Gravlander

by Erik Wecks

  An image of her bare hand receiving the contaminated vial from Kolas flashed through her mind. Jo’s pulse soared. Standing from her chair at the small table, she rushed to the wholly inadequate sink in the corner of the room and put her hands under the tap, then jerked them back just as the water came on. She wasn’t at all confident that the water reclamators on Korg Haran screened for nanites as small as those she had seen in the scope. She could contaminate the entire water system.

  Hell, this could be exactly how it is spreading, Jo thought. I’ll have to test the water. The things you take for granted when you live on a hospital ship.

  Stepping back from the sink, she held her hands in the air as if she had just stepped into a sterile operating suite.

  Her mind continuously replayed the moment that she had taken the sample from Kolas without gloves. It’s dumb choices like that that get doctors killed, Jo. Using only the barest minimum of her hands and fingers, she wrestled open a case of medical supplies at the end of the bed. Thankfully the packets of emergency disinfectant sat on top of her operating scrubs. Jo leaned down and picked one up with her teeth, still holding her hands in the air as if she were waiting to start a procedure. She used just the tips of one hand to hold the packet while she ripped it open with her mouth. Then, setting the large packet on the floor, she shoved one hand and then the other into the sticky umber liquid. Pulling them out, she rubbed them together and sighed.

  The evaporative disinfectant soon started to smoke, making her hands cold. She carefully inserted them into the two holes on the end of her case. When she removed them, the case had gloved them. She repeated the process two more times. Her blood felt cold. She was taking no chances.

  Having done all she could to protect herself given her inadequate preparations, she was still uncomfortable with her lack of gown and facial protection. Then she remembered that she had opened the disinfectant package with her teeth, placing them only a few centimeters from her contaminated fingers. Jo almost retched. It took her a second to calm her panic. Turning back to the container, she grimaced. Taking a little disinfectant on the tip of her finger, she wiped some on her lips and the surrounding tissue where she’d held the packet in her mouth. Pinching her lips, she was careful not to let any get inside.

  She still felt contaminated, but it was all she could do.

  Next, Jo turned her attention to the environment. She rubbed some of the disinfectant on the package and case where she had touched them and then some on the sink.

  Then she looked back at the lab and winced. She picked up the packet and walked back to her chair. Reaching inside, she started to pull the applicator out and glanced at the screen. The color drained from her face.

  The computer had pulled back the magnification on the microscope, showing something that seemed to resemble a red blood cell, donut shaped and thinner in the center, but this cell had little exit ports at regular intervals around its parameter. Jo could also clearly make out an electronics package on its back. It wasn’t a nanite. It was far too big, but it wasn’t natural either. Jo watched one of the triangular-shaped gene redactors she had seen when she first turned on the microscope exit this larger cell through one of the ports.

  “Computer, what is that?”

  “Unknown. It is not in my database. Its size is approximately one half that of a human skin cell.”

  “Best analysis.”

  “Best analysis indicates a genophage factory of some sort. It is capable of creating at least three or four types of gene redactors, as well as at least one biological infectant.

  “It produces a biological infectant?”

  “Yes. At least one, possibly more. This factory is expelling some kind of RNA-based structure that seems capable of reproducing.”

  “A virus? So what are we fighting here?”

  “In order to stop the threat, we will need to eliminate not only the factory cells but also the infectants they produce, since the infectants themselves are capable of self-replication. We will be fighting several infections at the same time.”

  Jo didn’t bother to answer. She was too busy watching as the genophage kicked out another new redactor. Jo felt her feet start to tingle.

  Still holding the sterilizer, Jo immediately started swabbing the table and the portable lab. “This isn’t going to be easy. Computer, you said that this agent is unknown. Do you have a record of any or all of the known gene redactors used by the Unity Corporation or the other failed multicorps before the Timcree emancipation?”

  The computer answered without pause. “My database has over one million human-generated genophages and gene-editing systems, including all known public and formerly secret gene redactors patented by the multicorps.”

  “The factory seems to be new—I’ve never heard of anything like that before. Am I right?

  “I have no record of such devices in my database.”

  “Okay, but what about the infectants? Are they familiar? At least some of them seem to be doing some heavy gene editing. I would guess those are based on old redactors.”

  “There is a greater than ninety percent chance that foreign agents A, C, and D were derived from the Unity Corporation’s suite of gene redactors used before emancipation. The odds of such similar redactors being invented on the fly without reference to Unity research materials is astronomical. All of these infectants are only partly biological. They have clear electronic components as well.”

  Jo thought she might feel more joy at proving who was behind the Timcree disease. Instead, her hands sweated in her gloves, and she just felt sad.

  I’m not sure I can cure this.

  “Computer, please continue your analysis with an emphasis on finding a way to neutralize each foreign agent.”

  “Such an analysis will take anywhere from several hours to a week or more,” said the computer in its usual flat voice.

  Jo responded in an almost equal deadpan. “Then get started.”

  The computer chirped its compliance.

  Jo watched for a couple of minutes longer, staring in dread fascination at the little creature. Jo had never felt so unsure of her ability to assist a patient. We’re going to do this, Jo. We have to. Her mind’s protestations did nothing to ease the cold fear in her gut.

  Jo took a long, slow breath and turned her attention back to disinfecting the lab, table, and chair with the swab in the packet.

  While she worked, she said absently, “Computer, do we have enough material to do a sample remediation trial?”

  “Affirmative. We can do trials on both Class A and Class C measures. However, considering that we face multiple infections, if we wanted to do a Class E or Class F trial, we would need the whole sample.”

  Jo thought for a moment. I don’t want to mess around with these. We aren’t looking at some high school science project that went bad. “Skip trials A-D. We need to decide on the E or the F trials, and let’s be careful here. We have to get this right.”

  “Affirmative.” The computer chirped its understanding.

  A few minutes later, Jo felt confident enough to remove her gloves and put away the remaining disinfectant. She shut the lid of the lab and put it back at the foot of the bed for the time being. She wanted to speak with Kolas, but when she got back, she would have to do something about safety.

  She stepped briskly to the door and hurried down the main corridor toward the communal area of Kolas’s home. Having newly arrived back on Korg Haran, Kolas sat talking to Zonezah, who sat on his lap.

  Jo slowed her pace, approaching with care, careful to clear her throat noisily. Seeing her approach, the woman clicked her tongue and gave her a very unTimcreelike look of open scorn.

  Jo almost took a step backward from where she stood at the edge of the room, but she held her ground, even as her cheeks went red. I’m not doing anything wrong, she thought. The problem was that when it came to Timcree matters, she could never really be sure that she wasn’t offending someone.

  The woman stood and remo
ved herself from Kolas’s grasp.

  He didn’t resist. Jo caught no trace of irritation in his expression, but of all the Timcree she knew well, Kolas remained the hardest for her to read.

  “The Unity is trying to kill the Timcree,” Jo said in English. She waited for a reaction. When Kolas didn’t respond, she continued. “It is a Unity disease—several of them, actually—and there is something new, some kind of internal factory that pumps new ones out at a furious pace.”

  Kolas just nodded and picked up his glass of jurang. “Can you stop it?”

  Jo’s heart started to pound. “I’m not sure. It’s like fighting six diseases at once.”

  Kolas didn’t look up, but Jo noticed that his eyes briefly darted to his wife’s distended belly. She thought she saw his shoulders slump just a little. “Thank you, Internist Josephine Lutnear. Please let me know if you find a solution.”

  “I will.” Jo walked to the door and reached with her hand to open it. She stopped and looked back at Kolas. “Doesn’t it ever make you angry?”

  Kolas didn’t answer immediately. Jo wondered if he might not at all. “All the time, but what can we do about it?”

  Feeling the indignation rise in her own chest, she said, “Don’t you want to fight back?”

  If possible, Kolas spoke with even more dispassion, as if he were totally separated from the problem they discussed. “Of course, but the Timcree have learned all too often that to fight back against an enemy as strong as the Unity is to simply invite your own destruction. We are better off when we avoid conflict. This is a hard lesson that we have learned over many, many generations. In our own way, I am fighting back. I am refusing to accept the path laid out for my people by the Unity. I refuse to simply let them die.”

  Jo thought about responding, but nothing she thought to say felt right. It all felt harsh and critical. She wanted to argue that the Unity deserved punishment, that the Timcree deserved justice, but she knew what Kolas would say to these things, and she was starting to believe that he might be right. When faced with such a superior enemy, was it really wise for the Timcree to try to fight the system that opposed them? Perhaps their separation from the rest of humanity had been for the best.

  Hearing that she had no response, Kolas spoke again. “It might be well for your Ghost Fleet to learn these same lessons. Sometimes the way forward is around an obstacle, not through it.” Kolas paused and then added, “Kree pa, Josephine Lutnear.”

  9

  Kree Pa

  Two days later, Jo unlocked the door to her quarters after making a quick trip to the sweat-ship to check on her patients. After making sure no one was watching her, she stepped in and locked it behind her. With a slight grin, she wondered what Tanith would have made of the room since she had transformed it.

  A thick, impenetrable plastic barrier greeted her just inside the door. Using the mobile sterile environment included with her equipment, she had created a room within a room. Designed to be used as a pop-up operating room, at full size it was at least two meters larger than her quarters. A little medical tape had fixed that problem.

  Jo had left herself a small corridor around it to her bed. She made her way there, careful not to disturb the plastic. On that side lay the entrance to a small scrub room, with its own radiological sterilization unit. Jo stepped out of her shoes and removed her heads-up, placing it on her bed. She stepped in and pulled her scrubs from the sterilizer—currently lit a safe green—and started to put them on.

  In the last twenty-four hours, the factory/cell/buglike thing in the sample had been Jo’s nearly sole obsession. Other than a meal with Tanith and a perfunctory effort at teaching him a little English, she hadn’t left her quarters since the sample had arrived.

  The nanite disease factories had exhibited a pretty sophisticated set of defense mechanisms. They were large enough that a single nanite wasn’t effective in a frontal assault. In fact, it was quite the opposite. The Unity factory had a nasty habit of hijacking the attack bots that she sent against it. Before long, they were attacking each other instead of the factory itself.

  Witnessing that had been so disconcerting to Jo that she began having difficulty falling asleep, and when she did sleep, she dreamt that she was being chased by one of the factories trying to mindjack her and make her its slave. Needless to say, she wasn’t exactly rested when she woke.

  Jo finished getting into her scrubs and stepped up to the hard, clear barrier between her and the makeshift lab inside. She palmed the center of it with her glove and the barrier seemed to shimmer. Then it loosened and slipped perfectly around her hand, almost like a soap bubble. Jo stepped forward. The barrier rejoined behind her and hardened.

  Jo stepped up to the mobile lab, which was now placed on a pedestal created from the clear fiberplast of the floor. The screen was blank. She touched it. It didn’t come on.

  “Computer, please show the results of today’s tests.”

  The computer remained silent.

  “Computer, respond.”

  It answered with only a system beep.

  Jo touched the screen again.

  It remained dark.

  Jo frowned. She tried to remember any other time when a medical lab had behaved badly. She couldn’t, but the truth was that there had never really been cause to use mobile labs in the Ghost Fleet, so the boxes were only used during training exercises.

  After staring at the malfunctioning box for a moment, Jo came to a decision. She felt alongside the lid for any kind of manual switch or reset button. Persistence rewarded her with a small indentation underneath the screen. She was just about to reset the box when movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention. She glanced down and saw that some kind of viscous, grayish fluid was dripping from a small hole in one corner of the case onto the floor of the mobile operating room.

  For a second or two, the substance confused Jo. As she squatted down to touch it, her intuition kicked in. She hesitated, holding her hand a few centimeters from the goo. A small drip from the hole above landed on the end of her glove. Jo rubbed it between her fingers. It felt a lot like lab-processed blood, but it was now dark gray, almost black.

  In her peripheral vision, Jo noticed the small pool of substance on the floor lift and move toward her nearby hand. Jo bolted upright, stumbled backward, and yelped. In her haste, she tripped and landed on the ground in a sitting position. Yelping again, she tore off the glove that had been contaminated. She threw it across the room, back toward the already infected portion of the floor.

  Breathing fast, she pressed herself backward against the wall of the operating room. Holy fuck! It moved!

  Controlling her urge to run screaming, Jo stood and took a moment to inspect her gear. She started with her gloves. The second glove underneath appeared unscathed. Jo noted that she could still see the antiseptic powder on the tip of her index finger and thumb, and if anything had gotten through, it was supposed to have turned a bright shade of pink. It remained powder blue.

  The inspection of her scrubs took a little longer than it might have because she was unwilling to look away from the gray ooze on the floor for more than a couple of seconds. It was definitely starting to move again.

  Jo shivered. Not at all satisfied that her scrubs remained uncontaminated but unwilling to spend any more time in the infected room, Jo dashed to the bubble exit and pressed her palm against it. She started to pass through the disinfecting barrier at the achingly slow pace she had been taught during emergency training in medical school on the fleet. All the while the hairs on the back of her neck stood up. She felt sure that somewhere behind her the substance was streaming toward her.

  She couldn’t help but think about all the medical horror holis she and the other medical staff used to watch in the fleet. They would laugh when a disease suddenly “came to life” and attacked a person. They aren’t supposed to move, her mind complained. Jo worked to control her rising pulse by forcing herself to think about the task at hand.

&n
bsp; It took an excruciating half-minute until she got completely through the barrier. Once in the scrub room, she turned around and looked back. The small puddle remained visible underneath the lab. She felt relatively safe to tear off her scrubs, shoving them in the sterilizer and setting it on high.

  She stepped out of the small scrub room and grabbed her heads-up. Putting it on, she looked back. She was still too panicked to put together a coherent string of thought commands. Instead, she spoke. “Computer, can you connect with the mobile lab in the clean room?”

  Her heads-up responded with both text in the eyepiece and a voice in her ear. “Yes, I can connect.”

  “What’s the lab’s status?”

  “The lab AI is fully functional, but the lab itself has sustained damage to both auditory and visual systems.”

  Jo puffed out her cheeks and let out a slow breath. The AI might be fine right now, but she didn’t trust it to remain so for long. “Back up the whole thing!”

  “You would like me to back up all the research gathered by the lab?” the computer queried.

  “Yes, yes! And the raw data, too, and the operating system. And collapse the OR. Emergency containment procedures! Threat level: severe!”

  The computer’s voice sounded unusually flat and expressionless. “Understood.”

  Jo had only watched the emergency collapse of a dirty OR once, and that had happened in training over two years prior. Within a few seconds, the walls started to push inward, buckling in the middle and pulling downward on the ceiling. Having become a semi-porous air-filtration system, the roof started to collapse onto the equipment below with a loud hiss.

  It didn’t occur to her until almost thirty seconds later that the attack on the lab might have also been technical, as well as physical. Her guts signaled their alarm. Jo rubbed her stomach without thought. “Heads-up?” she said tentatively.

  “Yes?” it answered in its usual monotone.

  “Watch out for cyber attacks in the data. Something malfunctioned with the lab, and I think the sample did it.”