Drink the Water

Chapter 2

"Don't drink the water."

Janine looked back, startled.

A man stood a few paces behind her, towering over her.

Kneeling at the end of the dock, nothing between her and the poisonous Nartressan sea, Janine felt a moment of vulnerability, as though a slight nudge might send her to her death. "I know," she replied, "I'm a biologist." Why do I have a sudden sense of déjà vu? she wondered.

The night fading, a blue penumbra to the east, only a few cottage lights illuminating him from the side, she couldn't see his face. She stood and looked at him fully, recognizing him finally from the numerous vid coms they'd exchanged. "You must be Doctor Thomas Carson. I'm Janine Meriwether, Assistant Xenobiologist at the Alien Microbiology Institute." She stepped nimbly over the equipment at her feet to greet him.

They shook.

"Pleased. You look just like your vid," he said, his dark prominent brow dominating his face above eyes sunk too far into their sockets. The hair was dark against skin too white.

"Aren't you cold in that formal? Seems too insubstantial in the breeze." She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the brisk bay breeze. She noted the maritime insignia at the left breast.

"Lived here all my life," he said. "It's invigorating. But come on, the panel's waiting for you. Dismayed them when they found you'd already left the spaceport, but I knew where you'd gone."

"And you came to find me." She grinned, having come to the dock to see for herself the poison seas she'd be studying for the next year or so, rather than wait for her escort. Janine decided she liked him.

"You grew up here, didn't you?"

She bent to snap her cases closed. "For a time, but I don't remember much except the cold and the wind." Snap-snap. "Father was in the diplomatic service, so we never stayed in one place too long. I spent more time in orbit than I did groundside."

Snap-snap, and ready to go. She handed him one and picked up the other two. Her mobile laboratory. She'd studied the prion remotely, but not up close. The vector resisted being taken off planet. The environment couldn't be duplicated, and the creature disintegrated in the face of all attempts to preserve it. She'd had just enough time before Doctor Carson's arrival to obtain a sample.

"This way," he said, gesturing toward a waiting hover.

She glanced back at the dock as she followed him, wondering what had happened back there. Just a dream, she thought, shaking it off.

The hover lifted and followed a path that wound its way up the hillside. She glanced down at the small collection of buildings that comprised the hamlet of Wainsport. Sparsely settled, Nartressa was ninety-five percent water, and its main export was seafood.

But not just seafood. The seas were so abundant that over twenty thousand robotrawlers plied its waters continuously with no noticeable drop in biodensity. Although the fish had been harvested for over three hundred years, only in the last forty years had it reached these proportions. The volume showed no sign of slowing despite multiple warnings from conservationists that the harvests were unsustainable.

From the hover window, Janine counted ten such robotrawlers off the coast, and above one hovered a suborbital resupply ship, lifting the trawler's hold right from its belly and dropping in an empty hold, the operation taking ten minutes.

The hover dash squawked. "Doctor Carson, distress call from Randwick. The weed's snatched another one."

"Pilot," Carson said. "Alert the panel we got a live snatching. They'll be happy to wait for Janine."