Eons Semester (The RIM Confederacy Book 8)

by Jim Rudnick

  From another inner office, a door opened up loudly and a shrill yelling voice rang out.

  “I’m telling you—it was her! I know my twin and it was her, and yet she’s been gone for years. Yet there she was on the street, walking and window shopping—but by the time I could get the bus to stop and get off and run back to that spot, she disappeared,” the young woman cried out.

  She stomped out from the back area, and all could see that she was upset as she loudly proclaimed that she had just seen her twin.

  Kendal trailed after her, nodding and putting a hand on the upset woman’s shoulder, trying to calm her, but she was having none of it.

  “You said that couldn’t happen—you said that they had taken away my twin—yet there she was, shopping on the street. I know my twin—even though she died—and yet there she was. And you said they’d killed her, and yet there she was—I saw her just yesterday …” the woman sobbed, falling into Kendal’s arms in grief.

  Kendal nodded, stroked the woman’s hair, and tried to comfort her as best she could.

  “Yes, Joy, yes … I know …” she said over and over, leading the woman slowly back toward an inner office to comfort her in private.

  The assistant looked at the twins still waiting, smiled, and went back to her own area behind reception, while the office quieted once more.

  Twenty more minutes passed, and then the upset woman, now quite calm, walked by and out the front door, while Kendal approached the two waiting women in reception.

  “I am so, so sorry about that. But I do thank you for your patience. Please follow me,” she said as she led the way to a side meeting room and sat at the round table within. She had a tablet and entered something as the two fraternal twins doffed their jackets and sat before her.

  She looked at them and smiled. “That was very unusual, but a part, I’m afraid, of what we see often here at the Twins Cooperative group,” she said calmly, knowing there would be more questions.

  One twin nodded but asked, “What was that all about?” Her voice was polite but searching for an answer.

  Kendal nodded. “Twins face a lot in our Issian society—you as twins, even though just fraternal twins, would know that already. One thing that is, or rather was, unknown is that sometimes—very seldom, mind you—after medical procedures, the Capgras Syndrome can occur,” she said as she shook her head.

  “Sorry, but what is that?” the other twin asked.

  Kendal nodded and sat back as she turned off her tablet. “Sometimes, a person who is undergoing a medical procedure that requires anesthesia, you know, putting the patient to sleep, requires that Ketamine be used—it’s a drug. The woman you just saw—yes, a twin too—has asthma, and last week she needed to have an outpatient procedure done to clear up her increased bronchial secretions. They used Ketamine, as it is one of the best drugs to use as it suppresses breathing so much less than other anesthesia drugs. However, what sometimes in some limited cases happens is that Ketamine can cause hallucinations—and what is also called the Capgras Syndrome. This occurs when a person—this twin—meets or sees someone and they suffer from a delusional misidentification. For instance, where you suddenly believe that your wife or your child has been replaced with an identical copy or clone. It’s not your wife but an exact duplicate. Happens rarely but it does happen. In this woman’s case, as she had a twin that died a few years ago, the delusions that she got from the asthma procedure last week meant that she identified a woman on the street—a stranger—as her dead twin sister,” Kendal said as she shook her head slightly.

  “Happens—and as we are all about twins here at the Cooperative, she came here looking for help. I am sorry to say that when we explained, and we requested verifications by her own doctor about the Capgras Syndrome, she was saddened but did see the truth. I suspect that she’d have been much happier to have her twin back—but that, of course, is impossible.”

  Kendal looked at the twins in front of her and smiled. “Being a twin often has issues that go beyond the ‘do we both wear the robin’s egg blue outfits today’ type of item, don’t they?” and that got a nod from both of them.

  “Will she be all right?” one said.

  Kendal nodded. “Yes, as soon as she realized that this was a result of medication used in her procedure, she calmed, and she has a new appointment with her doctor, as I said, to verify all of this.”

  The twin who sat with the magenta jacket over her lap leaned in. “We’d like to know more about the Twins Cooperative and how we might help here too,” she said and her sister, sitting beside her, patted her on her thigh.

  “Right,” Kendal said, as she rebooted her tablet and clicked some buttons. The view-screen on the near wall lit up with the Twins Cooperative logo of two twins entwined in the womb. As she clicked more buttons, a video played, and they all watched it as it explained the Twins Cooperatives goals and ambitions…

  #####

  On Neria, at their landing port, the ramp down to the tarmac wasn’t quick enough to just walk on, as the Caliph trotted at full gait to get off the Roc, his personal destroyer. The fact that he’d left the most recent RIM Confederacy Executive Committee meeting where he’d been thwarted at every turn by both the Master Adept and the Baroness was jammed in his gut.

  The Baroness had said—inferred perhaps might be a better way to have stated her position—that she would be willing to talk to him about the Ikarian longevity vaccine. She had it. It worked and he also knew that testing on criminals over on Halberd, the RIM prison planet, had been successful too. But she also knew that he had at least the same basic formulations—stolen from the Barony Hospital Ship just a year ago. But so far, his medical labs had not been able to duplicate the same results in their testing.

  We have it—and we don’t. But she didn’t know that. I played that card correctly, he thought. Still, she and the Master had forced him to accept that the Ikarian vaccine would be held off any public release until further testing was done.

  He knew what that meant. Yes, there’d be more testing, but at the same time, when those results were complete and the vaccine passed with flying colors, the first initial doses would go to Barony and Eons.

  The Baroness, as far as he could guess, was in her prime—so adding a few hundred years to that would be deadly. She ran ten planets now—had taken over his vice chairman’s position as the number two realm in the Confederacy. What she could accomplish in two hundred more years was unthinkable—he had to get the vaccine usable himself by his own labs.

  As he bounced into the seat of his scrambler, he quickly pushed the start button and dropped her into first. The tri-wheeled bike zipped away from the landing ramp on the Roc. He powered her up quickly, and the gate guard, knowing who was coming at him with no intention of stopping, hoisted the bar across the road, and Sharia flew by. Turning at the intersection ahead, he quickly passed all the slower traffic illegally in the left-hand lane and then took a side street at quite a clip in a left-hand turn that almost defied gravity. The scrambler tipped up onto only two of its large, knobby wheels, but it kept its footing as ahead loomed yet another gate, but this one was solid wood and steel.

  Lifting one hand off the handlebars, the Caliph thumbed a button on the gas tank that lay in front of him, and the message was sent as to who was approaching, and the gates ahead slid back noiselessly. He flew through the gateway, acknowledging his Ramat guardsmen with a quick salute, and then settled in for the three-mile trip across the small dunes to the Caliphate palace ahead.

  Palace, he thought as the scrambler climbed first one dune and then flew down another, is what it’s called, but in fact it’s a huge conglomeration of tents and buildings and service areas, all intertwined with sheltered walkways and even tunnels.

  Home is another word for it; he liked that better, and that thought got a real smile from him.

  He pushed the scrambler for even more speed, remembering that the tri-wheel suspension needed at least some purchase all the time on at least
two of its wheels. He’d dumped scramblers before, but not this time. He made a small directional correction to his left to keep the single front wheel still on the hard-packed sands as he came over the top of an angled dune.

  She hit hard, but the correction kept him on course and upright, and he slowed as he came around to the side of the palace to park his bike at arrival on the tarmac of the parking area.

  A Ramat guard snapped to attention and half-smiled at his Caliph. “Caliph, I see that she handled well.” As the guard who had worked on this area of the Palace for over twenty years, he knew his Caliph.

  Sharia nodded and said, “She went well—but could you get someone to just check the back end, left side, cables? When I had to brake to avoid a delivery truck back in town, she pulled left … so …?”

  The guard nodded and gave a brisk salute too. “I will look after that myownself, Caliph, and test it too. She’ll be ready for the next time you want to use her, Caliph.” He bowed his head slightly.

  Sharia nodded as he strode off the tarmac and entered the tenting to gain access to the Caliphate Palace. Another Ramat guard nodded to him and made some kind of notation on the entrance kiosk console. Sharia strode down the long brown-tented corridor. As usual, the corridor was setup to function only as a way to get from the parking area through to the central lobby area of the big building ahead, so it had no art and no style—not a thing but plain tiled floor and the brown tent walls.

  “Should do something about that,” he said to himself and then realized he had other things to worry about at present.

  In the lobby, his aides and his chief of staff, who knew he was expected, met him, and they took a centralized new corridor out of the lobby toward the inner areas of the palace.

  “Caliph, I did get your Ansible EYES ONLY and have assembled the lab team as per your request—they await you in the green room, Caliph,” his chief of staff said.

  Green room, indeed. If it was one thing that all his subjects knew, it was that the green room was so alien to Neria, a desert planet, that using it meant something was faulty. Something was wrong. Something was in your future and it spelled trouble.

  He nodded. Green room, indeed.

  Back in his inner palace quarters, he changed and refreshed himself with a brisk shower first. “One thing about being the Caliph means I can ignore all the issues about water,” he said to himself as the spray in the large plas-glass-walled shower sprayed down on him. He toweled quickly and then put on a clean and well-pressed brown arjack, fresh leggings, and his traditional polished indigo blue boots. At six feet five inches tall, he was average height for a Nerian. He checked out his image in the mirror and ran a set of fingers through his coal-black hair instead of looking for a comb.

  He nodded to himself. A Caliph for sure, and then he strode out of his Royal bathroom to leave his quarters and then down a side corridor that not many even knew existed toward the green room. No art in this one either, he realized, but there were a couple of consoles and monitors as sometimes he had needed to check on something before attending meetings and the like.

  At a plain wall in front of him, he swept up the tent wall, and it revealed another corridor, much bigger, and as he stepped into same, the brown tent wall behind him dropped back into place. Now a quick right-hand turn, followed by a walk, and, the tenting stopped as he entered a new palace building and a couple of doorways to a green door, which led to the green room.

  He stopped to gather his thoughts, but the overall failure of this team to produce results—desired results—flooded over him.

  He nodded to his chief of staff, who’d been waiting for him to get here, and they went in together, crossing the floor to the large table that sat in the middle of the large room.

  Already seated were eleven members of the Ikarian vaccine team and their leader, Doctor Bassim Najada, who stood up immediately when Sharia entered the room. The rest of the doctor’s team stood as well. They all watched as Sharia and his chief took up their positions at the far end of the rectangular table and waited, still standing quietly.

  After a moment of looking down at the tablet his chief had slid in front of him, Sharia looked up at the team leader.

  They’ll stand, he thought as he said politely but with a hint of threat, “Doctor Najada—I have read your reports—yours and your teams as well. You have failed to find me a stable, working vaccine. Have I stated that correctly, Doctor?”

  Sharia knew he was right. He also knew that by phrasing his question this way, the doctor had no way to spin his answer either.

  The doctor stared at him for a moment and then nodded. “Caliph—yes, exactly. We, so far, have not found a working formulation that has passed all its tests—”

  Before the spin came, the Caliph held up his hand. “Doctor, might I offer that I am therefore not happy. Not happy at all, as you have had more than a year with the best lab and equipment that you said you wanted and needed, and you and your team have failed?” Sharia said, and he then pointed a finger at the rest of the team.

  “Perhaps that’s it, Doctor. You have a team member, or even members, who have failed us—point them out, Doctor, and they’ll be on the next freighter to Neria Prime and a life of being an ore miner for the rest of their lives. Who is it, Doctor, that has failed us?” he asked and then leaned back to watch.

  Doctor Najada looked at his team members and then back at his Caliph—and he did that a few times.

  He’s valuing the way out of this, Sharia thought. He could throw a few team members under the bus—and gain time. Or take the blow personally …

  The doctor shook his head. “Caliph—that’s not it at all. It’s just that we have limited resources when it comes to the original supplied sample. We have to grow it very carefully and in acclimatized solutions only—so that all our testing is on the same exact sample. That takes time, Caliph—but I am happy to report that since my report was sent to you just two days ago, yesterday, we found out that a new track may be the way to get some results that are successful, Caliph,” he said, his voice full of hope.

  Sharia looked at him, took a full minute, and then nodded. “And that would be …”

  “The liver, Caliph. We have been led to believe, by our testing, that the liver may be the single functioning host for the vaccine. As you know, the liver has their special Kupffer cells, which eat up and break down the toxins or aging too perhaps, we now think. In short, these cells disarm the toxins by converting a dangerous chemical to a less harmful one or by packaging them for easier disposal through an Ikarian’s bile or urine. We think now that this new approach may reveal how the vaccinated liver doesn't always have to fight its enemies head on. Instead, it often uses a martial arts approach and paralyzes toxins by wrapping them in a water-soluble chemical so they land in your toilet rather than in a vital organ, or so we now believe, Caliph.”

  He was rubbing his hands together, as if he couldn’t wait to get back to the labs and get to work, perhaps, the Caliph thought.

  “Fine, Doctor. Take your team and find me results that I can use, but I do warn you that Neria Prime will be larger in population if you don’t find success soon, Doctor Najada—very, very soon,” he finished off.

  No one in the room doubted that he meant that.

  No one in the room moved.

  He nodded and waved his hand at the team, who almost fell over each other to get out of the green room.

  He looked at his chief of staff and said, “Identify, say, three of the team who we can send off to Neria Prime who we have replacements available for quickly. No need to do that just yet, but always good to be prepared.”

  #####

  As the RN Tripp touched down at the Dessau Naval Base, Tanner and his boss, the Rear Admiral Higgins, walked out slowly to landing pad number thirteen to greet Admiral McQueen, who was here for an inspection of the new academy. Tanner thought—and he was pretty sure that Higgins joined him in this—that the upcoming inspection would find some holes, some jury-rig
ging, some Rube Goldbergs, and yes, some not-so-good solutions. But he also knew that with only a month left in the allotted time to finish the academy, they were close to making that deadline.

  He nodded to the sergeant who drove by slowly to get the visitors’ luggage, and as the low truck went by, Higgins said, “Maybe we should commandeer that thing and hit the hills” in a sort of joking way. But not so much joking as Tanner knew too that some of their work was going to be picked apart.

  He smiled though when the landing ramp came down and Admiral McQueen walked down the ramp in big strides like he was in a hurry, which Tanner secretly hoped was true. Someone with an eye on their PDA clock seldom dug deep enough to see what lay behind the facade, he knew. Hardly sounded like the admiral though, he thought as he too stepped forward to come to attention and snapped a salute at the same time as his boss beside him. An aide had come along too, a CWO of some type, and they weren’t introduced to her, but she smiled at them nonetheless.

  “At ease, you two,” Admiral McQueen said as he too saluted back and then joined them on the tarmac.

  “This will be a formal inspection—you both know that. But I’m also aware that the almost insurmountable list of items that you two have faced and tried to get done is something that will mitigate circumstances. That said, safety and usability are the most important items, I would think, for opening day in, what, thirty-two days, I figure. I don’t care if networks aren’t up or if students are sitting on boxes—as long as we can get the new semester started is what I’m here to discover,” he said as he began walking away from the Tripp and toward a flyer that lay on the next pad.

  “Sir,” Admiral Higgins said as they strode alongside Admiral McQueen, “we’ve done our best with what we had to work with. And yes, as far as we can tell, the new semester will begin on time. Some boxes will also be in use, but on the whole, the Academy Towers are ready to open on the deadline,” he finished off.