by neetha Napew
“Hold it.” I left the exam table and put myself between them. “Centuron, I need to treat your friend over there. I don’t need to be scraping someone else off the floor right now.”
The limb dropped, and I pivoted to address the indignant loudmouth. “I understand how you feel. I’m sorry you got hurt. But you’ll have to wait. Make being quiet your number-one priority, okay?”
All my warning got me was a hateful glare. “I shouldn’t have come here. The League Commander was right. You’d rather make things better for yourself than help us.”
The League Commander was going to get my foot up a certain portion of his anatomy if he didn’t stop polluting the prison population with his waste. The centurons both looked ready to pound this guy into pate.
I scanned him, was assured there was nothing life-threatening present, then gave him a push toward the door. “Do yourself a favor. Get out of my exam room. Come back in a few hours.”
The patient stalked out, muttering things not complimentary to me or the medical profession.
I went back to the injured Hsktskt, who was regaining consciousness. Heavy limbs started thrashing around. Bellows of pain erupted from the thick throat. The centurons would come in handy after all.
“Grab his limbs and help me get him into restraints. No, not the injured one, idiot.” I glanced over my shoulder. “Nurse, if you’re done ogling, a syrinpress would be nice.”
A thorough scan reveal additional tissue and muscle damage, and I directed Vlaav to get the largest bonesetter we had prepped.
One of the centurons hovered at my elbow, and I glanced at him. “What, exactly, did this slave use to attack this male?”
“His foot.”
Now I saw the outline of the wide-base sole imprinted in the flesh. No question about it, the attacker had been Major Devrak. As far as I knew, he was the only Trytinorn on Catopsa, and twice the size of the next largest prisoner. The Hsktskt had been forced to modify a launch last week just to transport him off the Perpetua.
“Where’s the attacker?” Neither Hsktskt answered me, so I stopped working. “Don’t tell me you killed him.”
“The Major will be placed in isolation.” Reever entered the infirmary and stood at the end of the exam table. “Will the centuron recover?”
I finished infusing the patient with a sedativeIanalgesic compound and helped Vlaav align the bone-setter before I replied. “He should, if he’s given a week of bed rest and lets the limb heal.”
“See to it,” Reever told the centurons, then turned to my intern. “Can you continue the treatment by yourself?”
Vlaav’s hemangiomas pulsed and darkened. “Of course, I can. But-“
Reever grabbed my medical case and my left arm. A moment later I was being hustled down a corridor.
“Hey!” I tried to get loose. “I’ve got work to do!”
“There are prisoners who need treatment,” he said.
“So send them to the infirmary. I’ve been twiddling my thumbs for the past five days.”
“They refuse.”
I started to ask why, then recalled what the loudmouthed prisoner had said. My lips thinned. “How many need treatment?”
“Forty. Possibly more.”
We arrived at tier three’s commons, where a group of male prisoners had been assembled for a meal interval. A ring of Hsktskt centurons surrounded the large group, and held their weapons ready. I saw why when I pushed past one to get a better look.
A cluster of males in bloodstained tunics were shoving and snarling at each other, while several others lay wounded or ill on the floor. Surprisingly, the injured were all female. That didn’t make much sense.
Major Devrak trumpeted over the other voices, but I had no problem understanding him. “-an honorable death! It is better to die than to submit to the beast!”
Lieutenant Wonlee, I saw, was standing in front of the Major, with his claws ready to tear. Only he was holding them extended toward the League subcommander. Now that really confused me.
“You corrupted her!” Wonlee moved in. “She won’t listen to me!”
Fists, limbs, and tendrils started to violently collide.
I turned to the closest guard. “Can you fire a warning shot off in here without making more work for me?”
The centuron glanced at Reever, who nodded. The beast pointed his rifle at the ceiling structure and activated the weapon. A moment later a huge boom shook the commons and everyone stopped fighting.
I walked over to the first prone figure and knelt beside her. She was babbling and twisting, her body temperature elevated. A red, blotchy rash covered her face and upper appendages.
I opened my case to grab my scanner. “Get a blanket or thermal covering over here.”
There was absolute silence for a moment. Then someone threw a folded piece of berth linen at me. I caught it and covered the shivering female as I ran an internal series. The outer coverings of her brain and spine were badly inflamed She reacted only when I shined an optic light in her eyes, and then she tried to hit me.
“Get this one to the infirmary.”
I went to the next female, who was pale and still. A quick scan revealed she had died of the same symptoms. It took a few more seconds to scan the remaining females and confirm what I already suspected.
“Reever.” I gestured for him to join me. “They all have it. Two of them are already dead. I’m taking them out of here, now. We’ll need help to move them to an isolation area.”
Before my ex-bondmate could say or do anything, Devrak shuffled through the prisoners to stand over me. “You are not taking them anywhere.”
The last patient groaned as I got to my feet and straightened my tunic. Calmly I met the Major’s furious gaze.
“I said I’m taking them out of here,” I said. “They’re dying, you titanic moron.”
“Doctor.” Wonlee hurried over to one of the females who was curled up tightly in a fetal position, and picked her up in his arms. The insides of which, I realized, had no spines. “Can you help her?”
She possessed the same spiny exoskeletal plates as Wonlee had. They flattened to act like a prickly cushion between the two beings. A relative? I scanned her one more time to be sure, but the female was far beyond any help I could offer.
“I’m sorry, Lieutenant. It’s too late.”
He gently laid her down again, then hurtled up and at the Trytinorn with a furious shriek of rage. Devrak knocked him aside, but not without receiving some substantial, deep gouges on his hide.
“Wonlee, stop.” I went to where he lay on the deck, and scanned him. Devrak began thumping over, and I turned my head. “Back off.”
“We will not permit the doctor to remove these females.” A hunched-over canine figure appeared beside Devrak. Shropana. “She will kill them. Just as she did the others, from the Perpetua.”
“No.” Wonlee spat out some blood, then propped himself up by one arm. His claws scraped over the shoulder of my tunic, but he didn’t hurt me. “Take them. If you don’t, they’ll all die. Like she did.” Despite his injuries, he got to his feet and positioned himself between me and the League officers, his spines trembling but erect. “Let her do her work.”
“Very well.” Shropana gave me a shrewd smile. “They’re nearly dead as it is.”
Meaning I’d get blamed for that, too. “I was wrong, Patril. I can’t do heart surgery on you. I wouldn’t be able to find it.”
Reever organized more Hsktskt guards to begin transporting the females. The males watched in silence. One of the dead females was removed by a cenruron, but Wonlee picked up the other before anyone could stop him.
“You will need to perform tests to identify and cure the sickness, will you not?” he asked me. I nodded. “Use her body.”
Knowing how attached he was to the female, I started to shake my head. “I’d need to do an autopsy.”
“I know. I want you to.” The Lieutenant started limping toward the infirmary. “I want to know what ki
lled my wife.”
CHAPTER NINE
Twists and Turns
The Hsktskt grudingly transported the entire group of females to an isolation chamber near the infirmary, where I spent the next several hours treating and monitoring them. After the last patient stabilized, I returned to the infirmary to check on the injured Hsktskt and Wonlee.
I found the Lieutenant sitting alone at the end of the inpatient ward. On the berth beside him lay the body of his wife. He held her claws in his and stared down at her slack face, grief etched in deep lines around his eyes and mouth.
One of the Lok-Teel had attached itself to the dead female’s leg, cleaning the encrusted bodily fluids from her cold skin. I gently removed it and set it on the floor.
“Excuse me for intruding, Lieutenant, but I need to speak with you.” I sat down beside him and hoped he would confirm my suspicions without going ballistic on me. “Can you tell me what happened? How long ago did the females become ill? Why didn’t your wife and the others come to the infirmary?”
“They have shown signs for several days. My wife, Mareek fell sick last night. They would have reported, but Shropana and Devrak convinced them that you would have them killed. This morning Mareek became confused, nearly incoherent.” Something tore in his voice as he added, “I argued with her. Our last words to each other were spoken in anger.”
I couldn’t touch him, or I’d have put an arm around him. “I’m sure Mareek knew how much you loved her, Lieutenant.”
He made a harsh sound. “Wonlee. Just Wonlee.”
“How did the females end up in the male tier?”
“I don’t know. They appeared in our commons a few days ago. We hid them in our berths at first, but the beasts are everywhere and”-he gestured toward the see-through walls around us-“our deception was discovered.” He tenderly placed the female’s claws on her spiny breast and got up slowly. “Last night, their temperatures spiked. They caught me trying to cool them down.”
“You’ve had some kind of medical training, haven’t you?”
“I was a medic on our homeworld. That’s how I met Mareek, during one of her furloughs. I worked in the Star Surgeon’s Office, and she needed a deep-space eval. We married and I joined the League, to be with her. It would be an adventure, she said.” He closed his eyes briefly. “Now they’ve killed her.”
“I’m very sorry, Wonlee.” I didn’t like the way he stood, favoring one side. “I should take a look at you now, okay?”
He nodded. “Doctor, I know it doesn’t matter anymore, but I have resigned my commission from the League. As long as I am here, I will do what I can to aid you.”
“I can always use another pair of hands.” I pointed to the exam area. “First let’s make sure you’re going to stick around for a while.”
Devrak had nearly shattered Wonlee’s diaphragm which, unlike the Terran version, was composed of bone. Had it not been for the band of cartilage that allowed it to naturally collapse under stressful conditions, his chest cavity would have been crushed. The Lieutenant’s entire skeleton was similarly designed, another plus. Support braces and some analgesics for the inevitable inflammation were all he needed to remain mobile. I admitted him to the inpatient ward anyway.
“The last thing you need to do,” I said when he started protesting, “is to go back to the prisoner tiers right now. So keep your promise, shut up, and get some rest.”
Dchêm-os had finished the hematological work-ups when I emerged from the ward and offered a data pad with the results of her analysis. I didn’t bother with niceties. “Well?”
“Cell levels, decreased glucose, elevated protein and white blood. Nothing, the cultures revealed.”
That meant something more serious, but I’d have to do a spinal tap to confirm my suspicions. “Set up to perform lumbar punctures. Orderly.” I pointed to the Lok-Teel, who were climbing up the sides of the berths. “Move those blobs away from the patients, will you?”
Later that day I lifted my face from the electroniscopic scanner and let Zella and Vlaav have a look.
“I’ve seen something like this before.” The Saksonan peered again into the viewer. “Is it a microbe?”
“Give the intern a cigar.” I shut off the scanner and rubbed my fingers against my tired eyes. “They all have bacterial meningitis.”
Zella gasped. “Assassinate us, the beasts mean to.”
“I don’t think so.” I sat down and studied the reports. “Vlaav, start the patients on the intravenous cephalosporin antibiotics, compatible with their individual species.”
The nurse wasn’t finished. “Poisoning us, they are-“
“Nope. It didn’t originate from tainted food, or we’d all be infected. Something else did this.” I decided not to tell them I’d never seen this particular microbe before, and that it didn’t register on the medsysbank. Bad enough I was shaking in my footgear. No need to start a panic.
“Their side, you would take.”
“If I had, poisoning you would be number one on my list.” I switched off the scope. “Prep for a postmortem.”
The autopsy on Wonlee’s wife took nearly two hours, but I wanted to go slowly and rule out every other possibility. I knew Mareek had died of meningitis the moment I cut away the swollen meninges- mucosal exudate clogged the sulci fissures in the brain surface, and scanning revealed a massive release of proinflammatory cytokines in the basal cerebral arteries.
However, confirmation of cause of death was all I got from the autopsy. Nothing Mareek had ingested had caused the disease. Comparative scans of the survivors revealed that only two had eaten the same food within the last twelve hours. The others had been served a variety of meals, all based on their species requirements.
The worst part? I found no trace of the microbe in her corpse.
I performed spinal taps on the survivors, and verified that each of them had been infected with the bacteria. The microbe itself was very odd. The hexagonal-shaped bacteria possessed a tough outer cell hull unlike anything I’d ever seen. The dark green-colored wall darkened a few minutes after removal from the body, and completely concealed the cell nucleus. It resisted all my attempts to probe the interior as well.
Since the bacterium causing the meningitis could have been introduced to the victims through a wide variety of means, I was back to square one.
“So it didn’t come from what they ate.” I stripped out of my gear, handed Zella the data pad with the forensic analysis, and yawned. “I can’t think straight.”
“Sleep, you go to.” Dchêm-os annotated the appropriate chart. “One of the beasts for you, I will send, should they change, the females’ conditions.”
“Why are you suddenly being so helpful?”
“My friends, they are,” Dchêm-os said.
Right. Had nothing to do with me, of course. What was I thinking?
I waved at a guard to escort me back to my chamber, but he didn’t budge. “Come on, I’m tired.”
“OverMaster HalaVar instructed us to allow you unrestricted movement,” the Hsktskt said, and handed me a trustee’s tunic.
I wondered why. “About time. I’m sick of wearing yellow.”
I walked over to my room and found the door panel slightly ajar. That didn’t sink in for a few minutes, until I sat on my pallet and realized who was missing. “Jenner?”
He was gone.
Since I’d been given unrestricted access to the compound, I didn’t bother going to the Hsktskt about my missing pet. I looked myself, starting with all the chambers in proximity to my quarters.
I know I left that door panel shut, I thought as I peered in room after room, around and under anything that would conceal a small feline. If I hadn’t, and a hungry cenruron found Jenner first...
My pace quickened, along with my fear. I ran down the rows of prisoner cells, and pretended not to hear the angry jeers. A search of each tier’s commons turned up nothing.
Where was he? What happened to him?
This was
all my fault, I decided as I hurried into a corridor I hadn’t taken before. If I hadn’t let Jenner run loose on the Sunlace, he wouldn’t have wandered out of my quarters here. I’d given him too much freedom, and not thought about the danger that posed.
A forbidding weight collected under my sternum. Oh, God. If 1 lose him, I won’t have anything left.
The corridor arrived at a bewildering enclosure spiked with innumerable quasi-quartz columns rising from the floor. They were smaller and more tightly packed than the tower structures. It transformed the interior to a huge, glassy labyrinth.
I stopped. If I walked into the glittering maze, I might never find my way out. “Jenner?” I called out in a low voice. “Pal, are you in here?”
Something on my right made a scuffling sound, and I hurried around the pillar. And nearly stepped on the two adolescent Forharees entwined together on the floor.
“Hey!” The teenagers sprang apart and scrambled to their feet. “What is it with you two?” I looked around and lowered my voice. “Haven’t you ever heard of holding hands?”
Kroni’s beak arched with indignation. “We would rather die-“
“-‘together than live apart.’ You told me before, I know.” I tossed her trustee tunic at her and made a shooing motion. “I swear, I’m going to inject both of you with chemical inhibitor myself. Get back to your tiers, now.”
I waited until the grumbling kids hurried off, then pushed aside caution and walked into the labyrinth, calling Jenner’s name again. The central pillars had grown in tightly fitted rows, which made navigating the corrugated walkway a challenge. A few times I had to squeeze through narrow gaps to continue on.
“Jenner?”
The sound of a strange Terran voice made me freeze. “Stay where you are, dope.”
Astonishment left me mute. There were no other humans on Catopsa except Reever, and he barely qualified. I’d even verified it through the database. So who was this guy?
I got my answer when a slim, brown-haired Terran male dressed in a slave tunic appeared from around a corner. He had a narrow, clever face and the biggest, softest green eyes I’d ever seen. In his hands he held something wrapped in cloth, which he handed over to me.