by MadMaxAU
“We must use all those available hands,” the African spacer said at last. “Especially if we are to save the Newburn.”
“You’re approving the mission?” Saul asked, helping the apparent effort to change subjects. Bethany Oakes had ruled out the effort to seek and recover the long lost slot tug.
“Yes. Carl Osborn’s case is convincing. It may distract us from our . . . disputes.” Ould Harrad glanced pointedly at Linbarger. “They are our comrades, aboard the Newburn, and if it is God’s will, Inshallah, we shall rescue them.”
“Who goes?” Virginia asked.
“I shall decide later. First we must refine more tritium from the ice—“
“Jeffers is already doing that,” Saul put in. “He says he can get us enough in a week or so.”
Ould Harrad pursed his lips. “You people have been continuing work even though Bethany vetoed it?”
“Well, Yes,” Saul admitted with a small smile. “The refining uses big surface mechs which weren’t doing anything else.”
“Ah. So be it. Then the hydroponics pods must be arranged, the majority brought into Halley.”
“I’ll do that,” Linbarger said. “Some of my buddies will pitch in, too.”
Anything to get away from Percells, Saul thought. He’ll have plenty of Ortho volunteers.
“Very good,” Ould Harrad said warmly. “As for the rescue crew, I will decide after careful—“
“I’ll go,” Linbarger said. ‘if Osborn isn’t in charge.”
Virginia smiled dryly. “You want an all-Ortho crew?”
“Why not?”
“You’re more likely to have sick people going, then,” she said.
Saul frowned. Soon he would have to break it to her that he was going as ship’s doctor.
Ould Harrad said soothingly, “We all are taking risks.”
“You have no idea if Lintz and van Zoon and the others will find cures,” Linbarger’s mouth knotted up into a sour, disgusted sketch of impatience. “If they don’t, and I get sick, they’ll never bring me out of the slots.”
Ould Harrad spread his hands, open and uplifted, showing his good will. “Then you will finally wake up on Earth.”
“Nobody intended us to sleep seventy years sick! Metabolism is slow in the slots, but it’s not zero. All the experience has been with people who’re well, right? We could all die.”
Linbarger had a point, but Saul was damned if he would admit it. “There is ample reason to expect that— “
“Ha! ‘Ample reason.’ That’s not enough for me and my friends.”
“Which friends?” Virginia asked. “More dumb Arcists?”
Linbarger bristled. His voice came out thin and reedy, as if from a tight place inside him. “Yeah, some of us. Got kicked out of Indonesia for being against land rape and poisons and experimental animals like you.”
Virginia muttered, “And made up for it by shooting people in Pan-Africa.”
Saul tried to cut in. “Just a— “
“No, let him babble,” Virginia said evenly, her arms held ready, a concentrated energy in her stance. “I’ve heard it before. His kind took over Hawaii. Governor Ikeda’s dead, Keoki Anuenue’s uncle is in prison. I want to see what kind of creature does things like that.”
Linbarger did not seem to notice her rigid restraint.
“I’m an Arcist, sure, but I’m talking for all the normal people. We aren’t going to take orders from Percell pigs.”
Saul said, “You watch your— “
“Sure, we’re herding you Percells into camps in Hawaii—and we’d be better off doing the same thing here!” He shook a fist in her face.
Virginia caught him full in the stomach with a quick, savage kick. Linbarger flew backward with a heavy grunt and smacked into the wall. Ould-Harrad moved to block Virginia but she compensated neatly for the low gravity and slipped past him. She clipped Linbarger neatly on the chin with the heel of her hand, putting the full force of her shoulder behind her chop. Linbarger made a gurgling noise and spun away, still conscious but limp.
“Stop!” Ould Harrad cried severely and unnecessarily—Virginia had already come back to an automatic zero G defensive stance, floating, eyes gleaming like ice.
“Sorry,” she said. “It was a reflex.” Obviously she regretted nothing.
Ould Harrad and Saul checked Linbarger, who waved them away feebly.
Virginia said, “I’ve been hearing Arcist bullshit for days now, holding my tongue. No more. He’s endangering the whole expedition.”
“Do not overstate your case, Dr. Herbert. Dr. Linbarger has a right to his opinions,” Ould Harrad said judiciously.
What does it take to stir him up? Saul thought. Or has he witnessed scenes this bad already? An unsettling suspicion. Saul hadn’t been socializing himself for a week.
“In any case,” Ould Harrad said, shaking his head gravely, “nothing excuses such conduct as yours. If we were not desperate, I would confine you to quarters.”
“Oh, please do,” she said sarcastically. “I need the sleep.”
Linbarger opened his mouth to say something, but then the prep room door opened to admit Bethany Oakes. They all fell silent as the official commander slowly entered with her escorts.
Said was shocked at the sudden change—at her red rimmed eyes, bone-white face, and shambling walk. Her palsied hands trembled and her mouth sagged vacantly.
“Betty, you shouldn’t be walking,” Saul said.
Then he saw Akio Matsudo and Marguerite von Zoon following respectfully, their eyes beseeching him not to interfere. She way making a brave show, the commanding officer committing herself gallantly. Even Linbarger saw it, and though his face was still compressed with anger and resentment, he kept quiet.
Matsudo did not look very well, either. His eyes were glazed and his face had a hard, sweaty sheen. If he goes, that will leave only Marguerite and myself to run the hospital. That’ll keep me off the Newborn rescue for sure.
Bethany Oakes met his eyes briefly. “Saul . . .” Her smile was wan, sad. “Persevere . . . “
She passed slowly into the chilly inner chamber and the waiting techs.
Damn. Saul was uncomfortably aware that Oakes might well never revive from the slot-sleep process. If the disease could continue to do its dreadful work as she floated through the dreamy years, she might well be going to her grave. The accompanying party had probably guessed this, and there came upon them a reverential silence as Oakes insisted on struggling up onto the slab herself. She gave a fluttering wave of farewell and then sank down into the pink nutrient web. It was a release for her, Saul saw, amid the chill promise of salvation, to lie down gratefully into the embrace of fog shrouded, gleaming steel and glass.
Saul looked up at Ould Harrad. It was easy to read the African’s silently moving lips, shaping words in Arabic. Saul knew that the prayers were only partly for Oakes, but also for the new, reluctant commander, Suleiman Ould Harrad himself.
VIRGINIA
“Damn! I wouldn’t put it past him to have done this on purpose!”
Virginia paced back and forth in her tiny laboratory. It was difficult to do in less than a milligee, but she managed by holding on to a nearby console. Her velcro soles scritched softly as she walked from one end of the room to the other, tossing her hair and muttering to herself.
“Carl planned this. I know it!”
The main holo screen rippled. A face appeared, but the “man” was no member of the Halley Expedition . . . nor indeed any man at all. The visage was long cheeked, with reddish locks and a curling, salty mustache.
“Sure an’ ‘tis a churlish deed, liken to the way Queen Maeve was deprived of her beloved,” the figure agreed.
Virginia sniffed. “Oh, cram it, Ossian. I don’t need sympathy from literary simulacrums, I need Saul! And I don’t want him blasting off in a stripped-down, overaged spaceship that needs fifty years of overhaul before it’ supposed to fly again!”
The display flickered.
Another face formed . . . a graying eminence in scarlet robes. The woman on the screen held up a sign of beneficence. “It is a mission of mercy, my dear child. Forty souls are at stake . . . .”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Virginia’s feet left the floor as she smacked the tabletop. “Cardinal Teresa, off! I don’t need logic or appeals to my better nature. I need a reason why . .”
A last image appeared, drawn from deep within—an early simulation, seldom called up for the pain it brought. A smiling man with a small gray beard and eyes that crinkled as they smiled warn fly down at her.
“Anuenue, little rainbow. Reasons do not help at a time like this, daughter. Feelings have a logic all their own.”
Virginia buried her face in her hands. She floated against a storage cabinet and slowly settled toward the floor.
“I was happy, Daddy. I really was, in all this hell. I was happy”
A slender, lambent, transparent hand reached down, as if to touch her. The voice was strong with gentle wisdom.
“I know, darling. I know.”
CARL
—E Alulike! — the strawboss urged. And the crew pulled together filling the chosen comm channel with their chant.
—Ki au au, Ki au au
Huki au au, Huki au au! —
The Hawaiians heaved at the hawser as the main cargo unit of the Edmund Halley lifted out of the vessel’s body. Massive and immense as it was, the section climbed swiftly toward the top of the spindly A-frame, where a spacesuited figure gestured in exaggerated semaphore.
—Easy, easy. Okay, you Indonesians and Danes over there, you draw radially! —
Carl had not seen Jeffers so happy since the man had been unslotted. The man had hated work in the tunnels, preferring by far the hard glimmer of space and the oily tang of metal and machines.
Carl couldn’t really blame him, at that. Almost anything beat the doom and gloom down below. That was a major reason why he had pushed for the Newburn rescue attempt. He was convinced that the benefits to morale would do more for general health than all of Akio Matsudo’s traditional therapy and Saul Lintz’s laboratory concoctions.
He adjusted his visor to magnification 4 and looked toward Scorpio, where the comet’s fading dust tail was now barely a faint glow in the infrared. A few speckles told of grains big enough to reflect light still from the diminishing sun. One of the biggest of those speckles, he knew now for certain, was the slot tug Newburn.
If she had not existed, we would have had to invent her.
There came a cheer over the open background comm as the storage unit met Halley’s surface with a soft puff of vapor. Jeffers wrung his hands over his head in nonchalant triumph. Carl had to smile.
This was his favorite of the three shifts working to refurbish and strip down the Edmund. Sure, he felt at home with Sergeov’s purely Percell team. But the mixed volunteers were the most cheerful lot.
Especially the Danes and Hawaiians. They didn’t seem to give a hoot if a man was an Ortho or a Percell . . . or a Denebian Glebhound . . . just as long as he wasn’t a purple or a goddamn Arcist.
Virginia is Hawaiian, he remembered. No wonder she was such an unrepentant Orthophile. Ortho lover. Obviously, she didn’t see anything wrong with shacking up with one.
The thought lingered and made him feel a bit guilty as Lani Nguyen passed by, carrying a nickel iron brace that would have crushed her anywhere with gravity, even on the moon.
—Hey, handsome—she sent. —You busy for the next three months? —
“What’ve you got in mind?” he said, leering back amiably. And she managed to put a little wag into her walk as she passed. Her unicorn tabard grinned back at him.
Oh, hell, Carl reminded himself, there are some good Orthos.
Lani had volunteered for the rescue mission in a flash. Good old Lani. She was so patient with him, never rebuking him at all for showing up at her cubicle every now and then, looking for company, then disappearing or keeping things strictly comradely for weeks at a stretch.
If only she were more what I’m looking for. More intellectual. More sensual. A Percell.
More like Virginia, in other words.
Only one Arcist was on duty right now. Each faction had a “watcher” to keep an eye on the others’ shifts . . . an unofficial designation, to be sure, but one more and more common at important functions such as slottings and unslottings.
Helga Steppins viewed the proceedings carefully, using a laser transit to double check everything done by Jeffers’s crew. As Carl approached, she stepped to one side warily, as if he could infect her through two spacesuits and three meters of vacuum.
“You know, it’d be a lot easier to get at the Edmund’s science cluster if you’d let us remove the hydroponics modules first,” he told her. “It’d probably save two days.”
The taciturn, blond Austrian woman shook her head.
—Stupid trick, Osborn. We both know the launch date is set by when the fuel is ready. That’s at least next Tuesday. —
He balled his fists in disgust over this obstinacy. “Why, in the name of the Black, would I want to trick you? You people are the ones to insist on an insanely huge fuel reserve for a simple three-month rendezvous and return! We’ll have a stripped ship, and we don’t need more than six kilometers per second delta V!”
The Arcist woman shrugged. —Safer if the tanks are topped off. Only au idiot sets sail without proper stores. —
“But . . .
—You don’t like it? Complain to that Percephile, Ould-Harrad. —
Carl snorted. Ould Harrad? A Percell lover? Ha!
“Look, if we lower just the number one hydroponics module now...”
—No! — She whirled on him, gripping the laser transit tightly. —The whole colony depends on that farm! —
“But the new dome is almost ready. All the fittings . . .”
Steppins swiveled back to face the Edmund again, as if afraid that Carl’s intent was only to distract her while Jeffers and the Hawaiians spirited the entire torch ship away.
—You Percells don’t fear the Halley diseases as much as we human beings do. We won’t go into why, since you keep denying all responsibility for the sicknesses. But it is sufficient to know that we will not let the hydro be polluted! Both the big and small hydroponics modules stay attached until the new dome is completely checked out…and by an Ortho specialist!—
Carl fumed. He knew what his alternatives were. He could give Jeffers the go ahead anyway . . . and maybe spark a miniwar among the factions.
Or he could run below and complain to the spineless Mauritanian in command.
Or he could go down and lend a hand.
“Use a purple during your next erotic rest break,” he suggested, and kicked off toward the workers before she could reply.
“Hey, Lani!” he called. “Let me help you with that thing.”
SAUL
“I’m getting so I don’t even care about the danger of dying anymore, Saul . It’s the itch I can’t stand. All day, all night, in spite of the topicals Akio Matsudo gives me. I swear, if this keeps up I’m going to ask ‘Kio if I can borrow his great grandfather’s seppuku knife and really scratch!”
Marguerite von Zoon lay facedown on the taut webbing, trying to keep still as the masked and gowned treatment room techs picked away at her skin with tweezers and little glassine vials, sampling the fungoids that were turning her body into a battlefield.
A quarter of her skin was broken and cracked. Pink, half open wounds and dark domed blisters erupted in ugly patches. Here and there, the flesh had split open in nasty ulcerated sores, glistening with sickening dampness.
Saul worked his team as quickly as possible, knowing how hard this must be for her. Marguerite was an intensely private person—a true exile who had left Earth only in order to save her family from punishment for political crimes. Whatever it stated on some piece of paper, only a bureaucrat would try to say that she had “volunteered” to come out here to become
food for gnawing alien cells.
And yet Marguerite’s cheerfulness was legendary. The discomfort had to be severe for her to be complaining at all.
Saul stepped up beside her as soon as the techs had finished. “Marguerite, I’m going to bring up the new beamer and try that experimental subdermal scrub now. Try not to move unnecessarily.”
She nodded curtly. Only a damp sheen on her forehead and her flexing palms betrayed her nervousness. Saul guided a wheeled hospital mech into position, canting the broad plate of a synthetic aperture microwave array over her prone form.
I’ve been privileged to know many fine human beings, Saul thought. But none braver than this good woman.
She had volunteered to be the first to try this untested treatment. When offered a chance to escape into the slots instead, she had rejected the idea outright. “I’ll not leave you and Akio as the only physicians awake during this crisis,” she had told him flatly.
Days had passed while the technicians built and rebuilt the new beamer to Saul’s specifications . . . always scratching for priorities against the hall crews and those overhauling the Edmund Halley. By now, there was little choice left. If this treatment didn’t work, Marguerite would have to go on ice.
Secretly, Saul feared it was already too late even for that. There was no guarantee that cooling down to a degree above freezing would stop these vicious, multicolored, funguslike growths, once they were this deeply established.
A third of the awake crew—and even a few of the slotted corpsicles—have these creeping skin disorders. They worry Akio worse than the Crump Mumps or even the Red Clap. They’re the biggest reason why I may not be able to go out with the Edmund after all. Osborn and the others may have to take their chances without a doctor.
And there was one more cause for his hurry to make the new treatments work.
Yesterday, while they were making love, he had fund a fine lacelike webbing of green strands spreading under Virginia’s shoulder blades and issuing across her back. He hadn’t said anything to her, yet. But his motive was stronger than ever to find a cure.