by Richard Fox
Hoffman pressed his thumb against the pistol’s selector switch and a faint whine rose as it drew power into the capacitor. A few more steps and he’d have a clean shot at the target and both bodyguards.
Fellerin dropped onto his hands and knees, then cocked one oversized ear to the sky.
Hoffman felt a chill in his chest as the Butcher of Galveston looked straight at him.
“Damn it!” Hoffman drew the pistol and swung to face his target.
The blur of a thrown club flashed across Hoffman’s vision and pain erupted in his hand as the spiked head struck his pistol and fingers, knocking the gun into the air.
The now unarmed Kroar lowered a shoulder and charged at Hoffman. Caught flat-footed, Hoffman realized he had his back against a wall and was about to be hit by a freight train made up of alien blood and bone.
“No hurt!” Opal tackled the charging Kroar and landed on top of him. The two rolled toward Hoffman and he jumped aside before they could steamroll him.
Hoffman, his hand throbbing, broken fingers refusing to bend, looked around for his pistol as Opal and the Kroar pounded on each other.
“Ee’di sha, kul!” Fellerin shouted, pointing at the Marine, and the other Kroar ran at him, club raised overhead with both hands.
Hoffman let off a war cry and charged forward. The Kroar slowed, evidently shocked that a smaller, weaker foe would have the guts to fight head to head. Hoffman jumped up and thrust his legs forward, kicking the alien in the chest with both heels. The blow barely rocked the bodyguard back and Hoffman landed in a puff of dirt.
The Kroar swung the club at the Marine’s face. Hoffman rolled aside and felt the impact reverberate through the ground. The Kroar tugged at the club embedded in the dirt, then struck out at Hoffman again. Hoffman kept rolling until a massive hand grabbed him by the ankle.
The Kroar stomped a foot against Hoffman’s chest and the alien leaned forward, squeezing the air out of Hoffman’s lungs with his bulk. Saliva dripped from serrated teeth and onto Hoffman’s visor.
“Dumb enough to be human,” the Kroar said as he raised his club overhead.
Opal snatched the alien by the wrist. The Marine’s helmet was gone, leaving his mottled skin exposed. Cuts and bruises marred the patches of brown, green, and black making up the surface of the bio-construct warrior’s—the doughboy’s—face.
“No. Hurt!” Opal wrenched the Kroar off Hoffman and drove a knee into the alien’s side. He kicked the bodyguard to the ground, keeping a grip on the arm holding the club. Opal braced a foot against the alien’s shoulder, then ripped its arm clean out of the socket with a wet pop. Opal tossed the limb aside and rained fists down on the still struggling Kroar’s head.
“Opal…” Hoffman rolled onto his knees and elbows, trying to breathe through cracked ribs. “Opal…the other!”
The second bodyguard, his snout broken and one eye crushed, picked up his companion’s club and cracked it against the back of Opal’s head. The doughboy stumbled forward, one hand pressed against his skull.
A horn blared behind Hoffman, and King’s truck rushed past him, missing him by inches and slamming into the club-armed Kroar, sending it under the wheels. The alien got caught in the axle and sent the truck out of control. It veered into a building and screeched to a halt, the windshield shattered and the front cab slightly compacted.
“Opal?” Hoffman reached out to the doughboy, who looked up at the lieutenant, pain writ across his face.
“Sorry, sir,” Opal said.
Hoffman used Opal to haul himself up and saw Fellerin take off running.
“No! We can’t let him—”
The snap of a high-powered gauss pistol shot echoed off the walls and Fellerin’s chest exploded outward. His body pitched forward, carried by the momentum of a shot meant to pierce heavy armor, and slid to a stop, the Haesh’s limbs spasming in death throws.
Hoffman looked over his shoulder. The blond woman stood a few yards away, the pistol braced in her hands. She spat in the dirt, then her head and the pistol snapped toward Hoffman.
“Wait—I’m human.” Hoffman pulled his helmet off and tossed it away. “Terran Strike Marine Corps, we can…” He got to his feet and every injury screamed pain through his body. “We can get you out of here.”
She stared at him with icy blue eyes, blood seeping down a gash on her temple. Her head shook from side to side.
“Cowards. Traitors!” she yelled before she turned and bolted.
Hoffman watched in disbelief as she ducked into an alleyway.
Garrison grabbed the lieutenant by the shoulders. “Sir, you all right?” He tapped his helmet. “Gunney’s pinned against the wall. Not hurt too bad, but Booker can’t get him out.”
“Opal, go help.” Hoffman looked up as the rumble of engines approached. A small Haesh shuttle swept overhead and hovered above the roof of a nearby building.
There was a groan of metal as Opal ripped open the truck’s cab and wrenched the steering wheel off. He tossed it against the air car and pulled a struggling King out.
“Let go of me,” King stammered. “I can walk just fine.” He pushed away from Opal and stared at Fellerin’s dead body.
“Rot in hell, you monster,” King said.
“Team…let’s get out of here.” Hoffman winced as pain lanced through his chest. Garrison put Hoffman’s good arm over his shoulders and helped him toward the waiting shuttle.
Chapter 2
Doctor Acorso walked through the deep shadow of a high-rise building as a green sun broke over the horizon. He adjusted his scarf against the biting air, wondering just how long this part of the Dotari Prime would lag through another cold spell.
The morning light glinted off soaring towers, casting small kaleidoscopes of color across the wide streets and frost-caked patches of grass growing in swirls within the sidewalks. Why the Dotari chose to incorporate so much detail into things that were mundane in his native Phoenix escaped Acorso’s explanation. Asking any of the city’s inhabitants now would be useless; over a thousand years had passed since the city was abandoned, preserved by the Xaros occupiers, then reoccupied by the Dotari after the Ember War’s end.
The new residents had very little real connection to this city or the planet of their origin, a problem that vexed the doctor more the longer he was here. The Dotari that lived here were essentially squatters, long removed by a millennia spent in the stars traveling to a new world and scraping out an existence on Takeni. They’d reoccupied the city and the world like a poor family moving into a large estate willed to them by long forgotten relatives. .
What grated at the doctor more than anything was how empty the city was. The once bustling metropolis stretched for miles along the banks of a wide river flowing into the sea. Tens of millions had once lived here, but the Dotari had only a fraction of that to resettle the city and the rest of the planet.
Back on Earth, the capitol of Phoenix was alive with air cars and the constant hustle of the Terran Union’s military and political complex in motion. While there were a few signs of life in the Dotari city—open stores, drones flitting about, a few aliens walking in the brisk air—the place felt like it was about to wake up…but just couldn’t get out of bed.
Earth had an easier time repopulating, the doctor thought. The Dotari are less and less each day.
A pair of Dotari turned a corner and bowed their heads to him as they passed, the black quills on their heads rustling slightly in what passed for a Dotari salute. If one glanced at a Dotari quick enough, they could be mistaken for human. They were more slight of build and generally half a head shorter than most humans, but carried themselves with the same gait as most people. The loose quills in place of hair were thick as shoe laces on some, almost the size of dreadlocks on others. Their eyes and faces were nearly human, but the blunted beaks they had in place of nose, mouth and chin set them firmly apart from their human allies.
Acorso, his head of rapidly thinning hair covered in a black knit cap, n
odded in reply to the pair of aliens.
He rarely saw anyone on his morning walk to the hospital as the few Dotari who lived in the city that once housed tens of millions preferred to stay far from the ill. After another few terribly cold minutes of walking, he arrived at his destination. The hospital’s three tiers rested in a morning shadow, absent the sparkle the rest of the city enjoyed as a new day rose.
Black mesh incorporated into the fence around the hospital flapped against the chain links as a gust of wind assaulted the barrier. Sun-faded biohazard signs in English and Dotari swirls smacked against the metal wires in time with the wind as Acorso went to a gate.
“Mornings of good to you, Doctor,” said a Dotari guard as he slid a partition aside and bowed his head as Acorso stepped through. “Please remove your outer garments and enter the containment shower.”
“Hello, Vin’ci.” The doctor followed the guard into a small room connected to the hospital by a plastic tunnel. Mercifully warm air washed over Acorso and he worked his hands together to bring back feeling in his fingers. “I’ve come here almost every day for the last six months. I am aware of the procedure.”
Vin’ci let off a tss-tss-tss sound that constituted Dotari laughter as his beak clicked together.
“Every morning, the procedure is the same,” Vin’ci said as he lifted a plastic bin onto a table.
“You missed your calling at the DMV, you know that?” Acorso shrugged off his jacket and tossed it into the bin with his gloves and scarf.
“I do not know this,” the guard said. “I know that my wife made you candied gar’udda nuts to thank you for your hard work.” He took a box wrapped in shiny paper and shook it quickly. Acorso’s mouth watered as the gift rattled.
“I leave it here.” The guard put it in the bin.
The doctor felt his stomach rumble. There was no way he could take the treat inside, not with the strict contamination protocols that he’d helped write.
“Thank you, Vin’ci, she is most kind.” Acorso turned his head to the decontamination tank on the other side of the room and sighed. After thirty minutes of irradiation, sonic cleansing, and a shower in soap that stank of iodine, he could finally get to work.
“Your scrubs are inside, as always,” Vin’ci said.
****
Acorso found his laboratory almost the way he left it. He set his tray of reconstituted food and a cup of steaming coffee on his desk and swiped his fingers over a screen, sending the latest batch of emails from Earth rolling down a holo projection. None of the sender names or subject lines caught his attention as being urgent.
He plopped into his chair and took a sip of the finest Kona coffee while he regarded the Dotari sleeping at her desk against the wall, her head buried in the crook of an arm, purring softly as she slept. She wore wide red strips of cloth, tightly wrapped around her body, which the aliens preferred as hospital garb.
Acorso tapped out a quick message and sent it.
The Dotari’s workstation beeped and she popped awake with a snap of her beak, rubbing a hand against her eyes and blinking at Acorso.
“Doctor…you’re here early.” She picked up a data slate and tapped a finger against the screen several times.
“Are you here early, or did you stay late again, Bi’mal?” he asked.
“I was waiting for a gene sequence to come through…” Her eyes darted from side to side as she read. “The antihistamine trials from the lab in Gishara had a few variances I thought might…” Her hand gripped the slate hard and she slapped it against her desk, then shoved it away and crossed her arms over her chest.
“Who did we lose?”
“The hatchling in room fourteen,” she said quietly. “He’d gone from phase two to three during evening rounds, then went into complete neural shutdown within hours. I would hate the phage less if only it would behave the same way in each patient. Instead, some suffer for years, others only days.”
“Then let’s do our rounds.” He stood up and finished the last of his coffee. “See how the latest nano-regimen is working.”
“Or not working.” Bi’mal stood and straightened out her uniform. “No patient has made any improvements since your tiny machines started warring inside their bodies.”
“But some of them stopped getting worse.” Acorso picked up a large slate, slid an e-pen into his lab-coat pocket, and followed Bi’mal out into the hospital corridor where robots ran along the walls delivering food and fresh linen to all the rooms.
“The Dotari cannot survive like that,” she said. “The nanos may stop the phage’s progression in a few instances, but in the long-term, our immune systems will collapse completely if nanos interfere with our natural balance of—”
“You’re going to end by saying the nanos are a treatment, not a cure,” Acorso said.
“The Dotari once had the cure for the phage, one created in the laboratory of the interplay between the planet’s ecology and our bodies.” Her quills bristled slightly in anger. “Earlier generations did not suffer from this disease. We were in tune with the countless organisms and pollen that are all around us. Now, after so long traveling the void and living on Takeni, we return home and find that we are no longer suited to live here. You know there’s talk of abandoning everything and returning to that wretched lump of rock and ice that you humans rescued us from? All that trouble to escape Takeni, fighting beside you on Earth, then resettling Dotari Prime just to give it all up…”
“The Dotari aren’t quitters. I like that about you,” Acorso said.
“But we may be overzealous fools. Every Dotari that’s ever set foot on this world is at risk of their body going into system shock because we lack the immunity to our own environment. Did this ever happen on Earth?”
“It did. Native populations in the Americas suffered when explorers carrying measles and smallpox showed up to say hello. Those same explores didn’t do well when it came time to deal with malaria.”
“Tragic,” she said.
“Tragedy implies there was no intention to spread the diseases, which wasn’t always the case.” Acorso looked over a data plate outside a room and pushed the door open with his hip. A spray of antiseptic mist washed over him.
Inside, a little Dotari girl sat on her hospital bed, clutching a teddy bear. She smiled at Acorso; the juvenile aliens didn’t develop their beaks until just before puberty. The alien children could almost pass for human, which made it harder to see them ill than Acorso liked to admit.
The girl’s parents sat on a bench against the wall. Her mother wore black silk cuffs of morning; her father wore clothes that once fit a larger frame. Acorso suppressed a sigh. He’d hoped to visit this patient before her parents arrived; now he was in for another earful from her father, Lo’thar.
“Hello, Doctor.” The girl held up the bear and swung it from side to side. “Look what Earth sent me! What is it?”
“Hello, Trin’a.” Acorso flicked his right wrist to the side, then traced a circle around her face. Data fed into his data slate. “That is a teddy bear. We give them to all the sick boys and girls who are going to get better soon.”
“Is it an animal?” She brought the doll’s eye close to her own. “Perhaps I could have a real one as a pet once I go home. What do they eat?”
“Bears are not good pets. They eat…picnic baskets…and—squeeze my fingers, please,” Acorso said, leveling a finger at her. She took one hand away from the stuffed animal, her fingers bent into a claw, and set her palm onto the human’s finger. Icy-cold digits trembled against his skin as she tried to grip.
“It’s hard,” she whined.
Lo’thar leaned forward in his chair, his eyes wide.
“Look up. No peeking.” Acorso held his data slate next to her feet, blocking her view, and squeezed a toe through the sheets. “Which foot am I touching?”
“You’re not touching my feet, silly,” she said.
Acorso looked at her father, then glanced at the door. He nodded quickly.
“Thank you, Trin’a,” Acorso said. “Dr. Bi’mal will ask you a few questions? OK? I want to know what you named the bear when I come back, OK?”
“His name’s Elias,” she said. “Like from the story Papa tells me about Takeni.”
“Elias…that’s a good name. Excuse me.” Acorso left the room and waited a moment for Lo’thar to join him.
Her father had the presence to wait for the door to close before blurting, “It’s phase two, isn’t it?”
“There are a few more clinical tests to run before we change the diagnosis—”
“You have to give her the latest generation of nanos that Earth sent us,” Lo’thar said. “Just because her body rejected the last two regimens doesn’t mean—”
“No.” Acorso shook his head. “Her immune system would send her into shock fighting off another wave of nano-bots. That she’s experiencing difficulty only with her extremities means she’ll be in phase two for an extended period of time. The finest minds on Earth and Dotari are working on this problem, Lo’thar. You need to give it time.”
“My daughter is dying, you pinky, soft-beaked…sorry.” Lo’thar nuzzled his own shoulder.
“I’ve been called worse. We’re doing everything we can.”
“It is not enough!” Lo’thar’s shout echoed down the hallway. “I’ve lost my brother-in-law and three flight mates from the war to the phage. All of them died waiting for you and your ‘finest minds’ to find an answer. What haven’t you tried yet?”
“Lo’thar, your species lost their immunity to Dotari’s ecosystem after your colony fleets left before the Xaros invasion. Trying to rebalance your bodies to the tens of thousands of microbes and viruses and everything else that’s sending your autoimmune systems haywire is not something that can be done overnight.”
“If only we could travel back in time to find Dotari with the right set of immunity and antibodies…” Lo’thar backed against the wall and sank onto his haunches. He crossed his arms over his knees and hung his head down.
