Blood and Fire

by David Gerrold

  How much time do we have? Korie wondered. Is this another fool’s errand? There was only one consolation—at least, I can’t make any more mistakes. I won’t kill anyone else after this. He sipped at the water-nipple inside his helmet. I’m sorry, Mikhail. I’m sorry—

  A change in the light caused him to look up. The aft end of the Norway had appeared beyond the end of the transfer tube. It grew slowly as they approached.

  The external framework of the transfer tube extended; its latches opened, ready to grab the contact ring surrounding the Norway’s aft airlock. The hatch grew larger and larger until it filled their entire view. And then there was a solid thunk—a feeling more than a sound—as the latches grabbed the contact ring. The transfer tube extended and mated. Panels blinked green and air flooded back into the tube. And with the return of sound—real sound, not filtered electronic sound—Korie felt his tension easing.

  They had a place to go. Maybe it was safer than the place they’d been, but at least they weren’t going to die alone in space. At least that much was assured now.

  It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  Cargo Bay

  “We have acquisition,” Brik reported.

  “Commander Korie, you may reboard the Norway,” said Captain Parsons. She turned to Williger. “Anything?”

  Williger didn’t even look up from the display she was reading—she was using Korie’s station on the Command Deck. “I’ve found the medical log. This is fascinating stuff. Really fascinating.” Then, realizing that her words and her enthusiasm were completely at odds with the seriousness of the situation, she apologized. “Sorry. But it is fascinating. See, look—there are two forms to the creature: the wavicle and the bloodworm. The wavicle is like a seed or a spore; but it’s unstable. It’s like most forms of smart energy. It maintains itself by feeding off light. If there’s no light, it drops a quantum level and becomes a particulate form. But in that form, it’s always looking for an energy source so it can boost itself back up to the wavicle state. Now, here—this is where it gets deadly—living flesh is transparent to the wavicle form, but when the wavicle enters a living body, there’s not enough light to feed it, not the right frequencies of light, so it becomes particulate—and it’s trapped inside. The particulate looks for fuel to return to wavicle form, so it starts feeding off elements in the blood, any kind of energy it can release: blood sugar, oxygen, hemoglobin, whatever. But that’s still not enough energy in the blood for it to make the leap back to wavicle, so all it can do is breed more particulates—bloodworms. Hungry bloodworms. Hit them with a stinger beam or scan them, there’s the energy they need—they explode, you get wavicles. The sudden torrent of energy kicks most of the particulates back up a level. This is amazing stuff, Captain—you could win a Heinlein Prize for Medicine just for tracing the whole life cycle. I wonder how such a creature even evolved. That’s the real question here.”

  “What about breaking the life cycle of the particulate form?” Parsons asked. “Can it be done?”

  “To be honest ...” Williger leaned back in her chair and ran both hands through her short-cropped hair. She swiveled to face the captain. “This is kind of like the mythical energy creature from your childhood fairy tales. It feeds on energy, positive or negative, it doesn’t care which; it thrives on the tension between one state and another. The only way to kill it is to deprive it of energy. It can’t survive silence. But you can’t starve it without also killing the host. In fact, even killing the host is insufficient; these things will feed on the processes of decay. So there’s no way to get it out of a living body. Except—”

  “Go on,” Parsons said. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Well ... according to these files, there might be a way to block the bloodworms from eating. It would be kind of like gluing their mouths shut. But if the folks onboard the Norway actually tried it, I don’t have that information here. At least, I haven’t found it yet.”

  Parsons had a quirk—a quirk that some officers called “the leadership quirk”—even when she knew the answer, she asked the question anyway, just to be certain. In this case, if there was an answer to be found, Williger would have said. Nevertheless, “Is there any chance—any indication that the information you need is there, but you haven’t found it yet?”

  Williger gave her the look.

  “I have to ask,” Parsons said without apology.

  “As fast as HARLIE decrypts it and scans it, as fast as he assimilates it, as fast as he processes it, it shows up in the knowledge-array,” Williger explained. “HARLIE has performed a cross-correlated, Skotak analysis of the data clusters, weighted for relevance to resolution. Right here in the middle, there’s a block of data missing. A big block. You don’t get those kinds of holes in a data cluster by accident. That means someone has deliberately destroyed or removed the relevant information. So far, we’ve found nothing that even points to the pathways into the blank area. It’s a null-zone, empty as the rift—if we’re going to find the answer, it’s still aboard the Norway.” She nodded forward.

  Parsons followed her glance.

  On the main display, the view from Korie’s helmet was enlarged to theater-sized proportions. The mission team was moving forward out of the Norway’s airlock and into the Aft Reception Bay. The point of view bobbed and weaved with Korie’s head movements. Even with processing to steady the movement, the effect was still vertiginous. The mission team moved through the redundancy hatch at the forward end of the airlock reception chamber and into the Norway’s Cargo Bay.

  The view shifted first to the left, then to the right. Almost immediately, HARLIE’s voice: “I count fifteen survivors, in various states of deterioration. I am matching them to their ID records now. Captain Albert Boyett is not among the survivors.” This was followed by a strangled obscenity in some obscure language. Parsons ignored it.

  On the display, she could see that the mission team had come through the hatch with weapons ready; five camera views fractioned the screen, and it looked like an assault. As they turned, as they surveyed the room, the separate images revealed the ragged condition of the survivors, revealed the team lowering their weapons in dismay. The people here were haggard, sick and dirty. Some wore medical jumpsuits, others were crew. There were no Quillas or Martians or other augmented beings here, only raw humanity—dying.

  Berryman went immediately to the people in worst condition—they were lying on deck mats. He unclipped his scanner from his belt, then, after a brief hesitation, tossed it aside. Instead, he pressed his hands to each person’s body and let HARLIE do a remote readout through the touch sensors in his gloves. Blood pressure, heart-rate, body temperature ... it wasn’t enough, but it would have to do. What he really needed was a whole other domain of information that could only be obtained by microscanner. But scanners made the wavicles go crazy. Easton and Shibano saw what he was doing and began making the rounds of the other survivors, also taking readings through HARLIE.

  On the Bridge of the Star Wolf, Williger clucked to herself. She glanced back and forth between four different displays, muttering instructions to HARLIE the whole time. In the Norway, two men in medical jumpsuits approached Korie; one was portly with graying temples, and he looked eager—almost desperate—to talk. The other had a soldier’s physique and a military bearing; he seemed untouched by the plasmacyte infection and he acted as if he were in charge. “Dr. Makkle Blintze and Commander Yonah Jarell,” HARLIE whispered in Korie’s ear.

  Korie glanced from one to the other, doing that quick personal estimation that strangers always do upon first meeting. “Commander Jon Korie, Executive Officer, the Star Wolf,” he said. “What’s your situation here, gentlemen?” He made no move to take off his helmet.

  Blintze, the heavyset man, answered. “We’ve lost the captain and most of the crew. All of our people are showing advanced plasmacyte infections. We’ve been sealed in here, five days.”

  “What happened?” Korie asked.

  “Don’t answ
er that,” said Jarell quickly. To Korie, he said, “Commander Yonah Jarell, Fleet Preparedness Officer. This is Makkle Blintze, acting head of Project R. This is a need-to-know mission, Commander Korie. And you don’t need to know.”

  Korie glanced to Jarell only briefly, then looked back to Blintze. In his starsuit, he felt equally detached from both men. But Jarell’s quick assertion of authority annoyed him.

  “Yes, I do need to know. Commander Jarell—did you violate the Regulan quarantine?”

  “We were authorized to do so, Mr. Korie.”

  “So this was deliberate. Your mission was to determine methods of control and containment of plasmacytes.” Korie looked from one to the other.

  Blintze looked tired but quietly satisfied as well. “Yes, that’s correct. And we accomplished our mission. We made a breakthrough. A genuine breakthrough!”

  Korie glanced around the Cargo Bay, noting the infected and exhausted men and women of the Norway’s crew. “Yes, it’s obvious,” he said dryly.

  Blintze glanced nervously at Jarell, then said, “No, I mean it. It worked. We succeeded.”

  “I think that’s enough—” Jarell said, trying to cut him off.

  But Blintze refused to be silenced. To Korie, he continued. “We accomplished everything we set out to do. What we found is truly astonishing—”

  “I said, that’s enough—”

  “No, Yonah, it isn’t. We’re running out of time here and we need some help.” Turning back, Blintze went on. “We were ready to break orbit. Captain Boyett was worried about avoiding the star tip, but we were never in any danger from that. The important thing was that we’d broken the plasmacyte problem. But there was some kind of disagreement about what to do next. It involved the next phase of our mission, but before it could be resolved, we had a breakout. We initiated emergency containment procedures, but they didn’t work. We swept the ship with repulsor fields, from stern to bow, over and over and over again. They slowed the infection down, but the plasmacytes still got through—they were in the crew’s blood. They infected the entire ship. We tried everything. We tried to implement emergency triage, but—”

  “That’s enough, Blintze,” Jarell cut him off; then realizing how harsh he sounded, he explained to Korie, “We had some incidents. They weren’t pretty. We had to use ... force.”

  “We had a mutiny,” said Blintze. “A goddamned mutiny!” To Jarell, he said, “For God’s sake—the man’s on our side.”

  “How do you know that?” Jarell snapped back. “The Morthans could have captured a ship, outfitted it with slaves or renegades—they’ve done it elsewhere. They could have done it here.” To Korie’s pained look, he said, “Wouldn’t you be suspicious?”

  Korie didn’t answer. He’d been suspicious since he’d first read the Norway’s manifest.

  Blintze spoke again. “There are only fifteen of us left, Commander. The Norway shipped out with 123. A little cramped, yes, but as you know, we had a Class-9 power core. We managed. We were excited about the challenge. We had a mandate to crack the bloodworm dilemma. We found out how the plasmacytes reproduce. They’re not alive—they’re not organic life—but they use organic processes to support the wavicle state. It’s simply incredible. There’s no limit to what this could mean—”

  “Yes,” said Bach, coming up to stand beside Korie. “We’ve seen.” Her presence was as much to support Korie as anything else.

  “Then you know you’re infected,” Blintze said, not hearing the dryness in her tone. “The spores are in your bloodstreams too. They can get through starsuits. We thought they couldn’t, but we were wrong. We’re going to have to reclassify the bioarmor rating of standard starsuits, you know. We’ll have to increase the non-conductible quality of the polycarbon shielding—that’ll stop the wavicles from penetrating. Or we can spray the suits with conductible filaments and run a nano-current. That’ll attract them. Where there’s a current, the wavicles can feed; that traps them. If you ground the current, it pulls the energy out of the wavicles and they go particulate—and the particulate disintegrates if you expose it to vacuum or supercold. They’re more vulnerable in the wavicle form than is immediately obvious. It’s the bloodstream problem that took longest to solve because of the damage to the host—”

  “You have ... an answer?” Korie couldn’t bring himself to say the word cure. It would have been too much to hope for.

  Blintze started to nod in enthusiastic agreement, but before he could explain, Wasabe Shibano stepped up to report. “Mr. Korie, the Norway’s repulsor fields—? No question, they’re failing.”

  “Excuse me—” Korie said to Jarell and Blintze. He crossed the Cargo Bay to look forward through the starship’s keel. At the far end, he could see a throbbing reddish glow. Through his feet, he could feel the deep heterodyning resonance of the repulsor lenses.

  Bach and Shibano, Blintze and Jarell followed Korie; the four of them stood beside him and stared down the passageway too. “Wait here,” said Korie. He advanced up the keel cautiously. He had barely taken a few steps before he began feeling the pressure of the repulsor fields, pushing him forward. They swept over him in waves. This intensely, the fields had the strength to overpower a man. Korie grabbed a handhold on the bulkhead and secured his safety line to it.

  At the forward end of the corridor was a pulsating red glow. But he couldn’t resolve the image. He set his helmet display to zoom and the image swelled alarmingly. The repulsor field was an uneven ochre haze, like waves of heat seen across a distance. On the other side of it was ... a slithery bright carpet of bloodworms. All scarlet and crimson, they were on the deck, the walls, and dripping from the overheads. And clouds of wavicles filled the air. The red worms and the golden wavicles throbbed in unison to the beat of the repulsor fields. Every pulse swept visibly through the plasmacytes—successive waves of light that rippled the sparkling pinpoints and made the glistening wet bloodworms shudder and writhe and recoil.

  “Star Wolf? Are you getting all this?”

  “Yes, we are,” replied Brik, without apparent emotion.

  Korie cleared his helmet display back to normal. He unclipped his safety line and began pulling himself back through the corridor, aftward to the Cargo Bay. Handhold after handhold. He wasn’t going to take any chances on being pushed into that mess—

  He came into the Cargo Bay, arms wide. He guided everyone well away from the corridor hatch.

  “They smell our blood,” said Bach.

  “Not quite, Lieutenant,” Blintze corrected her. “They’re attracted to the heat of our bodies, the energy of your starsuits, the various electronics we surround ourselves with—the life support systems and so on.”

  “Whatever,” she said, unimpressed. “The effect is the same.”

  Shibano spoke now. “As the power to those fields weaken, Commander, the pulses are going to come slower and slower. Within a very short time, those fields will no longer be impermeable to the worms.”

  “How long?” asked Korie.

  Shibano hesitated. He was checking with HARLIE. “Ten hours ... maybe.”

  Risk Assessment

  “That means you’ve got to start now!” Jarell said.

  “Start what?” Korie was glad he was wearing a starsuit—even though it was an illusion, he liked the feeling of being isolated from this man.

  “Our rescue, of course!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Tell him, Blintze—”

  Korie held up a hand. “Star Wolf? Are you following this?”

  Parsons’ voice came back quietly. “We’re copying everything.”

  Korie turned to Blintze. “What have you got?”

  Blintze produced a memory clip. He held it up. “It’s a treatment.”

  “A cure?”

  “That’s probably the wrong word, but the effect is the same. We have a way to stop the bloodworms inside the body. We know it works—at least, we’re pretty sure it works. We tried it, more than once, and yes, it worked; but the p
atients kept getting reinfected, so we don’t know for sure if it works a hundred percent.”

  Korie took the clip from Blintze, turning it over thoughtfully in his gloved hand.

  “Be careful. That’s the only copy. We stripped it out of the Norway’s log. And there’s a self-destruct on that clip.”

  “Couldn’t have that falling into the wrong hands,” Jarell muttered.

  “No, of course not,” Korie agreed. “A cure for the most deadly disease in the galaxy has to be kept secret.” He said it with a straight face. He handed the clip back to Blintze. “Take the self-destruct off, and I’ll upload it to the Star Wolf. Dr. Williger will have to analyze it, and Captain Parsons will have to authorize any attempt at rescue. You realize that what you’re asking—demanding—is a violation of a standing order.”

  “With this information,” Jarell said, “the order becomes irrelevant.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Korie replied. “But it’s still the captain’s decision.” He accepted the clip back from Blintze and snapped it into place in his chest panel. Almost immediately, his suit display began flashing with information. HARLIE was sucking the data out of the clip as fast as the optical links could carry it. Several seconds passed, and then the display cleared. Transfer completed.

  “HARLIE?”

  “I’m analyzing the data structures,” came the reply. “It looks promising. Captain Parsons and Dr. Williger are examining the procedures.”

  Korie looked to Blintze, then to Jarell. He wasn’t going to let himself hope. Not yet. But he could see it in the others’ eyes. He turned away and whispered, “HARLIE? Can you patch me into the Bridge discussion?”

  Almost immediately, Williger’s voice was murmuring in his ear. “If this is correct, there is a chance, Captain.”

  “But there’s no assurance that the procedure is a hundred percent effective, is there?”