She reached for his shorter arm to free his meter and gasped. It didn’t seem any colder in the tunnel, but his body temperature had fallen considerably. He had to get into a warmer before his brain stopped functioning. She stashed her meter in her carryall and clipped his to his belt before scrabbling over him in the narrow tunnel. His body felt waxy and unyielding. She shuddered. It was like climbing over a Human corpse, but Nerua was still alive. If barely. His gill slits fluttered and his three-fingered hands twitched.
Gripping his scaly feet, Tina dragged him backwards through the access tunnels. He weighed at least twice as much as she did and by the time she’d moved him just a few meters, she was out of breath and dripping sweat. How could his body be this cold? It penetrated her bare hands and sucked the warmth from her core. She remembered feeling this nearly painful mix of hot and cold once when she’d been ill with a high fever as a child.
When she finally made it to the hatch in engineering, Tina’s spine and leg muscles were cramping and her hands burned with cold from where she’d been in contact with Nerua. She let him go to open the hatch. It took her half a dozen tries to get her numb fingers to cooperate with the latches shaped for three rigid claws rather than a Human hand.
She dropped into engineering and called out. “Hey, need some assistance here!”
Silence. Where was everyone? Tina turned around. Swallowed hard. Her fellow crewmembers in engineering were all there. They were motionless, sitting stiff and still at their duty stations. Some had simply fallen where they must have been standing. A shudder moved through her. What the hell?
She reached out to the closest Quentarian and snatched her hand away. The female was as cold to the touch as Nerua. Tina felt warm enough, but she’d just dragged his body through what felt like kilometers of conduit, so she might not be the best judge of the ambient temperature. It was always too warm aboard The Endurance, but she’d accommodated.
What was the temperature in here? Her monitor came back with a reading right in the Quentarian goldilocks zone: twenty eight degrees Celsius. So why did the lizards look like winter had just dropped?
There was no way she could drag Nerua all the way to medical on her own and if these Quentarians were any indication, something was very, very wrong all across the ship. Something that didn’t affect her. At least not yet. And with the atmo back to baseline, it wasn’t related to the voidspace changes. She needed more information.
Glancing wildly around engineering, Tina remembered the emergency heat lamps in the engine calibration chamber. The machinery needed to be at a colder temperature to function optimally, so any Quentarian unlucky enough to pull a shift inside had the use of a specially warmed work station. She’d quickly become popular with the rest of engineering for her willingness to swap any other duty for it. It was the one place she didn’t feel like she was sweating to death in some tropical forest.
Maybe if she could warm Nerua up, he’d regain consciousness and be able to figure out what had happened. And what to do to fix it. “Okay. I can do this.” She tucked her hands in her armpits for a minute before heading to the hatch and reaching for her near-frozen supervisor. “Sorry,” she muttered as his head thumped on the ground. There was nothing she could do to make this more comfortable for him. In fits and starts, she tugged him through the airlocked doors and into the engine calibration chamber.
She dredged up every gutter-slang term for the Quentarians she could, using her cursing as a kind of spaceship sea shanty. Reptilian bastard. Fucking Godzilla. If he did wake up and check the translation queue, she’d probably get booted off at the nearest port for insubordination, but she didn’t care. At least he wouldn’t die on her watch.
Dragging him into the warming chair took every last bit of her strength and she slid to the floor beside the work station shaking for several minutes before she could continue.
Tina pulled herself up to standing, leaned over Nerua’s unresponsive body, and set the chair to max warming. Then she swung the heat lamp over him and turned it on as well. If this didn’t thaw the Quentarian, she didn’t know what would. She glanced outside at the rest of the engineering crew. How much longer did they have? Would she be the sole living crew member on board The Endurance? Well, that wasn’t too creepy.
“Come on, lizard breath, wake up. Please.”
Nerua’s external-most eyelid slid open. The two layers of translucent inner membranes fluttered, but stayed closed. His glittery black eyes shifting back and forth beneath them. His gill slits opened and closed in a slow, steady rhythm that seemed better at least than when he’d been in the access shaft. But what was normal for a Quentarian? They’d hired her on because she was a life-support systems engineer, not a damned exo-biologist.
At least his brain had a fighting chance now. But the rest of the crew was still in danger. She had no idea how long they could live with their bodies dormant like this. Some Earth reptiles had a version of winter hibernation that looked like death, but as much as they called Quentarians lizards, they weren’t biological analogues to ones on her home world. What Tina did know was that their condition wasn’t normal and if she didn’t figure out how to stop whatever caused it, they might all die.
That would look just stellar on her resume, not to mention how it would play out in galactic politics.
She sent out a distress call, but The Endurance was already so far from known space, it would take cycles for the signal to reach anyone and cycles more for anyone from Quentar to reach them. The crew didn’t have cycles.
Getting in an escape pod would solve her problem in the short term, but Tina couldn’t leave her crew-mates. They hadn’t exactly embraced her, but they had accepted her. She frowned at Nerua. At least most of them had reacted to her with benign neglect. It was more than she imagined an all Human crew might do for a lone Quentarian. But maybe not. Once her own species had made the leap to the stars, they’d found that they were the smallest of fish in the very largest of oceans.
Anyone who wanted to survive out in the depths of space learned humility. Even the Quentarians, despite Nerua’s poor example. It was either that, or rapidly discover there were more ways of dying in the cosmos than surviving, and plenty of other species had already figured that out. So maybe her fellow Humans would have welcomed a Quentarian in their midst. It had been so long since Tina had been part of a full crew, she wasn’t sure how groups of her own kind acted anymore. She only knew she had a job and a responsibility to the beings around her. And if they weren’t going to make it on their expedition, she was going to get them all home. Somehow.
The air should have cleared out by now, but the Quentarians hadn’t stirred. Her crew-mates had been fine before she’d made the changes Nerua had programmed. All right, then, she had to go back to the beginning. Start with comparing her meter with his.
She leaned forward and reached for his tool belt.
His primary hand gripped her wrist. She jerked away by instinct and broke his hold, leaving a deep red line where his claws had dragged across her dark skin. Normally, his strength would have overwhelmed hers. As she rubbed her arm, deep vibrations rumbled in his thorax. She waited, hoping for some guidance, but the translator emitted a single squawk before falling silent.
“Nerua, I don’t know if you can hear me, but as far as I can tell, everyone on this ship is in some kind of coma.” She figured the translator would sort out the Quentarian equivalent. “I have you under a warmer, but I don’t know what else to do.” The translator had a buffer and would store the last several conversations, so she briefly summarized what happened. Maybe if he thawed enough, he would be able to help. “I’m heading back to the service tunnels.”
What else could she say?
With one final look back at the motionless Quentarians in engineering, Tina crawled back into the tunnels. It was a lot easier moving without dragging Nerua’s weight and bulk, but the narrow metal corridors amplified the irritating vibration of the emergency alarms. The feeling burrowed under he
r skin and triggered waves of intense nausea. Tina never thought she’d be nostalgic for the deafening howl of the klaxons in all her old ships.
She reached the atmo override controls and sat facing them, balancing both meters in her lap. Nothing looked wrong. Her meter and Nerua’s showed the same basic readings. The atmosphere was perfectly, infuriatingly normal.
But something had triggered a mass shutdown of every Quentarian aboard, so there had to be a contaminant. Just something a Human wouldn’t notice or be affected by. Something her meter wouldn’t flag.
She set aside her meter and studied Nerua’s. It was slightly different and included markers for the trace amounts of volatiles the Quentarian’s sensitive combined sense of smell and taste were so skilled at detecting. Even before coming aboard, Tina had ruthlessly eliminated any of her personal care products that carried a scent, but many of her crewmates still recoiled and pulled in their gill slits when she entered a room. She pretended not to notice.
Like everything else on The Endurance, Nerua’s meter wasn’t made to be manipulated by her small five-fingered hands, but she struggled through the submenus, looking for anything that seemed like an outlier. It was sensitive enough to pick up whatever scent the Quentarians found so objectionable about her, but the pattern of volatiles on the readout wasn’t only that.
A screech nearly deafened her until the translator caught up with the sound and parsed it for her ears. “Luan! PodMother preserve us, what’s going on? Where are you?”
Even through the boosting effect of the speaker, Nerua’s voice sounded weak and confused as he called for his pod-mate. If he left the safety of the warming chair in the engine calibration chamber, he’d fall back into the coma that had claimed his crewmates.
“Nerua! Stay where you are. Call up the translator queue. I’ll be right there!”
Tina winced at the burst of raw Quentaran that the translator gave up on. She scrambled as quickly as she could through the tunnels and through engineering. Racing into the calibration chamber, she caught Nerua just as he toppled over, trapping her beneath a hundred plus kilos of lizard.
The breath squeezed out of her lungs with painful force and her head hit the floor hard enough to scramble her thoughts. When her ears stopped ringing, she struggled to roll Nerua off her enough to scramble out from under him. It took her several moments to realize he wasn’t freezing cold anymore, though he was still not fully responsive. Sitting far enough away so that if he did startle, he wouldn’t lash her with his tail or pinion her arms again, she watched his gill slits open and close in a slow rhythm. Then his eyes blinked several times before he finally opened all the lids and focused on her.
“You.”
It was still disconcerting to hear the sibilant sounds of his native language coming from his mouth, but hear the translated word in her ears.
“It’s the volatiles. Your meter is picking up a strange pattern I’ve never seen before.”
“Luan?”
Tina winced at the mention of Nerua’s pod-mate. “Everyone on board is affected. I pulled you in here to warm you up.”
Nerua gathered himself and crouched facing her, his tail shifting side to side in the pattern Tina learned as agitation. “It’s cold in here, Human. This is the coldest room on the ship.”
She looked from the warming chair to him and back again. “I had you in the chair. You were practically dead.” The room’s ambient temperature was comfortable for her. It should have been freezing to him, but it didn’t trigger the strange rigor that had overcome him in the tunnel.
Watching her with his expressionless dark eyes, Nerua climbed back into the chair with what looked like a spasm or a tremor. Then he relaxed into the warmth and closed his lids again.
“Don’t!” Tina shouted.
The eyes opened again. “If you’re going to kill me, at least let me get warm first.”
“I’m not… I didn’t do this. There’s something wrong with the atmo. There are trace elements I’ve never seen before. Look at these graphs.”
He stared past the offered meter and past her. “You may drop the pretense, Human. Just before I passed out, I smelled hyrth seed oil. Rancid hyrth seed oil.”
Maybe that explained the volatiles. “Okay. What does that mean?”
The translator gave up on a very loud squawk and picked up again after a brief pause. “Very clever of you to add the one poison to our atmo that would fell every Quentarian on board before they could react, but leave you virtually untouched. Who hired you?”
“Your captain,” Tina answered, before she processed the meaning of what he’d said. “Look. Just look at the data. I didn’t …” Tina glanced from the meter back to Nerua and stiffened. His powerful clawed hand held a projectile gun leveled at her head.
“Who hired you?” he repeated softly. His large body sat motionless, as still as a statue, but Tina knew he could come roaring out of that chair and shoot her at point blank range before she could draw a complete breath.
She shook her head. His gill slits were fluttering in a way that didn’t seem normal. “Put that gun away, you idiot. Think. If I poisoned the ship, would I have dragged your sorry, green ass out of the corridors and brought you here? I’m trying to save your life.
“And will you turn off the damned alarm? It’s giving me a migraine.” She could feel it in her feet, pulsing up through the bones in her spine. How could something so silent be so irritating?
Still clutching the gun in one claw, Nerua waved his secondary arm over the control panel in the warming chair. The thrumming of the alarm cut out, leaving her body in a blissful stillness.
“Thank you.”
Nerua pushed himself upright. Tina started, then forced herself to stand her ground. There was nowhere she could run that would outpace the projectiles his gun could spit out so effectively.
“If you collapse again, don’t expect me to hoist you back up in that warmer.”
“I won’t.”
Tina wondered whether he meant he wouldn’t fall or wouldn’t expect her assistance. “What about the cold?”
“I’ll survive.” He stared at the doors that led back to engineering before sliding his weapon back in its holster. “Which is more than I can say for my crewmates.”
“Couldn’t we access environmental controls from here to increase the ambient temp on board? Would that help?”
“No.”
“But I warmed you up. You revived.”
“Much good that will do me. I can’t leave this room. I can’t save my crew.” The high pitched hiss that accompanied his words made Tina wince. Luan was out there. Cold, still, and helpless.
Tina followed his gaze to the airlock. And suddenly understood. It wasn’t the temperature. It was the atmo. The calibration chamber had an isolated air supply. This was the one area on The Endurance that wouldn’t have been automatically switched over for the insertion. “I’m an idiot.”
Nerua made a strange squawk that the translator didn’t even attempt to parse. He clacked all of his claws in a sign of agreement. “As I complained to the captain when she hired you.”
If that was sarcasm, it was something the Quentarians had imported from her species. She hoped that wasn’t the best Humans could offer. “You can’t go out there, but I can.”
He swiveled his large head and stared at her with his dark, beady eyes. “It was a dangerous mission. We all accepted that.”
“No.” Shit happened in space. The void wasn’t the place for amateurs, but this was something different.
“The ship is lost. Its crew is lost. We’re too far from even a remote outpost for anyone to rescue us.”
“There has to be something we can do.”
“There is. Take a life pod and escape. No one will fault you. Not even me.”
“That’s not … I can’t …”
“Not every egg in the clutch hatches, Human.” He reached for the door mechanism and had the inner chamber opened before Tina realized what he was doing. “
And not all hatchlings survive.”
She grabbed his primary appendage with both of her arms, ignoring the way his gill slits narrowed and his body stiffened at the contact. “Fuck that noise, Godzilla, just tell me how to fix it.” The translator would probably choke on that, but she didn’t care.
Nerua pulled out of her grasp and folded both his upper appendages over his thorax. She knew how easily he could push her aside, open the outer door, and join his downed crew and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. She slipped in between him and the door anyway.
“Don’t make me harm you, Human.”
“Give me ten minutes. I’ll get you an EVA suit. We can both figure out how to fix this.” There wouldn’t be enough suits for the entire crew, and their air supply was limited, but they might be able to revive enough crew members to be able to drag the rest to the life pods and their separate life support systems.
It would be tight quarters and unpleasant, but it would buy them time. Maybe enough time.
“You don’t understand.”
As Tina explained her plan, Nerua’s tail lashed faster and faster. “You have done me no favor by dragging me here.”
“Look. We’re both engineers. Our job is to solve problems. We have a problem. So let’s solve it.”
“It’s too late. There is little hope of reviving the crew.”
“It worked for you.” Tina wondered how many of the engineering crew she could drag in here.
Nerua made a noise that was a cross between a high keen and teeth grinding. “You don’t understand. You can’t.”
“Then explain it to me the way you’d explain it to a very simple hatchling.”
“Or a Human?”
She refused to rise to the bait. “Hyrth seed oil. Give me the quick and dirty version.”
He let out his breath in a long drawn-out hiss before answering her. “Hyrth is an invasive vine that grows on our homeworld. The seeds are harvested for oil used in several critical industries. But when the raw seeds are crushed and heated, they create a volatile that acts as a powerful paralytic. It’s a controlled substance for that reason.”
Orphans In the Black: A Space Opera Anthology Page 49