Mission: Planet Biter (Veslor Mates #4)(18)
She noticed that he hadn’t answered her question, but she really wanted to know how she’d ingested the drug. “What was it?”
“Your oxygen source was from the planet, but being filtered through a machine.”
“The air recycler. It makes sure none of the pollen or other pollutants come inside our living spaces. One of our scientists checked it. He said it wasn’t that. Was he wrong?”
“There was another machine that circulated the air inside your pods.”
“The pumps. We thought those were okay too. Then again, everyone was losing their minds. It was the pumps? The drug was airborne?”
He hesitated. “There were large canister devices found inside the vents that connected the different sections of your facility. Those devices dispersed the drug in a mist form. Doctor Kane ran some tests. The early results she shared is that the drug would have been absorbed through skin. It also would have gotten on your tongue, in your eyes, and inside your nose from breathing. Anything you touched near those vents immediately after it sprayed would have also infected you.”
Vera closed her eyes and put her face against his chest. Tears filled her eyes but she tried to fight it back.
None of her team had thought to check the vents. Just the source of where the air was being filtered and the large fans that pumped it though the pods. The vents were all located in the ceilings at the top of the pods, and they weren’t big enough for a person to fit inside. They wouldn’t have been able to check them thoroughly even if they’d wanted to.
“How did they figure it out?”
“The males were all given scanners programmed to detect the drug. The air vents turned on and they could see it coming from them. They tore out the ceilings and found the canisters.”
She clutched at his shirt. “Fuck!” It made her so mad! There were multiple vents in every pod, even inside the connecting corridors that linked them all. That drug had been raining down on them in mist form every time the pump kicked on to blow fresh air inside the pods. Why hadn’t they noticed? Seen it? The ceilings were at least fifteen feet high inside the pods, but only about nine feet in the hallways.
Roth put his arm around her and gently patted her back. “Do you remember any of the other humans working on the vents? Carrying long canisters?”
She shook her head against his shirt. “No. There’s surveillance cameras though.”
“The fleet is going over the recordings. That will take time. When was the facility built?”
“A little over two months ago.” She pulled herself together.
“Did any humans leave recently?”
“No. We came on the Dalton. It’s a freighter. New Worlds shipped us, the pods we lived inside, and the workers that assembled everything. Once we were stocked and had all our equipment on the planet, the freighter left. Heftner estimated that it would take us seven months to complete phase one. That’s when we were going to be picked up, and the secondary phase workers would have relieved us.” Her voice broke and she swallowed hard. “We had less than five months to go.”
“Heftner?”
“Gary Heftner is our project manager.”
“He was on the surface?”
“No. Heftner is our boss. He’d never want to be stuck on some planet for that length of time while we’re doing the initial survey. He’s the one we send updates to, or who yells at us if we fall behind schedule.”
“Schedule to do what?”
“New Worlds won the bid on Biter. That’s what we’ve dubbed the planet. All the animals, and even some of the plants we discovered, want to bite us. Most of these types of planets don’t get registered with an official name until after the initial survey is completed and we’re already being sent somewhere else. At that point, the claim is established.”
Roth kept stroking her back. “I don’t understand. Bid? What phases? And what claim?”
She inhaled and lifted her face away from his shirt to peer up at him. “If alien life isn’t present on a planet that gets found by Earth ships, companies like the one I work for can bid to send teams down to survey them. The first phase is to gather information on the wildlife, the terrain, vegetation, and minerals. I’m always assigned to phase one, since I fly drones to map and record the surface. Once we finish, phase two teams take what we’ve learned and begin to resource what they can.”
“Resource?”
Vera hesitated. “Two jobs ago, our mineralogist on our survey team discovered something that excited him. Don’t ask me what it was, thought I saw some of the samples he kept hauling into his workspace. He must have collected three dozen large crates of those rocks. They looked like chunks of green metal. All he’d tell us was that New Worlds was going to give him a raise and they’d easily make their money back on that project.
“Phase two teams are sent in to collect and ship whatever excites the bosses back to Earth, or to whoever my company can sell stuff to. As long as whatever they take doesn’t damage the planet, it’s fair game to resource green metal rocks or whatever. That’s how companies like New Worlds make money, if we find good stuff. They get to claim the rights for three years, to sell what they can after we complete our initial survey, and they register it with Earth and any allied alien races in that sector of space. Once the claim ends, Earth sometimes opens colonies on those planets.”