by R. Z. Held
“Get it to base while I draw them off.” Eriope pointed to the ground, across a sea of ex-soldiers.
Genevieve glanced to the Installs coming up the path. For a moment, she felt the clawing nausea of fear of a Pax Romana force ranged against her, her worst nightmare once upon a time. Presumably her sister’s last sight. But that was brief enough, possible to swallow down. After nearly a standard month she knew these people’s faces if not all the names yet. None of them were in uniform, and some were quite idiosyncratic in their style. She tore her gaze away from them to measure to the ground. She’d never make it past them with the flag now. “I can’t—”
“Of course you can. Easy, peasy.” Eriope snapped her wings out of her back, where they’d been tucked for climbing, and clambered onto the guard rail. “It’s even a straight line.”
She set her wings and launched herself into an elegant glide, curving around, then back, probably to illustrate how easy Genevieve would have it by comparison. Her short hair ruffled wildly around her face as if with joy at the wind.
Genevieve’s lips thinned with frustration. So this was a lesson. Pyrus must have tattled that she hadn’t been able to make herself glide yet. And what was Eriope doing, bothering to help him maneuver her into confronting the issue? That was something a friend would do. Genevieve was trying not to make friends.
Of course, maybe it would discourage Eriope if Genevieve completely failed, even with prodding.
Fear, of falling instead of soldiers, grabbed at her muscles, made it almost impossible for her to move. Her innate stubbornness got her as far as climbing on the rail, telling her system to lock her wings rigid at the right angle for flying. But she couldn’t make herself push off. “Come on, come on,” she chanted under her breath. It came easily in Lingua, at least one sign of progress from her weeks with Tsuga Security, but it didn’t help her push off the rail.
“No, Eriope’s clean,” someone shouted from the trail behind. Someone on the opposing team must have tackled her and commed up.
Genevieve couldn’t do it. She admitted it to herself, and started to turn to step down, but that was when a hand closed around her ankle. She kicked out, unbalanced, lost her grip on the metal—
She tumbled, view whirling too fast for her to make sense of it or know which way to twist to steady herself. Her system seized her muscles and did—something—or maybe it was deeper, more biological instincts than that, but she got her arms up to protect her face and her wings caught enough air to slow her so she plowed into the grass with less force.
Her knees and forearms still felt peeled, the pain at least fading quickly as the nanites healed the damage. She got to hands and knees, noticed the pairs of legs surrounding her, and groped out the flag and handed it over. She wanted to wheeze alone for a few moments, not try to run for it.
The opposing team members thundered off at a sprint, and Genevieve remembered to unlock her wings. “Sorry,” she said, when a few additional feet jogged up. Some of her own team, she presumed, given the lack of urgency.
“Could have been worse. You should have seen some of these clowns going ass over elbow when they were first learning,” Eriope caroled. She extended a hand and tugged Genevieve to her feet. Genevieve was more worried about recriminations from the others on their team, but they seemed philosophical enough, chatting together as they wandered off. No one so far had glowered at her the way Carex did, or indeed had offered her any fuel at all to stoke the intensity of her belief in her mission. She’d been trained by a variety of the ex-soldiers so far and while some were patient and some weren’t, she couldn’t see that there were more of the latter than in any population. She avoided the subject of frontier planets so she could exist in blissful ignorance of their precise opinions on those.
Genevieve drew her hand away from Eriope’s. She’d let this go too long, she realized. She’d allowed herself too many excuses. Time to release the virus here, whether these people were reserves or not. She honestly believed now that Pyrus believed he wasn’t—but that wasn’t the same thing. They were still Installs, of use to Pax Romana, if the empire decided to strong-arm them into action at some later point.
True, since she was still in training, she didn’t have the permissions to open a com channel to everyone in Tsuga. That might be the cleanest way—initiate an all-Tsuga channel, drop out, then stab anyone handy—but it certainly wasn’t the only way. She only had to be ready to seize her chance when such a channel was opened by someone else. It happened every few days for one reason or another.
But that would mean lingering near others for significant periods of time, to maximize the chances of not being alone when next an all-Tsuga channel was opened. Who would that make ground zero? Eriope was friendly, trusted Genevieve enough to include her in Tsuga’s after-hours camaraderie. Would Genevieve be able to sentence the woman to death, looking into her eyes, any better than she’d been able to glide?
It was as if the universe conspired to stab a pin right through the heart of her cowardice to watch it writhe, no excuses left. If she only unclipped the earring, right now, stepped into Eriope...
But there would be other all-Tsuga broadcasts, about nothing in particular. Not like this one, to which she desperately wanted to listen. Infecteds. Like her.
That wasn’t what Genevieve had been asking, but she didn’t see how else to phrase it. She’d have to go see for herself. She caught herself in the formal phrasing.
Eriope shrugged, unbothered by pretty much everything, and jogged toward the knot of people forming where the remaining players—Genevieve paid brief attention to the location-specific channel—were deciding whether to redivide into new teams.
Genevieve pulled up the building map and found the floor Eriope had mentioned without trouble. She’d assumed it was part of the general clinic complex before. She started out jogging, but slowed as she neared the building. Pyrus would hardly welcome her bursting in and getting underfoot as he tried to treat the Infecteds. If she’d wanted to gawk, she should have hurried earlier, and joined the group she assumed was transferring the Infecteds from the ship.
She loitered near the elevator and checked if anyone had their location information on the public map. Pyrus did, along with a couple others straggling in from the elevators closest to the freight entrance. Maybe she could still offer a pair of extra hands. Genevieve forced herself to consider whether she should stay out of it, but she had to know who these Infecteds were. Were any from her own planet? Other agricultural planets scheduled for their Pax Romana takeover? Or were they Pax Romana citizens who’d been exposed in some other manner?
And what was going to happen to them? Why transport them all the way here if they weren’t going to survive, as everyone seemed to believe? Genevieve wouldn’t be able to think about anything else if she didn’t at least try to find some answers.
She arrived to a scene of chaos. She remembered how the woman she’d pulled free had babbled, sometimes ranted, disconnected phrases of helpless confusion as she grasped for what wasn’t there. All nine of the forms being carried in not only ranted, but screamed and thrashed. For a split second, Genevieve was surprised that the Infecteds were being carried by hand, one ex-soldier with the feet, one with their hands under armpits, but of course they’d fall off stretchers. The people doing the carrying could flex with each thrash. And heal blows.
Any grumbling out loud would have been lost in the noise from the Infecteds, but Genevieve suspected there was plenty going on, on private channels. As she hung back, just inside the doorway, the Infecteds were dumped none too gently into individual gel pools. The gel cushioned their fall and blunted the force of their thrashing as it was intended to do. Pyrus walked down the line, a muscle standing out on his jaw, stopping at each control interface and calibrating until the gel level completely covered each Infected.
The noise dropped in stages, easing down to something almost bearable, muted sloshes and groans. The Installs cleaned their hands and drifted out without a second look at the patients, leaving Genevieve and Pyrus alone with them.
She edged forward as the gel oozed in to cover the last man’s mouth, nose, eyes, forehead. She couldn’t imagine the expense of all these individual pools, full to the brim. She was familiar enough with the small pools in the hospital at home, meant for a single limb, and of course she’d seen the advertisements for individual pools meant to be filled to the neck or lower chest. But full immersion was rare, and hardly necessary most times.
“Not a pretty sight, huh?” Pyrus said. “I hate this.” His words had a slashing quality she’d never heard from him before, making Genevieve jerk back.
Even genetically civil people must have their limits. Something in the line of his lips pressed tight reminded her of Eriope’s expression, when walking a ragged edge in the elevator. Then Pyrus dropped his head, reassembling control on his own. “I’m sorry. It’s not you.” He traced the edge of the pool with two fingertips.
Genevieve joined Pyrus in front of the control panel, kept her attention politely on the Infected. Seeing the man’s face through the covering gel made her instinctively hold her breath. Was he conscious enough to feel like he was drowning? You could breathe through gel, but your hindbrain didn’t like it. “Why can’t you let them breathe normally?” To feel your body being taken away from you and drowning too—her stomach surged up and she clenched her teeth until it settled. When she allowed in her memories of that time—which she did as little as humanly possible—beyond the feeling of her family’s presence she found mostly disconnected dreams, nonsense born of fear that didn’t understand its source. She supposed these people must have as little awareness of their surroundings as she’d had.
“Because they’re never going to wake up,” Pyrus said heavily. “They’re as good as dead, we’re just easing their passing.”
“No.” Genevieve shook her head, the word alone insufficiently emphatic to convey her steadily rising emotions. They couldn’t just drop these poor people into gel pools and leave them there. Alone. At least she hadn’t been alone.
She took the risk of reaching for the control panel even with Pyrus standing right there, and set the gel level to just below the chin. The man gasped and coughed as his mouth was revealed, clearing his lungs, but he didn’t speak. Genevieve leaned over the pool to drag goop off his skin and hair with her fingers, hastening the normal draining process. “There has to be something—”
Pyrus jerked her back, fingers digging into her shoulder. “Nothing we do matters. Nothing, do you understand? I used to imagine I could do some good. I fought to have them brought here, so at least someone would be trying to save them, instead of hooking them up to instruments in some out-of-the-way facility and walking out. Like all they’re worth is the data describing the process of their deaths. And I could help if they could grant me medic permissions, but they can’t grant anything if they’re not conscious. So they die, every one. And they still keep sending them.”
He clamped his hand to her other shoulder, turning her to face him. “You can’t beat yourself bloody against the impossible, lose yourself in the enormity of it. I did, and I’m still trying to come back from it—” He pushed her away as abruptly as he’d turned her in, twisted himself to face the blank wall instead.
Genevieve clasped her gelled hand with the other, fingers sliding unexpectedly when she thought she’d finally found a grip. “But I—” But she’d survived. And she couldn’t tell him that. Was she simply a statistical anomaly, the one in a million lucky combination of genetics, personality, and environmental factors? She refused to believe that.
If cold probability hadn’t saved her, what had? Pyrus seemed to consider the conversation finished, and dragged himself from one pool to another, checking readouts in silence. Genevieve opened the door to memories she’d shut away.
She’d dragged the infected woman free, across the floor of the former office building, detoured when a collapsed beam blocked their way—when had she started to feel ill? She’d—itched, Genevieve thought. Itched first in her hands, then her arm muscles had started to burn like she’d been lifting equipment above her head over and over for hours. But with the adrenaline, she hadn’t really thought about it as she got the woman loaded into the back of the ambulance.
And then sitting in front while her partner drove, her body had stopped listening to her. She remembered that clearly. She’d slumped against the window and thought that maybe she needed a rest, that she’d be ready to walk again when they reached the field medical station.
And then…pain, and the dreams. Or had the dreams come later? She thought the beginning had been more formless than that. Thoughts that weren’t thoughts, or dreams, or even emotions, they were too strange and didn’t feel like they belonged to her. But she’d been somewhere safe, with her family. Hang on, Vieve. She remembered the smell of her childhood room.
“What about the placebo effect?” When Pyrus turned to her, Genevieve wanted to take the question back, but she stood firm instead, trying to put confidence she didn’t feel into her face. She appreciated that he had to guard himself against burnout, she really did. But all the more reason someone else needed to ask the question.
“No placebo is going to cure death, like magic,” he snapped.
“But the environment, feeling safe, feeling cared for by professionals—”
“I am aware,” Pyrus bit off his words. “Of everything the placebo effect entails. Safety doesn’t address feeling yourself rebuilt from the inside by machines.”
This time, the retch called up by Pyrus’s words made it all the way to the back of Genevieve’s mouth. She swallowed it down before the acid could burn too badly, but she must have jerked. Pyrus’s anger drained from his face. “Genevieve—”
“Let me.” Genevieve returned to the man she’d freed from the gel. His eyes were open now, staring in fear at nothing. She smoothed his hair. “Let me take care of them. Please?” The words came out without thought, the only way to stem the tide of her clotted guilt. Her family had saved her, a coward. Of all those who had been infected so far, she was the only one who had lived. Somewhere in that survival, there must be a reason, a reason she could put to use.
What could she do to be worthy of her family’s gift? Save others, without family there beside them.
Or try, at least.
Pyrus was silent for a long time, then sighed. “It’s not my place to save anyone from themselves. Maybe—” He attempted a smile, managed at least a forced lightening of his expression. “You’ll see something from an outside perspective that’s been missed. I’ll tell Carex I reassigned you. It would have to be classed as training, unfortunately, rather than as a full position. Carex was complaining about how he’d have to grant you clearance soon, so if you don’t want to delay that…”
Genevieve shook her head aut
omatically. For all his protestations, he clearly was still trying to save her from herself, with what meager bait he had.
Then it hit her, like a fist into her stomach, still sour from her earlier emotional nausea. Clearance. Permissions to do things like open all-Tsuga channels. There it was, what she’d needed all along to complete her mission. That, too, would be putting the gift her family had given her to use.
In abstract, her choice seemed ridiculously simple. Save people, or kill them? Except she didn’t know if she’d be successful in saving anyone, and she didn’t know the virus would work. And what if killing Installs saved thousands of others, in the future?
Too many variables, too many unknowns to predict the future. What, then, could her choices do now? Killing wouldn’t unconquer Idyll. Killing wouldn’t give her sister back her life. But these people, maybe Genevieve could give them back their lives, albeit deeply changed ones.
“That’s all right, thank you. I want to do this.” Genevieve searched for some better words, to convey to him how she knew she was right, that changes in their environment would help keep at least some of these people alive. Because she’d lived. But she couldn’t think of anything, and let him leave with only the gratitude.
All right. If she was going to be anecdotal about this, she might as well go all the way. What would have made her feel better? Not drowning was good, but she could do better than that. She reached for the man’s hand beneath the gel. The control panel gave a pissy little beep at detecting a second set of vitals, so she pulled their clasped hands up into the air.
“I’m here,” she told him. She left Lingua behind so she could sound more emphatic in Idyllian. “I’m not your family and I don’t even know your name, but I’m here and I want you to survive, okay? All of you. We’re going to do this together.”