Playing God(5)

Nice opening, Vice President Brador. She looked back at tidy Veep Brador in his tidy office. She felt her back stiffen.

“Mr. Brador, exactly what do you want me for?”

She meant to shock him, but Brador's mouth just quirked up. A good sign, probably.

“As of yesterday,” he said, “Bioverse Inc. has a contract with the Dedelphi—”

“Yes, I untied the web knot,” Lynn cut him off. “Impressive. I thought getting all the Dedelphi Great Families to agree on something was impossible.”

“That's what I thought.” Brador nodded, and, for the moment, the vice presidential mannerisms dropped. “The Getesaph and the Fil actually contacted us over a year ago, but what they want… It was decided we couldn't make a contract without a worldwide agreement.”

“What exactly are they asking you to do?” Genuine curiosity prompted Lynn's question. There'd been so many rumors, and she'd barely skimmed the first thread of the knot in the office with Praeis.

“For a start, we're going to contract a biomedical team and put a stop to the plague they've unleashed on themselves.” For a second, Brador's smile seeped into his eyes. “That is what my colleague is speaking with your partner, Dr. Zelotes, about.”

“That's ‘for a start.’” She made quotation marks with her fingers. “What's after that?”

“We are also being asked to perform full-scale bioremediation efforts to clean the planet up after two centuries of extremely dirty warfare.”

Lynn sat back and rested her elbows on the chair's arms. She knew a fair amount about the world that Humans called Dedelph. There were places on that world that glowed in the dark. There were places you couldn't see from space because of the industrial haze. The Dedelphi never developed anything like the bio- and eco-tech that had allowed Humans to repair Earth and build themselves some brand-new homes on other worlds. To clean and repair a whole world after all those centuries of eco-disaster… Something warm surged through her.

With a little difficulty, Lynn set that feeling aside and looked back at Brador again.

“What are we going to do about the anaphylactic reactions?” she asked. “You can't drop thousands of Humans, and it is going to be thousands, right?” Brador nodded. “Thousands of Humans in the middle of a population they can kill by breathing on them.”

The vice president overshadowed Brador again. “That is an exaggeration.”

Lynn shook her head. “Not by much, it isn't.”

Brador reached over to his main desk and touched its surface. The upper right-hand corner of the office scene cleared, replaced by a simulation of a ragged archipelago of space stations on a field of night and stars. “The center of our operations will be space-based until we can evacuate the population—”

“Until we what?” Lynn gripped her chair's arms. A couple of implants beeped in protest.

Brador folded his hands in front of him. “We're going to move the population onto city-ships and go to ground with nanotech and biosculpt.”

For a second, Lynn remembered she was in the middle of a very high-powered job interview with a representative of a huge corporate enclave.

In the next second, she decided she didn't care. “Are you out of your corporate mind?” she demanded. “We're talking about a billion people!”

“One point three billion, by the most recent estimate,” replied Brador. He touched his desk again. The space simulation was replaced by a population-distribution chart.

Lynn stared at it without reading it. “One point three billion people who, despite what we saw today, have a long history of hating each other's genomes and going for blood when they can.” She threw up both hands. “You're going to move them onto city-ships—” She stopped and did a quick calculation. “There aren't that many city-ships in existence!” Lynn turned away for a moment, staring at her window. The evening sun turned the stone veranda a brilliant scarlet. She faced her interviewer again, somewhat more in control of herself. “Vice President Brador, you can't be thinking of jamming these people into a bunch of retooled freighters! This… project… is going to take at least fifty years!”

“Probably more like seventy-five.” His pinched face and round eyes were absolutely sober and serious. “And no, we're not putting them in retooled freighters. We are going to place them in fully functional city-ships, many of which will be custom-built.” The graphic changed to a construction blueprint. “Our engineering teams are already at work in the Dedelph system asteroid belts. We expect an eighty percent need fulfillment within the year.”