The Ephemera Read Online Free PDF

tall, butter-skinned Uidean. That was encouraging. If this panned out like he feared, Earth was going to need all of their friends on side. For now though the unfortunate sod had been cornered by Aunt Bella.
    "Is sumbdy puttin the kettle on or no? I'm awfy drouthie, so I am," she told it.
    The confused-looking extro was tapping the side of his head nervously, but Aunt Bella didn't seem to understand the signal. Calum thought about rescuing it, but the Uideans were seasoned diplomats. They'd surely faced worse—though perhaps not stranger—than Bella. Besides, there was activity in the garden that demanded his attendance.
    There were maybe half a dozen people standing around—or in—the rosebed, which itself was now covered in an open tent of heavy plastic sheeting. Calum's mother stood to one side in her dressing gown and slippers talking to a rumpled-looking man in a hairy suit. Calum would have recognised his boss from his posture alone.
    "Good to see you, Clarence," he said. From the centre of the group clustered around the roses came sounds of exertion and a metallic grating that made Calum think of sharpening knives.
    Sneijder turned. He didn't look happy, but then he rarely did. "You should have notified us."
    "I followed procedure," Calum replied calmly. "Species discovered in pre-nomenclatured areas have to be cross-referenced with both local and Lexicon lists."
    The Dutchman's lip curled. "Calum, you understand, don't you, the implications if this turns out to be a completely new species? You should have notified us straight away. God, for containment and assessment, if nothing else."
    Calum felt the feeling shift inside him again. He could almost hear the sighing of the slipping sand. One of the workers stepped to the side, revealing that the plant had already erupted into a dense bush as tall as his chest, sprouting fists of blade-leaves in all directions. One of the other workers did something that set the whole thing quivering with a noise like an emptied cutlery drawer. " Bloody... thing ," the worker tailed off, at a loss for a suitable epithet. Then, examining his steel mail gloves for damage, he told someone to fetch the torch .
    "All the more reason for following procedure," Calum told Sneijder. "Given the political ramifications, they will be examining every step of the process. We've got to be above board all the way." This was true, but what was truer was that he'd suspected that he knew what was going on from the moment he saw the plant, and he'd wanted to postpone all of this as long as possible. If there was a contamination risk, the botanical one at least wasn't unmanageable. At least he'd got a decent night's sleep out of it.
    "All right, what's done is done," Sneijder came closer. "But I need to ask you about Ghessareen."
    Calum had thought he might. "What about it?"
    "Well, specifically the quarantine procedures?" Sneijder said. "Is there any chance at all..."
    "That I could have brought something back with me?" Calum sighed. "Well, let's see. They pulled us off Ghessareen with the job half done and no explanation, and replaced us with an inexperienced team of Bellussibellom. Then they quibbled over every item in our necessarily incomplete report, rendering any information about any of the catalogued species confused to the point of useless. And even though they made us go through the decontamination procedure three times before they let us leave the station, virtually everything on the Ghessareen orbital just happened to be glitching from a suspected virus that they never did track down. So, in short, yes, it's possible that I brought something back with me that wasn't killed dead like it should have been. It would certainly be one explanation for how this thing ended up in my mother's garden."
    Sneijder's nose wrinkled in disgust. He might have known what the problem was with the Ghessareen survey, but he wasn't telling.
    Calum wasn't going to let being kept in the dark about it upset him.