Stars Beyond

by S. K. Dunstall

  “Stand back.” Not that there was anywhere to stand.

  Alistair raised his foot, slammed it against the door. There was no room to get any power to the kick. He forced the door open the rest of the way with his shoulder.

  They burst out onto the roof.

  This wasn’t the protected lobby where the aircars landed. It was the flat of the roof itself. The wind was almost strong enough to blow them away.

  “Oh, God.” Paola dropped to her knees, tried to bury her hands into the surface.

  “Don’t stand up,” Alistair ordered. “Head toward the lift lobby.” He crawled behind Cam, who was struggling.

  The aircar approached the lobby.

  Just in time. Just as ordered.

  But the lobby was on the other side of the roof, which meant the aircar was too.

  Could it land?

  The roof tilted, stabilized. The aircar hovered trying to find a level surface. Alistair grabbed Paola and Cam to stop them sliding. Nearly slid himself.

  “You called a car,” Cam said.

  “It seemed a good idea.” He kept his grip on them both. They’d have bruises tomorrow.

  If they made it to the next day.

  The roof tilted the other way.

  “Hold on.” He used the tilt to slide across the roof, dragging them with him.

  It took no more than five seconds, but those five seconds were the longest in Alistair’s life. Finally they reached the lobby. They were out of the wind.

  Alistair let Paola go and reached up to open the door of the aircar as it hovered a meter above the surface. Paola grabbed his legs, almost knocking him off balance. He steadied, then helped Cam through the open door. Paola staggered to her feet. Alistair scooped her up and threw her into the car behind Cam. A flailing foot forced him backward just as the building tilted again. He lost his footing, and his hold on the door. He grabbed in vain as he slid past the aircar toward the broken roof edge.

  The roof teetered on an angle. Alistair didn’t stop at the edge. He went over.

  Paola’s scream echoed behind him.

  He hit an exposed beam. Grabbed hold of it.

  Then the aircar was there, door wide open. A meter too far.

  “I can’t get any closer.” Cam’s voice was strained. “You’ll have to swing over.”

  The beam he had a death grip on collapsed. The floor tilted the other way. He rolled.

  The aircar swooped behind him. “Come on, Alistair. Hurry, hurry.”

  Another explosion rocked the building. Alistair was on his feet and running before the reverberations had stopped. He dived as the floor collapsed around him.

  He caught the bottom edge of the open aircar doorway. The aircar tilted under the impact. His hands slipped. Cam grabbed him and held on. The aircar steadied. Alistair pulled himself up and inside. Cam’s grip hindered rather than helped, but he was glad Cam didn’t let go. He collapsed onto the floor, sucking in deep breaths. Paola slammed the door shut behind them as he lay gasping.

  “State your destination.” The monotone of the aircar.

  “Justice Department,” Paola said, and Alistair was glad he didn’t have to answer.

  “Only you, Alistair, would think to call an aircar.” Cam put a hand to his stomach. “Remind me to throw up when I get back on solid ground.”

  “Take us to the nearest hospital,” Alistair ordered the aircar. “Priority override.”

  “Alistair!”

  “Hospital first. You can take the car on to the office once you’ve dropped us off.”

  Paolo looked at Cam and didn’t argue.

  The hospital took Cam straight in and wanted to take Alistair in at the same time.

  “I’ll wait till Cam’s out.”

  He was glad he’d refused when the doctor drained the genemod machine two minutes after Cam had gone in.

  “What’s going on?”

  “The man’s a walking dellarine mine,” the doctor said.

  What did that have to do with it? “Don’t touch the transurides.” He didn’t have his blaster, wished he did.

  “You knew he had them?” The doctor rolled Cam into another machine.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re lucky I’m an honest man, or I’d be in heaven right now.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Preparing hu-skin. I’ll fix his back by putting hu-skin on it, but I’m not touching his mod. Who knows what damage I could do.”

  “You’re telling me he has to go back to Nika Rik Terri to be repaired?”

  The doctor grunted. “Rik Terri. I might have known.” He flicked switches. “I’m telling you to take him to a modder. Someone who’s had more experience with transurides in quantity than I have. If he can afford mods like that, he can afford a decent modder.”

  “But you will fix his back.”

  “I just told you I would.”

  “Thank you.”

  The doctor shook his head. “You are lucky it was me. If you can imagine the temptation in that man’s body.”

  “Thank you,” Alistair said again.

  The doctor moved on.

  “Excuse me,” an orderly said. “Visitors wait in the waiting room until patients come out of the machine.”

  After what the doctor had just said. No way. Alistair pushed through his Justice Department ID and stayed in the room with Cam. He leaned against the wall and called the Justice Department to report. The agent in charge—Dirk Cartwright—knew him. “You’re not going to get involved in this, are you, Alistair? You know you can’t work on a case that involves you.”

  “I’ve enough of my own work to do.” It was the first friendly work voice Alistair had heard, not counting Paola’s. He had fallen a long way.

  “Where are you?”

  “At the hospital. Agent Le-Nguyen was hurt.”

  Dirk grunted, glanced down at the screen in front of him. “Rookie,” he said. “Sucks to be them, although I can’t imagine Paola placing you with a junior. I’ll get to you after we’ve investigated the scene.”

  “Thanks.”

  The doctor came by half an hour later. “There’s a lounge outside where you can wait.”

  “I know.”

  “He’ll be another hour.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  Alistair leaned back against the wall, closed his eyes, and listened as the noises of the busy hospital flowed around him. He should go back to the office and report in. Or find a place to stay.

  Cam had stayed by him in those horrible first months on Zell, when his eyes were healing and he’d worried he’d be nothing but a burden to the settlement. The least he could do was wait for him to come out of the machine.

  The only time Alistair had been in a genemod machine recently was on the Santiago ship orbiting Zell immediately after their second capture by the Ort. For diagnostic purposes only, thank God. That was when he’d first begun to suspect that Santiago was trouble. That they wouldn’t abide by the contract.

  * * *

  • • •

  Angel had sent Barry and Talli up to the ship to be checked over by the ship’s doctor.

  “I want the other two as well,” the doctor from the Santiagan ship insisted.

  “I’m not going.” Alistair had survived one treatment from the Ort. He could survive another, and he needed to understand what was happening here on Zell.

  “He’s hiding something,” the doctor told Angel.

  His eyes. He didn’t want them touched. “I have work to do, and I don’t want you charging for medical expenses I haven’t asked for.”

  “It’s also a security issue,” Angel said.

  Of course it was a security issue. “You’ve finally noticed.”

  “We are ready to work; you were stopping us. Barry sent Talli out t
o see what you were hiding.”

  Seriously?

  “Thank you for the trust, Angel,” Melda said. “Fifteen years of marriage and it comes to this. You don’t even have the decency to ask your own partner what is going on.” She turned away. “Enough discussion. Take your people up to their doctor. Leave my people alone.”

  She didn’t see the contempt flash in Angel’s eyes. Alistair did, and from the troubled way Cam’s gaze met his, Cam had seen it too.

  “You seem to forget.” Angel’s voice was ice. “I oversee the cleaning up here. If you get in my way—”

  Alistair made his own voice mild. “I hope that’s not a threat. Because I would like to remind you that under the terms of the contract, the head of the settlement is responsible for the settlement until completion of that contract.”

  “You work for a company. You answer to your superiors.”

  “Actually,” Cam said, “most of them don’t work for the company. They’re contractors. The conditions of their contract are that they spend two years here, doing the work they are contracted to do.”

  And a lot more they weren’t contracted to do, given the company left so many supplies off the semiannual supply shipments.

  “They answer to the company-supplied person in charge. That’s Melda.” Cam looked apologetically at Melda. “While you may have to do what Angel says—if she’s your superior—Alistair doesn’t. He only does what you ask him to.”

  He shrugged at Alistair. “Contracts 101. Even a bad lawyer knows that. Sorry.”

  Alistair understood what the apology was for. Cam had left Melda in an awkward position. If Angel was her boss, Melda had to order Alistair to go with Angel. But Melda wouldn’t do that.

  “I’ll go up with Angel and Barry,” Alistair said. “The doctor can check me over. I know I got an injection.” Though it hadn’t impacted him. “We’re not sure if Cam did.”

  Melda didn’t thank him, didn’t have to. They’d worked together for two years. She looked at Angel. “I want it under contract that we won’t be charged for the doctor, or for you taking Alistair up to the ship and back. That you won’t treat him, and you won’t charge us.”

  Because they all knew how companies worked. Those medical expenses could cost the group their bonus.

  “Fine,” Angel agreed.

  “And I want that recorded and signed before Alistair goes. No charges for any of this.”

  “Fine, I said.”

  “And I want to see it when you’re done,” Cam said. “I am the settlement lawyer, after all.”

  It was a pointed reminder that they still had a legal representative, and Angel would do well to not try to dupe them.

  * * *

  • • •

  The doctor took Barry first.

  Angel called the hospital fifteen minutes after Barry went into the machine.

  “He’s been injected with a virus,” the doctor told her. “Gets into the blood. From there it goes to the heart and everywhere else. He’s lucky we caught it in time. I’m clearing it from his system. He’s also hallucinating. Hopefully he’ll come out talking sense.”

  Alistair listened, trying not to worry about his own upcoming scan. What would the doctor do about his eyes? Alistair was used to the way he saw now, couldn’t imagine what he’d do if they took the expanded sight away. Could they even fix it, or would his vision revert to what it had been like before the Ort had changed it? Destroyed.

  He leaned back against the wall and tried to think of other things. Like, why had the Ort injected them all with a virus? It hadn’t seemed to harm any of them. At least not yet.

  “Is it contagious?” he asked the doctor.

  “It doesn’t appear to be, thank you very much, or this whole ship would be in lockdown.”

  After Talli, it was Alistair’s turn.

  “You’ve got the virus,” the doctor told him when he came out. “It’s all through your blood.”

  Alistair looked at the walls—his best indicator that he could see what others couldn’t—and saw electrical circuits as warm lines. He looked around, trying to reassure himself everything was still functioning.

  It was.

  He tuned in to what the doctor was saying, didn’t know what he’d missed.

  “You’ve a knee that will give you real problems in around three years. You’ve a scar like an incision across the top of your head, it looks like an old surgical job. Barbaric. Your eyes—I suspect the virus got into them. You’ll probably go blind. But I didn’t fix a single thing. I can’t. Your hastily cobbled together contract states no medical repairs, investigative scan only.”

  “Is he done?” Alistair hadn’t noticed Barry, waiting on the same bench Alistair had waited on earlier.

  “As done as I’ll ever make him.”

  “We’ll get something to eat on the way to my office.” Barry led the way along a narrow passage. Alistair paused to let a crew member exit from a nearby cabin. He glanced inside. The cabin was small. He saw four bunks, two on two, so close they touched, with a single step between the bunk and the door.

  The galley wasn’t much larger than the room the crewman had come from. Barry dialed up two food packs. He handed one to Alistair—it was warm—and led them down another passage to an office that was no bigger than either room.

  “They don’t give you much space.” They’d be extra cramped on this trip. There were fifty colonists to accommodate.

  “Tell me about it.” Barry sat down, tore the covering off his meal. “The ship’s ninety percent cargo hold. It holds a regular crew of ten. With the twenty guards we brought along for this trip, plus Angel and me, we’re bursting at the seams.”

  Alistair pulled the cover off his own meal. Where did they plan to house the colonists on the return journey? In one of the cargo holds?

  “So,” Barry said. “These creatures. Tell me about them.”

  The Ort. Melda had come up with the name, back when they’d finally accepted that their kidnappers weren’t human.

  “We can’t call them aliens,” Yakusha had said. “We’re the aliens. They’re local.”

  “We can’t call them locals either. We’re here as well, and we don’t know where they are.”

  “The Hidden, then? Mantis?”

  “You can’t call them after a bug.”

  “Enough,” Melda had said. “They are ort—‘of this place.’” It was a word her grandfather had used.

  “The Ort,” they agreed, and they’d called them that ever since.

  “There’s not a lot to tell,” Alistair said now. “Melda sent a report when we first became aware there may have been someone else on the planet.” True, the report had been couched vaguely, but at the time they weren’t sure of what was really going on. “I believe the reply was along the lines of ‘deal with it.’” Alistair shrugged. “Then the incidents became more frequent. They kidnap someone, inject them with this virus, and we find them a few hours later.” He shrugged again. “So far it doesn’t seem to have harmed anyone.” Not even him, and he’d been the first, nearly two years ago.

  “And they’re local.”

  “We think so. Tell me”—he should have asked Barry earlier—“what did you see?”

  Barry shuddered. “Legs on a pole. A bright, leaching green that sucked the color out of everything.”

  Which was pretty much what everyone else had seen, right down to the color. Something in the ultraviolet or infrared must change that green to white.

  “What do they want?” Barry asked.

  “We don’t know.”

  “Are they intelligent?”

  They had transport with engines. Hospital rooms with padded benches. They’d damaged and repaired Alistair’s eyes—without, so far as he could tell, a genemod machine. They’d deliberately injected humans with a virus. “What do you think?”r />
  “They might have bitten us. Or maybe we just caught a virus. We don’t know Zell all that well.”

  “That kind of denial will get you killed one day.”

  He hadn’t wanted to believe either. Not the first time. When he’d finally faced up to it, he’d told Melda and Cam. Melda had initially flatly refused to believe it. Cam had shrugged and said, “At least they saved your eyes.”

  “What do they want?” Barry asked again.

  Alistair shrugged. “It’s going to take time to find out.” Time they didn’t have. Maybe this was how they got their two weeks. “Santiago has to decide their priorities. Is cleaning up here still the most important thing?”

  He didn’t mention the bonus. Barry might not know about that. Then again, he might.

  Barry stared at the screen in front of him. Alistair couldn’t see what was on it. “Let’s keep this to ourselves until we decide what we’re doing.”

  “I don’t understand.” It was better to know exactly what was being asked. “How do you mean, keep it to ourselves?”

  The whole settlement knew about it, Barry’s team, and the doctor. Whom else was there to tell?

  “Don’t tell anyone on this ship.”

  “I’m not the only one who’s seen others. Nor are you. There’s Talli as well.”

  “She’s taken care of.”

  Alistair hoped he meant that differently to the way it came out. Barry moved over to the door—one step. “Let’s go.”

  Alistair took his lunch with him.

  As they walked to the shuttle, Alistair saw more crew quarters. It was a cramped ship. The warnings showed that this floor and the shuttle floor were the only ones with oxygen and heating. The shuttle bay, when they arrived, was surrounded by locked bulkheads. Each bulkhead had closed doors and huge, red warning signs. NON-LIVING CONDITIONS—NO OXYGEN, NO AIR.

  “Those things were gross,” Talli said, joining them at the shuttle bay. “What were they?”

  Barry frowned at her.

  Talli pantomimed zipping her lips. “Not a word.”

  “Talk about it on the ground,” Barry said.

  Alistair took a seat on the shuttle, looked around. It held eight people. “Is this the only shuttle you have?”