Part 13 (2/2)
”That's in the core samples?” Ray had been looking for confirmation. He hadn't expected to have it handed to him on a platter.
”Some say it is, myself included. Others disagree, insisting there is nothing there.” Harry turned his palms over in a dismissing gesture. ”Since we have drawn them from only a small part of this continent, a very small area of this planet, I cannot refute the doubters with any authority.”
Ray sat forward in his chair. ”Tell me about some of those bad-weather patterns. Major storm surges? Tidal waves?”
”I've drilled up evidence of six inches of sand twenty, thirty miles onto the Piedmont plain around Refuge and New Haven. Happened four or five times.”
”How strong were the mineral readings at the breakpoint between the end of the golden age and the beginning of the troubled years?” Ray went on.
”Don't know. Unless I drilled through a major ore seam or an old river, metal on this planet is very hard to come by. Not enough tectonic action in its short history. Why?”
”Mary, you got any gear for very small samples?”
”Down to parts per billion. What do you have in mind?”
Did he dare say? ”I bet if you find an area buried suddenly a million years ago, you'll find a very rich mineral layer.”
”Want to say why?” Mary asked.
”Not yet. Any places like that near here, or do we have to go back to the coast?” Ray asked Harry.
The old man pulled a well-used map from his hip pocket, unfolded it and studied it, right hand ma.s.saging his chin. ”The James River valley goes quite a ways inland. Much of it was flooded three, four times,” he said slowly. ”Where the river hasn't carried away the overburden, I could probably find that first layer.” He looked up, eyes bright and a smile forming. ”I'd love to work with a few of your miners. Jeff told me what they did to a single hill. When can we start?”
”As soon as the boss wants us to,” Mary drawled. ”By the way, Colonel, while we're stacking up anomalies, I got one to throw on the pile.” Ray waited while Mary gnawed her lower lip.
”I lost nearly ten percent of my nanos yesterday. Normal attrition is less than one percent. I recovered ninety-seven percent of the nanos. But six percent of the ones I got back carried nothing and are unusable.” Ray raised an eyebrow. ”The nanos were modified at their atomic level. Grapplers broken off, electric motors wrecked.”
”That's impossible,” Kat insisted.
”Yep, impossible, but that's what happened to my little metal wranglers. It's like they've been in a fight. Only, neither the metal nor the mountain's supposed to fight back.”
Unless the metal were fighting for its life, Ray thought, slumping in his chair. ”Mary, work with Harry today. Get me a good spectrum from a million years back.”
”What are you looking for?” Mary asked.
”I have no idea. Lek, I want you to get the sky eyes back up. One over New Haven, another for Refuge, one circulating around the Covenanters.”
”You don't trust the news media?” Kat asked.
”Let's say I don't trust them to know what they're looking at, or what's important. I want my own raw data feed.”
”I'll patch it into the stuff we're getting from Lek's taps,” Kat said. ”We'll get you one consolidated intelligence report for tomorrow morning, Colonel.”
”Good.” Ray turned back to Lek. ”While you're working on other stuff, spend some time meditating on what a surveillance system or computer network might look like after we've had a million years to polish the technology. Any ideas?”
”No.”
”Me neither. But for the moment, a.s.sume something very high-tech grew over the million quiet years, and some of it is still humming.” Ray's subordinates looked at each other, then at him. ”We need an estimate of the situation to work from. I'm offering one, You have an alternate, I'm listening.”
”A million-year-old technology that's been rusting for a long while. You know something we don't?” Doc asked.
”Maybe. I'm not sure. Kat, fit the data to the curve. Tell me where my guess doesn't fit.”
The young middie shook her head slowly. ”There's not enough data to conclude anything, sir.”
”Okay, I've stuck my neck out. Now you get out there and prove me wrong. By the way, Harry, before you go, would you let Doc take a picture of the inside of your skull?”
”Kind of a new-employee physical?” the old man grinned.
”Doc, I also want to spend some time on the table,” Ray said, getting to his feet. ”You've got your a.s.signments, everybody. Have at them. Oh, Lek, Mary, and I found an interesting pillar in a cave yesterday. Once you've got the sky eyes up, take a look at it; see if you can find anything electromagnetic about it.”
Ray walked over to the hospital with Doc and Harry. If he weren't so dead on his feet, he might have been able to skip the cane entirely. Then again, maybe he was just being optimistic. Doc scanned Harry quickly, ending it with a whistle and a question. ”You have many headaches?”
”When I was a kid. Not recently. Why?”
Doc motioned Harry and Ray over to look at his scan. ”I'm finding most Santa Marians have some kind of growth in this section of the brain. Yours is one of the largest I've seen. The Colonel here sports a bigger one.” Ray nodded and Jerry pulled up his scan, as well as the kids'.
Harry frowned. ”What do you make of it?”
”Right now,” Jerry said, ”nothing. I can't even figure out an approach.”
On that, Harry left and Ray took his place on the table, got comfortable, took a deep breath, and told Jerry, ”Today we do a brain activity scan. I'll think something, and you tell me what part of my brain lights up. I had a baseline done a while back.”
Doc fiddled with his station for a while. ”Here's that part of your file. Let's start with the multiplication tables.”
”Seven times one is seven,” Ray began. He'd droned through the eights before Jerry called enough.
”I'm supposed to show you some dirty pictures. All I've got is a couple of boring inkblots.”
”I'm a married man, Doc. Going to be a daddy soon. I ought to be able to provide a few thoughts gratis.” Rita in her, folks' garden, at the lake, on the s.h.i.+p.
”Nothing's changed there, Colonel. Try a tactical problem.”
Ray went over the a.s.sault on the pa.s.s, trying for the umpteenth time to figure out how he could have gotten around Mary and her bag of surprises.
”Yeah, that's a match, in spades,” Jerry said. ”You're dialed in. What did you want to show me?”
Ray thought of the Three. The soaring towers and purple gardens. The doctor whistled, started tapping his board like mad. Ray remembered the caverns of the woolly leg-legs, The art on the walls of the long tunnels. ”Any change there, Doc?”
”None. I mean, yes. No. Keep doing whatever it is you're doing.” Ray switched to the aeries of the spinners, dancing on the winds where gravity's kiss was but a light caress.
”That one is a bit sensuous,” Doc observed.
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