Chapter Two

 

Leena turned to Windemere. “I will be right back. Please don’t try anything. Wouldn’t do you any good anyway.” The scientist cursed and glared at her.

They marched out, Leena first, Corree behind, and Jeron in the rear. Two guards were waiting, and they fell into step on each side of Corree. A large dome squatted a short distance from their pod. It was red like the surrounding soil. In fact, Corree noticed that the dome was part of the hill.

The soil was hard and gritty, crunching beneath her tough soles. Corree felt her pelt thicken and lengthen, but she halted the mutation, not wanting anyone else to see her ability. The wind gusted, strong enough to push her over if she wasn’t wary, but it wasn’t as violent as the winds at the equator of the Ologrian home planet, Alogol. They marched at a fast pace, reaching the mound quickly. The hatch swung inward and they strode in without hesitation. When the door thudded shut behind her, Corree shivered. It sounded so final. She felt Jeron’s hand on her back as though pushing her forward, but she could tell it was to reassure her. Corree regained control of herself.

“This way,” Leena instructed, pointing down a right hand corridor. It curved slightly to the left. Their destination was a large room, also on the left. It was a laboratory. Again Corree balked. It brought back memories her dreams had awakened. It also reminded her of the time on the Ologrian ship when she had come close to death from a virus meant to kill Ologrians.

Two scientists stood in the middle of the room. One was older. He had no pelt on his head. His skin was dark, but shone under the room lights. It was like the skin of the tiny under-rock lizard. That, like most smooth-skinned Mendelian animals, was highly poisonous. Even though Corree knew that was a ridiculous analogy, it still made her wary of the man. The lower part of his face had a thick pelt of light and dark hair.

“Come in,” he beckoned.

The other scientist was a dark-skinned female and appeared quite a bit younger than her partner. Corree knew that age or gender was not necessarily an indicator of kindness or evil.

Still, she hesitated. One of the guards reached over to grab her arm, but stepped away before he touched her at a command from the older scientist.

“I just want to talk to you, Corree,” the older scientist assured her. His voice was low and soothing.

“It will be all right,” Jeron said.

Corree knew she had little choice. She walked into the room. The younger scientist had said nothing. She hadn’t even moved. Only her eyes; watching her carefully. Corree walked closer to the older man. She stood behind the chair he had indicated.

“Sit down,” he coaxed.

Corree looked around, but everyone else had left. She was on her own. There were no emotions she could pick up from either scientist. Corree had felt nothing since they landed except the little bit when Jeron had touched her.

“What about these?” she asked, holding out her hands.

“Of course,” the dark man replied. He reached over, but the younger scientist stopped him.

“You need to wait. I have heard she is dangerous.”

“Nonsense. What could she do and more importantly, where could she go?” Then he addressed Corree. “Please, sit down.”

With a shrug she did. The woman fastened her arms to the arm rest of the chair as soon as the older scientist released the restraints on her wrists. Corree glared at them.

“Excuse us for a moment,” the older man told her. Both of them walked through a doorway on the far side of the room. A panel slid shut behind them, but it must have been a flimsy door because she could hear them arguing. She caught enough to know that they were talking about her. The older one wanted her released; the younger didn’t. Corree listened as she studied the room. It looked a lot like the laboratories in the science station. There were only the two doors and no windows, just the austere gray metal walls. Instruments lined those walls, some in cabinets and others on shelves.

The two scientists came back. “I am Dr. Verin,” the older man said with a smile. “And this is Dr. Brekal. If you cooperate we will take off the restraints. Later you will be allowed limited freedoms of the base until your transport to Home world.”

“Why didn’t you just take me to there to begin with?” she asked.

“This is something of a quarantine base.”

“A what?”

“Quarantine is when you keep something or someone away from a large population of people just in case the something or someone has a deadly disease.”

“Oh, you mean like they had to on the Ologrian ship when I had that virus.”

Both scientists scowled, but the man recovered first. “I guess that is an appropriate analogy.”

“We are going to take some samples from you. Please cooperate,” Brekal ordered.

Corree wondered if they meant to keep their promises. She didn’t have a great deal of choice right now. Even if she was a little bit free, and could escape, where would she go? If only there was someone like Greelon on this planet. “Okay.”

They took blood, clipped her pelt, measured her, and made her breathe into tubes. They hooked machines on her and measured what was going on inside her as well. She walked and ran with some of the machines attached to her. There were large machines that she had to lay inside while it studied her. Corree worried they would see the blue stone and want to take it out, but strangely, if they did see it, they didn’t say anything. At least not to her. It was hard not to reach up and feel below her ribcage.

After what seemed an interminable time, they called two guards. “I am sure you are tired,” Verin said with a smile. “There is a room ready for you.”

He reminded her of the holo-man that answered their questions when the dreams came. He had been on the teaching pod their dreams had led them to. Like the holo-man, Verin was trying too hard to be nice. At least the younger seemed to be acting honestly. The feeling was mutual; she didn’t like her either. “Yes, I am. I am also hungry. Will there be anything to eat?”

“Of course! I am so sorry; the time just slipped away. A meal will be waiting for you in your quarters.”

“Thank you.”

One guard walked ahead of her and another behind. The corridors weren’t wide enough for more than two people to walk side by side. They continued down one hallway and then another and another until they got to an elevator that took them down. They walked forever in that part of the base, too. Corree could only guess they were trying to confuse her. It wasn’t possible; she still had the directional sense of the cave people. Not that she was going to use it right now. She needed to find out more about this place before she tried to escape. There was also the matter of getting a ship.

The lead guard stopped in front of a narrow door. He placed a disc against the metal and it slid open. The guard behind her ordered her inside. As soon as she stepped into the room, the door closed behind her with a whoosh. Corree didn’t have to check to know it was locked. The cabin was very small, with space for a narrow bed, a tiny bathroom, and a round table. That was where her dinner sat.

At least she thought it was dinner. It was warm, but small, wrapped up like her family used to wrap meat between leaves and pounded bark sheets. Corree pulled the covering off and inspected the food inside. It smelled all right, but it wasn’t much better than the stuff they ate in the space pod. Still, she was hungry, so she ate it. Dinner didn’t take long.

When she lay down on the narrow bed, Corree found it uncomfortable. She tossed and turned, thinking she wasn’t ever going to get to sleep, but the next thing Corree knew one of the guards opened the door and ordered her to get up. Neither of them was carrying breakfast. She hoped they were going to take her to one of the eating areas. They weren’t. Her stomach growled as they walked the corridor back to the lab.

That day and the next two were more of the same—tests, needles, and machines. The only difference was that she refused to go anywhere the following mornings until she had been given breakfast. The meager evening rations were pitiful, and despite the fact that she wasn’t exerting herself Corree felt starved.

Interspersed with the tests, they asked her questions. Her time with Jeron helped her now. Thankfully, they didn’t ask her the same questions he had. Corree supposed they had listened to all the stuff Jeron had recorded. That was confirmed when they asked her to clarify some things, mainly things about conditions on Mendel. She was happy to embellish her stories, making the rock snakes more numerous as well as deadlier, the forests denser and the mountains steeper with ice coating each slope.

This day, robots came and went, taking samples and reports away and bringing equipment and materials back. Corree remembered seeing some of the same things in the science station. Several questions arose. “You have been asking me a whole bunch of questions. May I ask something?”

“But of course,” Verin said.

“How do the robots work? Why do you have them?”

“That’s two questions,” Brekal pointed out with a sneer.

“I didn’t hear you limit me to one question,” Corree shot back.

“Touché,” Dr. Verin said.

Corree didn’t have a clue what the older man had just said, but that it irritated the woman was fine with her.

“Robots are mechanical constructs with bio-computerized brains. They are made to do work unsuitable or undesirable for humans to do.”

Corree’s next question would have been why they didn’t send robots to Mendel, but she wasn’t about to ask that one.

Brekal seemed to understand where her thoughts were going. “Mendel is too harsh for even robots. However, we keep improving them and assume that someday, we’ll be able to send robots to worlds like Mendel that will not be affected by the elements. At that time we’ll only need colonists to ease population on the homeworld and to claim the new worlds.”

Corree wondered what that would mean for her people.

“And by then your fellow colonists will know where the materials we need can be found.”

There it was again; that need for the Mendelians to obey without question.

“And we won’t have to deal with younglings who think they can defy the Federation,” Brekal added.

“Maybe if the Federation had been more straightforward with us,” Corree retorted. “Perhaps if the Federation hadn’t thrown us on a planet they didn’t know about and took away our memories….”

“Please!” Verin interjected. “What is done is done.”

They did more tests with her inside the large machines. That was when Corree knew they had seen the blue gem. Brekal felt her ribs, and it was all Corree could do to keep from batting her hand away.

“And where did this come from?” she asked. “An Ologrian experiment?”

Corree was flabbergasted. That was the last thing she would have thought of. The crystal was found on Alogol, but…. “No,” she snapped. “They wouldn’t do such a thing.”

“Then how did you get something that seems like a mineral inside your body?” Brekal seemed flustered. The arrogance was not evident during this questioning.

“I have been living on Mendel. Who can say?”

“It may need further examination,” Verin suggested.

“What do you mean by that?” Corree asked.

“We may have to remove it,” the older scientist said.