by Ginger Booth
Darren reported back. “Housing tent collapse, cap. Cosmo barracks.”
Her limbs stiffened, and heart hammered, ready to respond to catastrophe again. But the engineer calmly continued. “Air pressure’s fine. But I think someone cut these tent lines.”
“I’ll be right there.”
She collected Clay and made it halfway to Darren before Eli commed. “Cap, something seems to be growing in Tikka Gena’s sinuses. A plant, maybe. I’ll keep you apprised.”
With that worrisome news, she resumed her trudge to the cosmo platform. The flying snow in her face and crunching snow beneath her boots began to lose their allure. But at least she was warm in her p-suit. A few Denali in the new wet-suit model dug out a sprout and lit it on fire. Flame gouted up like a yellow roman candle twice as tall as her. She started toward them to demand they snuff it out, because the torch reached too close to the farmer platform for her liking. But the heavy snow doused it for her.
She hopped onto the cosmo platform, disdaining their steep ramp. Darren waved them to a 16-bunk tent toward the middle of the array. He’d already finished retying the line. But he showed her the ends.
They called it twine, but the stuff was actually a thin triple strand of carbon nanotube filaments, twisted in turn. Two of those strands had been severed neatly, leaving a third intact, strong enough under most conditions. But under the weight of the snow, it snapped.
Darren spoke on a private channel for just the three of them. “That’s not all. Half the Denali have stuffy noses. And the heaters failed in two tents. They hadn’t noticed before. They sure notice now.”
“Temperature dropped to 25 degrees,” Clay agreed. “Um, minus five.” Like Sass, he tended to join the Denali on the Fahrenheit units.
“Have you looked at one of these failed heaters?” Sass asked.
“Waited for you.”
He led them down and across to the farmer platform. The same Denali still struggled to get a fire going below, though this time they built a snowbank around it. With the high oxygen atmosphere, wood burned all too enthusiastically.
Sass pursed her lips. If this was sabotage, their wooden platforms were awfully susceptible to a firebug.
They announced themselves, then scuffed away some snow and wriggled in through the airlock of a tent. Airlock, Sass noted. Not a bio-lock. The Denali experimented and determined this was safe enough, and far more convenient.
The Thrive officers kept their helmets on. Only one farmer lurked within, huddled in mirrored space blankets. Nursing a cold. Sass sighed. How many times had she nursed a cold in the tent-cities before they left Earth? But these tidy new tents and double-level bunks looked nothing like the moldy excuse for housing of her youth. His pressure suit hung ready at hand between his bunk and the fabric wall.
Darren drew them to the back of the tent. The little pot-bellied heater perched on a brick-thick slab of foamcrete, an excellent insulator. Flicking its switch had no effect on its ‘on’ light. Darren turned it and opened the access panel on the back to pull out its battery.
While he examined that with an electrical probe, Sass peered into the chamber. “It’s the housing, chief.” She got out of his way. The prongs the battery connected to were bent out of position, one broken. “Excuse me, did this heater ever work?”
The drippy farmer nodded confirmation. “Cold every night. Stopped this morning.”
To Sass, the usual overnight 55 degrees sounded like perfect sleeping weather, the kind that made it so hard to get out of bed on a Mahina Monday morning. But to a Denali, she imagined it felt frigid. “Have you visited your healer?”
“Everybody’s sick. She said get some rest.”
Sass smiled at the middle-aged man warmly. “Feel better soon!”
Darren picked up the heater to bring with them. “Their techs can fix this. I don’t have new prongs, and the battery needs charging.”
“Thanks, Darren.”
They wriggled out again, and parted ways. Darren trudged back to the cosmo barracks to show a tech what he needed done, and proceed to investigate the other punky heaters. Sass and Clay headed home to Thrive, to learn about this new disease situation.
And call Ben about our equipment supplier.
27
“It’s a plant,” Eli explained to Sass, sticking a wand up Tikka Gena’s nose. The Denali woman, tattooed scalp bald as any Denali’s, but festooned with tattooed coils of DNA, flinched and batted at his hand as the probe dug higher into the sinuses. Sass grasped her hand in sympathy, but leaned over her on the auto-doc gurney to peer closer at the diagnostic display.
“Petunias,” the captain murmured. The seedlings weren’t green. But all seedlings were white until exposed to light.
Eli frowned. “What?” He studied the display. Tikka slapped at him again. He absently slapped her back. “More like alfalfa sprouts. But they aren’t, really. Probably more like a fungus, and this is one of its life cycle phases. You know, like insects have larva, pupa, and adult forms.”
The physiologist growled, jogging him to recall why he had a stick up her nose. “Yes, anyway, see how much more densely they grow in her sinuses? I’m not sure if that’s a better habitat? Or did she just snort them up there to control the nose drip?”
“I didn’t snort anything!” She seized his wrist and yanked the probe out of her nose. “We have plenty of recordings!”
“Yes, but it’s growing,” Eli argued. He turned to Sass. “Her sinuses are twice as packed as when she came in here.”
Sass frowned. “Why didn’t the bio-lock scans catch this?”
Eli batted his eyes at his impatient subordinate. “I just washed the outside of my suit! I didn’t…check inside.”
Eli took a bio-sensor wand and demonstrated that the bio-lock did indeed object, if only the tool was used. By their medic. Who really should have known better.
“But surely you didn’t take your helmet off outdoors,” the captain argued. Tikka Gena was downright shrill on the need to protect oneself from the poisonous oxygen levels.
“Of course not!” Tikka wiped her nose on a cloth handkerchief, then glowered at the tiny grey plants within. She’d need to sterilize the damned thing. And the med-bay. And Sass’s ship… “I’ve had sex with one of the hunters. And I visited a barracks tent to consult on a skin lesion. I took my helmet off in both tents.”
“I see.” Outside med-bay, Sass spotted Tikki Cook and Kaol, suited up to take their turn outside to play in the snow. “Hold up, you two! Have either of you taken your helmet off in the barracks tents?”
Tikki shook his head, eyes flicking to extreme right. That suggested a lie.
Kaol replied, “Once. Couple weeks ago. Card game.”
Clay took the bio-sensor wand and checked their noses. No readings. Eli bade them approach closer, though they preferred to stand back from Tikka Gena. They too got the probe up the nose, freshly washed each time. “Clean.”
“Thanks, guys,” Sass said with a smile. “Have fun in the snow!”
Kaol would have accepted that. But the geisha proved yet again that his IQ exceeded what Sass would pick for the sex trade. “What’s wrong? What did you think was in my nose?”
Eli missed Clay’s neck-cutting gesture and simply answered. “That stuff in the air we called pollen? Seems to be some kind of fungus spore or plant seed.” He flipped the view to show threadlike roots, or hyphae, reaching deeper up Tikka Gena’s sinuses, as though probing to find her brain to eat.
Tikki’s mouth hung open aghast. Kaol shuddered and turned away. “So will it keep growing?” their cook inquired. “Out her nose and into her eyeballs?”
“Ah, let’s check on the other side. You’re sounding much better, Tikka!” Eli’s bedside manner left a lot to be desired – he preferred talking to plants – but he tried. He dunked the probe into antiseptic, then stuck it up her other nostril. This sinus passage appeared less overgrown. “Yes, that worked. This side looked like the other, until she snorted this iodin
e solution. Aerosol.”
“Huh?” Tikki Cook inquired.
Rather than translate, Eli caught Sass’s hand and misted iodine onto the back, granting her freckles a nice orange glow. “You could have demonstrated on yourself, Eli.” She stepped to the sink and washed it off with soap.
“Sorry.” He wasn’t. “Ready to try the other spray on the other side, Tikka?”
“I’ll do it myself.” Tikka Gena picked up a vivid green spritzer from the over-bed table arm. “You squirted so hard I was bleeding orange out of my ears!”
Eli quirked a smile to Sass and Clay. “That isn’t true.”
“Is that possible?” Tikki Cook asked, still far more fascinated by the novel disease than leaving for his first close encounter with slush. “You can pour something up your nose and have it come out your ears?”
“It can feel that way,” Sass offered. “But not really. The nose and ears are connected, but not quite like that.”
Tikki Cook leaned sideways, around his captain, to observe the scientist as she stuck a nozzle up her nose and squeezed the bottle.
“More,” Eli insisted.
Kaol tilted farther, to watch over Tikki’s head. So that four people stared at poor Tikka Gena as a sudden spurt of brilliant green, full of thread-like seedlings with pin-head-sized leaves, or mushroom caps, dribbled out of her nose.
“Ow,” she mentioned once. “It burns!” The volume quickly grew hysterical. “Ow, ow, OW!”
Eli calmly leafed his display from the icky-sinus view to ordinary life signs. Then he picked up a hypodermic and tapped her gently on the neck with it. “Sedative,” he noted to the captain.
“He’s never the medic, is he?” Tikki Cook inquired.
“We use him for triage,” Clay admitted. “Some other times.”
“Better him than Tikka Gena,” Kaol suggested.
Tikka Gena shot him a hurt expression, corners of her mouth pressed down in a pout. She snorted hard into her handkerchief, over and over, trying to dislodge the burning solution and thready mushrooms. She began to cry, dabbing her eyes with the same cloth she used to blow her nose, now a study in green and orange tie-dye.
Eli gently retrieved the rag – he wore examination gloves – and inserted it into the hazardous medical waste disposal chute, to be flash-burned before joining the recycling stream. He handed her another cleaning wipe. “So iodine appears to work, gently, and doesn’t hurt like the minty green. Told you so.”
“You told me so.” Tikka Gena nodded miserably. “I’m not crying, dammit! This stuff… What is this stuff! That’s not what I put in the bottle!”
“Smells like onions,” Tikki offered. “The kind that make my eyes water.”
Eli picked up a bottle and studied the label, then opened it and took a sniff. “Onion juice in the paramycocide? It isn’t supposed to smell like this, is it?”
“No!” Tikka Gena wailed. “But I can’t smell anything!” She kept blowing her nose desperately, but the burning and eye-streaming continued.
Eli made her another bottle of plain saline solution, and irrigated her green nostril with that, until it flowed fairly clear. He took a wet washcloth and mopped her whole face, to remove any lingering onion irritants. Then he stuck the probe up her nose again.
“Well, paramycocide should have worked. But onion juice didn’t help much.” Pitilessly, he shoved the iodine up her nose and squirted hard, four times.
Sass watched mesmerized. Kaol forcibly removed Tikki to pursue the sledding agenda. “Any chance simply flushing with saline…?”
“Tried that first,” Eli noted.
“Ow.”
“Ow,” Tikka Gena confirmed sadly. But her eyes began to droop closed.
“Heavily sedated?” the captain inquired.
Eli retorted, “Would you care to snort onion juice?”
“Hardly,” Sass agreed. “OK. So apparently most of the colonists have breathed in the pollen-seed-spore –”
“Just call it a spore.”
“Nose spores. And they…germinated because?”
“Because it takes N weeks at temperature T under sinus conditions?” Eli hazarded. “Or because it’s suddenly cold enough.” His patient’s eyes were firmly shut now, her breathing deep and even in drugged sleep. “I’ll make up a few gallons of iodine solution.” He held up the saline nasal sprayer. “I have three.”
Clay plucked the bottle out of his hand and rinsed it out. “I can program the plastic printer. How many you want?”
“Ideally one per person.” Eli shrugged. “They’ll share if they have to. But I don’t know yet that this treatment is fully effective.”
“Is it doing damage?” Sass asked. “Aside from being annoying.”
“I wouldn’t want fungus in my sinuses, possibly passing threads into the eyes. It gets a lot harder to get rid of something in the eyeballs.”
“I’ll put a rush on that then,” Clay concluded, and headed off.
“And bio-containment?” Sass pressed. “On my ship?”
“Oh, these aren’t mature enough to spew spores around,” Eli assured her. “I think. Probably. I could check the air filters.”
Sass smirked crookedly. “Thanks, Eli. Great job.” She pounded the doorframe on her way out.
“Oh, wait, Sass!” She turned back.
Eli finally found time to analyze her water samples from the lake silt. The fine white bottom was pale grey ash. From forest fires, of course, but mostly volcanic ash, similar to the eruptions that buried Denali Prime during their first trip to the hothouse world.
Based on so little data, Eli could offer no timeline of when the last major eruption occurred, or where. They had no baseline to calculate how fast the glaciers moved off the polar caps yet.
She hadn’t realized Sylvan was tectonically active. They hadn’t seen any volcanoes. But then, any number of cinder cones could lie buried beneath the thick ice sheets. Fault lines were invisible under the forest.
“Not much we can do about it,” she concluded.
“No. Just a threat to be aware of.”
Great, another to add to my list.
Ben next. Though, onion juice in the anti-fungal solution? Gotta rule out the supplier first.
28
A downside of their faster-than-light ansible communications was that it couldn’t interface with their normal comms. Besides, Sass’s time-zone decoder supplied the time as just after 02:00 at Mahina Orbital. So she confidently expected to leave a message on Ben’s ansible. He’d see the light blinking on the moose-antlered device next time he dropped by his office.
She was wrong. Instead, the moment she finished speaking, Ben’s face came on the small screen, silvery with low contrast, and strikingly handsome. Oddly, he was one of the few people who looked even better in grey-scale.
“Hey, Sass! No, there’s zero chance your equipment was sabotaged at MO. That was the question?”
Sass was momentarily diverted by what sat between his hands. She caught him hunkered over his desk with a frog. “Is…the frog well?”
“The frog is fine. What kind of sabotage?”
She reeled off a litany of equipment failures. He laughed at the onion juice, and perched jaw on hand, leaning closer to his desk frog, eyes alight.
Great, I’ve caught his sense of humor. “People could have died from these accidents, Ben.”
He nodded judiciously. “More of a time-consuming nuisance, though.”
“Why do you say zero chance of defective supplies?”
“I did the purchasing and warehousing. Aurora wanted competitive bids and take the low-ball offer. But I overruled her. I use Mo on MO because I trust him. Costs a bit more. Every order is inspected, twice, and he won’t carry sub-standard goods. If you buy from Mo, the part meets spec, guaranteed. To me, that’s worth extra. He came to my birthday party. A stretch, wearing a shiny red dunce cap.”
“I remember him. So all Spaceways resupply orders go through Mo?”
Ben nodded em
phatically, then shrugged. “We’re light years from home. Can we afford a backup generator to go bad? No. So I buy from a chandler I can count on. That’s Mo. So other than sabotage, how’s it going?”
“I installed our first floating platform at Melt Lake yesterday. Now we’re enjoying our first blizzard. We went sledding!”
“Sorry to miss that!”
“Everything takes longer than expected. I guess that’s reasonable, but the sabotage doesn’t help. I just needed to rule out bad supply. This Mo doesn’t hire Denali inspectors, does he?”
“I doubt any qualify for the job. So you suspect disgruntled Denali? Makes sense.”
“Where are you?”
“Sanctuary. Loading both the mass transports.” He sighed, bored. “A thousand, direct from here to Mahina. I anticipate customer complaints.” He poked the frog, who leaped away in protest. “Of course they show up with luggage that masses more than they do. Cope’s out there supervising, to load the gear before the passengers. Tedious.”
“Sounds it.”
“But I have an odd request for you. Loki wants to speak to his grandson. Floki. Through the ansible. Privately. I was about to call, but still trying to figure out my opinion.”
“Floki might not want to,” Sass suggested. “We could ask.”
“Yeah… Mostly I wondered if Loki could subvert him. These Loki-spawn seem to have an innate need to return to Loki and merge their learning. Like some kind of AI orgasm.”
Sass snickered. “We could agree to the meet, minus the privacy.”
“I was thinking that,” Ben allowed. “But could we really tell what was communicated? They’re capable of creating a private code on the fly. Morse code, maybe, eye and muscle twitches in their avatars. Something.”