Putting Up Roots

Chapter Seventeen

Morning brought a dull, oppressive heat unlike anything since the trainees’ first arrival on Solferino. It had rained again in the night, and a veil of steam and yellow smoke stood above the Avernus Fissure. Josh dreaded the thought of going near it. Even within the camp, air drifting from the fissure was like a breath from the mouth of a furnace. The sound of dripping water meeting red-hot rock could be heard hundreds of yards away.

In spite of the weather, Sol Brewster remained in an unusually good mood. The sight of a weary and hunched Winnie Carlson only seemed to add to his satisfaction. She was the last to rise, trailing miserably into the dining area yawning and rubbing her eyes as though it were the middle of the night.

“Rise and shine, Carlson.” Brewster clapped his hands together. “Breakfast has to be over and done within five minutes, because you have a full day ahead. Unless you propose to renege on last night’s promise?”

“No, sir.” Winnie made an effort and stood up straight, but she stared at the breakfast trays as if she never intended to eat again. “I did a lot of preparation last night. I’ll have the appetizers ready by sundown, provided the day’s work doesn’t run too late.”

“I don’t see why it should. Yesterday we were engaged in a general search. Today we can be far more specific.” Brewster moved over to the wall, where an image of the Avernus Fissure was divided into sections and marked with multicolored arrows radiating out from a central point. “I have noted the location of our first discovery. Now I want to explore around it, and determine the extent of the find. Each of you will be assigned your own test sector.”

The trainees exchanged glances. It was going to be yesterday all over again, with heat enough to stifle, and without the excitement of a possible new discovery. One question remained: Which unlucky person would be given the test area closest to the Avernus hellhole?

“Let me end the whining before it begins.” Brewster had been watching their reaction. “No one will be assigned the quadrant closest to the fissure. The heat there today will be extreme. However”—he cut through the murmurs of relief—“that area must be tested. So each of you will spend one hour at that site. I will define the rotation of duties. I will also be spending more time there, myself, than any one of you.”

“But there are no plants in that sector,” Amethyst objected. “It’s too close to the fissure and too hot for anything to grow.”

“Quite true, but not relevant.” Brewster gestured to one of the tables, where a number of items of new equipment had been laid out. “Today you will not be testing plants. You will be testing soils. Let me show you how these instruments work.”

As they crowded closer to the table, it occurred to Josh that Rick and Hag’s questions of the previous night had just been answered. Soil tests were an important part of plant biology. That was why they had seen Brewster digging the ground in the place where Josh had made his discovery.

On the other hand, Brewster’s explanation was no explanation at all. It made sense to test soils, if you wanted to determine how well plants of a certain type might grow in them; but if you knew that nothing could grow close to the smoldering heat of the Avernus Fissure, why go to the trouble of testing soil there?

Josh pondered that question again later in the day, when his turn came to work close to the fissure. By noon, Solferino’s sun had burned off the morning steam and fog. Grisel shone blazing hot on his back as he knelt to lift a soil sample and place it in his new test kit. This time there was no chance of a startling find. The instrument did not display its results, it merely stored them internally for later integration into a computer database. You might be dropping gold dust in there, but you would never know it.

The soil analysis of each specimen took longer than a plant bioanalysis. Josh had to remain crouched in one place for more than two minutes in every test, until the unit finally informed him that he was free to move on. The air around him shimmered. Sweat dripped steadily from his chin and ran down his forehead into his eyes, and he could feel heat from the reddish soil burning through the padded knee-cloth of his trousers and warming the soles of his shoes.

It was probably only one hour, but it felt like three before Sig Lasker finally arrived to relieve him.

“Any sign of Topaz and Dawn?” Josh had to ask the important question quickly. Brewster might be watching, and he came down hard on anybody who stopped work to chat.

“Not a sign, but I’m going to tell you what I told Saph: Topaz is smart, and they’ll both be fine. If you can’t do anything about a thing, stop worrying.” Sig took Josh’s test kit and pretended to be studying it. “Schiitz, it’s hot down here.”

“Wait half an hour, then you’ll know what hot is. Anything else happening?”

“Rick and Hag aren’t feeling good. They had to go back to camp. Brewster insisted at first that they were all right, just faking it. But they weren’t.”

“He made them keep on working?”

“Not after Rick threw up all over Brewster’s boots. Then even Brewster had to admit there was something wrong.”

“How sick are they?”

“Those two morons?” If Sig felt any sympathy for his brothers, he didn’t show it. “Not as sick as they deserve to be. Put their brains together, you’d be lucky to get a half-wit. I’ve seen ’em do it before, but they never learn. They had another eating contest at breakfast today. Anybody would be sick, gobbling until there’s no room for one more bite, then coming out into this heat. I’m not worried about them. But Brewster seems to be. I told him they’d be all right, and still he seemed totally bent out of shape.”

“Maybe he feels bad about the way he’s been treating us.”

“Brewster? Yeah, sure. And maybe I’ll grow wings and fly across the fissure. Get real, Josh.”

“So what’s your explanation?”

“I don’t have one. I’m just reporting what happened.” Sig knelt down and pushed the little spoon-shaped sampler into the hard soil. He lifted it and dropped a few grams of red dirt into his test kit, then reached down and touched the ground with his bare hand. “It’s even hotter when you get down to ground level. Why are you hanging around, when you could be somewhere cooler?”

“I’m not. I’m on my way.”

Josh trudged up the hill. He could feel the temperature drop with every step. By the time he was back to his original station, halfway to the camp, the soles of his feet had stopped burning. He didn’t try to fool himself, though; the air was still too warm for comfort. He squinted up at the sun. Grisel was high in the sky. About four more hours before the signal came to quit for the day. What were the chances that Brewster would accept another trainee reporting sick?

Not good, unless you were able to throw up on his boots. And if you did, there would surely be reprisals later. Rick and Hag Lasker weren’t going to enjoy tomorrow.

Josh sighed, and stooped to test another sample.

Days had enough discomforts of their own to discourage thinking. Only when night approached did Josh begin to worry seriously about Dawn and Topaz.

Tonight, fortunately, there were distractions. It was strange, but the very word “party” produced a lift in everyone’s spirits. Even if it were Sol Brewster’s party, with the man himself presiding; even if half the group was not there (Rick and Hag had yet to put in an appearance; Sig reported that they were almost back to normal, except that any mention of food made them feel ill all over again); even if the food itself was a major question mark, because no one had any experience of Sol Brewster’s or Winnie Carlson’s cooking. In spite of all those things, Josh could feel his mood becoming more cheerful, and he knew from the rising noise level that others felt the same.

Certainly the two cooks seemed to be taking their jobs seriously. They were at opposite ends of the crowded dining room. Brewster had a gigantic pot bubbling on a heating element, and next to it a container of rice enough to feed twice their number. Keeping one eye on the pot, he was carefully pouring pale yellow liquid into disposable glasses from a large iced flagon.

Winnie Carlson, no less intent, hovered over two pans of her own and the portable autochef. She had made a great secret of its programming, refusing to allow anyone near while she was doing it.

Brewster called Sig over to him. “Where are those two good-for-nothing brothers of yours?”

“They don’t feel like eating tonight, sir.”

Brewster didn’t seem surprised. He nodded as though he had expected that answer, glared down at his newly washed boots, and said, “Very well. Go and tell Hagen and Alberich that they can be excused from dinner, but only if they come here now. They must take part in a celebratory toast to the success of our efforts at the Avernus Fissure.”

His last words were almost drowned by a crash of falling pans at the other end of the room.

“Sorry, sir.” It was Winnie Carlson, rising flustered from beside the autochef. “They were empty, I knocked them over by accident. But everything is ready. Would you do me the honor of taking the first bite?”

Brewster was clearly more interested in making sure that Sig returned with his brothers. He was glancing frequently at the door, and at the same time lining up half-filled glasses in preparation for the toast. He frowned at Winnie as she approached carrying a small tray.

“First, the blini and caviar by itself, sir, to establish the flavor.” She stood in front of him and held out the tray. “Then, we add the sour cream.”

Brewster gave a curt nod. He sat down and helped himself to a small, flat blini pancake about the size of a half-dollar. The caviar formed a small, dark heap at the center. He nibbled the edge, just enough to sample the caviar, and his eyebrows rose.

“Why, this is excellent.” He put the rest of the blini into his mouth and chewed vigorously.

“I told you that it would be, sir. The blinis just melt in your mouth. And you’ll find they’re even better once I add the rest.” Winnie took a spoon and dropped a great dollop of smooth yellow cream on top of another blini and caviar. She lifted the whole thing onto the spoon and held it out. “Here you are, sir. Open wide.”

Brewster didn’t need urging. He put his head back and allowed Winnie to slide the pancake off the spoon and into his open mouth. He started to chew with a look of total bliss on his face.

The enjoyment lasted until the mouthful was completely swallowed. And then, slowly, his expression changed.

First the dark eyes began to fill with tears. Brewster’s face darkened and his mouth opened. He put his hands to his throat and made a horrible gargling sound.

“He’s choking!” Sapphire cried. “Give him something to drink.”

Amethyst reached out to put one of the glasses readied for the toast to Brewster’s mouth. He knocked it away and rose to his feet, watering eyes bulging out of his head. He turned on Winnie Carlson.

“Aah-ll-hh… Aah-ll-hh.” He panted like a dog, and tried again. “The cream. Aah-ll-hh—”

He advanced on Winnie Carlson, towering over her. She stood her ground and looked up at him. “Mr. Brewster, I’ll put up with most things. But if there is one thing I won’t stand, it’s somebody criticizing my blinis with caviar and sour cream. I expect an apology from you, right now.”

“A-a-apology!” He was drooling so much he could hardly speak, and at the same time panting desperately. His face had turned fiery red. “Aah-hhh, aah, you—”

“An apology,” Winnie said firmly. “But since you clearly refuse to give one…”

She put down the tray, lifted the bowl of yellow cream, and pushed it into Brewster’s face.

He gave a great roar of rage, and rushed at Winnie. He was on her before anyone else had time to move.

One twist from those great hands would be enough to break her neck. But at the last moment Winnie somehow swayed her head and upper body to the left, just a few inches, while her hips remained in the same position. As Brewster’s momentum carried him up to her, she gripped him by the left arm and the right side of his shirt. She seemed to fall backward and he followed. But instead of landing smack on top of her he left the ground completely, turning in midair to fall headfirst onto the hard dining-room floor.

He was still conscious and cursing loudly, but before he could move again Winnie was on her feet and crouched behind him. Her fingers grabbed his thick neck and probed. For a few seconds he continued to try to stand up. He managed to reach his hands and knees, still straining upward, then toppled forward again onto his face. This time he did not move.

Winnie didn’t give him another glance—not even to confirm that he was unconscious. She looked at the startled trainees and spoke in a commanding voice nothing like her own: “Don’t drink from those glasses! Not one drop. Don’t even touch them.”

She jumped to her feet to make sure everyone was obeying. As she did so, Sig Lasker entered the dining room with his two brothers.

“Shit on skates.” Sig’s mouth opened as wide as Sol Brewster’s. “What’s the hell’s going on here?”

“No need for cussing,” Winnie said curtly. “Or if there is, I’m the one should be doing it. Lock that door behind you.” She was moving around the room, gathering each glass and making sure that it had not been drunk from. “I’m pretty sure the excitement’s over for the moment. I have one or two more things to do, then we can all relax. Don’t touch that, either!” Amethyst had been reaching out an experimental fingertip to the fallen bowl of sour cream. “It won’t kill you—not like the toast—but it will make your mouth and skin burn for days. I used the hottest spices in the known universe. Sol Brewster isn’t going to enjoy the feeling when he wakes up, but I guess soreness will be the least of his worries.”

“Kill us?” Sapphire had latched onto that one word. “Are you saying that if we’d drunk his toast, we would have died?”

“I’m saying exactly that. Of course, I’ll have to test it and make sure. But I believe that Brewster was planning to poison the lot of us tonight. He had found what he wanted, and we were no more use to him.”

“But what did he want?” Josh asked, as Sig, Rick, and Hag gathered round the fallen Brewster. Hag said in awed tones, “Did you all gang up on him?”

“No.” Sapphire pointed at Winnie Carlson. “She did it—all by herself.” Then Saph asked the question everybody wanted to ask: “What’s going on around here?”

“Too many things.” Winnie bent over to take another look at Sol Brewster, and apparently didn’t like what she saw. “Give me a minute to take care of this. Then I’ll explain all I know.”

“Are you going to make him wake up?” Amethyst asked.

“Definitely not.” Winnie was over at the cabinet containing medical supplies. “I’m going to make sure that he doesn’t.”

She applied an injection spray to the side of Brewster’s neck, raised one of his eyelids, and checked his pulse. “Good enough. He’ll be out for the rest of the night.”

She gestured to them all to sit down. “You want to know what’s going on here? That’s a fair question. I’ll tell you, but I’m not sure where to begin. I realized what was going on bit by bit, but it’s too confusing if I tell it that way. There are an awful lot of pieces. Let me start the way I started, with questions, things that worried me and maybe you, too. Number one: Where are the other people, the forty-odd who ought to have been on Solferino when you arrived? I gather you never saw any of them.”

“They’re at the medical center,” Rick said.

“I heard that, too. But did you notice, Brewster hardly mentioned it after I arrived? I thought that was significant. Question number two: Why did Sol Brewster drop everything, without warning, and take us all to the camp in the Barbican Hills, almost as soon as we had arrived on the planet? And the second part of that question, why did he then leave us there, and fly back to the compound and the main site of the settlement?”

“He said he’d had a message from the medical center,” said Amethyst.

“So he did. The one and only message anyone has had since we’ve been here. Because after that the computer that services the communications center went down. We lost outside contact, and many of the databases. Question number three: How did the breakdown and loss of data happen?”

“I think we may have done it,” Josh said. He looked defensively at Rick and Hag. “Well, we might have. It doesn’t matter now.”

“You didn’t,” Winnie said. “You smashed one backup data unit, but that had nothing to do with the general failures. What did cause it? Let’s go on. Question number four: What were Unimine ships doing near Solferino? You all saw one as you were first arriving. And Josh thinks he saw another one later.”

“I did see it. Dawn saw it, too—and she drew it.”

“I believe you. But what was it doing here? Unimine has mineral rights to Cauldron, but no rights at all on Solferino. Just a couple more questions, then we’ll look at answers. Number five: What were you really looking for, when you were doing plant tests around the Avernus Fissure? I didn’t accept for one minute that it was new alkaloids.”

“Nor did I!” Amethyst said triumphantly. “I told everyone that Brewster was lying when he said that.”

“Good for you. It wasn’t alkaloids, but you spent a whole day doing plant tests. Then Josh made his discovery. And after that Brewster switched to soil tests. Question number six: Why the changeover? In particular, why test on the brink of the Avernus Fissure, where plants won’t grow if you wait for a thousand years?”

“That was my question, last night,” Hag said excitedly.

“So you’ve all been wondering about things.” Winnie nodded. “I’m not surprised. You’re a bright bunch, and Brewster was crazy to think he could fool you for long with explanations he was dreaming up on the spur of the moment. All right, here’s the final question. What is it, number eight?”

“Seven,” said Amethyst.

“Good enough. Number seven. Maybe it would have been question number one, but I only heard about it from you much later. When you arrived on Solferino, Brewster wasn’t at the compound. He arrived later in the day, and he was very surprised to see you. Either Foodlines headquarters didn’t inform him that you’d be here earlier than the original date, or he was too busy doing something else to check for messages. I think it was the second reason. So here is question number seven: What had Brewster been doing, that took him away from the compound at the time of your arrival?”

“He had an answer for that,” Sig said. “He told us he had been with the other exploration team members to the medical center. We decided that sounded fishy. We agreed last night that not one of us ever heard about a Grisel system medical center in any briefing.”

“For a good reason. There is no off-planet medical center in the Grisel system.”

“So where did the exploration team go?” Sapphire asked. She put her arm around Ruby, as though she already had an idea what the answer might be.

“That was my number-one question. The answer also gives the answer to number seven: What was Brewster doing when you first arrived on Solferino? One thing’s for sure, he wasn’t off-planet, because when I arrived there were no vehicles capable of going off-planet. All you had was a cargo aircar, able to operate in Solferino’s atmosphere but not outside it.”

“That’s what he arrived in,” said Sig. “We saw it.”

“Yes, but there was no way he could have used it to come in from space. So when you first got here, he had been somewhere on Solferino. I hate to tell you what I think he had been doing, but I must. He had been disposing of the bodies of the Solferino exploration team. He killed all of them, maybe by poisoning them as I’m sure he was going to poison you.”

Ruby gasped. She shrank back closer to Sapphire, who held her sister tight and said, “Where did he put them?”

“I can only guess, unless Brewster chooses to tell us. But over there”—Winnie gestured in the direction of the Avernus Fissure—“is an environment where a human body would be completely gone in a few days. He had already been exploring in this area, and he knew it well. You arrived while he was busy disposing of the evidence. He wasn’t expecting you. He had to make up a story on the spot and get rid of Bothwell Gage as soon as possible, too. Gage is lucky. If he hadn’t been as keen to leave as Brewster was to get rid of him, I don’t think he would have survived his first night on Solferino. Gage wouldn’t have swallowed for a moment the story that Brewster gave you, about the healing effects of this planet—any more than I did.”

“We didn’t buy it, either,” Sig said. “Not completely. I guess we hoped it might be true. But why would he want to kill everybody?”

“I’ll get to that in a moment. First, I want to answer question number two. Why did he take us to the camp in the Barbican Hills, leave us there, and fly straight back to the compound? The answer to that is simple. Something you had found around the compound made him afraid there might be other evidence left behind. I’m talking about things that the exploration team would never have forgotten, if they had been alive when they departed from the settlement.”

“The bodger,” Josh said softly. “Rick and Hag found the bodger. Topaz insisted that no one would go away and leave a pet tied up to starve.”

Winnie nodded. “Topaz was right. And nobody did But when it was discovered, Brewster got scared. He realized that he had to get all of us out of the way so he could do a thorough search of the compound, inside and outside, without interference.”

Josh remembered how his personal belongings had been moved in the dormitory room, but he said nothing because Winnie was continuing: “Brewster also wiped out parts of the computer while we were away at the camp. Deliberately.” She glanced at Josh and the Lasker twins. “Brewster did it, not you. That’s the answer to my question number three. As to why, it was because some of the files held information that he dared not let us see. I spent a lot of time trying to find backup copies—I’ve not had a decent night’s sleep since I got here, that’s why I’m always yawning.”

“So that’s the two people I saw wandering around at night,” Josh burst out. “It was you, trailing Brewster.”

“Must have been—though I didn’t realize we’d been seen. But no matter how I tried, I couldn’t find out anything about the personnel assigned to Solferino, particularly their medical records. Brewster didn’t want anyone finding out that people here were as sick as people anywhere else. There were other missing files, too, that I didn’t think were significant at the time, but I do now. I couldn’t find files for the Foodlines charter for the exploration of Solferino, and I couldn’t find the interfaces for different groups working in the Grisel stellar system.”

Winnie looked at Sig. “Now it’s time to answer question number four: What was a Unimine ship doing buzzing around this planet, where it had no business to be? This will answer your question, too, Sig, as to why Brewster had to kill everyone on Solferino, including us. And it’s a simple answer: Brewster did it because he wanted to become one of the richest men in the known universe. He was an employee of Foodlines, but he had discovered something that made Solferino unique. It also made the planet far more suited to Unimine than Foodlines activities. Unimine has mineral extraction technology, Foodlines doesn’t. Have you heard of stable transuranic elements?”

“Bothwell Gage told us about them,” Amethyst said, “when we were coming through the Messina Dust Cloud on the way here. They are enormously valuable, he said.”

“He was right. Enormously valuable, but also enormously difficult to collect from the extended pockets of gas where they are found in the Messina Dust Cloud. A deposit of solid stable transuranics is a prospector’s dream. Brewster had found traces of such a thing, here on Solferino. That’s what the kits you were using were designed to test for. I know, because I checked late last night. That story about alkaloids was pure nonsense. Brewster knew pretty much where the deposits were, around the Avernus Fissure, but the more details he had on location, the better the deal he could make with Unimine. And Josh hit the jackpot.”

“But I was testing plants, “Josh protested. “Not for those stable transuranic things.”

“I know. But there is a branch of science called geobotany. It is a way of looking for minerals by knowing that certain plants will only grow in their presence or absence, and sometimes by knowing that the plants themselves concentrate particular minerals in their leaves and stems. I will bet my next year’s paycheck that Sol Brewster’s technical field is geobotany. You were testing plants, but you were actually looking for selected minerals. Of course, once Brewster had a strong enough geobotanical signal, he could go to that point and use ordinary mineral exploration methods. That’s why you started testing with plants, but switched to soil samples when the location was pinpointed accurately enough. And that’s the answer to my questions five and six.”

“But I still don’t get it,” Sig said. “He wanted to make a deal with Unimine. I understand that. But why did he have to kill us? Why did he have to murder everyone who was already on Solferino?”

Winnie was ready to answer, but Ruby had begun to cry. All the talk of death and murder was too much for her. Sapphire looked at Sig reproachfully.

“See what you’ve done?” She put her arms more tightly around her sister. “Don’t cry, Rube. We’re all safe now. Aren’t we, Winnie?”

“Perfectly safe.” Winnie went across and put her own arms around Sapphire. “Brewster won’t be waking up for a long time, and I’ll make sure he’s tied up nice and tight. There will be people coming here from Unimine at some point, and I’ll have to work out a way to make sure they don’t cause trouble—some of them probably realize what Brewster has been up to, and maybe they’ve even been helping him. But Unimine won’t come here at night. Tonight you can all relax. There’ll be no more surprises.”

As she was saying the final word, a loud banging came on the outside of the locked dining-room door. Winnie started up and turned in that direction. No one had to ask if she was frightened or worried. Her tense body posture said it all.

There would be more shocks before the evening was over—and Winnie had no more idea than anyone else what they might be.