For the Good of the World

Chapter Seven

Via shuddered with cold and terror alike as she crept through spore towers and lace-vines toward the bodies scattered in a circle around a large glittering specimen terrarium. The containment windows on the hut-sized experimental unit lay wide open. The native flora in the terrarium were covered in frost, but--adapted as they were to Aquarius's frigid weather--the cyan plant-like lifeforms had survived.

The scientists hadn't been so fortunate.

Via stared down at the first body, an old woman. Like the other Ancients, her pale skin was flushed a livid cherry red.

Just like Ivan and probably Grand Ma.

Via's attempt to review the recorded footage yielded nothing useful. Unlike the arcology, the station lacked a true security system. Such surveillance wasn't necessary here; few people ever ventured to the day-side anymore.

The killers would have just erased everything anyway, Via reminded herself as frustrated disappointment pricked deep.

Swallowing, she summoned a swarm of nanites drifting aimlessly above her and set them to the task of recording the crime scene. She was no Lifesupporter and could not perform a full autopsy, but the nanites began dutifully collecting information for Mitis to assess later. In the meantime, as Via gazed sadly from one corpse to the next, the nanites supplied her with their preliminary findings as to the cause of death.

"Just hypothermia?" Via muttered as the knowledge filtered into her. Her teeth began chattering.

Ignoring the station's warning that she had fifteen minutes left before the killing cold added her to the pile of bodies, she accessed the Caeles. As the mists rose in her mind, she fed them her questions and received an immediate response.

Hypothermia and carbon monoxide poisoning could both turn a corpse's skin bright red.

"Nothing suspicious here," she muttered with an eye roll, then glanced around. "Let's see what they tried to blame it on this time."

She spotted the culprit immediately and frowned. The terrarium's nanite controls had been modified long ago to allow the Ancients to use them for their experiments. She squinted at the holographic display hovering in mid-air above the bodies.

On one side, English words scrolled downward in blue lettering like a glowing waterfall. It took Via a few moments and a slight neurological tweak by her internal nanites for her to translate her grandmater's mother tongue.

"P-procedure," she muttered in English, scanning the text and continuing to read from memory as she walked to the other side of the hologram and peered at several hovering control panels. "Examining the effects of p-predicted increased temperatures and blue-green light supplementation on the germination and development of s-select indigenous flora."

The Ancients had completed most of the tests in their planned sequence, subjecting the specimens in the terrarium to increasingly Earth-like temperatures and visible light frequencies. But the tests had halted with a sudden massive drop in temperature to -150 degrees Fahrenheit instead of the planned 150 degrees.

Via shook her head, shuddering with more than cold as she transferred the incomplete study to her case files. The Ancients had been some of the best scientists back on Earth, all experts in their fields. They might not have been sorcerers, but they had been working with nanite technologies for fifty years. She highly doubted that they would have made such a simple but deadly mistake while running a scientific experiment.

And why had they all been running the experiment together? Her grandmater and a few of Kaitlyn's colleagues had been life scientists, but the others had been physical scientists or even social scientists. Why were economists, psychologists, geographers, and physicists studying the impact of terraformation on native flora?