by Timothy Zahn
“Really,” I said. That word wasn’t the first thing that popped into my mind; the phrase criminal stupidity held that honor. “That one I’ve definitely heard of. Interdicted world, right?”
His smile went from tight to bitter. “That’s the place,” he said. “And I can tell you right now that not a single thing you’ve heard about that hellhole is hyperbole.” His mouth twitched. “But of course, sophisticated college kids like us were too smart to be taken in by infantile governmental scare tactics. And we naturally didn’t believe bureaucrats had any right to tell us where we could or couldn’t go—”
He broke off, a violent shiver running through him once before his body settled back down to its low-level trembling. “It’s called Cole’s disease,” he said, his voice sounding suddenly very tired. “It’s not much fun.”
“I don’t know many diseases that are,” I said. “Are the rules for interdicted planets really that strict? That you can’t even get a prescription for your medicine, I mean?”
He snorted softly, and for a moment a flicker of the old Shawn pierced the fatigue and trembling, the arrogant kid who knew it all and looked down with contempt on mere mortals like me who weren’t smart or educated or enlightened enough. “Strict enough that even admitting I’d been to Ephis would earn me an automatic ten-year prison sentence,” he bit out. “I don’t think a guaranteed supply of borandis is quite worth that, do you?”
“I guess not,” I said, making sure to sound properly chastened. People like Shawn, I knew, could often be persuaded to offer up deep, dark secrets for no better reason than to prove they had them. “So how do you get by?”
He shrugged, a somewhat abbreviated gesture given the strictures of the restraints. “There are always dealers around—you just have to know how to find them. Most of the time it’s not too hard. Or too expensive.”
“And what happens if you don’t get it?” I asked. Drugs I knew, interdicted worlds I knew; but exotic diseases weren’t part of my standard repertoire.
“It’s a degenerative neurological disease,” he said, his lip twitching slightly. “You can see the muscular trembling has already started.”
“That’s not just the borandis withdrawal?”
“The withdrawal is part of it,” he said. “It’s hard to tell—the symptoms kind of mix together. That’s followed by irritability, severe mood swings, short-term memory failure, and a generally high annoyance factor.” Again, that bitter smile. “You may have noticed that last one when I first got to the ship on Meima. I’d just taken a dose, but I’d pushed the timing a little and it hadn’t kicked in yet.”
I nodded, remembering how much calmer, even friendly, he’d been a few hours later during Chort’s ill-fated spacewalk. “Remind me never to go into a spaceport taverno with you before your pill,” I said. “You’d get both our necks broken within the first three minutes.”
He shivered. “Sometimes I think that would be a better way to go,” he said quietly. “Anyway, if I still don’t get a dose, I get louder and more irrational and sometimes even violent.”
“Is that still a mixture of withdrawal and disease?”
“That one’s mostly withdrawal,” he said. “After that, the disease takes over and we start edging into neural damage. First the reversible kind, later the nonreversible. Eventually, I die. From all reports, not especially pleasantly.”
Offhand, I couldn’t think of many pleasant ways to die, except possibly in your sleep of old age, which given my early choices in life wasn’t an option I was likely to face. If Shawn persisted in pulling stunts like sneaking onto interdicted worlds, it wasn’t likely to remain one of his options, either.
Still, there was no sense in letting the old man with the scythe get at any of us too easily. “How long before the neural damage starts?” I asked.
He gave another of his abbreviated shrugs. “We’ve got a little time yet,” he said. “Nine or ten hours at least. Maybe twelve.”
“From right now?”
“Yes.” He smiled. “Of course, you probably won’t want to be anywhere around me well before that. I’m not going to be very good company.” The smile faded. “We can get to a supplier before then, can’t we? I thought I heard Tera say it was only about six hours away to wherever the hell we’re headed.”
“Mintarius,” I said, making a show of consulting my watch. In reality, I was thinking hard. I’d originally picked Mintarius precisely because it was close, small, quiet, and unlikely to have the equipment to distinguish our latest ship’s ID from a genuine one. A perfect place to slip in, get the fuel our unexpectedly quick exit from Dorscind’s World had lost us, and slip out again.
Unfortunately, Mintarius’s backwater status also meant that illegal drug suppliers would be few and far between. And those who were there were likely to concentrate on the lowest common denominators like happyjam, not the more esoteric, semimedicinal ones.
I thought about that, and about the increasingly serious Patth search for us, and about the fact that Shawn’s decision to go to Ephis had been a voluntary signing of his own death certificate anyway. But no matter how I sorted them out in the balance, there really wasn’t any choice.
“It’s actually a little farther than that,” I told Shawn, getting to my feet. “Don’t worry, though, we should make it in plenty of time. Assuming things go as planned—”
I broke off suddenly, turning my head and stretching out with all my ears. Barely heard over my own voice had been a faint dull metallic thud. The same unexplained sound, as near as I could tell, that I’d heard in the wraparound just after we’d left Xathru.
“What?” Shawn demanded, making no attempt to keep his voice down. “What’s the problem?”
“I thought I heard something,” I told him, suppressing the exceptionally impolite word I wanted to say. There might have been a follow-up sound, or even a lingering echo that could have given me a chance of figuring out its approximate direction. But both those chances were gone now, buried under Shawn’s inopportune and overly loudmouthed question.
“What, you mean that thunking sound?” he scoffed. “It’s nothing. You hear it every once in a while.”
I frowned, my annoyance with his bad timing vanishing into sudden new interest. “You’ve heard it before?”
“Sure,” he said, some of that old Shawn arrogance creeping into his tone. “Couple of times just while I’ve been lying here today. You want my opinion, it’s probably something in the flush equipment in the head.”
“Could be,” I said noncommittally. He could have whatever opinion he wanted, but I’d been flying for half my life and there was absolutely nothing in a ship’s plumbing that could make that kind of noise. “You said Tera went back to her cabin?”
“All I said was that Everett relieved her,” he corrected me, his tone suddenly testy. “She could have gone outside for a walk for all I know.” He waved a hand impatiently around the strap. “Look, what does any of this have to do with my medicine? Nothing, that’s what. You are going to be able to get it, right?”
“I’ll do what I can,” I said, reaching down and swinging the swivel stool back into storage again. Clearly, the obnoxious stage of Shawn’s withdrawal was starting, and I’d already had as much of that as I needed for one trip. “I’ll see you later. Try to get some rest.”
“Yeah,” he muttered as I made my way to the door. “Sure—easy for you to say. What a bunch of—”
The sliding door cut off the noun. Just as well. I started to turn toward the bridge; but as I did so I caught the soft sound and faint vibration of a heavy footstep from behind me. I turned to see Ixil come into the corridor from the wraparound, a toolbox in his hand. “Trouble?” he murmured.
“No more than usual around here,” I told him, not wanting to get into Shawn’s problems just now. “I thought I might as well go and relieve Everett on the bridge.”
Pix and Pax twitched at that, Ixil no doubt wondering what our medic was doing on bridge watch when Tera was supp
osed to be holding the fort there. But he clearly wasn’t any more interested in holding serious conversations in open corridors than I was, and merely nodded. “We found the problem with the modulator relay,” he said, continuing on down the corridor toward me. “All fixed.”
“Good,” I said, lifting my eyebrows and nodding fractionally behind me and to my right, toward the door to the mechanics shop. He nodded back, just as fractionally. Now, when everyone seemed to have taken themselves elsewhere, would be an excellent time for him to see what kind of cutting equipment Cameron had left us.
We went the rest of the way forward together in silence, Ixil breaking off to the left to the mechanics-room door aft of the bridge, me continuing the rest of the way past the forward access ladder to the bridge door. I tapped the release pad, and the door slid open.
For a moment I just stood there, staring in disbelief at the sight before me. Everett, his bulk nearly filling the small space between the command console and nav table, was half-turned to face me, his arms and right leg lifted in what looked like a grotesque parody of some kind of ballet step.
For a moment we stared at each other, and behind those blue eyes I watched his self-conscious embarrassment change almost reluctantly to a sort of stubborn pride. Then, very deliberately, he looked away and lowered his right foot back to the deck, his hands and arms tracing out a complicated design in the air as he did so. Just as deliberately, he moved his left foot around behind his right, his hands shifting again through the air.
And suddenly, belatedly, I realized what he was doing. Not ballet, not some odd playacting posturing, but a martial-arts kata.
I waited where I was, not moving or speaking, until he’d finished the form. “Sorry about that,” he said, breaking the silence at last as he straightened up from his final crouch and squeezed back into the restraint chair. “I was feeling a little dozy, and a bit of exercise always perks me up.”
“No apology or explanation needed,” I assured him, stepping into the bridge but leaving the door locked open behind me. Back when we’d first met, I remembered thinking his face had that slightly battered look of someone who’d done time with high-contact sports. Apparently, that snap judgment had been correct. “What form was that? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before.”
“It’s not one usually put on display,” he said, rubbing a sleeve across his forehead. Not that there’d been any sweat there that I could see. Maybe he kept it all inside the wrinkles. “Are you a practitioner or connoisseur of the martial arts?”
“Neither,” I said. “I got a smattering of self-defense training when I was in EarthGuard, but there was no particular style involved and I was never all that good at it. But my college roommate was a certified nut on the subject, watching everything he could find, and I picked up some of it by sheer osmosis.” I nodded toward the empty section of deck where he’d been performing. “Actually, what that reminded me of most was throw-boxing.”
Everett lifted his eyebrows. “Very good. Yes, that was indeed a throw-boxing training kata. I did a bit of the professional circuit when I was younger.” He snorted gently. “And in better shape, of course.”
“Very impressive,” I said, and meant it. I’d dealt with professional throw-boxers once or twice in my life, and knew the kind of tough breed those men and women were. “How long ago was that?”
“Oh, a good twenty years now,” he said. “And you wouldn’t be nearly so impressed if you knew my win/loss record.” He frowned at me. “What are you doing here, by the way? I thought you were asleep.”
“I came up to check on things and happened on your patient still strapped to the examination table,” I told him. “You know what’s wrong with him?”
“He told me it was a borandis-dependency problem,” he said. “Coupled with a chronic case of Cole’s disease.”
“You believe him?”
He shrugged. “The diagnostic confirmed the withdrawal aspects,” he said. “The medical database isn’t complete enough to either confirm or refute the Cole’s disease.”
“Close enough,” I told him, my last lingering suspicion that Shawn might have been faking the whole thing fading away. Muscle tremors and obnoxiousness were one thing, but a med diagnostic computer wasn’t nearly so easily fooled.
“Unfortunately, that leaves us with a problem,” Everett went on. “According to the database, borandis is a controlled drug. It’s going to take more than just a ship’s medic’s certificate to get some for him on Mintarius.”
“I know,” I said. “Don’t worry, we’ll figure something out.”
“I hope so,” he said. “The prognosis for untreated Cole’s disease is apparently not a very positive one.”
“So he told me,” I nodded. “Small wonder, I suppose, that he was at loose ends on Meima.” I lifted my eyebrows slightly. “Speaking of which, I’ve been meaning to ask how you wound up in that same position. At loose ends, I mean.”
He made a wry face. “Caught in the middle of a jurisdictional dispute, I’m afraid. One of the crewers on my previous ship pushed the captain one time too many and wound up rather badly injured. A troublemaker—I’m sure you know the sort. At any rate, I helped him get to the med facility at the Meima spaceport for treatment; and while we were out, the captain apparently decided he could do without both of us and took off.”
“Yet another Samaritan winds up with the splintered end of the stick,” I murmured.
He shrugged. “Perhaps. Frankly, I was just as happy to see their thrusters fading into the sunset. When Borodin came into the restaurant where I was eating looking for someone with a med certificate, I jumped at the chance.”
“Well, we’re certainly glad to have you here,” I said, glancing around the bridge. “Look, we’re not more than a few hours from landing, and I can’t sleep anyway. Why don’t I take over and let you go hit the sack.”
“Oh,” he said, sounding and looking surprised. “Well … if you’re sure.”
“I’m sure,” I told him. “There’s nothing you can do for Shawn at the moment, and you might as well be rested when we hit ground.”
“I suppose,” Everett conceded, heaving himself out of the chair. I stepped forward out of his way as he moved to the doorway. “Do call me if you change your mind and want to at least catch a catnap.”
“I will,” I promised.
He left the bridge, turning right at the ladder and plodding his way up to the top deck. I waited until his feet were out of sight, gave him another ten count, then closed the bridge door behind me and stepped over to the nav table.
Given the set of parameters I was stuck with on this, I wasn’t expecting the task ahead to be an easy one. I needed a world that was large enough and decadent enough to have an illicit drug-distribution network in place, with the kind of laissez-faire attitude toward paperwork that would let us slip in under our false ID, and yet wasn’t a haven for the kind of career criminals who would be sporting crisp new hundred-commark bills and keeping their eyes peeled for anyone resembling my Mercantile Authority file photo. And it had to be somewhere within, say, nine hours of our present position.
It took only five minutes to conclude that there was exactly one place on the charts that even came close to fitting my requirements: the Najiki colony world of Potosi, currently seven hours distant. It had the kind of cosmopolitan populace that promised that vices of all sorts would be in evidence, and it was run by beings with such keen eyesight—and such a stratospheric self-confidence—that they seldom used scanners to check ships’ papers.
There was, in fact, just one small factor that kept Potosi from being absolutely ideal. It was also a major hub for the Patth shipping industry.
I stared at the listing for a while, perhaps hoping that in my tiredness I was imagining things and that if I looked long enough it would go away. But no such luck. Certain parts of Potosi, including the sky above it, were going to be crawling with Patth, and that was just the way it was.
But there was nothin
g for it. Not unless we wanted to sit around and watch Shawn die.
It was a matter of two minutes to cancel the Mintarius course and recalculate a vector to take us to Potosi instead. Listening carefully, I was just able to hear the subtle shift in thrust tone from the drive as we swung over the twenty-three degrees necessary to make the course change.
And I’m convinced that it was precisely because I was listening so carefully that even through two closed doors I heard the muted pop and the equally faint and choked-off scream.
I was in the corridor half a second later, heading for the mechanics-room door five meters away. I crossed the distance in two seconds more, hearing a soft but ominous hissing sound that grew steadily louder as I neared it. I slapped the pad, and the door slid open.
And with a roar like a rabid dragon a wall of flame blew out of the doorway toward me.
An instant later I was rolling to my feet from three meters farther down the corridor with no clear memory of how I’d gotten there. I spun back to the open doorway, the terrifying image of Ixil trapped in the midst of that inferno paralyzing my entire thought process. I clawed my way back to the doorway, the smell of burning acetylene filling my nose and mouth, a small and still functional part of my mind noting with some confusion that there was now no trace of the wall of flame that had sent me diving instinctively away. I reached the doorway, bracing myself for the worst, and looked inside.
It was bad enough, but not nearly as bad as I’d feared. Off to the left, the twin tanks of the Icarus’s oxyacetylene cutting torch were sitting upright beside the main workbench, the pressure of the compressed gases sending their connected hoses writhing together along the deck like a pair of demented Siamese-twin snakes. From the open ends of the coupled hoses was spewing an awesome spray of yellow flame. Even as I took it all in I was forced to once again duck back as the skittering hoses swung past the doorway and sent another burst my direction—clearly, that was what I’d mistaken earlier for an all-encompassing wall of flame. The blast swept past and I looked back inside.
