Nightchaser

by Amanda Bouchet

  “I cleared a spot for it in Cargo 2,” Jax said, already digging into his lunch.

  I nodded my thanks. Cargo Bay 2 had plenty of free space for crates and a huge refrigeration unit that stayed cold even when the ship wasn’t running for days.

  “Any news from Mareeka?” Miko asked.

  “I haven’t checked in yet today.” Wiping off my fingers, I reached for the tablet I’d used earlier to order the food and supplies. As soon as it powered up again, I shot off a quick note to the director of Starway 8.

  A response came back almost immediately.

  “Same,” I told the others after reading the message. “Sickness but no quarantine, probably because there haven’t been any deaths yet. High fevers. The kids are weak.” I skimmed the few lines again. “Ships are starting to avoid the Sector as the news spreads, and food is getting scarce.” I glanced back up. “Mareeka says to stay away.”

  “What’s your plan?” Jax asked, obviously knowing we weren’t staying away.

  Honestly, Mareeka should have known better herself. How many times had she stuck me on ventilation-shaft cleaning duty for not following her directions? A hundred times, at least.

  She’d hoped my dislike of closed, still spaces would deter me and turn me into a better listener. It hadn’t. I’d just powered through my mild claustrophobia and cleaned the damn ducts.

  “As soon as Fiona gives us the go-ahead on the cure she’s working on, we’ll bring it to Starway 8.” I glanced at our resident scientist. She was doing her best to eat her noodles and sauce, but it looked as though it took a real effort and didn’t make me want to touch my own lunch very much.

  There were noises of consent from around the table, but I hadn’t been worried about anyone backing out. I shut down the tablet and picked up my fork. I would power through my meal just like I’d powered through those ventilation ducts.

  Eyeing the limp worms in mud, I scooped up a bite and aimed it at my mouth. Bleh. It tasted as bland as it looked.

  “Have you concluded that the blood Tess found in the lab is the base ingredient for the super soldier serum?” Miko asked.

  “Definitely,” Fiona answered, wiping off her mouth. “But it’s pure. Not only in the sense that it’s undiluted, but also in the sense that nothing potentially dangerous has been added to it.”

  “Perfectly safe for kids? Or anyone else?” I wanted to be sure, even though I’d already asked.

  “As far as I can tell, it’s simply ahead in terms of immuno-defense.” Fiona started to look excited and set down her fork. “Like an improved version of our own blood. If we’re life-form A, for example, then this is from life-form A1. Only slightly different, and still totally compatible, but a lot better.”

  “So life-form A1 will survive over A?” I asked.

  “Biologically speaking, it has the better chance,” Fiona confirmed. “Think of it in terms of natural selection and the very slight genetic modifications of evolution that, over time, make a huge difference to an entire species.”

  My brain seemed to slow down and speed up all at once, bouncing between shock and possibilities. “But a beneficial genetic anomaly needs to occur first? Propelling that change?”

  Fiona nodded. “In this case, the anomaly seems to have produced a person who’ll never get sick.”

  Was I life-form A1? Human, but improved? “Genetic flukes happen all the time, though. Is this one different?” I asked.

  “A little.” Fiona shrugged. “It’s not just a small jump; it’s a big one. And it has the potential to spread—if it hasn’t already.”

  “What do you mean?” Miko asked.

  “I ran diagnostics at the molecular level. It’s a change at the genetic level, and it appears to be a dominant trait,” Fiona said.

  Trying to process that, I asked, “How do we help the orphans with it?”

  Her tasteless meal as forgotten as mine, she said, “I was hoping at first that this might somehow inoculate them for life, but I was wrong. A1 blood will eradicate the infection, but it’ll also eventually get eliminated from the host body, because it can’t change the host’s own white blood cells. Giving someone A1 blood just temporarily adds to what they’ve already got.”

  “How do you know this?” Shiori asked, chiming in for the first time with a question that, as usual, landed in the air somewhere between Fiona and me on the opposite side of the table from her.

  “I mixed some of the test blood with some of my own and then watched,” Fiona answered. “The immune cells from A1 and mine didn’t merge in any way. They stayed separate. But A1 cells will help fight off sickness in the short term, like taking medicine. And that just further confirms that there’s no long-term risk.”

  “So the shift has to happen at the genetic level?” I asked. “You have to be born with it?”

  Fiona confirmed with a nod. “It was either a fluke at conception, and A1 is the first step toward evolution of the human species—if A1 procreates—or whoever’s blood this is had at least one parent already carrying the genetic material necessary to produce a child with type A1 blood.”

  Holy shit! The few bites I’d eaten were about to come back up. Mom got sick—she died from a fever. So either I was the starting point of type A1 blood, or my father…

  I couldn’t recall. Had he ever gotten sick?

  Noodle-and-red-sauce acid burned in my throat. If the Grand Galactic Overseer was the next step for the human species, we were so incredibly fucked.

  And if he was, he’d also used me as a lab rat instead of himself. If he was exactly like me, I was going to wring his neck.

  Horror percussed through me like the beat of a too-loud drum. If he knew, he could have saved her. All he’d had to do was inject Mom with some of my blood. Or maybe his own.

  I jerked back as if slapped. Of course he knew. I’d never tried to find out the truth before now because I’d been running from what I thought was something alien and horrible in my blood. And the possibility of my father tracing me back to any tests and finding me had put the fear of all the Powers That Be into me. But Fiona had figured it out in just a couple of days in a makeshift lab full of pieced-together, stolen equipment on a beat-up old cargo ship. With all the technology the Overseer had at his disposal, there was no way he hadn’t known. It was simply that creating enhanced soldiers with my special healing blood had been more important to him than saving Mom.

  “Tess?” Miko bumped my leg under the table with her foot. “You all right?”

  Rattled to the core, I said, “Yeah. Just thinking.” My voice came out hoarse, and I cleared my throat.

  Miko had lost her hand the day of the explosion on Hourglass Mile. No, she didn’t lose it; she sawed it off just before the fortuitous blast. Fortuitous for us, anyway. She and Shiori found the Endeavor before Jax and I did. We hadn’t known, or cared, who was on board when we’d vaulted up into the open cargo cruiser and raced toward the bridge. As long as there weren’t guards with guns on the ship, we were good. The two small women huddled in the corner together, one old and blind and the other spewing blood, hadn’t seemed like much of a threat.

  That afternoon sometimes still felt like yesterday, especially when I was alone at night in the dark, and with this new, unimagined information about myself, my thoughts raced wildly, just like Jax and I had that day.

  I’d powered up the ship and taken stock of the controls—luckily nothing newfangled or fancy—and been ready to take off when Jax had looked out the huge window panels and seen a pair of inmates running across the cargo-level docks. He’d yelled for me to wait, thinking they could make it to us. But then we’d watched as the man was gunned down by the chasing guards, hit in the head. The woman got hit, too—in the leg. She’d fallen, sliding through her companion’s blood.

  Even though we hadn’t known them, Jax had run back out, picked her up, and brought her on board the s
hip with us, somehow escaping the hail of bullets himself. The woman was Fiona. Just like us, she and her partner had run up from the mines, making a break for it as half the prison had dissolved into chaos and flames.

  We’d taken off, bullets pinging against the cargo cruiser’s outer armor, and I’d jumped us all the way to the Outer Zones, somehow bumbling through the coordinates math with Jax’s help, even though I’d been terrified of ramming us into a moon.

  Everyone was still alive when I slowed us down in 17, and Jax and I did our best to clean and bind Fiona’s wound and doctor the blunt stump of Miko’s arm. Miko had been in shock, in and out of consciousness, and Shiori had been murmuring soft words and holding her close.

  There’d been blood everywhere—so much that I was surprised it hadn’t permanently stained the bridge. Something from the explosion had sliced my hand. I had no idea what, but it had throbbed like crazy, and I’d been bleeding, too.

  Fiona had seemed like she had a decent chance of making it, but I was sure Miko would die of infection. We’d found the ship’s medical supplies in a severely understocked state. No antibiotics. Some saline. Hardly enough sterile gauze.

  Getting help had been out of the question. We’d have endangered any doctor or clinic that chose to assist us, and I was sure someone would see us and turn us in, even in a rebel-friendly zone. That was when Jax first told me about the Fold—a place where we could get medical treatment and disappear. He had friends there. It turned out that Fiona did, too, and that was when they discovered they had more in common than any of us could have possibly known, including a birth planet. We eventually found the rebel hideout, but it had taken days and days of searching, even for people in the know.

  And in that time, Miko hadn’t died. She never got even a hint of infection. Neither did Fiona. Nor did I.

  I understood why now. I’d bled on their wounds from my own cut hand, which had been the last thing to get cleaned and bandaged. Digging for a bullet. Unsteady stitches. Blood-soaked bindings over a stump that had made me want to vomit. I’d been their antibiotic.

  I turned back to our botanist—who was capable with a lot more than just plants. Unsurprisingly, plant genetics had been her specialty, although the force of things had set her on the path to biological warfare. Somehow, I couldn’t feel sorry for those goons who’d breathed in her poisoned spores. Incinerate a planet, and you got what you deserved.

  “It can’t be ingested, right? The kids would need to have shots?” I asked.

  “Shots, yes,” Fiona confirmed. “But a small dose should be enough. I can keep preparing the injections while we get ready to take off. I’ve already done a whole batch, and I remember seeing a few big cases of needles and syringes in the lab attachment. Can you get them for me along with more bags of blood?”

  I smiled, but it felt weak. Triumph never came without sacrifice. “How many?” I asked.

  There was no real surprise for me in her immediate question back. “How many do we have?”

  I hesitated. “Four.” I hated the answer I had to give her, but Shade would be done soon, and I couldn’t risk taking more than that in the time before we left.

  Fiona recoiled in shock. “That’s not enough. There are thousands of kids.”

  Yes, but I was only one body. “Knowing Mareeka and Surral, they’ve already imposed a quarantine of their own to try to minimize contagion. Not everyone will be infected.” I hoped.

  “Yeah, true,” Fiona said. “Still, keep looking. Maybe more bags will turn up.”

  I nodded, my already minimally appetizing lunch turning over in my stomach and making it cramp. I ate my noodles anyway. I needed to keep up my strength.

  * * *

  A few hours later, I delivered the blood and syringes to Fiona. I must have done a good job of pretending I wasn’t about to collapse, because she didn’t seem to notice anything strange about me. I made it back to my room without seeing anyone else, drank a bottle of water, and then took a nap with Bonk. Cats sure slept a lot.

  When I woke up, I drank another bottle of water and ate a protein bar while I sent a message to Mareeka, telling her I had a cure and to get the sickest ten percent of the orphans ready for a round of shots.

  Reading between the lines of her message back, I could tell she wanted me to be cautious, but she also wasn’t going to refuse something that could save her kids. I could also tell that ten percent wasn’t going to cover it. Double that, and maybe we had a chance.

  Shit. I felt nauseous just thinking about it, but if I took a bag each morning and evening for the next three days, that was six additional bags we could use to prepare more shots. It wasn’t the nine I’d already given, but it was more, and I could probably do it without totally incapacitating myself.

  For now, though, it was time to rest.

  Leaning over, I rummaged in my bag and pulled out the book Susan had given me on the Mornavail. It took a while to get used to the flowery writing, but the farther in I got, the more convinced I became that it wasn’t a religious text at all, but rather a thickly veiled retelling of the final Sambian War from the winner’s perspective.

  The Mornavail—Dad and his goons, if I was reading this right—were good, righteous, the answer to so many prayers.

  “Nope,” I muttered, scratching under Bonk’s chin as I read.

  Susan seemed to have taken the poetic, handwritten text literally, even though it wasn’t that old, buying into its suggestion that the Sky Mother had set up some new group of people to spread her light. Personally, I saw an attempted allegory for our new “peace,” who had brought it, and how it had been won.

  True, order had been restored after decades of war, but stability hadn’t been so much offered as imposed, with one freedom after another being tossed in the garbage and replaced by the Overseer’s fanatical prose.

  As a young man, my father had already been an imperialistic mastermind. Early in his career, he’d finished what the two generations before him had started by conquering the remaining free Sectors and bringing them one by one into the giant galactic machine, whether they wanted to be there or not. The Dark Watch was born, and before anyone knew what was happening, Dad’s reign was official, and his goons were more numerous than the stars.

  Narrow-minded ideas about the natural order of all things, including how people should think and act, became law. What to learn wasn’t a vast choice anymore, but instead determined by statistical analysis and apparent strengths, with no regard for human interests or desires. Lifestyle choices turned limited, at least publicly, and the concept of self-determination got tossed out the door. It had already begun over the course of the previous Sambian Wars, spreading across the galaxy like a plague, but then my father had come along with the heaviest hand of all.

  I sighed, stroking Bonk’s soft fur. “Dad’s a Mornavail,” I told him. “In case you’re wondering, that’s a four-letter word.”

  Bonk purred.

  Susan had said I was like them, but she must have gotten the story all wrong. She’d grasped onto the idea of the Mornavail being a light to follow. Flip the pages of recent history, though, and they grew dark with blood.

  When I finished reading the book, I got up and locked it in my closet. Maybe I was wrong about it. I hadn’t found a single mention of the word Sambian in the whole story. It was possible I was overthinking things, and this was simply the ramblings of some zealot who’d been convinced the Sky Mother and Her Powers had tried again, making People 2.0 or something, because regular people just weren’t good enough.

  Since I was firmly agnostic, it was a lot easier to believe the Mornavail were the winners of the last Sambian War, with my father now lording over us all from what was once the Sambian System but was now Sector 12 and the heart of galactic imperialism.

  Home sweet home.

  I snorted out loud, but as I stretched back out beside Bonk, I remained perplexed
. The book had gone on and on about the Incorruptible, but the anonymous author also hadn’t seemed to glorify mass murderers, intolerance, autocrats, or imperialistic fanatics. In the end, I wasn’t sure what to think, but I was too tired to try to figure it out. Blood loss sucked.

  I closed my eyes, wondering what Susan had found so special about that book. Maybe I’d read the whole thing wrong. I wasn’t tempted to try again.

  I did know one thing, though. Whoever had penned that first paragraph should have shut the fuck up about the Fold.

  Chapter 18

  Shade worked like a madman for three days straight. His dedication to fixing the Endeavor made me pretty sure he wanted me up and off Albion 5 as fast as he could humanly make it happen. I wasn’t sure if he was doing it for me or for himself, if I should be happy and grateful, or if I should feel like crap.

  Feeling like crap won out, but that was also because I’d just passed over six more bags of blood that I’d miraculously “found” in a concealed refrigeration compartment. What luck!

  Having given myself a couple of hours to eat, rest, and recover—again—I took a quick shower with our new water from the same multigoods outlet as the food and cat supplies. Refreshed and dressed once more, I towel dried my hair with Shade Ganavan’s final bill staring me in the face.

  It was exactly what I’d expected. No more, no less. I combed the tangles from my hair and explained to Bonk how the man’s manically hard work to get me off his planet as quickly as possible had done wonders for my already fragile ego where he was concerned, but that because I was tenacious and incredibly attracted to him, I was going to give it one last shot.

  “What can I lose besides pride?” I asked Bonk.

  Shade had worked shirtless for most of the last few days, and we’d all gone outside more often than usual because it had been so beautifully sunny and hot. I’d snuck more peeks than I could count at his tanned skin and hard body, glad that the heat wave had given me an excuse to fan myself, especially when my needle-marked arms had meant wearing long-sleeved shirts. Shade and I had gone back to conversing easily again, although I always felt tension and desire pulling me taut underneath. He’d chatted with all of us, even talking theology with Shiori and getting Miko to open up.