“I thought you guys were going to work on my real injuries,” she said, letting her tone sound as sarcastic as she felt.
“As you said, I’m not a real doctor.” Ibori sounded calm. “I’ll be bringing Orlena in here soon, but I need to know the extent of all of your injuries. Some of them are obvious, but your hands aren’t. So what’s going on with them?”
Orlena. Doctor Sycophant was alive after all. So there was a medical professional, and she would come into this weird little room on the death side of the med bay to…what? End it for Romano?
That wasn’t possible, was it?
“My hands hurt,” Romano said.
“Did they always hurt?” Ibori had glanced to the side. She realized now that he was working off a holographic screen she couldn’t see.
“You mean all my life or just today?” she asked.
“Is it normal for your hands to hurt?” he asked.
How stupid was that? “Is it normal for your hands to hurt?” she asked.
He raised his chin slightly and frowned at her. At least she thought that expression was a frown. It might have simply been a bit of shadow crossing his face.
“India,” he said. Amazing how one word could be so condescending. “We’re trying to help you.”
She snorted. “By locking me up and then bringing me here and putting me in a security chamber, being examined by a navigator? Really, Tindo, you’re trying to help me?”
“Yeah.” His voice remained even.
Hagen adjusted the laser rifle slightly. The movement was some kind of threat. It had to be.
“No, my hands did not hurt before today,” Romano said.
Ibori glanced at that place to his side again. “When did the pain start?”
“It didn’t start as a pain,” she said. “It started as tingling. Like your body does if you sleep on your arm funny or something.”
He raised his head again, and this time, she saw his eyes. They met hers. She felt his confusion.
“Tingling?” he asked.
“Tingling is tiny pains,” Hagen said. “Just not severe ones.”
“Thank you, Doctor Hagen,” Romano said.
He shifted the rifle again, and ostentatiously turned his head away from her, as if she was not worth his time.
“When did the tingling start?” Ibori asked.
She felt her face heat. This was his fault, all of it. He hadn’t wanted to close that anacapa container. So she had shown him that she wasn’t scared of it.
She had stupidly grabbed the thing without gloves. Or maybe she should have kicked it shut with a booted foot.
She hadn’t thought that through. She just wanted to show him that the container was harmless.
And now, she was going to tell him she had been wrong.
“India?”
She mentally cursed him. Then took a deep breath. No one could help her if she stayed silent about this stuff. Dammit.
“The tingling started right after I slammed the anacapa container closed.” Her fury, at herself and at him, made each word vibrate.
Ibori bowed his head. Hagen tilted his backwards. They had expected that answer, and they hadn’t wanted to hear it. She found that odd.
“I’m sorry.” Ibori’s voice was slightly muffled.
She knew what he was apologizing for. Hagen didn’t, and looked at him with surprise.
“Something got me, didn’t it?” she asked.
Ibori lifted his head.
“That same thing that killed Natalia,” Romano said. “That’s what got me, right? Am I going to die?”
“I don’t know,” Ibori said. “I’m not a doctor.”
“You keep saying that.” Romano raised her voice. “Where is the damn doctor then?”
“Saving lives,” Hagen said flatly.
Romano raised her head as high as she could. The strain made her neck and shoulders ache.
“You think mine isn’t worth saving?” she asked. “You really want me to die like Natalia did?”
“You won’t die like she did,” Ibori said.
“You don’t know that,” Romano said.
“I do,” Ibori said. “Because you’d be dead already. Whatever happened to her happened fast.”
That was true. Romano had seen it.
“You think I got, what, a minor dose of whatever it was?” she asked.
“Just let me finish with the questions, okay, India?” Ibori asked. “Then we’ll figure out what to do.”
“You and me and your pet security guard?” Romano asked. “Because none of us are doctors.”
“I told you,” Ibori said. “Orlena will be here shortly.”
“I want to see her now,” Romano said.
Ibori didn’t seem intimidated by her anger. Instead, he smiled sadly. “Yeah, I would too,” he said. “But we don’t always get what we want.”
Romano clenched the fist on the far side of Ibori, so that neither he nor Hagen could see her movement. Clenching was hard. It was getting harder and harder to do anything with her hands because the level of pain was growing more and more intense with each passing moment.
Maybe that was because she was focusing on the pain. She needed to think about something else.
But she had touched the anacapa container, and Stephanos had died by touching that anacapa drive, and what if the two things were related? Romano had never seen anyone die like that, not that quickly and not that horribly.
And she might be next.
Ibori took a small step toward her. He peered through the security barrier. She could see his face fully now. He seemed to be looking at her with compassion.
She had to wrench her gaze from his before she teared up.
She wanted compassion less than she wanted to fight. Fighting, at least, she understood.
“Tell me about the pain,” he said softly.
And she did.
The Renegat
Seymont slid out of the operating theater and leaned on the wall. She closed her eyes for a moment, then felt sleep edge close to her consciousness. When she’d been studying medicine on the Santé Two, she had often fallen asleep standing up.
She didn’t want to do that here. Not now. And she couldn’t use any stimulants.
She needed her mind clear.
She opened her eyes, and made herself take several deep breaths, then shuddered.
Three people had died so far. She didn’t have the skill to save them. She wasn’t sure anyone did. Maybe in concert with one of the experts on the Santé Two. Maybe not.
She had never been in a war zone or even a major battle, although she had heard that it could be like this.
Hearing about it and living it were two different things.
And she really didn’t have the time to rest. Right now, she had the virtual medical assistant scanning the second-stage triage patients, trying to see if they had worse injuries than the gurneys reported or if the injuries were causing a cascade inside the patient’s system.
She was most worried about Jorja Lakinas. Even if she survived, she might not walk again. Something the lasers had done had fused her spine in a way that Seymont hadn’t seen before.
If she had time, she might be able to reverse the damage, but right now, she didn’t have time. She really shouldn’t even be standing here, in the quiet between the two sections of the med bay, but she was.
Because she was supposed to go into the death wing and see what, if anything, was growing inside India Romano.
Seymont had taken a short, short, short break an hour—two hours? Three hours?—ago, and looked at the weird pink webbing that had threaded its way through Natalia Stephanos’s body. That webbing had wound itself around all of her internal organs, squeezing them as if it had been wringing out a washcloth. The webbing had paralleled Stephanos’s veins, and had essentially followed their path into Stephanos’s heart.
The entire thing looked like some kind of late-night medical quiz, something one of her professors would have foisted
on the medical students somewhere in the middle of their final year. But it wasn’t a quiz.
It was real life, life here on the Renegat, and, according to Crowe, that stuff was all over the anacapa drives as well.
If that stuff was inside of India Romano, then it was game over.
Of course, Romano hadn’t died rapidly like Stephanos. But Romano hadn’t touched the anacapa drive. Just its container.
And that, according to the information Tindo Ibori had sent to Seymont, had been enough to make Romano’s hands hurt.
Nothing showed up on any scan. But, then, nothing showed up on the scans after Stephanos’s death either. For some reason, that pink crap was invisible to all of the Fleet sensors.
Seymont had initially ordered Ibori to use some of the equipment in that morgue to slice into Romano’s hand to see if there was pink stuff alongside her veins.
But Ibori had balked.
It’s one thing, he had said, to let the machines help me examine a dead body. It’s another to slice into someone’s hand and pray there won’t be any consequences at all.
He was right; of course he was right. And so was Crowe. If this stuff was everywhere, and if it killed its hosts like it seemed to, then the entire crew was at risk.
It was just that Seymont wasn’t really a creative physician. She was a get-by physician, whose entire career had piggybacked on the shoulders of her betters. When she had a great coworker, she did a great job. When she had a mediocre coworker, she did a mediocre job. And when she had no coworker…
Ah, hell. She just wanted to go to sleep.
Or have a drink.
She licked her lips, then pushed off the wall. The moment she thought about alcohol, she had to move. She had promised herself that. She had to stay busy, so the drinks wouldn’t become the very next thing she did.
Besides, she didn’t want to die in the same way that Stephanos had.
She stopped at the storage closet, and grabbed another bio suit. She took off the suit she’d been wearing and put it in the cleansing unit. She hadn’t been following cleanliness procedures exactly. She’d been cleaning up properly, but she hadn’t really been decontaminating, figuring everyone had bled together in that alcove, so they had already contaminated each other—if there were any airborne pathogens.
But this was a completely different matter. She was going to wear the highest level of suit, and she was going to follow extreme conditions procedures, just to make sure she didn’t get contaminated (if she wasn’t already).
The suit went on quickly. She put up the hood before she stepped into the morgue, concerned that Ibori and Hagen hadn’t followed procedure in there.
But she needn’t have worried. The isolation chamber glimmered around the gurney. India Romano was strapped to that gurney. She looked gray and ill, eyes sunken into her face, lips chapped and bleeding. Her hair, which she had colored a bright lavender, looked like some kind of fake string cast about her head instead of the fashion statement that Romano was known for.
Romano didn’t see her, but Ibori did. His shoulders visibly relaxed, as if Seymont held all of the answers. Or maybe Ibori didn’t want the responsibility anymore.
Hagen saw her too. He nodded almost imperceptivity. He was still clutching his weapon, as if Romano—who was strapped onto her gurney and held inside that isolation chamber—could suddenly leap out and try to kill them all.
Seymont pushed past both men. She opened a holoscreen and scanned the answers to the questions she had made Ibori ask Romano. Seymont had examined those answers before, and on some low level, they had terrified her. But she had to set her own feelings aside.
She also had to keep her mind open. Just because Crowe thought that Romano had been infected didn’t mean she was. And that ache in her hands might have been caused by some malfunctioning weapon in that alcove. The tingling could have been anacapa vibration and completely unrelated to the pain now.
Seymont had seen stranger things just that afternoon. Hell, this entire journey had been strange.
She then examined the information that the gurney had provided. The wound on Romano’s hip was a straightforward laser burn. It would heal just fine with standard treatment, provided there wasn’t any pink parasitical thing slowly cannibalizing Romano’s insides.
Better to see if that pink stuff was threaded through her before handling the hip wound.
Romano was watching her warily. They had never liked each other. Romano had come into the med bay a few times, complaining of minor ailments, and trolling for medication.
Seymont had never given her any, which continually made Romano angry. Slowly, Seymont figured out that one of the three medical professionals who had left the Renegat on Sector Base Z had been giving Romano something to keep her calm.
Which, given what had happened in that alcove, had probably been a better decision than Seymont had originally thought it was.
“You gonna do something to help me or are you just going to take readings?” Romano asked.
Her voice didn’t sound normal. It was a little wobbly. She apparently was going for defiance, but it wasn’t working.
India Romano was scared.
Seymont felt a second of surprise, but tamped the emotion back. Sure Romano was scared. They were all scared. Seymont was scared. And she wasn’t going to try to calm anyone down. That wasn’t her job.
Not right now anyway.
She set the tablet aside, and closed the screens around her.
“I need to see what’s going on inside those hands,” Seymont said.
“Okay,” Romano said. “I can’t help you trussed up like this.”
“Actually, that won’t matter.” Seymont was going to have to explain this and she really didn’t want to. “Natalia Stephanos was killed by something that infected the anacapa drive. There’s a chance that same something infected you.”
“I’m not dead,” Romano said, as if Seymont lacked the ability to notice that.
“Obviously,” Seymont said, keeping her tone even. “But you didn’t touch the drive directly. The problem is that this material doesn’t show up on any of our equipment.”
“Grrr-eat,” Romano said, lengthening out the word.
“I’m going to have to open part of your hand and examine the interior myself,” Seymont said. “You’re right-handed, right?”
“What do you mean ‘open’?” Romano asked.
“I’m going to make a small incision, then look inside the area,” Seymont said. “Right-handed, right?”
“Is it going to hurt?” Romano asked.
“I don’t know, given the pain you’re already feeling. You’re already medicated. I don’t dare give you any more.”
“Medicated?” Romano frowned. “I don’t feel medicated.”
Probably because she had a tolerance. But Seymont wasn’t going to say that, nor was she going to assume it. The pain that Romano was experiencing might have been so severe that the medication didn’t block it.
“I’m going to put yet another protective barrier around your left hand,” Seymont said, since Romano still hadn’t told her which hand was her dominant one. “Then I’m going to make a small incision. I’m going to peel back the skin just a bit to take a look, and then I’ll close everything up.”
If it looked normal, that is. If it didn’t, Seymont was going to have to make some decisions on the fly.
“If you want,” Seymont said, “we can knock you out. It might be easier on you if we do.”
Romano’s eyes narrowed, as if she didn’t trust Seymont. And then Romano shook her head slightly. Apparently, she wanted to stay awake.
“I don’t want to see this,” Romano said. “Shut me down.”
That surprised Seymont. Maybe Romano had been weighing the pros and cons of staying awake. Most people would have. Apparently, Seymont hadn’t expected Romano to act like most people.
“All right,” Seymont said. She adjusted the controls on the gurney, and within seconds, Romano was unco
nscious.
Seymont felt herself relax. She really hadn’t wanted to do this tiny procedure under Romano’s watchful eyes.
Ibori had moved beside Seymont. She almost told him she was feeling crowded, because that was what she normally would have done, if she were doing a little bit of hands-on surgery. But, she realized, she wanted him there.
She needed his vision to augment hers.
She activated the internal hands on the isolation chamber, and used one of those hands to lift up Romano’s left hand. Then Seymont created an isolation bubble around Romano’s hand and the surgical device. She had the surgical hand turn the index finger into a laser scalpel. The third finger became a collection unit, so that she could rub the finger along whatever she saw, if she needed to.
The second finger had a tiny camera on the tip. She pointed that down.
Then she moved so that she could eyeball the incision as well. Ibori got out of her way. She appreciated that. Most medical students didn’t have that kind of sensitivity.
Through the surgical hand, she could feel everything as if she were doing the surgery with her own hands. The palm of Romano’s hand rested heavily on the other surgical hand. Dead weight.
Although, as Seymont thought about it, the hand shouldn’t have been dead weight if it were being cleansed of fluids the way that Stephanos’s system had been. Or, as Crowe had described the anacapa drives, if the hand had been hollowed out.
That all was a good sign, then.
Seymont bent as far forward as she could. She had opened yet another screen, so that she could glance at the interior of Romano’s hand—if the camera showed anything at all.
It probably would, since it had with Stephanos’s corpse.
Then Seymont banished all speculation, and, with a steady finger, sliced between the delicate bones on the back of Romano’s hand.
Seymont had chosen that area because there were a lot of muscles, veins, and nerves in that tiny area, but nothing that could cause Romano to bleed out quickly.
The cut wasn’t deep. All Seymont wanted to see was the dorsal venous network, since the pink stuff had traveled alongside Stephanos’s veins.
Seymont expected to see the red veins, the rich meaty look of the muscles, the yellow of the fatty tissue, and the whiteness of bone. But the first thing she saw was a purplish-blackness coating everything, like mold.
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