Contagion

by David Ryker

  My voice came out so faint and harsh they didn’t hear me. I cleared my throat and asked again.

  Dr. Stark turned to me and I started in surprise. He looked like a zombie. His face was drawn, his swollen eyelids half closed over glassy, reddened orbs. He said a final word to the other surgeon and shambled over to me.

  “She’s going to pull through.”

  I let out a gust of relief and almost drifted back to sleep. Really. Wondering about her was the only reason I had woken up in the first place.

  “Thanks, Doc. What’s her condition?”

  I was about to remind him that as a fellow member of the high command, I had a right to know, but I didn’t need to.

  “Guarded. She took a nasty bit of shrapnel in the abdomen. It cut through the small intestine. That was fairly straightforward to fix. Worse was one of the kidneys. She lost that, I’m afraid.”

  “Lost her kidney!”

  “The human body has two kidneys. When one is removed, the other tends to grow and take on more work. She should have no serious side effects. There is a chance of high blood pressure later in life, but that is manageable.”

  “Oh, that’s good. I didn’t know we had two kidneys.”

  Dr. Stark looked at me, confused. “Really?”

  “Public school, Doc, then the army. I had a different education path than you.”

  “We all have our roles in life. I expect she will be back at work in a couple of weeks, although knowing her she’ll want to get back before that.”

  “And me?”

  “You need to rest for a couple of days until your system gets stronger, and then I’m going to operate on your eye.”

  I reached up and felt the bandage swathed over it. “Yeah, I don’t want to go around looking like a space pirate.”

  “You won’t have to. Flying will be out of the question for some time until your eye recovers.”

  “I might need to.”

  Dr. Stark looked around at all the wounded in Medical, his body shaking a little, his jaw slack from a weariness so deep I could almost feel it myself.

  “I didn’t have your brand of education, Commander Ayers, but I don’t think we’ll be ready for another battle for quite some time.”

  28

  It was several days before I was allowed out of bed. The fingers of my left hand healed quickly enough, but I had compound fractures on my right hand, arm, leg, and foot, not to mention several broken fingers and toes. I guess my ship impacted the rear of the fighter bay on its right side. They had some video of it, but I didn’t watch it. A nurse told me it would be bad for my “healing process.” More likely it would make me puke my guts out.

  Dr. Stark operated on my eye and said I’d get my sight back, but I needed to wear the patch for several more days while the nanites and healing salves did their work.

  I wasn’t lacking for company during that time. Qiang came every day, as did Lieutenant Mabaso, who hadn’t forgotten my daily visits to him while he was recovering. Others came as well. Foyle was not among them.

  Despite all the well-wishing, I was beginning to go stir crazy. I was officially off duty and I barely even got situation reports. We were still in warp, still going toward the rendezvous, still licking our wounds. I felt guilty lying in bed while everyone else was working their asses off trying to get the ship into something approaching working order.

  We dropped out of warp several times, quickly going back into it to continue our retreat, or tactical withdrawal, as we presented it to the crew. You can trace the vector of a ship in warp, but the trace disappears fast, so by moving in and out of warp we covered our tracks and made it impossible for the Centaurians to follow us. Theoretically. We had stopped making assumptions when it came to the Centaurians.

  On the day Dr. Stark finally let me out of bed I got a surprise visitor to help me—Dr. Matteo Conti, the biologist who got a spinal injury in the crossfire of the first Biospherist attack. Got a spinal injury from a flechette from my gun.

  If he knew or suspected, he didn’t let on. He arrived, all smiles, in his electric wheelchair. A Medbot pushed another one behind him.

  “Feel up for a driving lesson?” he asked with a grin.

  “Anything to get out of here.”

  The Medbot extended a pair of metallic arms to help ease me into the wheelchair. When your entire right side is broken, it’s pretty damn hard to do anything, even something as simple as getting out of bed.

  Sitting in the wheelchair felt like heaven after days stuck lying down. There was a control pad and stick on the left side.

  “Is your left hand healed enough to work the controls?” Dr. Conti asked.

  I wiggled my fingers. “Yeah. They took the splints off yesterday. The nanites and a few calcium injections have fixed these fingers right up.”

  “Dr. Stark tells me you’ll need a lot longer for all those other breaks. So you’ll be in one of these for a while. It’s easy enough to drive. If you can fly a Dri’kai fighter, you can drive one of these.”

  In a lower voice I said. “The Dri’kai didn’t invent those fighters.”

  He smiled a little, looking around to make sure no one was in earshot. The guy in the bed next to mine was in a coma, so he wasn’t listening. I have to say that he had made pretty boring company over the last few days.

  “No they did not,” the biologist said. “I’m curious to get to the bottom of that mystery. Lately, though, all the work in the Biology wing has been devoted to analyzing the Centaurian ships.”

  “What have you found?”

  Dr. Conti tapped the wheelchair. “Your duty right now is to learn how to use one of these.”

  It took all of about thirty seconds of instruction before I was whizzing around Medical. The freedom felt wonderful. He had been right, of course. I had enough experience flying fighters that this was a piece of cake. I wondered why he had even bothered to play teacher.

  “I want to get the hell out of Medical,” I said. “Is that allowed or are we going to have to sneak out behind their backs?”

  “You are not allowed out of Medical, and you don’t want to go.”

  “Oh, you have no idea.”

  I felt like slapping myself. Of course he had an idea. He had been laid up here for a lot longer than I had.

  But he didn’t seem bothered by me putting my foot in my mouth. Instead he just treated me to a sly smile.

  “Why rush around the corridors when you can visit Dr. Sanchez?”

  I perked up. “She’s awake?”

  My God, I sounded like a horny teenager. Whatever happened to keeping workplace relationships hush hush?

  Impossible on this ship, and we didn’t have rules against fraternization anyway. Got to make the new generation, after all.

  Wait, did I just think that?

  Shoving that aside as way, way too premature considering that we had only been sleeping together for a couple of weeks and we might all die tomorrow, I followed Conti to a private room.

  Valeria lay in bed, her face drawn and pale. She had lost a lot of weight. It didn’t matter. She still looked beautiful to me.

  As I buzzed up to the side of her bed and Conti made a quiet retreat, her eyes fluttered open and she turned her head.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey.”

  Her eyes took in the wheelchair and the casts and the eye patch.

  “You look like shit,” she said.

  “Wow, you’re a real diehard romantic.”

  She managed a weak smile. I stroked her hair.

  “I may look like shit, but you look gorgeous.”

  “No, I look like I feel.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” I said, still stroking her hair. “Doc said you’ll have a full recovery.”

  Her face went dark. “It was terrible. There was a huge explosion and everyone got knocked off their feet. I got hit in the abdomen but I was still awake. The air started rushing out of the room. I couldn’t get any oxygen. Every breath felt empty.�
��

  “Try not to think about it.”

  She shook her head. “How can’t I?”

  As soon as she said it I realized how dumb my words were. Valeria was a civilian, like most people in the Nansen. She’d never been bombed. She had never been hit by shrapnel. My body was a topographic map of scars—some faded, others fresh. The only scar she had was one on her knee when she wiped out on her bicycle as a kid.

  Valeria took hold of my hand. “Charlene died.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Charlene had been one of her friends at work. A happy-go-lucky Southern girl who always gave Valeria a wink when I walked into the main lab.

  “I don’t like living in this kind of world, Mitch. We have to get through this and find someplace peaceful. Someplace where we can do it right this time.”

  “We will,” I said, squeezing her hand. “I’ll get us through.”

  I held her hand until she drifted back to sleep.

  Getting up and about made me even more restless than I had been before. Being off duty meant that I’d only be in the way if I tried to interfere with other people’s work. Not having anything else to do, I sent a messenger probe to the Dri’kai flagship, greeting R’kk’kar and congratulating him on his great victory. It hadn’t exactly been a victory, but I’m sure the Dri’kai would see it as one.

  Then weariness tugged at me and I went back to bed. I’d hardly done anything, but I’d reached the limit of my endurance. Damn, it looked like it was going to be a long recovery.

  When I woke up a few hours later, R’kk’kar’s answer had reached me. I turned on the video.

  To my shock, the Dri’kai general was wearing an eye patch just like I was.

  “Hello, my friend and comrade in arms. I am glad to hear that you survived the battle. You were seriously injured when you crashed into our fighter bay and I fear you would have died if it were not for the quick work of your friend and comrade in arms, Major Li, in giving you first aid and flying you to the Nansen. You owe him your life as much as you owe it to your medical staff.”

  “Several times over,” I said.

  “I am sorry to hear your mate was injured in the attack. I hope that she has a speedy recovery and is still able to breed.”

  I laughed, which caused a sharp pain in my side. I didn’t care. It felt good to laugh no matter how much it hurt. I’d have to pass this on to Valeria.

  The general continued. “I have found that when a partner is wounded, as one of mine once was during battle, it is best to manipulate their sensitive parts. It speeds recovery and eases the pain.”

  “All right,” I said with a grin. “I’ll take that into consideration.”

  The general pointed to his eye patch. “You must be wondering about this. I am ashamed to say that I did not get it in battle, or at least not directly. The Centaurians were able to hit us with one of their bioweapons again. The Dri’kai, like all species, have a number of symbiotic microbes that live on or inside our bodies. One of them is a type of one-celled organism that eats the grit and dirt that gets into our eyes on our mostly desert planet. The organism has the unfortunate side effect of also irritating the surface of the eye. It is not noticeable, but it does lead to the buildup of cataracts in middle age. These, thanks to our brilliant medical technology, are easily treated.”

  I suppressed a smile at this typically Dri’kai comment. I hoped his boasting about their medical technology had something to back it up. We didn’t need the backbone of the fleet blind on duty. He went on.

  “What the Centaurians did was to genetically alter these microbes to make them attack the eye, thus speeding up the development of the cataracts. Our scientists estimate that we contracted this in our first battle with the enemy and the cataracts are just now forming. I had one removed this morning. Several other crew members are temporarily blind. They will all recover and the microbe has been eliminated, but it is a reminder that we must all be on our guard.”

  General R’kk’kar growled, his hands balling into fists.

  “We don’t know how these Centaurians know so much about us. How can they know our physiology so well that they know the microbes in our eyes? I begin to suspect that this fleet was preceded by some scout ships that captured examples of our species. Sometimes ships travelling in deep space go missing. It is not uncommon considering all the dangers, and one or two extra missing ships would not be noticed. We must work on the assumption that they can use any weakness, any biological possibility, as a weapon against us.”

  Well, that’s reassuring.

  “At least our scientists have figured out how the Centaurians are able to transmit these microbes. Just before we went into warp, we sent some science drones to swab the outside of several of our ships right around the openings, the edges of the fighter bays and airlocks. They found a microbe common to the Dri’kai large intestine. It would have given us debilitating stomach upset.”

  I cringed. A ship full of Dri’kai with diarrhea sounded like a serious weapon of mass destruction.

  “The microbe was encased in a tough coating that shields it from the vacuum. The coating was designed so that it would decay after a few hours. Half of them had a positive electric charge, while the rest had a negative electric charge. This way they would bond like dust to fighters, drones, and people going into the ship. It didn’t matter what charge the object going into the ship had, there would be microbes to bond with it. The Centaurians are a crafty lot. We’re still not sure how they got them onto the ship. We’re analyzing the videos of the battle. I suspect that some of those tubes we saw sticking out of their ships fired these microbes in bunches of millions.”

  I nodded. That made sense. I did remember their ships seemed to have more guns than they appeared to use. Turned out they were shotgunning us with poisons made from our own bodies. Great. Just fucking great.

  But not human bodies. We were too new to this part of the galaxy and their scout ships hadn’t had a chance to analyze us.

  That might give us an edge.

  General R’kk’kar let out a belly laugh. “I have heard they are keeping you from working, my friend and comrade in arms. I have no doubt that your physicians are correct in doing so, but you and I are individuals of action, which is why I tell you all of this. I have already sent this information to all other ships. You now must tell the officers of the Nansen. I hope to fight by your side again soon, Commander Mitch Ayers.”

  He signed off.

  I smiled and gave the blank screen a mock salute with my one good hand. R’kk’kar was a good guy. He realized I must have been getting antsy lying in bed all day, and here he had given me a way to get out of it.

  No rest for the wicked.

  29

  I must admit I did not cut a very impressive figure at the high command meeting I called that afternoon. Sitting in an electric wheelchair, with a patch over one eye and casts on two limbs, slumped with fatigue and the effect of painkillers, I didn’t look like the man of action R’kk’kar had called me. Still, at least I was there.

  Valeria was not. She had a lot longer of a recovery to get through. Chief Engineer Andrei Iliescu hadn’t gotten off unscathed either. One good hit had jarred the ship so badly he had done a faceplant into a control screen. He had a splint on his nose from where it had broken. His thin, angular face made it look even bigger than it was. He could have had it fixed with nanites by now, but he had been too busy to bother going to Medical.

  I explained to the assembled officers the message the Dri’kai general had sent me, adding the not particularly true statement that the Dri’kai had just figured this out and were sending it to all other ships at that moment.

  “So why didn’t he send it to us?” Foyle asked, looking irritated.

  Just because I’m in a wheelchair doesn’t mean I’m not included in “us,” asshole.

  Out loud I said, “He assumed that I was back on official duty.”

  Well, he figured that passing this on to me would put me back
on official duty. That’s close enough, isn’t it?

  Foyle looked like he was about to say more but Commander Loftsdóttir cut in. While she was far too indulgent with him, for reasons that were still a mystery to me, she wasn’t blind to his behavior.

  “Thank you for coming to us with this information right away, Commander Ayers, despite your condition. I hope you’ll soon make a complete recovery.” She nodded at Qiang, who sat beside me. “Major Li has been working out well as acting commander, so you can rest assured that Security is in good hands.”

  Qiang and I exchanged an awkward glance. She wasn’t going to replace me with my best friend, was she?

  “The question is what to do about it?” Barakat said. “Science is now severely understaffed, and Medical is too busy to help.”

  The commander nodded somberly. Dr. Stark hadn’t even come to the meeting.

  Foyle shrugged. “I don’t see that we have to do anything. We’re not affected because they don’t know anything about us. It’s the alien scientists that are going to have to watch out for their own people.”

  I could have smacked him. Did this guy seriously not give a shit about the well-being of our allies? If they went down, we wouldn’t last five seconds against the Centaurians.

  But then again, when was the last time he or anyone else in the military had to worry about allies? We’d fought for the Global Government. It didn’t have allies, only enemies. We were all working in new territory here.

  But at least he could try to adapt a little.

  “We should give as much support to our allies as possible,” Barakat explained. “I’ll go through the list of colonists for anyone with expertise in microbiology, botany, or any similar science.”

  “Thank you,” Commander Loftsdóttir said, nodding to him. “As short staffed as we are, we need all the help we can get. I’ll put Dr. Conti in charge of that team. Have you noticed any strange behavior from Juan Carlos Garrido?”

  “None at all,” Barakat said. “Either he is awaiting a signal or is biding his time, not sure if he’s being watched or not. I’ll keep an eye on him. In the meantime, he’s doing his job diligently. He’s most interested in all the habitable worlds out here. There are so many more than we thought. I’m thinking that with all that’s going on, the Biospherists won’t make a move for some time.”