Nara

by M. L. Buchman

  He looked at the two open locks. Kirgen’s welds, fresh and dirty with carbon scoring, stared at him like the twin eyes of death. He stepped out of the lock and walked away down the corridor leaving a trail of red footprints.

  # # #

  Jackson leapt from beside his screaming girlfriend and plowed into Ri’s captors. She stumbled free killing one with a fist to throat and felled the last two with the needler she hadn’t had time to draw earlier.

  The mob, those few still standing, had wound down.

  Ri dropped one who still clung to a machete with a quick blow, not stopping to see if the woman’s neck had actually broken. The high hopes she’d carried since this afternoon were now shattered along with the bodies of those who chased the dream. Tenna sat holding her severed hand in her lap. Blood no longer pumped from the cut arteries.

  Ri made the mistake of looking when Donnie lifted the sheet from Yerke’s dead form. She sought desperately for somewhere to be sick and just made it to the lab sink. When she could breathe, she realized Donnie was heaving beside her. They were washing off each other’s faces when they heard Rolovsky’s voice.

  “Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn.” He was squatting by Bamker’s feet looking at something on the floor inside the Tank.

  Ri and Donnie supported each other as they stumbled over to the windowsill. At Rolovsky’s feet was a small shattered vial. He was twisting his head to read a label.

  “One-oh-five-seven. Can anyone look this up?”

  Silence reigned throughout the lab. Someone still in an isolation suit with a long tear down the side twisted off their helmet. Veller, his face white against his dark hair, moved to the lab console. He rested his hand on Jenningson’s shoulder. The small man rolled out of the chair and landed on the floor with a dull thud. One eye was sealed with drying blood, but the other stared up at the ceiling.

  Donnie’s scream matched Ri’s own, not to be outdone by Veller’s loud curses as he backed away. Donnie recovered first and stepped carefully around Jenningson’s body. She wiped at the console with the cloth she’d used to clean Ri’s face.

  “Console’s still up.” She wiped at it again, but only smeared the blood further.

  “He was looking at it when he died. He knew 1057 was loose. Psittacosis.” Donnie sounded it out. “Anyone have a clue?”

  Veller had backpedaled until he came to rest against the mouse maze. “Yes, Bamker…”

  Ri could see him swallow hard and very carefully not look at the people covering the doubled-up figure in the remains of an envirosuit.

  “He was testing the transmission of parrot fever between parrots and humans. It is one of the most virulent cross-species contagions. He managed to isolate the gene and separate the strains. That way it couldn’t jump species as Samnal’s bug did. Is 1057 marked human or parrot?”

  Veller moved to look over Donnie’s shoulder.

  “Parrot, I think. Is that the proper code?”

  Veller nodded. “We’re okay. Are the hatches open?”

  “Yes.” A new voice spoke.

  Ri turned to face Devra and Olias standing by the window. She almost broke down into tears she was so glad to see them. All her plans. All these good people. There were at least twenty bodies ranged about the room. The only standing equipment was coated in blood.

  Olias continued. “Both doors of the lock are tack-welded, no way to shut them. The seals were damaged by the torches, so it would do little good even if they could be closed. I have called a repair crew.”

  Devra moved past Olias as Jackson arrived next to his brother. She stepped over the wounded and the dead as if they weren’t there and glanced at the screen.

  “I’m no scientist. I saw the isolation code flash out and we came running. Explain.”

  Veller stepped back as if attacked even though he was a head taller than the Captain. “Well, psittacosis, in this strain will only infect Psittaciformes: parrots, cockatoos, parakeets, and so on. All the other orders of avians are safe. But it will be fatal to the Psittaciformes. And it’s airborne. Within the next hour or so they’ll all be dead, if they aren’t already.”

  She nodded and turned her fierce attention on Ri. The woman cared about nothing at the moment except her ship. That’s probably why she was Captain.

  “You told me the biomes have isolated air systems. Could they protect against this?”

  Ri felt a knot in her stomach. “No. The filters only block down to pollen size. This bug would have no problem getting through. Except for various pet parakeets, they all reside in R4. The air circulation is slower toward there, but it is still too quick for us to set up a better filtering system. There’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

  Devra barely nodded. At first Ri thought she was emotionless, but then she saw the working of the Captain’s throat as she struggled to avoid being sick.

  “Who did this?”

  Ri blinked at her through burning eyes. “It’s my project. I am responsible for…”

  “No,” she cut Ri off.

  “What is going on here? Why didn’t I know about…” Olias was still perched by the window, his face suffused with red.

  Devra faced the Sub-Captain. “This project was deemed need-to-know by me. Commander Jeffers will bring you up to speed later.” In the midst of all the blood and destruction, Ri gained new respect for Captain Devra Conrad. To all appearances she was calm and, without a question, in full command.

  “Now, I shall repeat the question. Who mounted this attack?”

  “I did.” Robbie stood just outside the windowsill. She was heavily blood-spattered though not apparently bleeding.

  Ri wrestled with an image she’d seen as she fought for her life. Flashes of background. Felt as much as seen.

  “No. Jaron was here. Right here. I remember him next to Jenningson.” She’d seen him squatting as well. “He broke the vial.”

  “The man is not a fool.” Robbie’s voice would brook no argument.

  “Then he saw it break. And can you say this is not the work of a fool?” She crossed until only the remains of the Tank’s wall separated them. “People are dead because of him. His fucking parrots are dead because of him.” The heat burned in her and she wanted to strike out at the massive woman. Or anyone else who was handy that she could blame other than herself.

  “Passionate, yes. Desperate, yes. Fool, no. Naive, perhaps.” Ri might have struck out but for the tears she finally noticed rolling down the woman’s cheeks. She felt about Jaron the same way Ri felt about Bryce. Perhaps more. Robbie had waited for Jaron for years. She’d even tried to take the blame for his deeds.

  Devra moved beside them. “Where is Mr. MacAndrews?” She glanced about the room, but only shrugs answered her.

  “If he knows about the psittacosis, I can guess.” Robbie’s voice filled Ri’s heart with a great heaviness.

  They were headed back into the jungle.

  # # #

  Jackson had escorted his hysterical girlfriend back to his stateroom by the time they climbed the stairs. Ri almost fell when she saw Jane on the floor of the lounge with Jill Emers’ head cradled in her lap. The woman had been nearly cut in half across the waist.

  Jane was sobbing as she looked up at Ri. “I ducked and they got her. I killed him with a needler, but it was too late. God I wish it had been me.” She hung her head. She didn’t even react when Devra reached over to close Jill’s eyes.

  They had a sheet over Hank. But Sicily clung to one of the arms so they couldn’t finish covering it. Wright was nowhere in sight. She certainly hoped for Donnie’s sake that her lover was somewhere about.

  The entire journey to Ring Four passed in a haze. Ri led, followed by the Captain and Robbie. Olias had stayed behind at the Captain’s orders to oversee the wounded and in case there was another attack of some sort. He hadn’t been pleased.

  Once thro
ugh the jungle’s airlock, Robbie took the lead and headed for the central clearing. They’d check there first and then up his favorite side trail. But it was halfway down the biome.

  Robbie was a shaking wreck and Ri was little better. It was like Nara, only worse. Nara looked awful, so death didn’t seem out of place, but the Jungle biome looked so clean and alive. Yet every few moments there was a rapid patter of a body falling through layers of leaves and then a thud as another dead parrot hit the ground. It was all Ri could do to place one foot before the other.

  Robbie flinched at each one and actually collapsed into a huddled ball when one landed at her feet. But she sorted herself out quickly and insisted on continuing.

  They found Jaron sitting in the middle of the jungle on the arching root of one of the trees. Ri could remember sitting there with Bryce, was it just a few days ago? It felt like a year.

  He was cradling his favorite, a scarlet macaw, his machete lay against the log beside him. Dozens of other brightly-plumed bodies, ranging from a dozen centimeters to a half-meter in size, were lying about him.

  Ri moved slowly around behind him, keeping a careful eye out, and lifted his machete. If he noticed, he didn’t react; he simply kept stroking the bird’s long red and blue feathers making sure each one was in place. Every now and then he would gently tap the unresponsive beak with a gold ring he wore on his middle finger. His other hand dangled uselessly and unnoticed.

  She sidled back to Devra and showed them the blade. Not a drop of blood on it.

  “I killed them all, Robbie.” Jaron’s voice, always soft, seemed to drift lost in the jungle.

  “I wasn’t thinking. It was on my shoes and I came in here. I touched it. Harold came to me before I could stop him. I realized too late. Not a breed will survive, will they?” He looked up at her with the great, wide eyes of a child. “Can you make it better?”

  “There must be a way we can save some, Jaron. We’ll find a way.” Robbie started to move toward him, but the Captain shook her head.

  Robbie squatted down until she was at eye level with the man.

  Ri wanted to pound her fists into his flesh for killing the poor people on the Icarus, the ones who had trusted her. And for killing humankind. What chance did they have now? The last thing she wanted to do was reason with the bastard.

  “They’re all dead Robbie. The man said it was a pure strain. I killed them all.” He looked past Robbie and up into the trees. Two birds thudded to the ground only a few meters behind him.

  They all jumped, even Devra this time. Jaron didn’t appear to notice.

  “They’re my pollinators. Without them, my jungle will die. I lost the bats, and now the parrots. Oh, my beautiful trees.”

  Robbie’s voice was calm and soothing. “I’m sure we can find another polli—”

  Jaron twisted to face Ri and she stepped back from his blazing anger. “You, Jeffers. You couldn’t accept the natural course of life. Of all people, I trusted you. I thought you understood the biomes; everything in balance.”

  His eyes were almost black with anger as he rose to his feet.

  “Your precious Captain Devra Conrad commanding,” he spit out her name, apparently not seeing her standing there. “She said, ‘Go forth and reshape humankind.’ And you went along to do it. Didn’t anyone ever teach you that science for science’s sake has brought all our worst disasters. No, you’re too young. But you must have studied them in school. Atom bombs, then carbonite weaponry, add on biological warfare and the WEC’s death camps. Over a billion people were sunk into the grave using that damned genome as a guide, and you think you can control such wild knowledge. They knew what they were doing when they nuked Auckland. I’ll give you something new.”

  With a scream that ripped an answering one from her own throat, Jaron leapt to his feet and rushed. The Captain fired, but it was Robbie who brought him down with a bone-crushing tackle that left him with his head shattered against a tree.

  Robbie instantly pulled him back and laid him out on the grass. Arranging him so that he almost looked natural. Stroking his hair to cover what she could.

  “How could he hate me so much? That is what I was trying to fix.” Ri fell to her knees in the soil.

  “He didn’t hate you that much.” Robbie arranged his hands in a cradle. She picked up Harold and placed him across his friend’s chest covering the hole the Captain’s shot had burned there.

  “There wasn’t that much anger in him. He wanted to die and you were the most convenient way to do so. By charging you he guaranteed his own death. He spoke often of the power you had over people so much larger than yourself.” Robbie wiped at bloody cheeks wet with her own tears as she tried to clean up the corpse of Jaron MacAndrews.

  Brightly-colored parrot bodies continued to thud to the ground around them.

  EPILOGUE

  15 February 1 A.A.

  Ri lay between the pinned sheets. They had rigged her a cocoon at the core where gravity couldn’t bruise her fragile nerve endings. For three weeks, the remaining members of the Icarus team had studied her in the hope of finding a cure.

  The genetic alteration of the single injection Bamker had designed had made her empathy much higher. But it also made her physical sensitivity intolerably higher as well.

  She couldn’t even sit up without the nausea overwhelming her, she was now more susceptible to vertigo too. The journey up to the core had almost killed her until she’d finally passed out from the pain. She’d woken here in her own private quarters.

  A gentle knock sounded against the plas wall that formed one side of her chamber.

  “Yeah?” She hoped it was Devra or some friendly face from the Icarus, though several had been avoiding her. Including Jackson. His rare visits had been stilted and awkward. She could do nothing to remove the blame he heaped on himself, as if he could have stopped what had been done to his ship. She hated to see him without his smile, it had been his only weapon against the world.

  And no one would tell her how bad it was out in the corridors. When she asked, their faces closed down. It was clear that Homo sapiens were destroying themselves well ahead of schedule.

  As the silence continued, Ri began to fear it would be Olias. He hadn’t forgiven her for not telling him of the Icarus project. But the others had been right, he’d been dead set against it. And it was always a struggle for him not to point out that it served her right for taking the untested injection immediately upon her return from the jungle.

  A hand appeared through the opening and grabbed onto the edge of the doorway. No one followed it. Its owner seemed to be bracing himself to enter. But there was no mistaking the hand.

  “Bryce.” She breathed out into the room.

  He pulled himself around the corner and drifted over until he gripped the railing that protected her from accidental contact. He reached out and she cringed away.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  He snatched his hand back as if stung. “So, it’s true.”

  She hadn’t meant to shout. It had hurt, even past her heavy earplugs. She looked away and nodded.

  “Aw, Ri. Nothing good ever came from that damn genome.” He gripped the rail tightly with both hands.

  “Sorry. You already know that.”

  “You came from it.” That elicited a weak smile. “And they still have hope…”

  His dark eyes focused upon her. His emotion of disbelief was clear despite his obvious attempts to mask it.

  “…but for me the damage is probably permanent. I don’t think I’ll ever see another sunrise with you over the cold ocean.” Tears formed at the corner of her eyes. She dabbed at them gently with a bit of cloth. Small motions she wouldn’t have noticed before she’d taken the dose now felt like fisticuffs.

  “I miss that most of all.”

  His hands were white on the rail and his eyes darkened. “Damn.�
� It was little more than a whisper.

  “Damn it all to…” He turned for the door.

  “Don’t go.”

  His push for the door was stopped as if her words glued his hand to the rail. He hung there, not facing her, but he didn’t leave.

  “Please don’t go, Bryce.” Still he didn’t turn and the darkness seemed to wrap around her. She’d been fighting against it so hard, but she was losing the battle.

  “I’m scared, Bryce. I’m so scared. But it is better when you’re here. You bring, I don’t know, a peace into the room for me. Others’ emotions batter me, but not yours.”

  He turned to face her. With a deft twist, he swung under the rail but stopped himself before he ran into her. He slowly extended a hand palm up.

  She slid her hand out and lightly rested her palm on his. For the first time in a weeks, she felt the warmth of another living being.

  “I’m afraid, too.”

  Ri could feel each tiny turn the tears took as they coursed down her cheek in the light fan-driven breeze that supplied her fresh air.

  “Why is that, Bryce?”

  “I thought my bar’s name was for other people. Now I know it was for me.”

  She could only shake her head. He’d never answered anyone’s question with more than a shrug.

  “My heart wonders how can it go on beating without the woman who is ‘Right For You’?”

  # # #

  Ri woke after her first good sleep in a long time. The nightmares had inexplicably shifted into dreams. Perhaps not so inexplicable. She could still feel Bryce’s gentle kiss on her lips. Why had she insisted on being first?

  It was getting bad out there. She could tell by what they hadn’t told her. She’d had a long talk with the Captain. Devra, or whoever survived, must destroy the ship if it reached the threshold of the Nara Effect, it was the only kindness. It was a sign of how bad it was that the Captain didn’t argue very hard.