by J. J. Keller
Back Cover Copy
Madness lurks in the shadows…
Tiorné, a merchant respected for her just and unbiased practices, staffs her space freighter with a motley crew chosen for their abilities rather than their Blood. How can Tiorné refuse when a man ill with a mutated strain of leprosy seeks sanctuary aboard the Nimrod? His unknown disease is killing him and all he wants is to die free from persecution.
Her decision, however, may prove fatal.
When the Nimrod’s crew begin to show signs of infection, it becomes apparent they have all been exposed to the plague. Tiorné’s son, Reigo, finds himself heading a mutiny against his mother as the crew struggle for their lives.
How can anyone fight a disease that infects both the mind and body...one that also promises salvation and eternal life to its sufferers?
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A benign smile flew across the leper’s distorted face as he made eye contact. Reigo tried to ignore the revulsion he felt. “You are not as other men. You see men equally. Morrans too.” Naral tilted his head in the direction Ogonaovan had gone. The movement dislodged flaky skin into his steri-suit. Reigo quelled a shudder. “That is mental transcendence not often seen in one so young.”
Reigo stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Lazarus, too, sees all men are equal, and morrans. Their bodies may be frailer, but that matters not to Him for the life that will come next.”
Reigo shook his head. “That does not sound like Steel and Flame to me. There cannot be any life beyond the death of the body, for all that the mind is compartments of solvated ions. So the Pagan Atheist said.”
Naral smiled, although on his face it resembled more a grimace. “Ah. The Pagan Atheist. Three books where twenty-four should stand.”
In the Shadow of Lazarus
9781616502287
Copyright © 2010, Manda Benson
Edited by Nerine Dorman
Book design by Lyrical Press, Inc.
Cover Art by Renee Rocco
First Lyrical Press, Inc. electronic publication: February, 2011
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
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Published in the United States of America by Lyrical Press, Incorporated
Dedication
For the memory of the summer of ’02.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Nerine Dorman.
Chapter 1
Reigo hurried across the loading bay. “Ogonaovan!”
The mechanic turned his head and raised his eyebrows in answer. The handles of various tools poked out the rack on the back of his mobility chair, above his muscular shoulders. Neural shunts in his temples connected his mind to the multitude of motors and switches that operated his chair. His trouser legs were tied in a knot, for his thighs ended just above the knee inside them. According to Ogonaovan the accident had occurred in his youth and had involved a falling loading crate.
Reigo lowered his voice as he approached. “Tiorné says the payment’s been settled. We’re clear to leave once these crates are on the belt.”
Ogonaovan slapped his hands together and grinned, his pocked, stubbled face creasing. Reigo wished he could grow facial hair like that. So far he had only managed a pitifully sparse moustache. Males of the Blood always grew soft hair that didn’t develop fully until well into their twenties, not that coarse, dense stuff that looked like it belonged on a cactus in a castellan’s garden. It had something to do with lower levels of sex hormones in the upper castes, or so his mother said.
“Reigo?”
Reigo felt a tug on his trousers. Amber eyes with vertical slit pupils peered up at him through dark-tinted goggles. The little morran wrapped one of its two jaw tentacles around his knee. Bands of glowing mauve and yellow passed over the spray of translucent quills growing from its rump.
“Oh, all right, Na’Athril.” Reigo capitulated, crouching to scoop the morran up. He lifted it with his fingers under its body, over his head and onto his back, so its forelegs rested over his shoulders and its tails draped the length of his spine. When he rose, Na’Athril hooked its blue-black claws into the fabric of his tunic. Its furry neck brushed against Reigo’s ear as it angled its head to get a better view of the other morrans working to secure the cargo to the Nimrod’s loading belt.
“That’s valuable cargo! Don’t drop it!” ordered Hectar, a stout and heavily potbellied man who stood with his back to them, wearing a gray tunic. His grimy gray-blond hair was twined in a pigtail at the back of his neck. A stylus perched behind his ear and he had a writing-slate clamped under his arm.
Ogonaovan rolled his eyes. “Fucker.”
Hectar glanced over his shoulder and noticed Reigo. “Put that morran down! She’s supposed to be working!”
“She is a se,” said Ogonaovan.
“What?”
Reigo elaborated. “It’s a semale morran. They have four other sexes, asides from hims and hers.”
Ogonaovan said, “Hectar, leave ’im alone. You don’t have the guts to order him around when Tiorné’s about.”
Hectar narrowed his eyes, turning his head to Ogonaovan before returning to face Reigo. “You may be Tiorné’s son, but if you fraternize with morrans, and other things that are beneath men, you only lower yourself to their level.” He walked away with stiff strides and stopped to examine the figures on his slate, his back to them.
“Hectar!”
Hectar ignored Ogonaovan, but from where Reigo stood, he noticed his head turn slightly.
Ogonaovan leered at Reigo as he dug a fiber loaf bag out of a pocket on the side of his chair and ripped it open.
“Ogonaovan, don’t,” Reigo warned him in a low voice, as Ogonaovan stuffed a lump into his mouth. He chewed on it in a slavering, exaggerated fashion before jerking his shoulders forward and spitting at Hectar’s back. A sodden brown-green lump landed on Hectar’s backside. Ogonaovan grinned and pumped his fist.
Reigo turned his head to take in the full view of the cargo bay. Two large, cubic frames of heavy-grade polymer alloy blocked the airlock door. The interstices in the frame lattices held glass receptacles as long as Reigo’s hand, each containing a waxy-white segmented object.
Reigo watched one of the fleshy things pulsing within its glass prison. “What are they?”
Ogonaovan shifted an eyebrow and glanced sideways at the crate. “Worms.”
“Worms?”
Na’Athril fidgeted.
“Typical. As soon as I pick you up, you want to be put down again.” Reigo bent his knees and lowered his shoulder so the morran could slide off. Its quills turned yellow as it thrust its blunt nose up against the crate, its nostrils opening and closing.
Ogonaovan shrugged. “They’re,
like, whatchacallems. Larvas. Men of the Blood like castellans eat them.”
Reigo stared at the grubs. “What do they want to eat those for?”
Ogonaovan snorted. “Guess they taste better than eating levigated esculents all the time.”
“Guess so,” said Reigo. “They must be worth a fortune if we’re shipping them individually like that.”
“Those ones are. They’re queenie worms. They’re getting ready to make a cocoon, and when they come out, they’ll be in their adult form, and they’ll start laying eggs. All we need to do is get them to Carck-Northfenvier and sell them without bollocking them up.”
Looking away from Ogonaovan, Reigo spotted a figure in shabby purple raiment walking stiffly across the cargo bay. It appeared almost bald and carried itself with a hunched-over posture, clutching a small case. Even from this distance it was apparent something was very wrong with it.
Ogonaovan made a disgusted face. “Oh, shit, he’s coming over here!”
As the figure came closer, light reflected strangely from his head--his skin was swathed in a layer of transparent plastic. An air filter and humidity control hung from the material below his mouth. Mucus and flakes of dead skin clung to the inside of the plastic, and the man’s lips and nostrils were blackened and shriveled. His ears appeared to have rotted to uneven stubs, and a thick discharge oozed from their orifices. His eyes were crusted about the lids and sunken into his head. When Reigo looked more closely, he could see the lenses were clouded, the irises pallid and bloodshot. He wore a skullcap over his steri-suit, and sparse, scurfy hair which had lost its original color lay under the plastic. Reigo shuddered. It looked as though the man was decomposing from the outside in.
The man coughed and began in a hoarse voice, facing Reigo. “Are you the Nimrod?”
Hectar turned aside from ordering the morrans about. “I’m in charge round here! If you want to speak to someone you speak to me--” His voice cut off as the stranger’s appearance registered, and Hectar’s mouth dropped open.
“My name is Naral. I am a man persecuted. I wish to invoke the sanctuary clause in the Code of the Merchants.”
Hectar stared at the man and said nothing. The man stared back.
Reigo said, “The Code of the Merchants is for men of the Blood. Are you of the Blood?”
“I understood this ship was the Nimrod, Tiorné’s ship.
Ogonaovan looked at Reigo. Reigo looked at Hectar, who widened his eyes and creased his forehead in an expression Reigo could make no sense of. Naral looked at Hectar, then Reigo, and Reigo noticed the stranger roll his eyes ever so subtly.
“The Nimrod’s reputation precedes it,” Reigo said, after no one else volunteered to speak on the ship’s behalf. “I will ask Tiorné for you.”
Naral nodded.
Reigo thought his request to the Nimrod’s computer. “Mother?”
“Yes, Reigo?” Tiorné’s voice sounded in his head.
“There’s a man here and he’s asking for sanctuary, but there’s something not right. He looks like he has some sort of disease.”
A pause. “Lend me your eyes.”
Reigo put his fingers to the interface bolt on his forehead and concentrated on transmitting the image he was seeing to the Nimrod’s computer, focusing on the skin on the man’s deformed face and twisted hands.
Tiorné transmitted, “Ask the man the nature of the persecution he faces.”
“My mother asks, ‘what is the nature of your persecution?’”
“I am persecuted because I am infected with a disease.”
After Tiorné did not respond for several seconds, Reigo thought, “Mother, he said--”
“I heard what he said, Reigo, I’m considering it,” Tiorné interrupted. “It may be he knows we have a medic aboard and he has a wish to be cured. The Code considered, I can’t let him board unless he can convince us the disease he’s carrying can’t infect the crew.”
“What am I to tell him?” Reigo asked.
“I’m going to send Ceril down there to inspect him. You think of what to tell him.” Tiorné’s transmission took on a patronizing tone. “You’re a big boy now.”
“Yes, Mother.”
Reigo realized Naral was staring at him. “Something troubling you?”
Reigo shook his head. “No.” How much of his conversation with his mother had his face betrayed? “A medic is coming to look at you. Tiorné needs evidence that you can’t...that you can’t pass whatever disease it is you have on to the crew.”
Naral nodded. “’Tis understandable.”
Behind him, Hectar twisted his mouth and widened his eyes at Reigo. Ogonaovan made a benign expression at the newcomer, but his hands tensed on the armrests of his mobility chair. The morrans continued to secure the crates to the Nimrod’s loading belt, apparently undisturbed by the man’s appearance. Possibly they couldn’t see much difference among men, at any rate. Much as how, to Reigo’s eyes, one morran was hard to distinguish from another.
“Reigo, tell Ogonaovan to turn off the belt,” said Tiorné.
“Ogonaovan, Tiorné wants you to switch the belt off,” said Reigo.
Ogonaovan frowned. “What for? That Blood ponce Ceril too important to climb down with it running?”
“Ogonaovan, just do it, please. The sooner we get this dealt with, the sooner we can leave.” Reigo rather hoped Ceril would come up with some reason to prevent Naral from boarding the Nimrod as he watched Ogonaovan scoot over to the panel beside the airlock and jab at the controls. The belt stopped moving and the morrans stood idly and looked about themselves. A moment later, a tall, dark-haired man pulled himself through the airlock and crawled onto the floor. He wore a dark blue tunic that came down over his knees, and carried a platinum staff fashioned in the shape of two snakes nose-to-nose with their bodies entwined. Ceril elegantly got to his feet, scrutinizing the stranger standing before Reigo and Ogonaovan.
“I’m Doctor Ceril,” he introduced himself, his face reddened and his breathing rapid. “Tiorné has asked that I examine you before you are permitted to come aboard the ship. Do I have your permission to examine you?”
Naral nodded. “Yes.”
Ceril raised his staff, and color flickered over the interface bolt in the center of his forehead. The eyes of the snakes began to flash blue alternately. He held the staff out level, the snakes’ heads a few inches from Naral’s face, and steadily lowered it to the man’s feet. All the time, the staff hummed faintly. Ceril raised it again and stepped around Naral to repeat the motion against his back. The bolt on Ceril’s forehead clouded over, and the humming ceased, the eyes of the snakes flashing green and red simultaneously.
Ceril frowned. “Well, I can see you are ill with something. What it is, I am not sure. I can’t find an exact match of the symptoms in any of the current medical databases. I can at least confirm that steri-suit you have on is secure and no viral particles or bacteria are escaping it. A steri-suit is usually for the protection of the wearer from contaminants in the environment, but I see it is efficacious in the reverse situation.” Ceril chuckled.
Naral smiled slightly.
“I will need to do further tests on you. I don’t know yet if I will be able to find a cure for your ailment, but I am happy to try, and Tiorné has been a fair captain all the time I have traveled with her, and will, I hope, grant you passage to a medical research facility where they will no doubt be able to synthesize a treatment.”
Naral coughed. “With all due respect to your profession, Doctor, I ask that you do not attempt to cure me, and that you respect my rights to this. I have not long left to live, and I only ask that I be allowed to die free from persecution and in peace.” He glanced at those gathered around him. “I see a ship with a crew composed of an engineer with no legs, an auditor of half Blood, and a horde of morrans, and I see true freedom, and an egalitarian captain.”
Ogonaovan roared with laughter, but Hectar scowled. “How do you expect us to believe you can eat, with that
thing on?”
Awkwardly, Naral lifted his sleeve to reveal a swollen elbow, its inside surface punctured with numerous ports for the intravenous administration of nutriment. “My digestive system, I regret, has not functioned for some time.”
Ceril grimaced. “I swore the Hippocratic Oath to preserve life where I can, but if that’s your decision I will respect it. Provided you do not remove or otherwise compromise your steri-suit, I see no impediment to you coming aboard the Nimrod.”
Reigo sighed discreetly. “Mother?”
“I heard. He has permission to come aboard. I gather that you have taken a disliking to this man, Reigo, but that is not a valid reason to turn him away. I must be of Steel and Flame, and I have the ship’s reputation to think of. I should hope you will ponder your irrational impressions and try to be of Steel and Flame in future.”
“Tiorné has granted you permission to board the Nimrod,” Reigo said. “Ceril, you had better help him go up.”
As Naral and Ceril turned away, Hectar grabbed Reigo’s collar and pulled his head down, level with the shorter man’s face. His eyes were wide, his teeth bared. “What’s she letting him on for? Can’t she see he’s diseased?”
“Don’t tell him I saw that. Make him get on with his work.”
Reigo cast Hectar’s hand away from his tunic. “Who my mother permits on her ship is her decision, not mine.” He shut off the visual link to the Nimrod. Tiorné surely knew of the friction between Hectar and Ogonaovan, and it annoyed Reigo that she never confronted it, either ignoring it or leaving Reigo to choose between doing the same or challenging it.
The noise of the belt restarting set the morrans scuttling back to their posts. “Come on you lot,” Ogonaovan called. “Let’s get this shit shifted!”
After all the pallets had been attached to the belt, Ogonaovan went over to the airlock and announced, “Right, let’s get out of here.” The morrans scrambled up into the cargo pipe. Reigo got into the airlock aperture and stood behind Ogonaovan.