The Renegat

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Ibori swore next to her. That made Hagen crowd over.

  “Back away,” she said. “Let me work.”

  She sent the camera finger as close to the moldy stuff as possible, trying to see if the stuff was actually attached or if it had layered itself across the surface.

  As far as she could tell with just a look, the stuff had attached to the nerves, and was choking them off. Or had been choking them off.

  Unless she missed her guess, that purplish-blackish stuff had once been pink.

  She took the gathering finger and slid it over the material. It wiped free, like dirt on glass.

  “Tindo,” she said, “see if the scanners can read this stuff now.”

  Now that the hand was open, she meant. But it didn’t matter if he entirely understood. She just wanted him to scan and see.

  “They’re showing damage to the nerves, but not any of the stuff around it,” he said.

  That was what she was afraid of. She was going to have to figure this out on her own. She ran a diagnostic of the material the container finger had gathered.

  It read an unidentifiable foreign substance.

  She queried the operating system with her free hand. Could the surgical finger clear that material from inside Romano’s skin?

  That system said it could. So she set it to remove the purplish-blackish stuff in the area that had been cut open.

  The finger did as it was told, collecting the material and dropping it into a container it created out of the surgical hand’s palm.

  This operation was going to take time—maybe a lot of time, depending on the extent of the contamination.

  Seymont raised her head and peered around the double isolation chambers. In the actual operating theater, a dozen injured people waited. Jorja Lakinas needed attention now.

  Seymont didn’t have the time she needed to clean this stuff out of Romano. Nor did she have the time to teach Ibori how to do it.

  Seymont took a deep breath. Then she removed her hands from that set of tools.

  “What are you doing?” Ibori asked.

  She didn’t answer him. Instead, she dropped another small isolation bubble around Romano’s left biceps. Seymont set up another surgical hand, and carefully sliced open a bit of skin near the veins on the top of the arm.

  No blackness, no purplish debris, no mold looking stuff, no pink stuff. Just normal healthy tissue.

  Seymont let out the breath she had taken. Then she moved to Romano’s right side, and examined the biceps there.

  Nothing out of the ordinary. Nor was there anything out of the ordinary on Romano’s forearm or on her thighs.

  Whatever had infected her had only infected her hands.

  Which made Seymont’s choice a bit easier.

  She could clean out the hands, save the strange material, and analyze it later. If Crowe wanted it analyzed sooner, he could find someone to do that.

  Seymont set the isolation systems on the biceps, forearms, and thighs on automatic, letting them seal the skin. She hoped nothing had gotten through the isolation chambers, because if it had, Romano would feel the tingling (as she had described it) when she woke up.

  Otherwise, she wouldn’t feel a thing.

  Then Seymont set to work. She took images of the damage inside Romano’s hands. Then Seymont cleaned it all, wiping and scraping, being careful to avoid any damaged area.

  She wasn’t going to worry about repairing Romano’s hands. That would have to wait until Seymont dealt with the more seriously wounded people in the next room.

  But Seymont would clean out the contaminant, and then, later, she would check to see if it had regrown.

  She was hoping for a one-time contamination.

  But she was learning on this godforsaken voyage that whatever she hoped for invariably did not come true.

  The Renegat

  Crowe slipped inside the med bay, expecting chaos. Instead, he found an empty entry, with a discarded bio suit on one bench, and some clothes on another. The usual automated voice did not come on, directing him to either the med bay proper or the ship’s morgue, which the Renegat had some fancy term for.

  He stood there for a moment, tired and woozy, expecting to see someone at least, or a crowd, clamoring for the attention of Orlena Seymont. As far as he could tell, she was the only remaining doctor on the ship, and she had to be pretty overwhelmed by now.

  He stopped at the main med bay door and peered inside. It was slightly shaded, so that he couldn’t see anything clearly, but he could identify a stack of gurneys, which meant even more people were waiting to be helped.

  He wondered if Romano was in there. He really didn’t want to see her, but he would if he had to, particularly if he had to move her forward, and force Seymont to care for her.

  A door slid open behind him. As he turned, he saw Seymont standing just inside it. She was wearing a bio suit, with the hood down. She looked as exhausted as he felt.

  “Mr. Crowe,” she said, with a slight wry emphasis on Mr. Apparently, she had no idea what title to give him. Neither did he, not at the moment. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

  He wanted to stick his hands out at her, and tell her to examine them. He wanted to get all of this over with.

  Instead, he made himself turn until he faced her.

  “Have you looked at India Romano yet?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Seymont said. “And it was quite fascinating.”

  He felt a chill. “So she was infected.”

  “She was,” Seymont said. “Emphasis on was. The material had died inside her hands. I cleaned up the residue, stored it so someone someday could figure out what it was, and then came out here to find you.”

  “It…died?” It took him a moment to process that. “It was organic?”

  “I think it was,” Seymont said. “I didn’t study it closely. I was thinking of it as a parasite, but Tindo says he thought of it as a virus. Whatever it was, it was starting through her system, albeit much more slowly than it had gone through Natalia’s. But then, India hadn’t touched the drive directly.”

  Crowe clenched his hands. The gloves covering them creaked. “I touched the communications anacapa,” he said. “I want you to examine my fingers.”

  She was shaking her head before he even finished. “I don’t have time,” she said. “People in that operating theater will never recover properly if I don’t get in there.”

  “And if this stuff contaminates anyone who touches it with their bare hands, we might have something going on that threatens the entire ship.” He kept his voice level. He didn’t want to panic her, but he did want her to understand the urgency.

  “You realize I’ll have to cut your hand open,” she said.

  “Start with the fingertips,” he said. “That’s where I held it.”

  Her mouth formed a thin line. Then she sighed.

  “I’m going to do this fast, and we’re going to do it in here.” She swept her arm toward the morgue.

  He nodded, then followed her inside. He didn’t have to go far. Romano’s gurney took up most of the space. Ibori was looking at something on a floating screen, and DeShawn Hagen was standing to one side, holding a laser rifle. Both men were wearing bio suits.

  They glanced at him. Ibori nodded, and then went back to whatever he was doing. Hagen watched Crowe as if he expected Crowe to do something to Romano.

  Romano was out cold—thank god, because Crowe did not want to listen to anything she had to say.

  She was covered in an isolating bubble, and her hands had extra bubbles on them. Both hands had long red marks along the back, apparently where Seymont had cut her open.

  “Over here,” Seymont said, leading him toward a small table near a row of equipment that he could barely identify. Something medical and important, something he was too tired to think about.

  He stopped beside the table.

  “I’m going to put both of your hands inside an isolation bubble,” she said. “You’re going to remove y
our gloves. Then I’m going to isolate each hand separately. I don’t have any gurneys to offer you, to numb you or put you out. I can give you some medication to ease the pain.”

  “Will the medication interfere with my thought processes?” he asked.

  “You’ll be fuzzy for several hours,” she said.

  “Then no,” he said. “Just do what you’re going to do.”

  “In that case,” she said, “I’m adding an extra pair of surgical hands to hold you in place. The last thing I want is for you to jerk around while I’m digging into your skin.”

  It all sounded unpleasant, but he could deal with unpleasant. He almost told her that but then realized that he wasn’t sure if he could control his reactions to that kind of isolated pain.

  “Do what you need to,” he said.

  She put on extra gloves over her gloves, then took him gingerly by both wrists. “Keep your hands there,” she said.

  An isolation bubble formed over them. It covered half of his forearms as well.

  “Remove your gloves,” she said.

  He did. His fingertips on his right hand were tingling, but he wasn’t sure if that was simply the power of suggestion.

  He let the gloves fall onto the table—or, at least, that was where he thought they would end up. Instead, they landed on the bottom of the isolation bubble. It had more solidity than he expected.

  “All right,” she said. “Now move your hands slightly apart, palms up.”

  He did. Two more bubbles formed over each hand. Then a surgical hand formed underneath each one, cupping the back of his hand. The surgical hand was warm, which surprised him.

  “Which hand held the communications anacapa,” Seymont said.

  “I touched it with both,” he said, “but I held it with my left hand.”

  “All right,” she said, then did something he couldn’t quite see without moving his entire body.

  More hands appeared inside the isolation bubbles. None of the new hands touched his.

  “Forefinger and thumb?” she asked.

  “On the left hand?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” Her voice was curt as if he was getting in her way, by clarifying questions.

  “I cupped it with all of my fingers. It was very fragile.”

  She leaned forward just enough that her expression became visible. She was frowning.

  “Show me,” she said.

  He moved his hand into position, as if he were still holding the communications anacapa. He could feel just a bit of tingling in all of the places that touched the anacapa, and he wasn’t sure if that tingling was simply memory or if the tingle actually existed.

  She moved something on her screen, then shoved her hand forward. One of the hands inside the isolation chamber gently grabbed his pinkie.

  “I suggest you look away,” she said.

  He didn’t. He would rather watch this.

  The hand that she was clearly operating inside the chamber had, instead of a forefinger, a scalpel. It sliced into his pinkie, making him gasp from the sharp pain.

  “Told you,” she said. “Painful.”

  His fingertip was bleeding profusely. One of automated fingers became a suction tube, gently pulling out the blood. Then Seymont grabbed the edges of the skin and started peeling it back.

  That was when Crowe looked away. Looking away didn’t help the pain, but it settled his stomach.

  Next to him, Seymont sighed.

  “Look here,” she said.

  He looked at his finger, which didn’t look so much like a finger as a tiny peeled (and bloody) banana.

  “No,” she said. “Here.”

  He glanced sideways, saw the three-D image she had turned toward him. The interior of his fingertip, filled with things he couldn’t easily identify.

  But he did recognize the pink stuff. Just a bit of it, alongside the blood vessel she had sliced.

  His heart sank.

  “I touched that drive maybe two hours ago,” he said.

  “We could inspect your whole hand,” Seymont said, “and see how the stuff has spread.”

  He wasn’t sure what to do. He looked at the pink stuff, looking like healthy lace, then said, “Can I see what was in Romano’s hands?”

  Seymont opened another three-D image, showing what was recognizably a hand, but with the skin pulled back, showing him things he didn’t recognize, but which looked like those models of the human body he had seen decades ago in school.

  Overlaying all of it was blackened crud. If he squinted hard enough, he could see some of the same patterns he saw in the delicate lacy pink stuff that he saw.

  He raised his gaze to hers. “You think that’s dead.”

  “It’s dead,” she said. “I calibrated the instruments to make sure, but it’s dead.”

  Two pieces of news in that, which she clearly hadn’t realized would benefit him. That something had killed the stuff inside Romano’s hands, and that Seymont had recalibrated the instruments to recognize the stuff.

  “If you’ve calibrated the instruments to recognize this stuff,” he said. “Can we scan for it?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “But I can compare it. And it’s clear: what exists in your hand is alive, and what was in hers is dead.”

  “But mine isn’t growing,” he said.

  “We don’t know that,” Seymont said. “It’s just not growing as rapidly as Natalia’s did or as India’s initially did.”

  Then Seymont straightened her shoulders, and glanced at the door.

  “Now,” she said, “unless you want me to examine the rest of your hand, I need to close you up and go back to my other patients.”

  “You don’t need to examine me anymore,” Crowe said, “but I want you to look at Tindo.”

  “What?” Ibori spoke from behind them, almost like a man coming out of a dream. “Why me?”

  “Because you touched Natalia,” Crowe said. “Because you’ve been around all three of us who’ve been infected.”

  “I’m not sure I want to know,” Ibori said.

  “You don’t have a choice,” Crowe said. “If you’ve been around us and haven’t become infected, we have a piece of data we didn’t have before.”

  “That this spreads only by touch,” Seymont said, as if Ibori didn’t understand that.

  “By touching the anacapa drive or anything nearby that…” Crowe stopped. Thought. Realized there was something at the edge of his consciousness.

  “What?” Ibori asked.

  “…absorbed the anacapa energy,” Crowe said, slowly. “Whatever this is, it might have to mix with anacapa energy to infect us.”

  “Which means I’m still vulnerable,” Ibori said, “because that container lid was off for quite a while, and anacapa energy was thick on that bridge.”

  Crowe suddenly wanted Seymont to conduct more autopsies, to see what was going on with Preemas and the others. But he knew she would refuse.

  “Are you seeing any of this in your other patients?” he asked.

  “I’m not cutting them open,” Seymont said. “I’m healing them.”

  He nodded. He might end up telling her to look for this. But first, Ibori.

  “Please, Tindo,” Crowe said. “Do this.”

  Ibori bit his lower lip. If he refused, Crowe wasn’t sure what to do. Crowe hadn’t really taken over yet as captain. Would this force him to make the final leap into leading this ship all the way?

  “All right,” he said. “But where would you look?”

  He addressed that last at Seymont.

  “You touched Natalia with your bare hands, right?” Seymont asked. “We start there.”

  Then she turned to Crowe. “I’m going to let the machine close you up.”

  She didn’t ask his permission. She just decided to do that.

  And he was all right with it.

  He didn’t have to look at what the automated hands were doing. And besides, he needed time to think.

  He was on the edge of a breakthrou
gh.

  He just wasn’t sure what, exactly, it was.

  The Renegat

  The bridge smelled different. Justine Breaux felt her stomach turn as she stepped through the main doors and scanned the emptiness. Normally, this place was abuzz with activity, and Captain Preemas had been at the center of it.

  Now, there were only a handful of others on the bridge besides herself, and they all seemed really busy. Except Atwater.

  He gave her a tentative smile and then made a microshrug with his shoulders, as if he didn’t want anyone else to see it.

  She should have listened to him. He had contacted her, asking her to help with the research, but encouraging her to go back to her usual research station.

  She didn’t want to be alone, anywhere, though, and so she decided to come here. Some of that was because she found his presence…not soothing, exactly, but something akin to soothing. Comforting? No. Familiar?

  Maybe.

  He was one of the few people who actually understood how she felt. When they had all been hiding in the mess, it had been clear that the fighting occurring on the Renegat had nothing to do with them.

  Now she felt like she was being sucked back into a conflict, one she didn’t entirely understand.

  She stepped onto the bridge proper, almost ready to bolt. If she went to her quarters, no one would see her for a long time. She could order food, sleep, stay quiet. And get really restless.

  And even more scared.

  She took a deep breath, then regretted it. That foul smell was underneath everything. Atwater had warned her—he had said that the environmental system on the bridge wasn’t keeping up with the mess, and no one had cleaned it up—but she hadn’t entirely understood what “the mess” meant.

  She could see edges of it, black on the carpet near the anacapa container.

  No one stood over there. That entire part of the bridge looked neglected.

  Atwater was standing near a console that he had never used before. She joined him. Patches of sweat covered his shirt. Since the bridge wasn’t overly warm, she had to conclude that the sweat came from nerves. She couldn’t smell him, though, because of the underlying stench that seemed to coat everything.