Stranded in Space

by Rinelle Grey

  She didn’t stop reading though. She scrolled through page after page with a rapidity that Kugah’s newly learned reading skill couldn’t keep up with. He suspected she was going to be at this a while.

  It occurred to him that she hadn’t eaten in a while. Kugah stood up, and Amelie barely even noticed. “Kugah go,” he said.

  “No worries, Kugah.” Amelie didn’t pause or turn around. “Thanks for your help.”

  Kugah watched her for one more moment, then turned and left. He made his way through the halls, unusually silent for this time of day, to the mess hall. It wasn’t meal time, Amelie had missed that an hour ago, but there was still some food out, so Kugah heaped a plate with foods he had seen Amelie eat before, and then made his way back to med lab.

  Chapter 17

  Amelie heaved a sigh. Hopefully Tyris would find her an assistant soon. Discussing things with Kugah had helped her straighten them out in her own mind, but it hadn’t really helped her progress any. What she needed was to collaborate with other experts in the field. Hopefully Tyris would set up that meeting soon.

  She rose and checked on Kerit who was sleeping peacefully. The medication she’d given him so far seemed to be working, but if his condition advanced as fast as she suspected it would, then she’d be constantly adjusting the dose.

  The door slid open, and Amelie’s heart rate sped up. Someone else with a new illness. What would it be this time? Would it be minor, or life threatening?

  But it was Kugah, holding out a plate of food to her. “KaGeeGee, eat,” he said.

  Amelie’s eyes filled with tears. She couldn’t even begin to explain why, and she didn’t even try. She swiped them away quickly, and nodded to Kugah. “Thanks,” she said, her voice wavering. Her stomach growled. “I hadn’t even realised it was past lunch time.”

  Kugah sat and watched her for a while, as she ate.

  It had been a long time since anyone had brought her food when she was hungry. Not since she was a child. Even then, it had been slammed on the table with an adjunct to eat it all or there would be no dessert.

  There was never any dessert anyway.

  She didn’t need her family. She hadn’t since she could fend for herself. Anyway, she’d found a new family here with Tyris and Marlee. But even though she knew she could trust them, and they’d do anything for her, it wouldn’t occur to them to bring her food like this.

  Not that they didn’t care enough, it’s just that they were busy with their own lives and families. She didn’t begrudge them that.

  But she couldn’t help the fact that the thought popped into her head that an alien was more aware of her needs than any of the humans on the ship were.

  “How is your research going?” Kugah typed.

  Amelie heaved a sigh. “Nothing useful yet. I need to test a bigger sample before I can gather enough data to make any sort of inferences. The more people I test, the more chance we have of finding someone who’s resistant to whatever this is.”

  “KaGeeGee check,” Kugah growled, and pointed to her.

  A jolt of reluctance shot through Amelie. “Test me? There’s no need for that. It makes no difference whether I test me or someone else.”

  She didn’t want to know if there was something wrong with her. She didn’t have time to be sick. If she went down, who would look after all these people and figure out what this was?

  Kugah growled. “KaGeeGee,” he began, then he reached for the tablet and typed furiously. “Amelie needs to look after self, or how can she look after all these people?”

  Amelie sighed. He was right, of course. If she had minor ailments, she could treat them and be able to help others for longer.

  “Fine,” she agreed. “I’ll test myself as well, okay?”

  Kugah nodded, satisfied, and Amelie couldn’t help feeling a warm glow. He may have cited her needing to look after everyone else, but she wasn’t fooled into thinking that was his real reason. He didn’t have ties to anyone else here, and he didn’t care about humanity as a whole.

  He wanted her to test herself because he cared about her. The thought made her feel special, and a little strange at the same time. Why was she so attached to this alien? They had nothing in common.

  Or did they? Perhaps, on the inside, they had more in common than they thought?

  A thought occurred to her, and she looked up. “How about your people, Kugah? How quickly do they age?”

  He could be a useful sample too. She’d tested him when he’d first arrived, so she had a baseline. She wasn’t sure how useful an alien reaction could be, but it was silly to discount any possible information at this point.

  Kugah shook his head. “Kugah not age.”

  “You don’t age? Your people live forever?” Amelie demanded.

  The idea was crazy. Yet what did she know of alien races? Immortality could be normal, for all she knew.

  “No, not all my people. Most age. But Kugah has been changed.”

  Of course. The genetic engineering. So much for that then. Seems Kugah couldn’t be affected by travelling through a wormhole. If only all of them were so lucky.

  If only Kugah could tell her how it was done, so that she could do it to everyone.

  No, that wouldn’t work. Not ageing might be useful for wormhole travel, but it would cause massive problems in the long term. If there was no death, then no matter where they went, their home would soon be overpopulated. And they didn’t want to deal with that again.

  No, there had to be a better solution. All she wanted was to reverse this ageing, and bring them back to normal.

  The door slid open, and Amelie looked up to see Karla, the old nurse from Marlee’s home planet, shuffling in on her walking stick.

  Her heart sank. Was there something wrong with the old woman? As one of the oldest people on board the Resolution, Amelie had the sudden fear that she would be one of the first to die.

  She jumped up out of her seat. “Karla, are you okay?”

  “Of course I’m okay,” Karla said, her voice terse. “Tyris said you needed a hand, so here I am.”

  Amelie stared at her. This was who Tyris had sent when she’d said she needed an assistant? Didn’t he realise? “I’m sorry,” Amelie said quietly. “I’m not sure Tyris understood. With everyone ageing so quickly, I need someone who is younger. I can’t leave you here in charge, what if you have a heart attack?”

  Karla gave a rough laugh. “I’m already old, do you think I’m going to fall apart just because I’m getting older?”

  That’s exactly what Amelie thought, though she wasn’t quite game to voice it. By her estimation, everyone on board the Resolution had already aged about twenty years past where they should be. That put the sixty year old nurse at closer to eighty.

  Far too old to be in sole charge of critically ill patients.

  She looked at the elderly woman, not quite sure how to put it gently.

  Karla stared back, her expression challenging. The sharp eyes showed that she knew exactly what Amelie’s problem was, and she wasn’t going to make this any easier.

  The door slid open again to reveal Bris, one of the young women that Karla had been training to help her on Zerris. “There you are, Karla,” she said. “I thought you were going to wait for me at your room.” She turned to Amelie and gave a smile. “Tyris said you needed our help.”

  Amelie let out a breath. She didn’t feel quite so bad about leaving Junie and Kerit in the care of both nurses. One older and experienced, the other younger and hopefully stronger. “Yes, I do. I’ll just update you on the patients, then I’ll have to go find out about this meeting Tyris is organising.”

  She gave them the brief rundown, relieved as Karla nodded at her explanation.

  “Go to your meeting,” she said. “They will be fine in our care.”

  *****

  “You’re the one who knows what we’re up against, you tell us what to do,” Tyris insisted.

  As soon as he’d ascertained that Kerit was going to
be okay, Tyris had called a full meeting of the crew, meaning it was standing room only in the briefing room.

  Amelie bit back a sigh. Didn’t he realise she didn’t know what to do? She hadn’t expected this sort of responsibility on her head when she’d signed up for this job. That fact might have given her pause.

  No, that wasn’t true. The fact that these people needed her so much would have drawn her, just as it had drawn her to help Marlee. At least here, no one was forcing her to make an unethical decision. She might not know the right answers yet, but at least she had the freedom to look for them.

  “Testing is the first step,” she began, looking around the room. “Preliminary results indicate that we’re dealing with a shortening of the telomere, the protective end cap on our DNA that prevents deterioration as the DNA replicates. The more data I can gather, the more complete the picture we can get.

  Amelie looked around at everyone in the room. She could see from the tight lips and subtle exchanges of glances that the biologists, at least, understood the seriousness of that statement.

  And how hard it would be to combat.

  Not everyone did though.

  “When can you start figuring out possible treatments?” Marlee asked. Her arms were tight around the two babies, Isala and Camali, even though Amelie had told her she didn’t think the children would be affected.

  Amelie wished she could give her some positive news, but she had none to offer. “I can’t possibly say at this stage.”

  The sad light in Folly’s ma, Molly’s eyes said she understood. To Amelie’s relief, the biologist from Semala didn’t admit that either, and she did offer a grain of hope. “But you can treat the symptoms at this stage, can’t you?” she asked. “That should buy us some more time.”

  Amelie nodded firmly. “Yes, I can. We need to identify heart and organ issues and treat them as quickly as possible, because even if I find a cure for this, there’s no knowing if we’ll be able to reverse the damage that has already been done.”

  “We should check everyone, even if they aren’t showing symptoms then, shouldn’t we?” Tyris asked. “Can we do that at the same time as the further testing you were talking about earlier?”

  Amelie stared at him. Didn’t he realise? There were nearly three hundred people on board the Resolution. Yes, testing them all would be ideal, but she couldn’t possibly.

  “Do you have any idea how long it will take to test everyone?” she asked hopelessly. “It would take weeks to test everybody. Weeks we don’t have. By my initial calculations, even being conservative, all the adults on this ship will be dead within two weeks.”

  That caused a complete and utter silence in the room.

  “You don’t need to do it by yourself,” Molly said stoutly. “We can help. Just show us what to do. Paulus will help,” she nodded to Folly’s Da, “and so will Aleck.”

  “Yes,” Imyne agreed. “I’m perfectly capable of running any number of tests. And Regor can help with collating the data.”

  “Right,” Tyris said. “We can turn the cargo bay into a testing room, med bay is far too small for the numbers we’re talking about. If we can get ten people testing at once, then we could get through the whole ship in three days.”

  “I can’t,” Amelie pointed out. “I have patients in med bay who need constant monitoring. I know Karla and Bris are there now, but they can’t possibly run med bay full time. They’re not qualified to deal with the severity of issues we’re going to encounter over the next few days.”

  “We’ll bring them down to the cargo bay too,” Tyris responded. “Turn it into a full sized med bay. Then you can supervise the testing while keeping an eye on your patients.

  It was still too slow. They were going to lose people. Especially the elderly. Amelie tried not to think that Folly and Tyris’s parents were already closer to death than the rest of them. She didn’t want to consider the possibility.

  There had to be a solution. She just had to find it.

  There was only one way to do that. The sooner they started these tests the better. “I can have it set up and ready to go in under an hour.”

  Tyris heaved a sigh. “Then I’d better start working on a speech.”

  Amelie felt guilty for being relieved that she wasn’t the one who had to pass on this news. There was no easy way to tell a ship full of people that they were heading for old age and death far faster than any of them had imagined.

  As she set up the testing facility in the cargo bay, with Kugah helping her move equipment, she listened to Tyris’s speech, and realised that even if it had been her job, she would never have done it as well as Tyris did.

  “People of the Resolution, you are all here because you are determined. Because you believe that what you are doing is right, and have decided to take the risks necessary to uphold that. I’m afraid that we are about to be tested yet again. In our attempt to avoid the Colonies boarding us, and likely arresting us, we had to use the Artificial Wormhole Projector before we had tested it thoroughly enough. Now Dr Benton believes that we may have unwittingly subjected ourselves to an advanced form of ageing.

  “I’m telling you this not to alarm you, because you can be sure that we are working to solve this issue as quickly as possible, but because we need your help. The more information we can collect on this ageing, the more likely we are to come up with a solution. And in the meantime, Dr Benton can prescribe medication to help combat any symptoms you may be experiencing.

  “So I’m asking you to remain in your quarters until your family is called. When called, please proceed to the cargo bay, where several members of our scientific community will be undertaking the testing. Please cooperate with them as fully as possible.

  “We will get through this. We just need to stick together, just as we did in the tunnels on Semala.”

  His voice crackled out as the announcement cut off. Amelie pointed for Kugah to move the equipment a little to the left, then looked around. It would have to do.

  “KaGeeGee?” Kugah pointed to the piece of equipment.

  “Yes, that’s fine,” Amelie said, nodding.

  Kugah shook his head. He reached for the tablet—Amelie had finally given it to him and he wore it on a lanyard around his neck—and typed swiftly. He was getting good at typing. A lot faster, and his sentences were more and more correct each time.

  “Amelie take test first.”

  “I can’t possibly go first. Do you have any idea how many…” Amelie began, but her words petered out under Kugah’s blank stare.

  They’d already had this argument. And she’d been able to see his point. Even if she did feel bad, testing herself first was a sensible precaution. “You’ll have to work the scanner,” she told him. Can you do that?”

  “Show me.”

  Amelie showed him how to work the scanner. He picked it up just as quickly as he had picked up their computers, tablets, and even their language and customs. Whatever else the people on the Resolution thought of him, no one could argue he wasn’t intelligent.

  Which was lucky, because they might just all end up having to rely on him. Half her volunteers were already in their sixties. How long were they going to last before they succumbed to age related illnesses themselves?

  It was hard to sit still and let Kugah complete the scans. Even harder to draw her own blood and put it into the microscope. But none of those compared to waiting for the results to come up on the computer screen.

  Amelie blinked as the numbers started to come in. That couldn’t be right. She stared at them again. Maybe Kugah had done the scan wrong? Something had to be wrong.

  Her results were exactly what she would have expected of someone in their thirties. No sign of a single age related illness.

  A chill swept over her. Had she gotten it all wrong? Had she let Tyris alarm everyone on the ship, and drag them all down here for testing, all for nothing? No, it couldn’t be that. There was something going on, there were too many illnesses for it to be a coinciden
ce.

  “KaGeeGee kay?” Kugah put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Yes,” Amelie said, her voice shaking. “Yes, I’m fine.” Tears pricked the back of her eyelids, and her voice was too choked up to say more. She hadn’t realised, until that moment, how scared she’d been of what she was going to find.

  At the same time, she felt intensely guilty. Why should she be unaffected, when so many others were? She could take solace in the fact that it would give her longer to help them, but that only alleviated so much guilt.

  Why? Why her?

  That was what she needed to find out. Maybe there was an answer there, something she could use to help the others.

  But she didn’t have time to search further. The rest of her examination team arrived, and she only had a short amount of time to show them around the equipment, performing each other’s tests as practice, before the patients started arriving.

  Patient after patient walked into the room, and a damning set of evidence began to mount. Amelie lost track of the number of heart conditions, diabetes, failing eyesight and hearing, osteoporosis, and scariest of all, cancer, that was recorded. Regor’s face, as he sat at the computer and collated the information as it came in, grew grimmer and grimmer.

  “KaGeeGee geep.” Kugah’s hand landed on her shoulder.

  Amelie tried to shake it off, but his fingers tightened just enough to make it impossible. “I don’t have time to sleep right now, Kugah,” Amelie said impatiently. “We haven’t even scanned half the ship yet. There’s too much to do.”

  Kugah had to let go of her shoulder to type, and Amelie ushered the next patient into the chair so she could draw their blood. The pregnant woman eyed Kugah nervously, but the reality was, the alien was the least of their problems right now.

  Kugah shoved the tablet in front of her face. “You need to sleep, or else you won’t be able to help all these people.”

  “Not now, Kugah. I need to finish these patients first.”

  He didn’t get it. There wasn’t anyone else to help all these people. If she slept, time passed. In that valuable time, people she could save might die. Sleep seemed unimportant in comparison.