “Sorry,” she said once she’d sucked in a breath, and then her teeth gritted once more, the glare returning to her expression. “But yes, Silva. That insufferable—” Again she rattled off a quick succession of words he couldn’t quite translate, though he understood the tone enough to get the meaning. She shook her head and turned away from both of them for a moment, still cursing, and waved her hands at the back wall of the unit.
“Silva,” Anna said with a nod in Jake’s direction. “Sounds like he blamed her for something.”
“For messing with his samples,” Jane said, spinning back around abruptly and facing both of them. “Every day we go through this. Something of his doesn’t come up properly, and it is my fault. I messed with his samples! I touched his instruments. I broke something. It doesn’t matter what it is, it is all my fault!” She let out a strangled growl of rage, her fingers tensing as if she longed to wrap them around someone’s neck.
Probably Daniel’s, Jake thought as the woman spun around once more, pacing rapidly back and forth in the small kitchen space. “So you came out here to have lunch?” he asked. It was stating the obvious, but in her current state, he doubted she’d notice.
“It was that, or choke the life out of a fellow botanist,” Jane said, still pacing. “Which I still might do.”
“What happened this time?” Anna asked.
“He accused me of sabotaging his work,” Jane said, coming to a stop and throwing a scowl in their direction. “Another batch of test results came back wrong, and he decided I must have had something to do with it.” The pulse oven let out a beep, finished, and she yanked the door open so quickly that it hit the side of the wall with a metallic clang. Her meal came to a spinning stop atop the countertop, steam hissing from seams in the cardboard.
“What went wrong?” Jake asked, and Jane’s glare snapped in his direction.
“If I knew that,” she growled. “I wouldn’t be out here trying to cool off by having lunch, would I?” Then she paused, one hand raised with an accusatory finger that he suspected had been about to be pointed in his direction. “You meant what went wrong with the process, not what happened to cause it.” Jake nodded, and Jane lowered her hand, picking up her meal and bouncing it in one hand as she walked around the counter and motioned at one of the remaining chairs.
“Take it,” Anna said, and the botanist sat down next to her, tossing her meal to the table and tearing the softened cardboard open with one hand, ignoring, unaffected by, or not caring about the plume of steam that rolled out of it.
“It’s an analysis problem,” Jane said, stabbing her fork into her lunch with far more force than was necessary. “Genetic analysis.” There was a short pause as she tore into her forkful of food, and then she spoke again. “It keeps going wrong.”
“Gene analysis?” Jake asked, glancing at Anna. “So, like analyzing the genetic code?”
“Exactly that,” Jane said. “Save it’s not genetic code like we’re familiar with. Human genetic code—and everything on Earth, really—is made up of nucleotides.”
“That much I remember from science class,” Anna said. “That and that alien DNA isn’t usually the same.”
“No,” Jane said, shaking her head. “In fact, it’s never the same. Alien DNA, or XNA, is … alien. Life on Earth evolved to use—Well, it’s really not important. What’s important is that our DNA is what tells our bodies what to do and how to do it. So one of the first things we like to identify when surveying an alien planet is what life there—or here, I guess—uses as its genetic material. If we can study that, and maybe determine how it works, we gain insight into the life of the planet we’re on. Not at first, but as we compare and contrast differences in XNA structures, we can learn about the background of species on the planet—why things may be the way they are, what differences there are …” She shrugged. “It’s not an exact science. Not at first anyway. Really it’s something that we use simply to help us narrow down similarities between life that we know; we cross compare what we find with what our databases hold. Should I go into more detail?”
“If you do, you’ll probably lose me,” Jake said. “Biology wasn’t exactly a subject of mine in school.”
“But you’re following me so far?” Jane asked.
He nodded. “Alien DNA is XNA, cross comparing it to known forms of XNA, combine that with what you’re observing to learn about how life on the planet ticks.”
“That’s essentially it,” Jane said, stabbing her fork into her meal once more. “And that’s how things should be going here, except they’re not, and it is, of course, my fault, because there’s no way someone with as much damn experience as the great sage Silva could screw up.”
“You said something was going wrong with the analyzing?” Anna prompted as Jane bit down on another bite, chewing furiously.
“Something?” the botanist shot back. “More like everything. Do you know how long it took us to determine what passed for XNA here?”
“No,” Anna replied, her eyes darting at Jake for a moment. “One of you mentioned having difficulties in the meetings, but—”
“A week,” Jane said quickly, her fork stabbing into her lunch hard enough that Jake felt the tap of the tines against the cardboard through the table. “A week. It’s supposed to only take a few days at most. And we almost doubled it. Of course, if you ask Silva, it’s because I did something wrong. Because I screwed up his samples, or messed with his analysis. Even if I haven’t touched a damn thing.”
“Hold on,” Jake said, curiosity plucking at his mind. “I heard about the sample thing, but never any specifics. What happened?”
“The first batch of samples we took rotted,” Jane said. “Some sort of … self-defense function?” She shook her head. “It was the grass cuttings we took; right from the clearing. Within an hour, all of them had … come apart. Turned to goo. So, naturally it was because of something I’d done.”
“Did the next batch of samples do the same thing?”
“No,” Jane said, scowling. “And it didn’t help that Silva wouldn’t let me touch them. Just convinced him all the more that I was at fault, even when the samples I was working with didn’t come apart either.”
“Do you know what caused them to dissolve—I guess that’s the best word for it—like that?” Jake asked.
“No,” Jane said with a shake of her head. “I just hope the samples we sent back up to the Sojourner didn’t suffer the same fate. We cut them in the same way.”
“So what about the analysis, then?” Anna asked. “What’s been going on there?”
Jane let out a sigh, shoving another forkful of food into her mouth and chewing and swallowing before answering. “So we started our studies—cells, make-up, content. Anything we can find. One of those is determining what the genetic material for the biome here is made up of. Which is usually easier than it sounds, since UNSEC has a lot of experience with it. Feed the samples into the Razor—that’s a nickname for the analyzer—let it go to work. Normally, of course, we’d have more to compare things to, but right now we still have just the five types of plants we’ve discovered so far.”
“Five plants?” Jake asked. “That’s it?”
“Not exactly. That’s where the problem comes in,” Jane replied. “Both Silva and I say five because we’ve identified five different species visually: The grass, the canopy trees, the mushroom trees, the moss on the jungle floor, and the vines.”
“What about the growths that keep trying to climb up the sides of the hab?” Anna asked. Jake nodded in agreement; he’d spent plenty of time pulling the stubborn feelers off of the bio-hab’s feet.
“As far as we can tell from a visual examination, they’re a young form of the same vines that grow throughout the forest,” Jane said. “And that’s where the analysis problem becomes important.”
“How so?”
Jane chewed another bite of her lunch before responding. “Both of you see the problem with five species of plant life in a rainforest, right?” she asked, looking to each of them. Once they’d both nodded, she continued. “The simple fact of the matter is we should be seeing a lot more life than we currently are. Now, it’s possible that where we see five species, there are actually subtle distinctions that we’re missing—say, in the way the moss grows or spreads—that could signify a multitude of species competing with one another. But since we’re not seeing any visual indications of that yet, our best bet to find out quickly if there are multiple species of plants here simply displaying incredibly similar outward appearances would be to analyze their genetic makeup. Look for differences in their code.”
“Right,” Jake said, nodding. “With you so far.”
“Sí,” she said. “So we went to work on that with one of two theories. Dr. Silva’s assumption was that we would find extremely simple DNA stand-ins—let’s just call it XNA for simplicity’s sake. It’s not accurate, but it will do. Anyway, his assumption was that we would find very simple XNA, and that would explain why we’d only seen the limited diversity on display. Early life-forms, young biosphere, not much time for life to really explode out in all directions.”
“Early life forms with island metals in them?” Anna asked, lifting one eyebrow.
“Life can be stranger,” Jane replied, waving a hand. “The life-forms Naomi was studying on Hades before she was sent here were simple—barely past microbial—but they contained island metals in their makeup.”
“Really? How’d you learn that?”
“By talking to her,” Jane replied, returning Anna’s skeptical look for a brief second. “She’s quite accomplished in her field.”
“Right,” Jake said, steering the conversation back on topic. “So in other words, Silva’s theory was that everything here was young. What about you?”
“Well, it’s not the theory I held to,” Jane said. “Just the alternative. That the plant life is visually similar, but would be different genetically. Variance that we couldn’t see, in other words, that we could then look for once identified.”
“Okay,” Anna said. “So what went wrong?”
“Well, for starters, figuring out what the hell life on this planet uses for XNA,” Jane said, letting out a frustrated sigh. “It didn’t help that Silva was looking for something simple and undeveloped.”
“Was it not?”
“No,” Jane replied, letting out another sigh. “Though in all fairness, I hardly wanted to believe it until yesterday.”
That’s an odd answer, Jake thought. “Why not?”
“Because what we’ve found instead is …” She opened and closed her mouth several times, holding up both hands before dropping them in front of her. Then she shook her head before finally speaking.
“Let me put it this way,” she said. “Dr. Silva didn’t want to believe what the computer was telling us because he was looking for a simple system, something on par with or simpler than our own genetic code. I didn’t want to believe it because it seemed unreal.”
“Which would line up just about perfectly with everything else weird about this planet,” Anna said dryly.
Jane let out a short, almost sarcastic laugh. “Weird?” she asked, and shook her head. “No, weird is something else entirely. Weird is a tri-spiral XNA structure, or a structure that’s more than three percent different than anything else on the planet. This?” She leaned forward, a look of awe replacing the frustration that had blanketed her face until then. “If we’re right, this is unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Silva or anyone else.”
“Is that why he kept accusing you of messing things up?” Anna asked, and the look of amazement dropped from Jane’s face.
“In part,” she said. “And he hasn’t apologized for that, either. And he’s still blaming me for some of the stuff we can’t explain. Saying it ‘doesn’t make sense’ and that I’ve screwed it all up somehow.”
“So what has been going wrong?” Jake asked, pulling the conversation back. “You said it’s unreal; Silva didn’t want to believe it because he was looking for a young ecosystem. What happened?”
“It’s … complicated.”
