The Year's Best Military & Adventure SF: Volume 5 by David Afsharirad

Author:David Afsharirad [Afsharirad, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781625797193
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2019-06-03T21:00:00+00:00

III: The Fugitive Doctor Who

Looked Backwards in Time

A MONTH EARLIER, when Umerah Javed’s Night Witch was just entering Ra System and began deceleration from its six-year journey, two people walked across the bottom of Osiris’s Jormungand Sea. Their pressure-suited bodies stumbled through tangles of reeds, silt, and the heat of thermal vents as they went.

“Why didn’t we just take the submersible?” demanded the man named Bok.

Dr. Catherine Avellani had dialed down the volume in her headset; nonetheless, Bok’s grating timbre had a way of piercing her ears like a stiletto blade. “There are things down here that don’t like submersibles,” she explained.

Her bodyguard scoffed. “Fishermen’s tales. I’ve heard ’em, and I don’t believe ’em.”

“As I recall, you also don’t believe that there’s a way to look backwards in time.”

Bok’s tattooed face displayed itself on her visor. He was a muscular man with sharp teeth, a former mining guard and pit-fighter with a mind-boggling 148-2 record. He grinned, showing rows of fangs. “You’re paying me to believe that, lapochka.”

Catherine sighed. A whole planet at their disposal, and this was the guy Tier Starsworks chose to be her local guide and bodyguard. She shook her head inside her pressure suit and continued trudging along the velvety sea-bottom to her destination.

The geodesic plants!

Her heart skipped a beat in excitement.

Catherine could already discern the behemoth, swollen roots of the giant vegetation. Far, far above, the mighty stalks rose out of the ocean, their bizarre leaves stretched wide to gorge on solar nourishment.

Bok halted beside her and craned his neck. “If nothing else, this job offers new perspectives.”

Catherine ignored him; she worked steadily, anxiously, detaching several modular components from her utility pack and staking them around the base of the nearest giant root.

Bok watched her for a while. “We could have taken a shuttle here and air-dropped to this spot. Just sayin’.”

“The Order of Stone watches everything we do. They won’t be watching the sea-bottom.”

“But—”

“Quiet.”

She set the last of the readers in place; they formed a roughly circular ring around the root. Using her wristpad controls, Catherine activated the array. Interface needles penetrated the mighty root, seeking the plant’s “brain.” Yellowish sap clouded the seawater.

“Still don’t believe that a plant can have memories,” Bok scoffed.

“It’s not about belief. Scientists have known for centuries that prion-based memory structures exist in—”

The world disappeared.

Catherine cried out, the needles tapping the plant’s “brain” and auto-uploading to her sightjacking nanonics. A parade of sunrises and sunsets wheeled in her mind. Electrical storms. The rising and falling of tides.

The growth rate of geodesic plants was relatively constant, and so a ticker displayed in Catherine’s wondering eyes, counting back along the synaptic growth rings. To think that she was peering back in time one hundred years! Two hundred! A blazing chronology of nights preceding days. Trees on the shoreline shrank down to buds. New growth vanished in the scarlet bloom of forest fires that faded into old growth. It was exactly like watching time-lapse video in reverse.

Somewhere far away, Catherine began to laugh.

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