Visible over the rooftops of the nearby buildings, the sheer, two-thousand-foot red rock canyon walls shouldered in on both sides of the compound. Squinting against the sunlight, Zenn could just make out the metallic glint of the bary-gens. About the size and shape of a fifty-five-gallon drum, each barometric ionic generator was mounted some three hundred feet up, anchored to the cliffs on either side of the canyon at regular intervals. The pressure-seal created by the generators shimmered like a heat mirage where the oxygen-and-water-rich air of the valley pressed up against the thin, lifeless atmosphere above it. Terraforming the entire surface of the planet had never been an option; too expensive, too lengthy and complex. Modifying only the land they needed, piece by piece, down in valleys was the obvious solution. Now, sections of the Valles Marinaris and the other half-dozen enclosed valleys strung out across the planet’s midsection were the sole refuges of the remaining human colonists on Mars. Beyond these protected canyons, up amid the ultraviolet-blasted plains, towering volcanoes and ancient dried-up ocean beds of Mars, nothing grew, nothing breathed, and nothing moved but dancing dust-devils.
Here, in her home valley, the lush scent of freshly mowed switchgrass rode on the breeze that blew from the depths of the four-mile-deep canyon systems to the east. Above, a scattering of mare’s-tail clouds drifted high in the ruddy-pink sky.
The hound yawned beneath her, and Zenn bent at the knees to absorb the motion, bracing herself as the jaws clapped together again with a click of massive canines. Adapted for pursuing their equally huge prey through the planet-wide oceans of Mu Arae, whalehounds reminded Zenn of immense, eight-legged otters, but with more elongated heads and jaws bristling with double rows of teeth long and sharp as sabers. It was only during Otha’s rounds earlier this morning that he’d noticed the animal’s reddened, weeping eye. Zenn’s sleep-dazed state of mind had instantly cleared when, between bites of toasted muffin at breakfast, her uncle said she’d be allowed to handle the treatment. He said he was getting too old to go hound-climbing.
Otha’s confidence in her came as a pleasant surprise. The whalehound had been purchased recently by the royal family of the Leukkan Kire – and they were paying royally to have him housed at the cloister until they came to pick him up. If anything went wrong, they could lose that money. And the cloister, Zenn knew, couldn’t afford to lose any money right now. Just last week Ren Jakstra had come around again to badger Otha about the overdue mortgage payment. He wasn’t nice about it.
“Are you set up there?” The buzz of her uncle’s voice in her earpiece brought her back to the task at hand. “I’m boosting the seda-field to fifty percent… now,” he said. The effect of the general sedation field was immediate: the hound’s body drooped, and the lid of his open left eye lowered to half-mast. The right eyelid slowly crept up, allowing Zenn to see more of the infected tear-duct canal. “Alright. He’s under,” Otha said.
With the seda-field at half power, the hound should be just relaxed enough to let her gently rinse his eye with the solution in the tank-pack. Taking extra care to keep her movements slow and deliberate, Zenn eased the spray nozzle from the holster on her belt and took aim at the inflamed tissue in the corner of the hound’s right eye.
Then, without warning, it was there. Inside her mind. Waking, stirring to life under the surface of her thoughts, making her vision dim and knees watery beneath her.
No…
The sensation rose up like a fire flaring from hidden embers, writhing, probing… searching… releasing a wave of unnatural warmth, dizziness and nausea deep inside her.
Not again.
The hound craned his huge head to one side. She saw his left eye focus, the huge, inky pupil dilating, his attention fixing on her, keen, unsettling.
Not now.
But this time, there was something new, something she hadn’t noticed the other times she’d felt this, with the other animals. This time there was pain. Sharp, burning her eyes. No, not eyes. Just her right eye, as if scoured by sandpaper.
This can’t be happening…
“Remember,” Otha’s voice sounded far away. “Gentle on the trigger.”
Only half-aware of what she was doing, Zenn’s finger closed around the nozzle trigger. But then, at the merest touch of her finger, the nozzle activated. Instantly, there was a seething whoosh of rapidly released pressure. Solution sprayed wildly in all directions. Her safety goggles were immediately coated with a thick froth, and the salt-sweetness of antibiotic-laced saline solution filled her mouth. She spit and gagged and tore the foam-covered goggles off. A second later, the whalehound reacted.
The first, violent shake of his head sent Zenn sailing into the air. With a spine-wrenching jolt, the safety line attached to her pack harness snapped tight, pushing the breath from her lungs. The world spun around her, a multicolored blur. She swung back toward the hound, slamming hard into his neck. Her headset and goggles were sheared off by the impact, one leg wedged awkwardly between her and the animal. Pain shot through her, so sharp she thought the leg must be broken. Then she was swinging away again, whipped out and up, past one huge, whiskered cheek, then jerking around to fly past the other. She gasped for air, and glimpsed Otha far below, scrambling to get out of the way.
The half-blinded hound lumbered backwards. Zenn bounced viciously in the harness, the straps cutting into her flesh. With a screech of bending metal, the animal plowed into the side of the infirmary at the rear of the pen, sending wall panels flying to the ground. Still shaking his head, and Zenn with it, he lurched forward again, heading directly for one of the transmit posts of the pen’s energy fencing. She fought to get a grip on the safety line, the slick rope slipping through her fingers. Surely, the line couldn’t take the strain. Surely, any second it would break, sending her flying like a tetherball cut free.
And then, in an instant, it was over. The hound halted his headlong rush, and stood, breathing hard. The strange sensation gripping Zenn vanished, along with the pain in her eye, as if whatever connection she and the animal had briefly shared was now severed. Beneath his dripping jaws, she swung back and forth, each arc smaller than the next. She saw Otha, working the virt-screens again. He must have dialed the seda-field up to full power.
The hound’s eyelids lowered to slits, his massive frame curled in on itself and he crouched low, folding eight pillar-thick legs beneath him. The muscular tail swept side-to-side once before coming to rest on the pen floor. With a gust of exhaled breath the animal closed his eyes and was still.
Zenn hung limp, suspended from the safety line beneath the hound’s jaw. Beneath her coveralls, an ice-cold trickle of liquid snaked down her back. Otha was directly underneath her, his upturned face lined with concern. Bits of debris littered the ground around him.
“Zenn! Are you hurt? Speak up, girl.”
“I’m… I’m fine,” she sputtered through clenched teeth, struggling for breath, her body twisting on the line, her shoulders and thighs burning where the straps dug into her. “I’m alright.”
“Are you?” Otha said, hands on his hips, watching her dangling in midair. “That would be a matter of opinion.”
Zenn’s face flushed hot.
A simple eyewash. And I messed it up. Well done, Zenn, you just blew test number one…
Finally, she gathered herself sufficiently to grasp the safety line and regain her footing on the soggy fur of the hound’s chest. Releasing the line’s hand brakes, she rappelled to the ground.
Otha reached up to steady her as she touched down, his face stern. They moved away from the hound toward the transmit post that held the fence’s control panel. Her left leg felt as if it might buckle under her, but at least it wasn’t broken. She made an effort to keep Otha from seeing her limp. They stopped, and it took her a moment to realize Otha was waiting for her to shut down the fence so they could exit – a reminder that this was her patient, her responsibility.
She toggled the switch and the invisible energy barrier crackled off. Still trying to
clear her head after what just happened, she was about to switch the fence back on as Otha came to help her out of the tank-pack. Strands of her hair lay like damp red cobwebs across her face. Her sodden coveralls, pant legs and sleeves rolled up to fit, clung to her like a clammy second skin. She didn’t want to imagine what sort of scrawny, drowned animal she must look like – a Tanduan skinkstork, according to Otha. And that’s when she wasn’t soaking wet.
She was tall for her age, but not tall enough in her own opinion, her body thin and wiry, her straight-as-string waist-length hair the color of Brother Hamish’s homemade strawberry wine. Years of clinic chores and fieldwork had left her lean, muscled and tan, with constellations of freckles spangled across arms and face. She didn’t mind the freckles especially, but she alternated between liking the look of her strong arms, and then wondering if they made her look boyish, and then wondering why she was wasting time thinking about this at all.
As she stood dripping before him, Otha gave her a hard look.
“Well, novice?”
Zenn winced at the sound of the word. Halfway through her novice year – and this is how she showed him what she could do. Wonderful. Nice job.
“I… lost my balance. I must have hit the nozzle keypad when I slipped,” she said, being careful to avoid his gaze so he couldn’t read the lie she was telling. “I should have locked in the setting.”
“That you should,” Otha said, inspecting the tank-pack nozzle to confirm her error. “And what should you have done when you slipped? That is, after you hoisted yourself back aboard the animal using his eyelid for a hand-hold?”
He’d seen. Of course he’d seen. He never misses my mistakes. And now he’s going to turn it into a “teaching moment”. Perfect.
“I should have checked the setting again,” she said, trying not to sound irritated with him, still not meeting his gaze.
“Right. But I’ll tell you what you did instead. You patted yourself on the back and took a little extra time for some daydreaming, eh? Enjoy the view?” Zenn inspected the ground at her feet. Otha was mad. With good reason. But his temper was shorter than usual lately. She assumed it was the cloister’s finances, or what was left of them. That and the towners. But to have Otha talk to her like this inflicted an almost physical pain on her.
“I slipped, Otha,” she repeated. “If I could try one more time…”
“You know how this works, Zenn,” Otha said, cutting her off. “Results for end of term proficiency tests are final. Period. I’m required to report scores to the Level Progress certification board. And even if I was allowed to show you any favoritism, I wouldn’t. That would do you no good at all in the long run. Now, you just had some bad luck on the first test. But no need to panic. Two tests left. And I’m sure you’ll make up the difference on those. Won’t you?”
She nodded, and briefly considered bringing up the fact that the tank pack spray nozzle seemed to have developed a sudden case of hair-trigger. But Otha, she could tell, was in no mood for excuses, valid or not.
“Checklists, novice,” he said. Apparently, the lecture wasn’t over yet. “We have them for a reason. What’s the first item on the list when treating mega-fauna?”
“Big animals are dangerous. Small mistakes are deadly,” she intoned, her face going even redder as she recited this, the most basic principle of all.
I know what went wrong, Otha.
Actually, that wasn’t entirely true either. She knew she should’ve verified the nozzle setting, of course. And checked the trigger sensitivity. But she had no idea what had just happened with… the other thing. She certainly couldn’t tell her uncle that, though. With his fiercely bearded face, graying braids and barrel-chest, facing Otha’s displeasure was more like confronting a medieval Earther warlord than the director-abbot of a Ciscan cloister training clinic. She kept quiet and wrung solution out of her hair.
“You’ve been a little… distracted lately, eh?” Otha’s sharp tone said this was the teacher speaking, not the uncle. “Maybe more than a little. Studies? End of term jitters? Or something else?”
Studies? Well, yes, for starters! she wanted to say. The heavy course load, the late-night cramming sessions, the merciless exam schedule, all on top of her usual chores and tending the clinic’s animals. Prepping for her all-important end of term tests was just more of the same, only with the added stress that the results would determine if she progressed to the next level of training or… well, the alternative was too horrific to consider. She had to accumulate a passing score on the tests. The first was the whalehound eye wash, and she was fairly sure she’d failed that about as miserably as was humanly possible. But Otha was right. Two more chances. And no reason to think she wouldn’t ace the next one: an in-soma pod insertion into a Tanduan swamp sloo. And while the mere thought of being confined in the body-hugging interior of the pod instantly provoked feelings of claustrophobia, Zenn felt quite confident about that particular test. She knew the in-soma procedures backward and forward. Despite her mother’s fatal in-soma run on the Indra, or maybe because of it, Zenn had always been drawn to the device and its remarkable capabilities. She was actually looking forward to finally going beyond the textbook diagrams and v-film animations, and taking a pod into a living animal for the first time. So, test number two was in the bag.
Test number three, however, was much more worrisome. Legendary among exovet novice trainees, the end of term Third Test was always a mystery – at least until the day it was sprung on the unsuspecting novice. The only requirement was that it had to be roughly within the parameters of something the novice should already know at that point in the program. As director-abbot of the Ciscan cloister school, Otha was allowed to pick the procedure and the animal for the Third Test, but was not allowed to so much as hint at what the challenge entailed. This, as any exovet novice in history would freely admit, was crazy-making.
And, of course, beyond her schoolwork, there was her father. But Warra Scarlett was a different kind of problem altogether. Worst of all of this was the hard fact she couldn’t bring any of it up with Otha. Being overworked and stressed was simple reality for any would-be exoveterinarian in their first year of training. And besides, none of this was the real issue. The real issue was what just took place between her and the whalehound, whatever that was.
Why now? Why is this happening to me now, of all times?
Maybe it was nothing, she told herself. Maybe it was her imagination. Maybe it would just go away. The problem was that she simply didn’t have enough information to form a working hypothesis. And without the building blocks of a basic premise about what was happening between her and the animals recently, she had no hope of getting to the truth. She had to wait, gather data… or in this case, let the data happen to her, and attempt to sort it out afterwards. The facts so far simply made no kind of sense, gave her nothing to work with. This was deeply frustrating. But Zenn had been raised in a house of science. And the clean, unambiguous answers science yielded had demonstrated the superiority of this approach time and time again.
Let the world speak for itself.
She heard this from Otha on a regular basis. This was the simple key, the scalpel-sharp tool of the scientific mind. Of her mind. She would wait for the data.
“…and if the course load is too much for you, if you need a break,” Otha was saying, his voice a little softer now, one large hand coming to rest on her shoulder, “you need to speak up. These animals don’t just deserve your full concentration. They demand it. You know that.”
“I’m fine, really,” she said quickly, a sharp flutter of fear passing through her. Zenn knew she would be – knew she had to be – an exoveterinarian from the moment she learned there was such a thing. She also knew novices had been dismissed from the cloister exovet school for less serious mistakes than the one she’d just made. She couldn’t tell Otha what she’d been feeling lately. She couldn’t risk being washed out of the program. And after what just happened, that unthinkable disaster sudd
enly edged a little closer to the realm of the possible.
“I’m just tired, that’s all,” she lied again. “I’ll do better.” To avoid Otha’s eyes she turned toward the sedated hound. He could have been hurt. So could she and Otha.
“Right,” her uncle said. “That would be wise. When we send the royal family’s hound back to them, we want to hand over a healthy animal, don’t we?”
Zenn nodded.
“Good. Lesson learned.” Otha waved his hand at the virt-screens still drifting around his head. But instead of turning off, the screens flickered fitfully and gave off a harsh whine. The main CPU needed new optic relays. That, however, would take spare parts, and spare parts of any kind had been in short supply on Mars for as long as Zenn could remember. The Rift with Earth made sure of that. Now stretching into its second decade, the Rift’s imposition by the ruling Authority on Earth had totally shut down Earther trade with Mars, or with any of the dozen alien-inhabited planets of the Local Systems Accord. The effect on the Martian colonies had been minimal at first. The true scope of the Rift only gradually revealed itself. Now, as old machinery and technology began to wear out, break down or become obsolete, there was no chance of replacement parts or software upgrades from the original Earther suppliers.
And the increasingly troublesome “Indra problem” was only making it even harder to get supplies from the other planets of the Accord – not to mention bring new clients to the clinic. Another starship had been reported missing just last week. During the past five years alone, almost two dozen Indra-powered ships and everyone on board them had vanished without so much as a neutrino trail. So far, the losses were limited to ships plying the far frontier areas – military scouts, survey missions. Some sort of on-board mechanical failure was suspected, but at this point, the sporadic reports that filtered through to Mars made it sound as if investigators had turned up nothing conclusive.
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