She studied the chabacho log he sat on, took in the couple of pieces of aquajade that had had the misfortune of being tossed into the river by their fellows. Definitely not enough to make a raft out of.

She unsealed her pouch, poured the water out, and found what she was looking for. A tube of adhesive and a roll of cord.

Raising an eyebrow, she told Dek, “Time for us to get naked.”

He grinned. “I thought you’d never ask. But shouldn’t we be putting our energy into getting off this gravel bar first?”

“What if I told you I have a plan?”

56

Michaela had come at a fast trot when Anna Gabarron had paged her through com, saying, “Director, we’ve got trouble.”

Michaela took the stairs to the lab level two at a time. She had been in her quarters, at her sink, preparing for bed. Now, a robe wrapped around her, her broken arm in a sling, she rushed through the quiet Pod.

The only sound was the soft purr of the HVAC system and the distant splashing of water on the pilings. She’d seen the latest view from the external cameras. The once-white pilings were now blue-green, covered with a thick and slimy coating of algae. The stuff had worked its way up to cover the bottom of the Pod. In places it looked like it might have been a couple of centimeters thick and was now creeping up in dendritic patterns that almost reminded her of veins.

She wasn’t sure why that was surprising; she’d seen algae and moss growths back on Earth that were twice the size.

Turned out that not everything on Donovan was terrifying. Some things, like the algae, were a constant. Right down to the ever-present patches that Tobi Ruto kept blasting off the deck and more particularly out of the Underwater Bay. The good news was that the power washer removed the stuff in mats that just peeled free and sluiced back into the sea.

At the top of the stairs, she made the left, hurrying to the clinic. Ducking inside, she closed the door behind her, asking, “What have we got?”

Anna turned from the isolation tent—a clear, plastic bio-container with its own oxygen and ventilation system. The intravenous drip fed a needle in little Toni Yoshimura’s arm to keep him hydrated and fed; a catheter ran from the little boy’s penis to the collection bag on the isolation tent’s wall. Samples could be drawn through the plastic by means of a syringe for analysis.

“Got a problem,” Anna told her. “Sorry to bother you, especially with everything that’s going on, but I thought you should know. Toni’s got some kind of growth in his neck. I saw the swelling under the corners of his jaw. Didn’t think much of it, but it’s creeping down the sides of his throat. Take a look.”