by David Coy
She redialed the number. There was no use putting this off. The inventories had to be done. She wasn’t a whistleblower, but if it came to that, she’d do it. There were lives at stake.
“Hi, Afshin.”
“Hi, Applegate.”
“Afshin, can I make an appointment with Mr. Smith at his soonest convenience, please?”
Afshin pursed his lips.
“He’s very busy . . . ”
“I’m sure he is.”
“What is it about then?”
“Well, it’s a very important matter, I’m afraid.”
“I see. Well . . . let me . . . check his schedule for you . . . okay, I can fit you in for next month I think . . . let me see . . . here . . . ”
“No,” Donna said firmly.
“No?”
“No. A month is too long.”
Donna took a deep breath. She was about to get on Afshin’s bad side, and that was a curse she’d carry forever. You either lived and worked under a secretary’s curse, or you stood blessed by them. There was no in between. Donna felt herself slipping into a special form of Hell from which the road to redemption is long and hard, sometimes never-ending.
“I see . . . ” Afshin said.
“It really is important.”
“I’m sure it is . . . ”
“Really . . . very important.”
“Yes yes yes . . . let me see what I can do . . . I’ll call you back . . . Goodbye."
The screen went dead.
She fell into the pit.
Well, it didn’t matter. She’d have those inventories. If they weren’t done, she’d make sure they were. If she didn’t hear from him by tomorrow at this time, Afshin and she would discuss those inventories in great detail. No more pussy-footing around.
She heard a door buzzer. It took her a few false steps to find out it was coming from the clinic’s rear door. When she stepped outside on the little receiving dock, the heat cloaked her head again like a cloud of steam. She felt her face scowl against it.
“Two containers for Donna Applegate,” the delivery boy said. “Where do you want them?”
The efficient logistics of an off-world project’s material feeds never ceased to amaze her. She’d been there less than an hour, and the system was delivering goods to her.
“Put them up here. They’ll be okay.”
“Whatever you want, ma’am.”
Nice kid.
Mike raised the containers up and brought them slowly forward. When they were squarely on the dock, he lowered the carriage and sat them gently down on it.
“That okay? There like that?”
“That’s fine,” Donna smiled.
Mike jumped down from the lift and sprang up the stairs with his pad in his hand.
“Okay, then. Just sign here and stamp.”
She could feel him looking at her eye, but he didn’t say anything. Most people didn’t. Bemused, Donna signed her name with the stylus then put her thumb in the space provided. The pad beeped and read her print. When she was handing the pad back to him, she noticed a swollen knot on the boy’s neck, like a pebble under his skin, just under his ear.
“How long have you had that thing?”
“What?”
“That,” she said leaning closer and knitting her brow at it. “Oh, a couple of days. Everybody’s got 'em. They don’t hurt.”
“What do you mean by everybody’s got 'em?”
“Well, not everybody, but a lot.”
“How’d you get it.”
“Bug bite, I think.”
Christ, I knew it.
“Bug bite, huh?”
“Yeah. A little stinger about this big,” Mike said, making a space with his thumb and forefinger about the size of a golf ball.
“That’s little?"
“Some are a lot bigger than that, believe me.”
“Hummm . . . .” Donna lifted the lid on the top container and pulled one of the ProPaks out by its straps. The kits were drenched with water.
“These are wet . . . ”
She looked at Mike for a reaction. He seemed as confused as she was.
Yes, ma'am.
Donna puzzled over it for a second, shook the water off the kit, then dismissed it.
“Come inside. I want a better look at that thing.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
She marched him inside and sat him down on the closest examination table, pulled out the retractable tray from the side and unfolded the kit on it.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Mike Kominski, ma’am.”
“My name’s Donna Applegate.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you, too. How old are you?”
“Twelve. Well, twelve and a half actually.”
“Lie back on your side, Mike.”
Mike complied.
She adjusted the table to raise his neck then swung the magnifying lamp down on its swing arm and brought it close to Mike’s head. She pulled a pair of latex gloves on, then gingerly touched the ball under his skin. It was hard and moved around loosely. It wasn’t very deep, just under the epidermis. When she stretched the skin over it, she could see faint striation patterns in it. She didn’t know the species—it wouldn’t have a name yet anyway, but she knew what it was: it was either an egg mass or a developing insect larva. There were dozens of species on Earth with the same sickening and parasitic life cycle.
“Are you sure that thing doesn’t hurt?”
“It doesn’t hurt, honest. It might if you squeezed it, though.”
“I’m not going to squeeze it just yet.”
She felt around it a little more. There was no inflammation or edema. She took the thermometer out of the pack and touched it to Mike’s head. He was just a tad warm, but he’d just come out of the sun, too.
“Has it changed any recently? Grown any?”
“It’s got bigger is all.”
“Mike, I want to remove that thing from your neck.”
“You mean cut it out?”
“Yes. I promise it won’t hurt.”
“Now?”
“Yep.”
“Well, okay, as long as it won’t hurt me.”
“It won’t hurt. You stay put.”
The kit had all the basics she needed except the local anesthetic. It took her awhile, but she found a bottle of Novoloid in a box of miscellany from the infirmary and prepared a syringe with it. She also found a pair of forceps and some glue. That was good; she hated doing sutures and glue was so much better. She gathered everything up on a stainless tray and carried it over, keeping it out of Mike’s sight as much as possible.
“This might sting a little.”
She swabbed the area with a sterile pad then slipped the needle under his skin just at the base of the knot. She injected about a third of the anesthetic then picked two more spots around it and put in the rest.
She waited a minute then touched the area with her fingers. “Can you feel that?”
“Not very.”
“Okay. You won’t feel a thing. You might hear a little scratching noise but don’t let that scare you.”
“Okay.”
Although he was trying to hide it, Donna saw the fear in his face quite clearly. There are some emotions a child just can’t camouflage with a stiff lip, especially fear.
“It’s okay, Mike,” she said gently. “Just relax.”
Using the scalpel, she started at the base of the knot and worked around it in a neat semicircle. The skin parted cleanly and a little stream of blood ran down his neck from the incision. She blotted the area once with gauze, then using the tip of the scalpel, lifted the flap of skin covering the object. The skin came away easily revealing a spherical, yellowish and bloody grub. She scowled and grasped it gently with the forceps. She lifted it out and knitted her brow at it briefly. When she dropped it in the steel tray, it made a rubbery plonk sound that only her guts could hear.
“All done.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“What was in there?” he asked, trying to reach her with his eyes.
She wanted the word to spread as fast as possible. Anyone with one of those things in them would run full steam to the clinic when they found out what it was. That’s what she wanted. She wasn’t going to pull any punches.
“An insect larva—a grub. It would have eaten its way out of your neck once it developed the mouth parts to chew with.”
“Really?”
“Really. And it would have hurt, believe me.”
“Wow.”
She removed the dry swab and covered the area with an adhesive bandage.
Before he left, she gave him an injection of Trilicine and a half dozen tablets of the same to fight infection. When she looked for the Xercodan in the kit she found the bottle gone. It didn’t take her long after that to figure out why the kits in the containers were wet; someone had stolen it. She gave him a tin of aspirin instead.
She told him to get everybody he knew who had those knots on them over to the clinic as soon as possible. When he left, she issued a Med-alert from the data center and posted it on the company bulletin board in each shelter describing the symptoms of the infection and the process for removing the parasites. She hoped they’d all see it. The company bulletin board wasn’t the most popular appliance in a shelter.
She was in business before she’d even unpacked. They came running. The extractions went smoothly. By the end of the day she had an alcohol-filled jar of about twelve of the little bastards drifting in it and several appointments the next day to remove at least four more. She hadn’t done complete physical examinations and serum workups on the patients who came in, and she saw a couple of cases of yeast-like epidermal infections and one Rigger had a wet cough that sounded ugly. Another had a discharge from his nose the color of grass. She’d scheduled follow-ups to see those individuals the next day; this wasn’t the kind of place you got a simple case of athlete’s foot.
I knew it, she thought. This place is disease heaven . . . ”
She held the jar up in the light from the magnifier and studied the grubs. They were rolled up into nearly spherical shapes, like bizarre fetuses. She could make out the immature head parts and the sharp, tiny forelegs that tucked flat against the thorax. They all looked to be in the same stage of development. That fact and the information she’d gotten from the patients about when the “stings” were acquired suggested to her that the insects might have a long and seasonal life cycle. Everyone who had been parasitized had gotten impregnated within a few days of each other, and as far as she knew, no one had been “stung” in days. With any luck, she might not see any more of that particular infection until the next season, whenever that was.
She’d been at it for six hours without a break. She made herself a cup of coffee and sat down at one of the benches along the wall.
This is just the beginning.
There was no telling what horrors crept, crawled or buzzed through the foliage, soil or air of this sodden planet. She thought about how much valuable baseline data could have been in those inventories. Done properly, they would have offered a wealth of information and would have been the cornerstone of all the health and safety policies and procedures issued from the clinic. As she mulled it over, her anger at Ed Smith grew. If she hadn’t gotten there when she did, those things might have hatched out in a day or two, or worse, might have migrated within the bodies of those people, sickening them or, perhaps even killing them. Proper biological inventories might have prevented it completely.
Every experienced contractor who signed on for off-world duty knew the first part of a project’s schedule: the site was surveyed so that the biological dangers could be cataloged, gassed, whacked, powdered and poisoned. It was one of the most tedious, important and time-consuming phases of the project. The inventories were mandatory. It was illegal not to do them.
She felt like shutting the entire project down right then and there.
Stupid bastard. He’s endangering lives.
It wasn’t bad enough that children were made to do the work of adults, but to put them in harm’s way through negligence was unthinkable. She remembered how frightened Mike Kominski had looked when she told him she was going to cut . . .
Christ.
She looked at the phone and pursed her lips. Aft whatshisname hadn’t called back yet. She was fairly certain he wouldn’t. She’d have to force the issue, and she was prepared to do just that, dammit. She’d give him a full day just to be sure. After that, she was putting the pressure on.
8
After dropping off the last contractor, John Soledad lifted off and put the shuttle in a straight course down the jungle’s western-most edge, just above treetop level, just like always.
He set his jaw, and for a moment feigned resistance to the call.
He wasn’t supposed to do it, but it wasn’t like he was breaking any law or anything. Besides, he could get back in a matter of minutes if he had to. It was just so damned boring sitting around with nothing to do for most of the day.
Nobody would mind anyway.
He banked in a hard right turn, leaving the relative safety of the clearing behind. In a matter of seconds he was half a kilometer into the green.
He set the ship’s guidance to pick up the route he’d followed yesterday. He’d try to go a little farther this time, maybe far enough to get a look at that valley over the range of hills to the northwest.
How could they expect a pilot to sit all day anyway?
He lit a smoke. He wasn’t supposed to do that either.
Everybody he came in contact with complained about this project. He heard the contractors bitching and moaning about it when they got on board in the morning and when they left in the evening. They bitched about the heat, they bitched about the rain, they bitched about the bugs, they bitched and they bitched.
He didn’t mind any of that. In fact, he liked it. He liked the richness and diversity of the plant life, especially the scent of the flowers once you got away from the installation with its huge mounds of rotting plant stuff. He’d set down in a dozen places over the last week, and each one seemed more beautiful than the last. Just yesterday, he’d found an incredible sparkling stream running through a deep green grotto. He didn’t think he’d ever seen a more beautiful place. The stream plummeted over a fall of perhaps ten meters into a crystalline pool. He’d been tempted to strip and jump into it; but since he didn’t know what was in the pool, he decided against it. He’d taken pictures for most of the morning; and when he left, he marked it on his map so he could find it again. He planned to go back many times.
He watched the sea of green roll pass under the shuttle like waves and delighted in the excitement and promise of discovery. This was what piloting was all about, going into the unknown; seeing and experiencing new things. He wasn’t just an airbus driver—he was a pilot for God's sake. One of these days he was going to snag the shuttle on his day off and fly it all the way to the sea and back. Now that would be a trip.
He rounded “Soledad Spires” and headed down “Soledad Canyon” for about ten kilometers. He could see the range of hills now dead ahead. He had to guess at his ETA since the shuttle had no distancing radar. Fifteen minutes, tops.
This section was one of the most scenic he’d seen and much of the forest was broken by sharp rock outcroppings the color of rust and soft green oxide. The plant life clung to all but the most unforgiving rock facings. Some were fairly flat on top and were covered with only sparse vegetation; suitable for an easy landing. He marked the area on the map.
One of the enormous fl
ying things he’d been seeing almost daily passed under at a tangent, then vanished into the treetops as if swallowed. He estimated their wingspans at about three meters or greater. They seemed to exist only in the deeper canyons. He’d once flown toward a flock of them; and when he got too close, they vanished into the canopy as if they’d never existed. He wanted to get close enough to one for a picture, but didn’t think that would be possible in the shuttle.
So much life.
He buzzed another hillside, half of it seemingly cleft by a chisel, then straightened and swung back on course. He brought his elevation down to within a few meters of the canopy and raised his speed to seventy knots, just a percentage or two from the craft’s maximum speed. The ship wasn’t fast, but being that close to the treetops increased the sense of speed.
He wasn’t supposed to do that, either.
There was an enormous outcropping ahead and, to the west, jutting up out of the basin like a fist. He just had to buzz that one. He banked toward it and lit another cigarette.
He approached wide and banked hard around it, keeping his eyes out the side port. He would have missed it if he hadn’t been looking.
“What the hell is this?”
It was there just at the base of the outcropping.
The structure reminded him of an old scar at the base of the hill, fused and melded to it. The arms seemed to radiate from a central hub roughly like the spokes of a wheel and bent snakelike around the larger obstructions. The jungle had encroached over and through the thing, trying to reclaim its space.
He pulled up, hovered, then lowered the craft to get a closer look.
The tentacles seemed to be made of a polished material that still shone where the plant life hadn’t dulled or obscured those sections. He realized when he got closer that the tube-like structures were actually made of individual hexagonal pieces, like tiles, carefully laid in, each beside the next, perfectly arched, to form the tentacle shapes.
Some of the pieces had fallen in, leaving gaping black holes and cracks in the hollow structures. Other fissures were choked with erupting vines and plant growth. A large section of one tentacle was completely collapsed.
