by Lina Rather
GEMMA LAY UNDER ONE of the hydroponic plant beds, where the air circulated the moisture rising off the water, cooling her face. It almost felt like being in a forest, with the sounds of the leaves rustling in the climate control system’s breeze and the nutrient-rich water pumping over the vegetables’ roots.
Vauca laughed. “Is that what a forest is like? I’ve never been.” She turned over onto her side and bumped her head on one of the crocks fermenting cabbage into kimchi and garlicky sauerkraut. There was a leak in one of the feeder lines and after forty-five minutes in the cool damp they’d finally replaced the tubing. Not that they were rushing.
“Sort of.” Gemma searched for a way to describe the feeling of so many trees. She had only been in forests a few times herself, and years ago. “It’s like . . . there are so many lives. They talk to each other through their roots, you know. They send information back and forth in patterns of nutrients and bioelectricity.”
“Like the shiplings! Well, maybe.”
“I bet we could inject one of the shiplings with magnetic dye and watch how it travels through the others.” Gemma let a curl of Vauca’s hair wrap around her fingers and slip through. She was not so young anymore, not really. On the station where she had grown up, she would be married with three children in the creche by now. But she felt like a blushing, budding teenager, waiting for someone to ask her to dance at an eclipse festival, wondering what it would feel like to have someone else’s skin touch her neck, her cheek, the curve of her back. Vauca’s hair smelled like vanilla. How very strange their lives were, she thought, that their toiletries could smell like a spice she had never seen in real life, that would not grow beyond Earth.
“Interesting. How would we track it? We’d have to set up a CT scan net outside the ship and that would be extraordinarily large.”
“Hmm.” It was a problem. Would it be possible to do a CT scan in sections, with handheld scanners? Surely one of the shipyards had developed a more space-efficient diagnostic tool. Then again, ships produced such large egg clutches and so few were expected to grow to size, most of the time shipyards just disposed of problematic larvae.
The door to the hydroponics bay slid open and Gemma jumped. She still wasn’t used to the sounds of a metal ship, where doors slid and hissed instead of squelching and sucking.
“Gemma?” It was Jared, the comms officer. “There’s a call for you.”
Gemma shimmied out from under the table and Vauca followed after. “Who’s calling me?” She couldn’t think of a single person who would be. Not directly, in real time. It took a lot of power and bandwidth to send a targeted call and keep the channel open for responses.
“A woman named Lucia on your old ship.”
Something was wrong. She ran for the comms room. Sister Lucia’s face loomed in the screen and Sister Faustina stood behind her like a reaper. Sister Faustina’s wimple was askew, a snaking coil of salt-and-pepper hair writhing down her shoulder.
“How much of our ringeye treatment do you have?” Sister Lucia asked, as soon as she made it in view of the camera.
She didn’t understand. “I took a couple batches with me. I’ve been tinkering with it.”
“Does it work?”
“I don’t exactly have a live ringeye sample to test it!” No one would dare keep that on board a ship. The risks were unthinkable. She had tested her samples on less lethal cousins to ringeye, like the shadowpox that plagued the second system, with good results. But good results on an annoying rash didn’t mean they would have good results on a deadly hemorrhagic fever. “What’s happened?”
Please, God, don’t let ringeye have broken out on the ship. She imagined Sister Ewostatewos, thin already, curled crumpled and crimped in her bed, her eyes black and orange striations like the rings of Saturn, blood bubbling from her mouth. She imagined the Reverend Mother in the clutches of fever, her elderly heart giving out after only a day. No one would be brave enough to render them aid. They would be quarantined while the disease burned through them. After they all died, the ship would be euthanized by whatever local government was unlucky enough to be closest, then burned. Gemma had never been on a ringeye quarantine zone. The Reverend Mother had, she knew, as part of the only teams willing to go into the zones, and when she spoke of it her hands went to her rosary without her meaning them to.
Only a few groups were even willing to go near disease-stricken colonies—some orders of nuns, a Buddhist order of physician-monks, a shipful of rabbis who had taken the disease on for their mission, a few secular cohorts of humanitarian scientists. Most of those people, she knew, had died in the same hospitals as those they had come to help.
“The Phoyongsa III colony,” Sister Lucia said. Her face was drawn and still.
“Oh my God, that baby.”
“Yes. So, we’re going back. We’ll rendezvous with you in a few hours and I’ll take what stock you have.”
“It won’t be enough for all of them, even if it works.” Thirty people. She thought of Terret’s baby boy crying alone for a mother who was never going to come.
“Do we have what you would need to make more?”
Gemma looked up and found the crew of the Cheng I Sao assembled behind her. Vauca and Jared; Werrin, the captain for all that meant on a communal-property ship; Yevet, the cook.
“Did she say ringeye?” Werrin asked.
“There was a ringeye colony on a moon of the planet where I grew up. In school they took us to walk around the ruins and you could still see where the bloodstains were,” Yevet said. Their mouth twisted at the memory.
“It will take more than a few hours to produce another batch,” Gemma said. “A day at least. We would have to follow the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations halfway to the colony.”
Vauca tilted her head against the edge of the door frame, her arms crossed over her chest. “You want to go with them, don’t you?”
How did they already know each other so well? Gemma saw every emotion in the crisscross of those arms: sadness, fear, strength. “Yes. I swore to myself I would still do good if I left the habit. And—I know these people. They welcomed us and I ate their food and blessed their marriages. I can’t just leave and wish them well.”
“You’ll need more hands than a dozen nuns,” said Werrin.
“I can’t ask you to put yourselves in danger.”
“And it is going to be dangerous!” Yevet said. They shuddered. “Gods below, do you really want to risk dying like that?”
“I have to.”
“We should go,” Vauca said.
Yevet scoffed. “You’re saying that because you want to impress her.”
“No.” Vauca looked out the viewscreen, toward the cool, orange arm of Andromeda, millions of empty light-years away. “We should go because I would want someone to come for us. We’re all just scattered, lonely specks out here, unless we try to be more. We shouldn’t be brutal just because the universe is.”
Yevet was quiet.
“Think of it as practicality,” Jared said. “If we left Gemma, we would have to put up with Vauca moping until our flightpaths crossed again.”
They put it to a vote, as a formality, because they voted on everything. It was unanimous. They were going to Phoyongsa III.
* * *
Sister Lucia held the vial aloft in front of her assembled sisters. The liquid inside was amber, viscous. She used to think it ridiculous when secular people told her that all nuns looked the same, but here, with all of them wearing the same tight, worried grimace, she understood. Unified in one purpose, they were a single weapon, the fingers of a single hand. By now the ship would be entering the gravity well of the mother-planet; they were only hours from Phoyongsa III and whatever awaited them there. “If this works, the victims should cease to be contagious twenty-four bells after the first dose. The virus can live airborne for longer than that, so keep your respirators on the whole time we’re on the surface.”
Sister Mary Catherine raised her hand, her fin
gers quivering. “How long can it live airborne?”
“We don’t know.”
They didn’t have Level 4-certified biohazard suits—they weren’t funded by any deep-pocketed civilian gov and they were not one of the orders whose sole mission was to follow the black foot of pandemic as it strode across the known systems, leaving footprints of phlegm and bile and blood in its wake. They would be wearing their vacsuit skins under their habits, and nitrile gloves that would not do anything more than make them feel a little secure. If this were the first system, where every half-decent rock was full of people, they could wait for one of the real authorities to arrive and render aid. But here, where the distances between settled places was so great people could sometimes go years without seeing a ship, there was no one.
“You will have to inject it into the jugular vein.” Sister Lucia demonstrated with a used syringe. “Ringeye victims are known for their unnatural strength. They will fight you. You cannot allow any bodily fluids to come into contact with your skin. It’s highly, highly contagious. We are here to render aid and bury the dead, not to become burdens ourselves.”
A sound chimed overhead. Sister Faustina looked up, something like a mix of confusion and fear written in the lines of her face. Sister Lucia did not like it when Sister Faustina showed either of those emotions. It was usually a very bad sign. The other woman slipped away from the group and out the hatch. She returned only a moment later.
Sister Lucia was about to show how to remove a pair of gloves without getting any of the secretions on them onto your skin, but she stopped. “What was that alarm, Sister?”
“Proximity.” Sister Faustina huffed. She must have run from the lab to the comms room and back. “Mother, Father Giovanni, there are four Central Governance ships in orbit around Phoyongsa III.”
“What?” Sister Lucia said. Her hand loosened on the vial—she caught it just before she lost it completely. They could not waste any of this. She set it on her workbench snug in the case with the rest of them.
“There are. Four Central Governance ships. Outside Phoyongsa III. Did I stutter, Sister?” Sister Faustina bared her teeth, that scraped-down look of pure bridled anger she got when Central Governance came too close to them.
Sister Lucia drew herself up. “Excuse me.”
Sister Faustina swallowed whatever hot rage she kept leashed inside herself and her face settled. “I’m sorry. Please excuse me. Father Giovanni, they have asked us to leave our present course and stay at least beyond Phoyongsa XI. They are saying they will not allow us to land on the moon.”
All eyes turned to the priest. Father Giovanni was sweating, moisture gathering at the edge of his hairline. “Well. That’s very unexpected. Did they give a good reason?”
“For our protection, of course.” Sister Faustina’s lips stretched thin, toward that animistic grimace again. “Please come speak with them. Perhaps you Earthers will understand each other better.”
The Reverend Mother signed Faustina! over the priest’s head, but he did not, apparently, pick up on her tone. They all followed him and crowded into the hatchway of the comms room, pressing their hands into the ship’s muscles to keep it open so they could see the screen.
The man on the screen was rosy-cheeked, wearing a silver and gray uniform that struck Sister Lucia like something out of one of the cheaply made educational vids about the war she had been made to watch in school. He looked middle-aged, though rumor was the Earthers were hoarding a secret way to live centuries instead of decades, so who knew really. He certainly held himself like he expected nothing but respect and obedience. When the lag time between their ships caught up, she saw his upper lip twitch, like he was repressing a sneer, and she understood why Sister Faustina had such a gut-level reaction to Earthers like this.
“Part of the duty of the sisters’ order is to care for the sick and dying, to offer them respite and kindness,” Father Giovanni said. When he was talking to the soldier, he smoothed his voice into a radio-drama Earther accent, all the hard stops softened and the vowels drawn out long like hot taffy. “We merely wish to go to the surface to offer what comfort we can to these poor souls. And one of the sisters is a doctor. She believes she may have discovered a treatment for this awful disease, using the genes of our own ship. Perhaps it will ease their suffering, at least. Those people down there need not die alone.”
Sister Lucia bristled at his phrasing, like she was a dilettante playing with vaccines. Better to close her mouth around that before she said something to escalate the situation. “There’s a baby down there. We need to at least rescue him.”
Not a spark of sympathy appeared on the lieutenant’s face. “No one is going down to the surface. We have quarantined the moon. I will not see us spark a plague like during the war.”
“There hasn’t been a plague like that since the war,” Sister Faustina said, leaning over Father Giovanni so she could glare right at the soldier. “And what authority do you have to stop us? We don’t abide by Central Governance laws. This isn’t the first system.”
The soldier sighed deeply, picked a tablet up from in front of him, and sent something to their ship. The comms array pinged when the datapack downloaded. “These colonists signed a contract when they accepted the supplies from ECG’s New Worlds Foundation. That contract entitled us to take over military duties on their colony in the event of—and I quote—a natural disaster or conflict that significantly threatened the rest of our signees, member colonies, and ships. An outbreak of ringeye more than qualifies. We will close orbit for eight weeks. If you want to stick around that long, we will allow you down afterward.”
“There will be nothing but bodies,” Sister Lucia said. “The baby.”
“It is very unfortunate, yes.”
“Unfortunate is not the word that comes to mind.”
The soldier shrugged. “Do not attempt to travel closer to the moon. We will disable your ship. And I know those slugs don’t move fast enough to evade us. And if you continue to resist our directive, we will board you and hold you until we are sure the danger period has passed.”
“You certainly don’t have the authority to do that,” Sister Faustina said.
“Sister, I’m a good Catholic boy. I went to parochial school, I still can’t wear collarless shirts. I do not want to do anything to inconvenience you. But listen to me carefully—no one owns this sad little corner of space. We have the power to enforce our authority.”
The screen went dark. Father Giovanni sat back in the comms chair and yanked at his collar. “Well. Should we continue on our previous route? I have identified several colonies and mining camps that have not yet been visited—in their entire existence!—by representatives of the Church. And that request for medical assistance you received earlier—I suppose it would be on our way to stop there.”
Silence fell as the sisters tried to think of a way to disagree with him without taking the Lord’s name in vain.
“We are not leaving,” said Sister Ewostatewos, surprising them all. She was so quiet, usually. But she also had the firm conviction of an iron rod. “Those people are part of our flock. We married them and blessed their child and their home. We have a duty.”
“We can hardly resist three warships,” the priest replied. “I don’t see how it is a good use of our limited resources to continue to fight them.”
“There are ways.” Sister Lucia drummed her fingers on the comms board, thinking. “Gemma’s ship might have an engine capable of tight maneuvers. I don’t think they’re in range of the ECG ships yet. We would have the element of surprise.”
“I will not allow it.” Father Giovanni stood up. Sister Lucia didn’t think he meant to intimidate her, but he towered over her, and his hands were fists and it made every instinct in her snarl like a wild dog. “Those people are not our enemies. I know that is a very strange notion out here, where you all seem to hold these prewar fantasies that it’s you against Earth, but the New Worlds Foundation does good work. They did go
od work for those people dying down there. And they are trying to do a good thing now by preventing that hideous disease from slaughtering millions again. It is painful, yes, but the greater good—”
“Have you forgotten Matthew?” Sister Faustina asked, and there was a dangerous tone in her voice, a tone that forgot their roles. “‘And proclaim as you go, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. You received without paying; give without pay.’”
He turned on her, and even she stepped back. “I will not have you cherry-pick theology at me. Do you think I have not noticed that you are the least faithful of these good women, skirting your obligations, doing only the devotion that is necessary? Do not pretend that you know more of His word than I do. The Bible also says Render onto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. And this matter—quarantine, war—that is Caesar’s.”
He shouldered past them, through the hatch, away. Like he thought that was the end of it.
* * *
The Cheng I Sao hung behind a tiny moon—just a large asteroid caught in an improbable orbit, really—while they waited for the Central Governance ship to turn away. They heard the entire exchange. Someone—Lucia or Faustina, Gemma wasn’t sure—had opened a channel to them.
Vauca made a face. “What the fuck. Are priests supposed to be pro-Caesar?”
“That’s not really what he meant—” Gemma began, and then waved it away. “Never mind. We can have a deep discussion of theology later, if you want. But look—there are shuttles on the surface.”
The Cheng I Sao had been a long-range mining and geological survey ship, before Werrin bought it for two barrels of copper chit in a war-surplus junkyard. The interior was not much to look at, but the scanners on the ship were incredible. Far more powerful than the Our Lady of Impossible Constellations was equipped with. Which was probably why they were buying the lie that the Central Governance soldiers were merely holding quarantine. But Gemma could see at least three short-range shuttles, docked meters from the orange-tarp roofs and prefab houses of the colony. Three shuttles meant a dozen soldiers, at least. If they didn’t want humanitarian nuns with a potential cure on the surface, why would they go themselves? Surely Navy transport ships didn’t carry a full complement of biohazard suits.
