by Patty Jansen
“Let them rescue him. It’s not your job, and if the president wants this man retrieved, why doesn’t she employ people to do so, as well as pay for it?”
We were back to the same argument made by Sheydu. And yes, they were probably right in a hard-nosed Coldi way, but that was still not how people on Earth operated.
I said nothing for a while. We had been extremely lucky to only come out with minor injuries, although I would have to get someone to look at my leg. It itched and stung and to be honest I didn’t feel too well.
“So, what were you actually doing here?” I asked. My mouth felt funny.
“I analysed the vehicle movement data from the Exchange and found a couple of interesting trails I wanted to look at.”
“Interesting, how?”
“Businesses with boats that regularly go out to the ocean. We got coordinates and went out to take aerial scans.”
“Find anything?”
“I’ll show you when we get home. Oh. And we found the guy.”
“Serious? You found him?”
“Yeah, he’s got a camp on a little island just around the corner from the Thousand Islands tribe settlement. I’ll show you that when we get home, too.”
“For all that you don’t want me to do this, you take a lot of interest in the project.”
“You want this man recovered. So we do it, despite trying to change your mind.”
I spread my hands, was going to say something, but I didn’t. This was, ultimately, how associations worked. One person was at the top. What this person said went.
I blew out a breath. Anger rolled off her in waves, so I thought it wise to keep my mouth shut until she cooled down a bit and I found out what upset her so much.
To be honest I didn’t really feel myself either. I was sore, hungry, shivery and smelly.
Eirani was going to have my hide for ruining my uniform.
But the fact that Thayu found Robert was a good thing, right? And the fact that he seemed to be alive. I should let his wife know.
Thayu landed the plane on the island’s small airport, which was mainly used for service flights. There were no passenger services or comforts.
As soon as we’d touched down, Sheydu and Veyada got up and collected their gear. Veyada had packed the fearsome gun away into its case, which he slung over his shoulder. He carried the helmet and goggles in his other hand.
I rose from my seat—and the world turned black around me for a brief moment. I was holding the back of the seat, so I didn’t fall, and I didn’t think anyone noticed, but I should really get my leg looked at. It felt heavy and numb.
I managed to stumble to the door and down the steps, but it was a good walk across the tarmac and another good walk to my apartment. It had to be the sitting still during the flight. Maybe it would get better if I walked.
In contrast to almost everyone else, I had nothing to carry. The others were all talking, but I didn’t hear anything of what anyone said. I just concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other—
—And my knee gave way. It felt like it turned to jelly. The next moment, I was on the ground and people were yelling around me.
* * *
When I next opened my eyes, I lay on my back in a bed in a strange, low-ceilinged cubicle. There was a wall to my right, painted creamy yellow, then a walkway through the middle of the cubicle and another bed to my left, empty.
The air was humid and laced with a strong scent of megon oil.
A window at my feet looked out over the roofs of the city. It was morning and sunlight streamed into the little cell. The door had to be behind my head. Above my bed was a shelf that contained blinking equipment, and a stand stood next to me with several “arms”, each of which contained a bottle with some sort of fluid and a thin hose leading to two arm bands around my left arm.
What the hell? I was in the hospital. What sort of contraption was this? Why was I in this cell?
I tried to push myself up, but my muscles didn’t have the strength. My leg ached. A vague memory came to me about blood running down my shin. Someone seemed to have wrapped it in a tight sock-like bandage.
Boy, I was really short of breath. I let myself fall back on the pillow.
“Oh, he’s awake,” someone in the room said.
I arched my neck on the pillow to look behind me, but as far as I could see, there was no one in the little cell with me.
I noticed the mirror at the foot end of the bed reflecting the door at the same time that the door opened with a hiss. It looked like there was some kind of air lock on the other side. Nicha came in. He wore a light purple gown of a thin, rubbery material that covered all of his arms and hung down to his knees, and a purple cap that covered his hair.
“Nich’?”
He walked to the bed and gave a me hug while trying to avoid all the tubes attached to my arm.
He sat on the edge of the other bed. Deyu came in after him, also wearing a purple gown and head covering. They looked like a pair of laboratory workers.
“You gave us a real fright,” Nicha said.
“What happened? Why am I here? Why are you wearing that funny get-up?”
He pulled the gown. “This? Non-friction material. This is the high-oxygen chamber.”
That explained the cubicle and the air lock, and the smell of megon oil, which was a strong fire retardant.
“But . . . how did I get here? The last I remember is getting out of the plane.”
“You collapsed,” Nicha said. “It was so scary. One moment you were walking home, and the next, you were on the ground with your eyes rolling back into your head.”
“Ew.”
“That’s not the worst thing. Look at this.” Deyu pulled out her reader and held it up so that I could see the screen. On it was a picture of some pale surface flecked with blood . . . I couldn’t even begin to describe what that horrible thing was. Flesh-coloured and raw, encrusted with a multitude of black-brown bulges.
“Is that my leg?” What were all those brown, barnacle-like things attached to it?
I glanced down at my leg again and the sock that covered it.
I was beginning to get a horrible feeling about this. I’d sometimes heard people talking about the leech-like parasites that lived in the water.
“Yup, that’s your leg,” she said. “You fainted, and your trousers were wet with blood. When we looked at your leg, we saw this. We brought you straight here.”
Holy crap and ew.
“These suckers really liked your blood. They told us there were more than a hundred of these critters on you.”
Ew, ew.
“Dey’, I don’t think he likes hearing about this.”
“Well, it’s true.” She put the reader back in her pocket.
“So . . .” My gaze followed the tube from my arm to the stand next to the bed with all the bottles, most of them with clear fluid.
“Temporary solution,” Nicha said. “Fortunately, the medicos knew that your blood is incompatible with their universal serum so they didn’t kill you, but you have to stay in here and you’ll probably feel pretty lousy until you can hunt down a compatible donor, or wait until your body regrows its own. They put out a call for donors, but the only one who has responded so far—Melissa—is not compatible.”
“I guess that’s what you get when you piss everyone off. How long is this going to take?”
“They said at least seven weeks.”
“Seven weeks!” A week in Barresh was five days, but still . . . “I don’t have that much time.”
“You have no choice. It takes as long as it takes.”
Great. I was feeling mortally tired already. “Can I at least go home?”
“When the medico is satisfied with the condition of your leg. It’s infected.”
“Where is Thayu?”
“Asleep in the next room. She’s been sitting with you all night.”
Damn, now I felt even more terrible. Why did I keep doing these stupid
things that upset the people I cared about most?
“I need to . . . there is so much to do.”
“You have a good rest and look after getting back to health. We’ll worry about the rest.”
“But . . . the elections, and the security breach and . . .”
“Don’t worry. We’ll look after everything.”
I made Nicha go through all the things he needed to look at. I was fading fast. I knew I was forgetting something, but couldn’t remember what it was before he and Deyu left.
I slept a bit.
A nurse came with some breakfast, but eating made me so tired that I finished only half of it.
Thayu had woken up by this time, and did her best to feed me as much as possible. “You have to drink lots as well.”
But just looking at that huge jug of water made me feel ill.
A medico came, and she undid the bandages. The smell that came from them almost made me throw up, and she confirmed my fear that I wasn’t going home just yet. “The water in the channels is very nasty,” she said. “There are many diseases. Your ability to fight them has been reduced because of blood loss. You really need a quick supply of clean blood. We’ve had a second person come in for testing. He was also incompatible.”
“Who was it?”
“The academic, Benton Leck.”
“I can go and ask the others,” Thayu said. She’d been sitting on the spare bed, looking at this bandage-changing procedure with a slightly disgusted expression on her face.
“That would be your best bet,” the medico said.
“What if we find no one?” My blood group was B negative and there was a real chance that no one who wanted to help was compatible, and the hospital wouldn’t have the targeted immune suppressants that hospitals on Earth had.
“Then it will be a long recovery.”
“Can we have a supply brought in?” Thayu said. “I’d be willing to go and get it.”
“That’s not necessary, Thay’—”
“Yes, it is. She says so. You could die if you don’t get this.”
“We can have it shipped. I can ask Melissa—”
The medico shook her head. “Unfortunately, the Exchange process doesn’t allow for cooled products to be transferred without spoiling. It keeps everything at body temperature. By the time your blood is here, it will have spoilt.”
“But what about artificial blood?”
“It still has a biological component.”
I thought there was blood that could be stored out of the fridge but I couldn’t remember the details. My brain was too foggy.
“My choices are to find a donor or face a long recovery with potential added illness?”
She nodded.
I attempted to push myself up, but couldn’t even manage that. Then all of a sudden I remembered what I’d forgotten earlier. “What about Robert? We have to get him.”
“Let someone else worry about that,” Thayu said. “I’ll ask Melissa.”
Damn, no. “We can’t ask Melissa. She has nowhere near our resources. I don’t even think she’s got a regular guard.” She’d use guards from the gamra pool, if she needed guards, but could only do that if she was doing work for gamra.
“Please, Thayu, can you look after her? Make sure she doesn’t get killed if she decides she wants to go out there?”
“I will try,” she said. “But you know what Melissa thinks of me. I can only give her the information we have. Whatever she decides to do is her decision.”
* * *
Thayu left after the medico was gone, and I stared at the ceiling, and slept and stared at the ceiling some more. I was so incredibly tired, and my leg hurt. That couldn’t be good.
A nurse came to check me, and I asked her if she could put my reader on the bed. In the mirror, I could see it on the table next to the door, but there was no way I could reach it. I attempted to read some work stuff, but I could barely hold the thing up. Also, these annoying flashes kept going over the screen. I’d stared at them for a while before my foggy brain registered that this meant there was an urgent message for me.
Damn it.
I had to blink hard against the wish of my eyes to fall shut, but managed to open my inbox. Red flashing at the top was a message from Margarethe Ollund.
I opened it up and stared at the screen. The message was only two paragraphs, but it seemed like an insurmountable wall of text to me. Certain words penetrated the fog. Consequences, press, assembly.
It was important. I had to read it, but I just couldn’t get past the first few words.
Then, to top it off, the reader beeped. I managed to find the right button and then almost dropped the thing.
“Yes?”
A male voice said, “It’s Yetaris Damaru here. You just opened a message with an urgency alert. I have a communication waiting for you. Let me put you through.”
“But . . .”
Oh man, I couldn’t think straight, let alone discuss something of extreme urgency.
But he was already making the connection, and not much later a female voice came out of the loudspeaker.
“Cory?”
Damn it, that was Margarethe Ollund, and I was still trying to decipher her message.
“I’m sorry I haven’t—”
“You’ve received my message,” she said.
“I have, but . . .”
“We really have to act now, because—”
“Listen. I got the message. I haven’t read it. I’m in the hospital and I’m not well.” I was fucking struggling. “Just tell me what’s going on, and I’ll find someone else to deal with it.”
There was a short silence.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Some of the urgency went out of her voice, and was replaced with something else that I couldn’t place: a kind of cool annoyance. “What happened?”
“I did something stupid. Too long to explain.” And entirely too revolting. “I’ll be out of action for a few weeks. Tell me, what it this about? What do you want me to do?”
“Robert Davidson. I take it you’ve heard of him by now.”
“Yes. We know where he is.”
“Good. Get him out of there and bring him home. A lot of people here are very upset about his disappearance. It’s all over the news. I don’t know how this happened and why he was able to leave, but it’s a big scandal here.”
“As I said, we know where he is.” Thayu hadn’t specifically said that he was alive, but I assumed so. “I’ll make sure he gets retrieved.” I knew I was forgetting something.
“Good. Please do this as soon as possible. Preferably not in a body bag. Body bags are untidy and cause me all kinds of problems.”
“I’ll do my best.”
She broke the connection and I was left puzzled. She hadn’t even greeted me or asked how I was or wished me a speedy recovery. That seemed really out of character for her.
But I was simply too tired to think about it further.
I closed my eyes and when I next opened them, it was dark outside. There was a light on in the room, and someone was rummaging through my clothes which were on a chair next to the door.
“Excuse me.”
The person turned around. It was Thayu. Wow, I was really out of it not to have recognised her.
She sat at the edge of the bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Tired. There is some problem on Earth. Margarethe asked me to return Robert as soon as possible. She didn’t say why there was such urgency.” She also hadn’t said anything about a budget.
Damn it, that’s what I should have asked, if I hadn’t been so tired. I could barely recall what the president had said.
“I went to see those people,” Thayu said.
“Which people?” What the hell was she even talking about?
“All the ones from your world who live in Barresh.”
Oh, I saw. This was about the blood transfusion. “And?”
“They’re . . . funny.”
“Not
in a good way, I gather.”
“Yes, well . . .” She folded her hands. “That fellow in the main square with his eating house almost chased me out of his shop. The tall old fellow who works at the History Centre has been in, but his blood is not compatible. He also said, and it really makes a lot of sense, that he stores a supply of his own. Why haven’t you done this?”
“I . . . I don’t know.” I guess I should have, and at some point someone might even have mentioned it to me, but I’d never done anything about it, and in hindsight that was fairly stupid.
“As usual, you think you’re invincible.”
“I’m sorry.”
“From now on, I will see to it that you do it. He also said that if you find no one else, you can use some of his supply, if you can find a way to make it useful to you . . . I’m sorry, that’s not what he said, but I am not familiar with the things he did say. He said it was hard.” She spread her hands. “I don’t know. I’m not a medico.”
“What about the others?”
“The old guy and his wife didn’t open the door. They were at home, but I guess they don’t want to help.”
“He is the one who owns the ferries whose yard we blew up last night.” Was it last night? I had no idea.
“Right. I guess I can see why he’s not interested in offering help.” She thought for a while. Then she said, “The most interesting reaction came from that guy who owns the warehouse.”
“Jasper Carlson. You mean, he actually spoke to you?”
“He did. His Coldi is almost as good as yours.”
“Not quite?”
“I said: almost. He and his partner run a courier business exclusive to the Trader Guild. They’re preferred suppliers.” That was a much-coveted label amongst merchants. Preferred suppliers to the Trader Guild usually made a lot of money. Again, I cursed myself for being so preoccupied with gamra things that I never checked out the people from Earth in Barresh.
Thayu continued, “He told me some very interesting things. I’m still hunting some of them up, but he will probably come to see you as soon as you return home.”
“Well,” I said, wiping my face. “That is quite a big change in behaviour for someone who couldn’t be bothered to come to the door when I went to see him.”