by Ilsa J. Bick
She smelled it then: the astringent odor of molten plasticine. Balls of black smoke boiled from the ceiling-mounted transporter assembly, and her throat seized against the smoke’s acrid sting. Then there was a brilliant yellow flash that left her dazzled as a shower of sparks arced to the deck, and tongues of red-orange flame licked along a bulkhead.
Get up get up get up! Rolling, Lense snagged the edge of a seat, hauled herself to her feet, then staggered to an emergency locker. Dragging out an extinguisher, she clicked it to life. White fire suppressant spewed in a white cloud, and she aimed up, but then the ship yawed to port and flipped so violently she lost her balance, her boots skidding like she’d slipped on sheer ice. She lost the extinguisher; the back of her head cracked against the deck, and then she saw the extinguisher spinning high as a baton before arcing down, straight for her face.
“No!” Tucking her head to her knees, she rolled. But she was too slow. The extinguisher glanced off her spine with a solid, brutal thwack, and she screamed.
“Elizabeth!” Bashir, frantic. “Elizabeth!”
“I’m all right!” Through a haze of pain, she saw Bashir’s back; the drizzle of his blood; the way his shoulders hunched as he fought with the ship.
Got to get to him…he’s losing too much blood…got to put out the fire…
Somehow she made it to her knees and then she was crawling on all fours, grappling for a handhold on the science console just aft of Bashir’s seat. Only everything was blurry and she was breathing hard, and sour bile burned the back of her throat.
Head hurts…can’t breathe…where’s the control for…can’t black out, not now…
She was shaking and it took all her focus and concentration to get her fingers to obey. But they did, and in the next moment, there was the faint electric blue shimmer aft. She huffed out in relief as black smoke and flames flattened against the force field. Then she did the only thing she could think of: shut off life support from the field aft and evacuated all the air.
No air; fire will suffocate. Her head was fuzzy and she shook it clear, hard to do when the ship was still jittering so badly it was a wonder they hadn’t already broken apart at the seams. Bashir’s bleeding; have to get to him; we’ve got to call for help…
“Bashir,” she began—and then her voice died in her throat.
Because all of space gathered, knitted into a tight ball, a single point, and the stars winked out.
Chapter
3
The rainbow blur of stars and black space peeled back, and they shot into a vast stretch of absolutely nothing the way a toboggan hurtles into a long, dark tunnel. There was a pause, a sensation of jumping from one place to another. And then, faster than thought, the Missouri rocketed through, and then there was space and there were stars. The turbulence was gone, and things should have been better.
But they weren’t. They were speeding up, not slowing down; she could tell by the heavy drag of gravity’s fingers pulling at her skin. Then she looked forward and saw why: a murky, soot-stained ball of a planet, dead ahead, filling the viewing port and looming closer by the second.
“Bashir! Bashir, we’re in a gravity well; you’ve got to pull up, pull up!”
“I can’t!” Bashir armed blood from his eyes. “The plasma injectors shut down. All I’ve got are maneuvering thrusters, and our shields…”
“I see them,” she said, her voice grim. Shields were at thirty percent, plus the runabout had taken major structural damage along the starboard hull. If Bashir couldn’t correct their approach angle or get into a stable orbit somehow, the runabout would simply split open and spit them out in a rush of sudden depressurization. Or they might just burn up. Or, more likely, both. “Can you ditch us?”
“I can try. What about the planet?”
She brought up sensors, thanking whatever deity was watching over them that they still worked. “M-class, high levels of atmospheric contaminants, pollution, silicates and copper arsenicals, lots of radioactive decay. Partial pressure of carbon dioxide’s higher than Earth.”
“Can we breathe it?”
“Not very well, but we don’t have a lot of alternatives. Sensors reading three continents: two north, and an island continent, about the size of Australia, to the south with a big inland sea or lake. Low salinity, no aquatic life there; mountains north, stretches of desert, and some kind of big industrial complex south.”
“All right, I’ll try for the water. Jettison a distress buoy. Then break out the suits just in case, a medical kit, whatever supplies you can.”
“I’m on it.” She was already moving but with aching slowness, the gravity sucking at her legs like thick mud. A wash of harsh yellow light fanned in, bright enough to throw shadows. Startled, she glanced over her shoulder and saw fire sheeting over the front viewing port, the friction of their passage through the atmosphere igniting a ball of flame like a meteor. The Missouri was burning up.
No time! We’ll never make it down in the ship! Got to evacuate now, now! The runabout was jittering again, and there was a guttural roar so loud that she gritted her teeth as the sound pummeled her brain. Just focus, get the suits; get Bashir into his suit; then we blow the hatch, use the suits’ thrusters to get us down and pray like hell our force fields don’t cut out before we hit or…
The equipment locker was aft of the force field she had thrown up against the smoke, but the transporter fire was out. She stabbed the controls, bleeding in air to equalize pressure before bringing the field down. Then she dragged two suits and helmets from the equipment locker. Even as she tugged one on, her mind was already skipping ahead.
Job one’s to get him into his suit. She jammed her right leg into her own, and then her left before cinching it up around her waist. She shrugged into the arms, toggled the clasps. Need to slap on a fast-clot pressure bandage then bring up his suit’s force field, program his thrusters to correct for speed and distance, tether us together so I can control his descent if he passes out; he’ll pass out; he’s got to, he’s losing way too much blood; patch him up as soon as we get down. Got to hope to hell the impact doesn’t kill us.
“Bashir, come on!” She fumbled out a medical kit, clicked it open, pawed through for a pressure bandage. Got to be quick, quick…“Come on, it’s no use! Leave it! Let’s go!”
“Just a few more seconds!” The runabout was thrashing like a roped steer, and he was straight-arming his console, working fast while his blood puddled on the deck. “We’re still too high! If I blow the hatch now, the depressurization will suck us out; we won’t have any control!”
He was right. She knew he was right. But what made her furious was that she was getting suited up, and he wasn’t.
This is nuts; he has to get back here now! Jamming her helmet down over her ears, she thumbed the catch, heard the click and hiss as the helmet sealed and the suit pressurized. She banged open her external mike. “Bashir, now!”
“Almost there!” His voice was a little tinny and sounded small and very far away through her internal speakers. But he did turn, and she tossed his suit forward, then his helmet. He fumbled for the suit, nearly lost it because his hands were slick. But then he had it, shook it open, shoved in one foot, then the other. Tugging the suit past his waist, he wriggled in one arm, then the other. But then, to her dismay, he turned back to his controls.
“I’ll try to level us!” he shouted over the staccato sputter of maneuvering thrusters. “That way when I blow the hatch—!”
“Forget that! We can blow it from here! Now you’ve got exactly three seconds to get your ass back here, or I’m going to drag you out by your thumbs!”
“No, Elizabeth, stay where you are!” And then Bashir stiffened and he turned. Their eyes met and for one brief instant, it was as if time stopped. Everything fell away, and she would remember the look on Bashir’s face for the rest of her life: his horror and his regret, and all that blood.
Then time began again. The runabout streaked toward its death; the alarm
shrilled its ululating cry; then there was a weird, wrenching metallic scream and Bashir was shouting, wildly, “Elizabeth, she’s breaking up, she’s breaking up, she’s breaking—!”
“Julian!” she shrieked. She lunged for him, one gloved hand hooked to a bulkhead, the other outstretched and they were so close she could nearly touch him, she was almost there, she could save him, she had to! “Julian, for God’s sake, give me your hand, give me your hand!”
Maybe he started for her. Maybe not. But she’d never know because the next thing she heard was an enormous ka-bang. Flames sheeted through the runabout, and the air roared. Her right hand closed reflexively but her fingers clutched air, and then she was screaming because suddenly there was no deck, no bulkhead. No Julian.
The entire starboard hull erupted like someone had touched off a bomb.
Lense was swept away in a hail of debris. She smashed through murky clouds, tumbling head over heels so she saw dun-colored land and then an orange sun and then a vast gray-green smudge that undulated like oil. And then she was on her back, looking straight up, and she saw a bright fiery ball: the runabout, or rather what was left of it, arcing south and away from the water, shedding bits and pieces in its passage, streaming a jet of superheated plasma behind and breaking apart like some sort of angel fallen from grace.
Then clouds swallowed her up and she couldn’t see the runabout anymore. There was only the sound of her guttural sobs, the wet of tears upon her skin, a swirl of vertigo. Her vision dimmed as she accelerated, and she went by feel, the g force hammering her body, squeezing her until she could barely take a breath. Her fingers crawled over her suit’s controls as she activated a force field to cushion her impact and programmed reverse thrusters.
Her last coherent thought was that she would never survive. The impact would kill her. She was going to die, and only a fool would think otherwise.
The very last thing she heard was the full-throated bellow of the wind.
Then there was silence, and her mind slid into darkness. But that was a mercy.
Chapter
4
Another primate had died during the night, the third in six weeks. Dr. Idit Kahayn knew because of the smell. The primate lay in a pool of vomit and feces: black eyes glassy as a doll’s, purple tongue lolling from a mouth stretched in a rictus of death.
Death and more death. That was her life now. Death for breakfast, death for dinner. Death in her dreams: the image of soldiers and rifles and Janel’s face exploding into a mist of blood spray and bone, and her screaming a warning, too late. That same dream every night, like her mind was stuck in an endless, recursive loop. No way off; no way out.
The remaining primates tracked her as she passed through the animal room to fetch gloves, a gown, her safety glasses. But she paused, staring them down. “It’s not my fault. I didn’t mean for this to happen. But I don’t have a choice.”
The primates didn’t answer. They just looked at her with their grave, liquid brown eyes, and she could sense the room getting thick and electric and icy.
“It’s not my fault,” she said again. Then she went to the isolation room, pulled the body from its cage, bagged it, and lugged it to the lab, leaving the animals to throw their thoughts back and forth in the air above her head.
The lab was chilly and smelled of antiseptic and old death. The counters were metal, the walls were white ceramic tile, and the floor was scuffed gray linoleum. A metal autopsy table stood on rolling casters in the center of the lab. The table was fitted with gutters all around to funnel away blood and other fluids. She unbagged the body and placed the primate on the table where she hosed it down, sluicing away vomit and filth, grateful that the water was triple-filtered at least so its color wasn’t black but a shade of watery ash. Then she braced the primate’s neck on a block so the head hung back and those blind eyes fixed on a point somewhere far away.
She used a scalpel for the skin along the crown and from ear to ear, incising through tough, calloused scalp and stringy muscle all the way to bone. Then she pulled the front flap down over the primate’s face and tugged the back flap to the base of its skull just above the spine. She took up a rotary bone saw, thumbed it to life. The saw whined, then dropped in pitch as the blade bit bone. As she cut, watery wine-colored blood dribbled into the gutters. She buzzed the circumference of the skull, notching the bone at the occiput. If the skull slid off when she bagged a dead animal for cremation, it made a mess.
When she’d cut through, she lifted the calvarium from the brain. The skull and tissues made a hollow sucking sound, like picking up an overturned bowl of thick gelatin. The primate’s brain was so edematous that once the cap of bone was removed, gray matter (though it was never really gray but a dirty pinkish purple like thin jelly) lipped the edges of the cranium like an underdone soufflé. The dura mater clung to the underside of the skull cap, so she got a good look at the brain in situ. The gyri were plump and choked with fluid, and she saw the bruise at once: a purplish-black splotch fanning around the implant like a squashed bug. She nudged away brain until she spied a clear bulb that was the proximal end of the implant: a thin, nearly filamentous metal cylinder bristling with synthetic dendrites.
Inflammation and swelling; probably a reaction to the separation. But how to beat that? After an easy dozen primate deaths in the past twelve months, she still wasn’t sure. Either way, the animal’s brain had swelled with fluid. Intracranial pressure had built up and the brain—really nothing more than a gelatinous mass of tissue and fluid held together by the thin bag of the meninges—had nowhere to go except the spinal canal. There would have been pain. The animal would’ve lost the use of its arms and legs, then bowel and bladder control. It would have been frightened. A horrible way to die but, then again, Kahayn didn’t know too many ways that were terrific either.
After separating the brain from the spinal cord and the tentorium, the dural connections between cerebrum and cerebellum, she scooped out the brain with both gloved hands. The cooling brain was tepid against her right hand but cold in her left.
She suspended the brain with a string in a formalin solution. She’d leave the brain in the preservative for the next ten days or so while the tissue firmed enough for her to section and see where she’d gone wrong—again.
By six-thirty in the morning, she was done, and then it was time for a stim and the OR. She wasn’t hungry. As she passed through the primate room, she didn’t look at the animals but she could feel their eyes on her back and their thoughts chasing her down the hall and out of the research wing.
Late afternoon now, and on her fourth procedure of the day: a rail-thin man with lung rot. Her pager shrilled as she was wrist-deep in a small, plum-colored lake of blood that smelled like an old clot. She had a fistful of rotted left lung and the tip of her left pinky plugged an arterial rip. There was so much blood, she’d gone by feel, tweezing through stiff, filamentous lung until she felt the rhythmic pulse of a tiny gusher a third of the way down the aorta. The blood was warm, but the tip of her pinky was cold and she needed her right hand free to do the fine work.
Her pager nagged again. “Someone get that, please? I’m a little tied up here.”
A surgery tech patted at Kahayn’s left hip, found the pager, killed it, glanced at the display, then hip-butted his way out of the suite. Kahayn jerked her head at the lieutenant standing opposite: a new girl who was all round blue eyes set in pale blue skin above a white-edged blue mask. “C’mon, c’mon,” said Kahayn, “get some suction going so I can see what I’m doing here.”
The lieutenant jumped to, stabbing the patient’s pleural cavity with the suction tip.
“Easy, go easy,” said Kahayn, grabbing the lieutenant’s gloved wrist with her free hand. Grape-colored beads of blood pattered onto green surgical drape. “Not so hard; you’re going to give him another bleeder you keep that up.”
“Sorry.” But the lieutenant slowed down, working with exaggerated care. Blood gurgled through tube, and the blood l
ake receded until Kahayn saw first the knuckles of her gloved left hand and then the spot where she’d plugged the artery. The rip was, thankfully, small, and the artery not yet so brittle that she couldn’t simply suture it shut. But rot had eaten into the left lung, and the normally spongy blue tissue had morphed into tough, stringy, prune-colored filaments that had insinuated through pleura and into the patient’s rib the way ivy suckers clung to old brick.
“Okay,” she said to the chief OR nurse, who stood with anesthesia behind a green drape at the head of the surgical table. “We’re going to need a left lung here.”
“I think we only have nine lefties on hand,” said the nurse. She was a major, and a perennial hard-ass. “Besides, this casualty hasn’t built up enough credits for a lung and if people get wind that he got one without…”
Kahayn drilled the nurse with a look. “Maybe you didn’t hear me. I said, get the lung, Major.”
“Colonel, I am just following protocol—”
“I don’t care. Now either get the lung, or get out.”
“Colonel, there are established procedures for—”
“That’s it.” Kahayn cut her off with a jerk of her head. “You’re out. Breynar,” she called over to the circulating nurse, “I need a left lung.”
The nurse, a first lieutenant, shot a hesitant glance at the major, then nodded and scurried out, his booties whispering against linoleum. The major’s eyes narrowed over her mask before she did a quick pivot with the precision of a drill instructor. She hipped the door. “I’ll be reporting this,” she said and pushed out through the scrub room. The doors had hinged flaps and fwap-banged.
No one said anything, so the suction gurgle was very loud in the silence. Then the anesthesiologist said, “You got to go easy, Colonel. She has a point.”
“Don’t start,” said Kahayn.
“I’m not. But you think we’re busy now, all they got to do is riot out there and then you’ll be getting up before you go to sleep.”
