Kybek does the quiruth nod. “Can you do it with the autosurgeon?”
Ariam does the human nod. “Yeah. We shouldn’t waste any more time, either. Get him prepped?”
“That’s proving difficult. He’s difficult.”
Ariam touches the intercom on the Ryr’s chamber. “I’m Dr. Ariam McKeown,” she says in the quiruth trade tongue. “What can I call you?”
Kybek says, “He doesn’t understand you,” and the Ryr gives Kybek a dirty look.
“Oh, he understands me,” Ariam says. “He just doesn’t like us very much.”
The Ryr unfolds a forelimb and makes a motion with his squat digits, like fingers on a keyboard. Ariam releases the button.
“Can we get him a keyboard?”
Kybek rushes off.
Ariam turns the intercom back on. “Keypad is coming. I understand you’re in some pain. We’re going to take care of you. Until your people arrive.”
The Ryr blinks once.
Ariam wonders what a ryric nod or thanks would even look like and if she’d recognize it. She almost smiles, then stops, not knowing how that would be received either. Then, in English, she says to herself, “Just hang in there, your highness.”
The Ryr is off the bed and at the glass in one quick four-limbed dash. He hoists his head up high and looks down on Ariam. His breath fogs the window. One canine lip is snagged on a yellow fang.
Ariam goes back a step and freezes there, hand off the intercom. The Ryr’s mouth moves. She steps toward the glass and presses the intercom button again.
“Human,” he says. “Human.”
Ariam nods, then says in quiruth, “Yes.”
The Ryr’s forelimbs fold up in front of his chest. He’s oozing through a bandage. “Human,” he says again, his head swaying side to side, his gaze fixed.
Kybek comes back. “What is this?”
“I don’t know,” says Ariam.
Kybek puts the keyboard into the pass-through airlock in the Ryr’s chamber. The Ryr’s ears move as the airlock cycles, then he reaches out one long forelimb and picks up the keyboard. For the first time in a minute, he takes his eyes off of Ariam. He pecks out a few characters on the pad, which translates and projects his words to their monocles and a display in the chamber’s window. It reads: My people will come.
Kybek says into the intercom: “They’re already on their way.”
“Your injuries,” Ariam says. “We need to get you into surgery. To help you.”
My people will come.
“Not in time,” Ariam says.
The Ryr looks back to Ariam. No humans.
Kybek looks at Ariam.
“What?” she asks.
No humans. Humans are sick. Humans are thieves.
“The operation is done by telepresence. By remote. She won’t—”
The Ryr slams a forepaw against the glass.
Kybek shrinks. “It won’t be a human. I’ll do it. I’ll operate.”
Ariam looks away.
A human caused this. A human fugitive.
Ariam shakes her head.
“No humans,” says Kybek. “Quiruth. I’ll operate.”
The Ryr lowers his head to get eye to eye with Kybek and stares.
“What do we call you?” asks Ariam.
The Ryr drops the keyboard into the pass-through and pads back to his bed.
“Nice,” Ariam says, removing her finger from the intercom.
“What’s nice?”
“You’re going to operate? No offense, but at least get Gomig, she’s the only other class-three surgeon that’s logged a lot of hours on the—”
“I can do it. I can’t force a patient to—”
“You backed off as soon as he had a problem with me. That feels great. As if I’d even be in the same room as him during the procedure. Do patients get to just—”
“Calmly. Choose their physicians? Yes.”
Ariam flips up her monocle. “Fine, then. Good luck.” She heads for the door.
“Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“Stay here, logged in. In case we need you.”
“What about—”
“Gomig came off a double shift two hours ago. We may need you. Please.”
Ariam makes a gesture meaning fine.
“You can examine the human pilot? You know better than anyone else what—”
“Yeah, okay.”
“We can probably let him out of the secure chamber, too.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Ariam says, stopping in the doorway.
Kybek tilts his head.
“Just…” Ariam shakes her head again, then looks out across admin toward Secure Exam One. “Let me talk to him, first. We don’t know who he is yet.” She walks out, leaving Kybek alone with the Ryr.
*
She’s on her way to Lowry’s chamber when she dials Gwoma on her mobile. He appears on the tiny screen as a face in a dark space, lit by monitors and instrumentation from a dashboard. Reflected screens bend into letter Cs in his eyes.
“Ariam,” Gwoma says. “You at work?”
“Yeah. You?”
The quiruth nod. “We’ll be out here for hours yet, gathering debris from the crash. That ryric ship was pulled right apart. How are the patients?”
Ariam stops at a data kiosk in an alcove and ducks into the space it affords, getting her out of the corridor’s regular traffic of patients and nurses. She pries off her monocle and pockets it. “I don’t know yet. Too soon to say. What’s the crash site look like?”
“It’s a mess. Of course. Why?” Gwoma’s squinting, which means he’s concerned.
“And the smaller ship?”
“It’s a wreck. Utter. What’s going on?”
“How big was that smaller ship?”
“It’s a runabout. A rover. Tiny.”
“Room for a passenger? Cargo?” Ariam’s not looking at her mobile. She’s looking into her imagination, trying to picture the ship.
“Not at all. Just the cockpit—ejected—and the engines. Ariam, what’re you thinking?”
She turns back to face the mobile in her hand. “Nothing. Not really. Not yet. Except, Gwoma: who makes that ship, the rover?”
Gwoma turns his eyes upward. “It’s a cheap faster-than-light craft. Commonplace, until a few years ago. Hemingway Aerospace, I think? A human company.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I’ve heard of them.”
*
The airlock cycles around Ariam on the edge of Lowry’s chamber, air shushing against her face and across her knuckles. She’s dressed in Earth scrubs and her big brown boots. The inner door opens and she steps inside the cleanroom with Lowry.
He waves. “Welcome to my humble… cell.”
She gives off a half-smile as she opens her medical bag. “It’s just for safety’s sake,” she says. She pulls a scanner out of the bag—it’s flat and banged up, with a screen on one face and lens-like sensors on the other, ringed by four plastic grips.
“For plague?”
Ariam waggles her head from side to side. “Sort of. Quiruth are immune to it, but we’re waiting to hear about the Ryr.” She snaps her fingers, fishes her monocle out of her pocket and dons it again. “Tests should be back soon.”
“That sort of thing isn’t on file somewhere? Which species are susceptible and which aren’t?”
Ariam smiles again. “We don’t get a lot of data on the ryric body, despite them being so close by. The quiruth didn’t have much on us, on humans, until I got here.”
“When did you get here?”
“About two years ago.” She steps up to Lowry, puts the scanner near his face, thumbs a button. It chirps to life.
“Why did you—can I talk? While that thing runs?”
“Yeah.”
“Why did—how did—you end up out here?”
“How do any of us?”
“I’m here because I had an FTL failure. By chance. While the Ryr’s
ship was chasing me. I’m guessing you didn’t get here quite by accident.”
She considers it, taps a few keys on the scanner, and drags it through the air down to Lowry’s torso. “I came here on purpose. I stayed by accident.”
“What does that mean?”
“I came to study the quiruth, to see why they were immune to the plague, to see if we could learn anything from their physiology.” She moves the scanner to her hip, types in a few notes. “Just a few more scans.”
“So what happened? No breakthroughs?”
“It turns out I’m not a research scientist,” she smiles.
“You said you were a doctor.”
“I’m a surgeon—a trauma surgeon, by trade. The last licensed human surgeon, as far as I know. In exchange for a two-year contract manning autosurgeons for the quiruth, I got a few quiruth cadavers sent off to our research scientists. No breakthroughs.”
“And your two-year contract is up.”
“More or less.” The scanner beeps. She logs a reading, starts a new scan. “I’ll be out of here in a few days.”
“What about me?”
“What about you?”
“Can I go?”
“Why don’t you tell me more about how you got here first. You were running salvage?”
“Yeah, I was in pursuit of a human ship, drifting, and it went across the border into ryric space as I was trying to land in it. The Ryr, there, claims everything in his turf, and I didn’t want to be a prisoner. I ran, they followed.”
“What kind of ship was it?”
“What’s that?”
“The salvage. What kind of ship?”
“Old transpo hauler, for passengers and ore. Ghost ship.”
Ariam nods, makes an adjustment on the scanner. “How does salvage work on a ship like that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your ship’s awfully small. What were you hoping to get as salvage?”
“The ship itself. Right it, fire it up, steer it out of there.”
Ariam lowers the scanner, looks Lowry in the eye. “The whole ship? That’s quite a score.”
“Hell yeah, it is.”
She nods, expressionless. “Okay. I’ll let you know how your scans come back.”
“You can’t tell from—”
“You’re still in the incubation period. You’re not manifesting symptoms the scanner can detect.”
“So how long do I—”
“Still no way to be sure. Some incubation periods last upwards of thirty years.”
“I’ve heard.”
“How old are you? Twenty-five?”
“Twenty-eight.”
Ariam nods. “You inherited?”
Lowry nods.
She looks him in the eye again. “You want to see something?”
He shrugs. “Sure.”
She goes back to her bag, packs in the scanner, and pulls out the rustling plastic bag she got from Gwoma. She tosses it to Lowry.
“Hey!” he says. “Nice! I haven’t seen these in years.”
“I know, right? A, ah, a quiruth captain got them for me. From a salvage team who found them near Earth.”
Lowry moves to open them.
“Whoa, whoa,” Ariam says, taking the bag back. “I’m saving these.”
Lowry smiles. “Traces of us all over this part of the galaxy, still.”
“Still,” she says. Her mobile beeps, so she fishes it out and checks it. “I’ve got to take this. I’ll be back.” She hits standby on her device and heads for the door.
“I’ll just stay here,” Lowry says, sitting down on the chamber’s bed.
On the other side of the airlock, Ariam keys her mobile. It’s Gwoma.
“I’m on my way back early,” Gwoma says.
“What’s up?”
“Not on the mobile. I’ll meet you there for tea.”
*
Ariam’s sitting in the hospital’s tearoom, reading quiruth reports about ryric culture, when her monocle squawks. She slides it over her eye and eyeballs the report from the Ryr’s tests, CC’d to her by the lab. She’s still reading when Gwoma stomps over, in his flight-crew gear, minus the helmet and hardware. He pulls up a stool and sits down at the chromed table with Ariam.
“You,” he says, “look concerned.”
“I am,” Ariam says. “Blood-type matches came back on the Ryr. Generic artificial type-G plasma is a match. So are three kinds of blood in our records.”
Gwoma waits for it.
“Two species are further away than the ryric ships on intercept and the third… is human.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Yeah,” she says, taking a sip of tea from a tiny cup. “It gets worse.”
“Ah.”
“Kybek is into the second hour of a two-hour procedure that’s going to take him three. The Ryr is bleeding out internally while he works.” She looks into her teacup, sets it down, looks back at Gwoma. “Kybek’s going to run out of artificial blood, I just know it.”
“What happens then?”
“Then,” Ariam says, “the Ryr bleeds to death. The thing is, his species doesn’t even need that much, but supplies are so low and the only possible donors are me and Lowry.”
“And the plague—”
“Doesn’t affect his species the same way, according to these findings,” she taps her monocle, “but it would still probably kill him.”
“Ah.”
They sit in silence for a few minutes. Gwoma pours himself some tea, puts it to his mouth, and freezes when Ariam says:
“The thing is…”
“Yes?”
“There’s this thing that human doctors do. It’s called the Hippocratic oath. It’s basically a promise to act ethically as a physician and do no harm. Named after the human we think of as being our first doctor. More or less.”
“So it’s old.”
“It’s real old.”
Gwoma sips his tea, sets down his cup, folds his hands. “And you’re thinking about violating that oath.”
Ariam looks away. “The surgery with Kybek may mean I don’t have to worry about it. If Kybek’s online right now, he knows what I know. He’s probably conserving blood as we speak. It’ll be fine.” She pauses. “What about you? What didn’t you want to say on the mobile?”
“I can get you access to the human ship.”
Ariam looks back at Gwoma, excited. “Really?”
“More accurately, I can let you watch me access the human ship.”
“I can’t leave the hospital for another—”
“It has to be now.”
Ariam makes a face. “Dammit. Why now?”
“The salvage is being held until the ryric ships get here. I know the agent at the hangar right now, but she goes off shift shortly. We have to act quickly.”
“You’re just going to hand the ship over to the Ryr’s people when they arrive? Both ships?”
“Not me. But yes.”
“That’s—”
“The Ryr’s people will bomb this place apart if their Ryr dies here and we don’t cooperate. The station authority will give up both ships and your human pilot, unless we can prove that he’s—”
“That’s not what I—forget it. Go and check the runabout’s storage drives. Let me know what’s in there.”
“What are you looking for? You’re not exactly entitled to—”
“I don’t need copies of anything. I just want to know what sort of data is in there.”
“Okay.” Gwoma considers. “Okay. What if—”
Ariam’s monocle squawks again. She holds a finger to pause Gwoma and activates her display. “Shit,” she says. “Dammit.”
Gwoma squints.
“Kybek’s almost done,” she says.
“Isn’t that—”
“And he’s out of blood for the Ryr.”
*
Kybek strips off his telepresence rig—gloves, goggles, mic—on his way out of the operation room up in s
urgery. He catches sight of Ariam on the other side of the glass sliding doors and braces himself. She stands there, in her scrubs, arms folded in front of her, a complex look on her face that Kybek still can’t quite read after two years.
The doors slide open as he approaches. He holds a blue-green finger up to Ariam—a human gesture he’s seldom used before—and speaks first. “Don’t say it.” Kybek sits on a bench outside the operator’s room and puts his head in his hands.
Ariam stands next to him.
Kybek looks back toward the surgical room, where the alien king still lays, anesthetized and bleeding. “I nicked a blood vessel late in the procedure. I think it’s repaired, but he’s oozing blood. His system will keep cycling what we’ve given him, but it’s only a matter of time until he bleeds out now. I’ve called Gomig.”
Ariam nods. “I’m here. Now.”
“And?”
“Wake him up. Let me convince him.”
“You want to operate?”
Ariam considers. “I want to convince him to let me save his life.”
Kybek looks at her. “You saw the lab report?”
Ariam waits a second, then: “Yes.”
“I can’t let you—”
“This is a quiruth hospital. It’s the patient’s—”
“No.”
“It’s his decision.”
“He’ll say no.”
“Let him. If that’s his choice, after I’ve talked to him, then fine. But don’t leave him there dying while you assume.”
Kybek weighs it. “Gomig will be here soon.”
“Good. If I’m right, I’ll be too busy to operate anyway.”
Kybek looks Ariam up and down. “You can’t donate enough.”
“Not just me, no.”
Kybek blinks. “Oh.” He makes a low rumbling noise, a brief laugh. “The Ryr won’t agree to that.”
Ariam is still. “Let me talk to him.”
*
The Ryr awakens in the bright white operation theater with a start and a snap of his jaws. Kybek flinches, almost drops the injector he’s used to dose the king into consciousness.
On the other side of the glass, in the observation room, Ariam keys the intercom. “Sir,” she says, not knowing how else to address an alien king in the quiruth tongue, “I need to talk to you.”
Kybek hands the Ryr a keypad with monitor. The Ryr takes it; he’s still groggy, still aching from the wounds of surgery.
The New Hero Volume 2 Page 14
