CHAPTER 41
BANG!
This was the hangar they had departed from, at least. They were back in A-stan. Rich Dalton felt relief. It worked.
There was a sleepy-eyed MP on watch inside, or rather, he had been sleepy-eyed. He startled suddenly, sat up from his chair, almost juggled his weapon, and came to attention.
He held up a hand to indicate they should wait, and keyed the radio mic on his armor.
“Control, this is Depot. They’re here, over.”
A crackly voice replied, “Is that what we heard? Over.”
“Yes, sir. They’re all here, over.”
“Roger that, stand by, over.”
Elliott ordered, “Everyone stand fast.”
They did, buzzing and almost muttering.
Only a couple of minutes later, the general, the colonel, and a handful of staff arrived, along with a squad of MPs.
The general loudly announced, “Welcome back, soldiers.”
“What date is it?”
“You’ve been gone fifty-four hours. It looks as though you were successful and they brought you back promptly.”
That was a relief.
Elliott saluted, “Sir. Mission accomplished with some variances. Shug returned to his people. Our element recovered with one casualty and one remaining behind. I’ll detail in debrief.”
McClare nodded and frowned. “Excellent. I do want to know about that.”
He turned and faced the recoverees.
“Gentlemen, ladies, welcome home. There’s a necessary debrief, as I’m sure you’re aware. We will get you all home as quickly as possible. Please follow the MPs to quarters. We’ll have rations, recreation, and hot showers at once.”
Even Lozano looked sober and damp-eyed.
“We’re actually home,” he said.
Rich replied, “We are. Good luck, Christopher.”
The man nodded as he followed the MPs. The squad leader pointed and raised an eyebrow. “Cuffs?”
Spencer told him, “They can come off now. We had to make sure he complied.”
“Got it. Watch out for him?”
“Probably not on post, but we’ll have supplemental info.”
“Understood.”
Dr. Raven shoved to the front of their team.
“General, I need a voice recorder and a big notebook right this second. I have some of the info you wanted.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He turned. “Captain, give her your notebook, and set your phone up to record, at once. This is critical intel.”
“Er, yes, sir,” the woman replied, fumbling her phone out of a pocket and handing over a ruled book and pen.
Raven took the chair the MP had sat in, dragged another over, and furiously started scribbling.
Colonel Findlay took over. “We have your billets waiting, and no trust issues this time,” he said. Rich chuckled. It had been intense trying to prove they’d been separated in the past and future. This time, it was understood.
In ten minutes he was in a room shared with Oglesby, his gear on a bunk, and getting comfortable in a chair for a few moments.
“Damn, what a trip.”
Oglesby said, “We did the best we could.”
Rich agreed. “We did. Not perfect, but I can’t think of anything better. I still feel like crap about how we treated the kids, and Shug, though.”
Oglesby stretched in his chair and nodded. “It sucks, but the Bykos didn’t leave time for niceties.”
“Yeah, they’re mostly pretty blunt SOBs.”
“How’s Lozano?”
He thought about it and said, “I really don’t know. I hope he can adapt back to our world. They’re going through an easier debrief than we did, since they don’t need to explain where they were. On the other hand, they’re going to have a hell of a time fitting in.”
“Also Munoz.”
Rich nodded. “Yeah, they’re going to be trouble. It’s in the captain’s AAR, with details. I did what I could. Elliott made a note to even monitor their morale calls home.”
“You were amazing, Rich.”
He was always embarrassed when someone thanked him for doing what he would do anyway. “Thanks. And Dan, I know you felt out in the cold a few times, but when you contributed, it was critical. Well done and thanks.”
The man smiled. “I do appreciate it. Yeah, once we had local language experts and computer translation…but I did have to double-check.”
Two hours later they were in a private chow hall with food delivered. It was Army contractor standard, not bad, though nowhere near the Byko version. They were spoiled.
Dr. Raven still had a headset on, and was dictating apparently as things occurred to her, and between bites of roast beef.
She was speaking to Caswell. “—I’ve got three projects at least from this, regarding haplogroups and mDNA, which Kate’s team will expand on at length. I’ve got three variants of rhinovirus and what may be the MRCA of the Coronavirus family. Yet none of us got sick with the unfamiliar viruses. So that’s a project—oh, wait.” She adjusted the headset mic and tapped the phone. “Translation took a notable fraction of a second, though breakthrough proper was near instantaneous. There is atmospheric displacement, but I noted no ozone content. More to follow.” She turned back. “Yeah, it’s going to be like this. I’m doing everything from memory other than the basic disease stuff. They wouldn’t let us bring some of the haplogroup files. They kept all that. I can guess why.”
Rich asked, “So what is your actual field?”
Raven almost smiled as she said, “That’s the question no one asked. I do have a doctorate in the field. My bachelor’s was endocrine biology, my master’s paleobiology. My first PhD is paleoepidemiology. It was both interest and preparation.”
Everyone had gathered around.
Spencer asked, “For?”
The woman glanced upward. “For going to Mars. My second PhD is plasma physics, but I also took classes in neurological interfaces for electronics.”
Oglesby burst out, “Jesus. How old are you again?”
She replied, “Thirty-five. I had my BS at nineteen, MS at twenty-one, doctorate at twenty-three, the second one at twenty-five.”
She really wasn’t kidding about breaking IQ tests, apparently.
“How did they bring you into this?”
She grinned with deep, enticing eyes. “Who do you think was studying your displacement? You brought biological samples back—those quilted hides—and that device that self-destructed. We’re studying what we can of those, Sergeant Alexander’s photos, and every little bit of anything we can scrape up.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“The research element assigned to your event.”
“What and where is that? How many?”
She shook her head. “I am not at liberty to discuss such questions. I can say that Kate is one of the other biologists.”
Sheridan giggled, then looked a bit put upon. “I was doing real work, and was in charge, and then I get told she’s going to try to crack their technology.”
Elliott commented, “So they really screwed up in letting you along.”
She shrugged. “Maybe. I do have data and observations. What we can do with it remains to be seen. And then I have the ethical concern on if I should actually develop anything that might interrupt the issues they’re already having.”
“The US Government will be mighty pissed if you have a conscience.”
Her expression was half disgusted, half amused. “And what will they do? Fire me? They need me.” She shook her head. “I don’t need them. I can be on SpaceX ground crew, or heading a radiation oncology section by Monday next week. Though I do find this fascinating. But I can’t be bullied.”
Elliott said, “Well, good luck to you, Amalie. And thanks very much for all your support before.”
“You’re welcome. It was an awesome thrill to come along.”
Rich added, “Yes, ma’am. It was very educational, and you were great support under fire and with the natives.”
She smiled. “I do appreciate it. I wish I could come on the return trip. You are going, right?”
They all looked at Elliott. “That’s up to the general, but he understands the matter. In the meantime, we rotate out day after tomorrow.”
Caswell looked surprised. “Damn, that’s quick. Awesome. Now I get to go back and deal with an assault charge.”
Rich gaped. “Do wha?”
She blushed. “Some mouthy asshole in a club opened his yap and was really, really crude, and I smashed his beer pitcher into his face.”
“I will happily be a character reference,” he offered.
Spencer loudly said, “Yup, she’s a character.”
They all laughed for a moment.
Elliott cut in with, “The incident is resolved. I spoke to the general, he spoke to some people. They were told to make it go away, no questions asked, and Counselor Fairley sent a letter covering you as a PTSD issue, which it is and is more than fair.”
She did look relieved. “Thank you, sir.”
He spread his hands. “It all points out how long recovery is, and how rough a road it’s going to be for our charges. We’re still dealing with it and will be. They’ll never be the same.”
Armand Devereaux asked, “Amalie, the issue you wouldn’t talk about in front of the Bykos. There was some sort of genetic effect that killed all the Africans, wasn’t there?”
She sighed, put her head in her hand, then looked up. “It wasn’t all Africans, but most above a certain fraction. It was genotype linked to melanin production. It might have been an attempt to eliminate skin cancer. It wiped out entire haplogroups, as best I can tell from the samples we got. That’s one of the things they’ve been trying to hide.”
He sat in shock as she continued. “And they do have African DNA. Some of them. It’s thinly spread, but present. It’s blatantly obvious, though, that there are few if any actual black people there, because not only didn’t we see any—and we should have, given the genetic mixing I find—but the way every chick in sight homed in on you.”
He had to ask. “Genocide?”
“It could be. I’m very sorry.”
He really wanted it not to be true. “What? How?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know more than that, but it appears to be about six generations back from the Bykos. Some sort of massive population bottleneck. None of the Asian or European genotypes seem affected. There’s spillage into Arabian lines, but a lot of them have African influx. Anyone more than one-eighth sub-Saharan seems to have either become sterile or died. That would include me if I were alive at the time.”
Armand felt cold. There were always a handful of racists, and a few of them were ignorant assholes. But this suggested pure evil. His gene line was doomed.
“Could it have been accidental?” he asked hoping.
She shrugged. “It could. It might have been an attempt to fix a genetically linked disease—sickle cell anemia, for example—that had some deleterious side effect. It could have been some random mutation, but that’s incredibly unlikely. As thorough as it appears to have been, I’m betting on deliberate action. I don’t know if it’s worse if it’s negligence or maliciousness. Armand, I’m very, very sorry.”
“Yeah, me too.” There wasn’t more to say than that.
Black people weren’t allowed in paradise.
He really wasn’t sure he wanted to be involved with any of them, either, knowing that.
Dalton asked, “So how far in the future are they?” He said it a bit too loud, obviously trying to steer away from a bad subject.
Sheridan said, “I can tell you approximately when we were, based on mDNA generations.”
Dalton asked, “When?”
She giggled. “You don’t believe in that stuff, remember?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“This is the same science I used to check the locals to the present time, as confirmation. It’s reliable. But it doesn’t agree with your Bible.”
“Okay. I’m listening.”
She said, “You can never mention this around Bykos. You understand this?”
He agreed. “Yes. As secret as everything else.”
Sheridan nodded.
“It was an easy enough calculation. Absolute minimum one hundred fifty years, maximum five hundred years, probable median two hundred and twenty-five. Ish.”
Dalton looked shocked. “That’s all?”
Armand said, “I checked their stars. Calculating forward, it wasn’t very different from our astrography.”
Oglesby said, “The linguistic drift is present but not great. I was figuring less than a thousand years, more than a couple of hundred.”
Sheridan said, “Their technology isn’t that much beyond us. We can at least recognize it. The Neoliths couldn’t. You said the paleoliths didn’t. The Romans recognized your vehicles as vehicles. We recognize most of the tech the Bykos have as achievable.”
“Yeah.”
Raven said, “They also seem to be from a technological center point.”
“Oh?” he prompted.
“At least one development of agriculture was invented not far from where they are. So was the spoked wheel, as far as we know. Cities and iron working aren’t terribly far. They seem to have invented time travel. It makes me think of the SF stories where certain locations are pivotal to the universe.”
“Hmm. It does sound if they’re from somewhere in the same geographic region.”
“Armand…Doc, nailed that down at once. So did I. He looked at the stars and calculated back.”
“Oh.”
“Right. Not long after our own time. I looked at DNA, and their naming conventions give it away. Bykostan is obviously named after the Baikonur Cosmodrome.”
“Russia?”
She said, “Kazakhstan, but they lease it to the Russians in our time. It’s obviously still a science and tech headquarters.”
Armand commented, “It was dangerous of them to let you come along.”
“Yes, which is why we will never mention it. They have to know we’ll guess some of it.”
“I understand,” he said. There were far too many events and discussions here way above his level. He’d just say nothing.
And question how much support he should give such a society.