by David Coy
“I suppose you’d enjoy that,” Smith said.
“No more so than your boys there enjoyed throwing me into the jungle from a shuttle,” she laughed. “That was fun wasn’t it, Wethers? You both must have loved doing it, ‘cuz you were smiling about it quite a bit as I recall.” She swished the vial as she spoke. “You know when you kicked me off the force field, Lindstrom, you must have broken one of my ribs. I still can’t take a deep breath without feeling it.” Her fingers found the spot on her side and massaged it. “Yep. Still hurts. Imagine what it’s like to be reminded how much I hate you every time I breathe.”
She leaned back in the chair. “You sonsofbitches…” she said, shaking her head slowly and beaming wickedly. “Aren’t you just surprised as hell to see me? I can’t imagine what it must feel like to be you, looking at me. In a way I feel sorry for you.”
“If our roles had been reversed,” Smith said, “you might have done the same. Your actions right now only confirm it.”
“You know, I can’t argue with you there,” Donna said. “And now look, I get the chance to be you with three sonsofbitches like you to get revenge on. Feels nice, actually.”
She uncapped the bottle of liquid, raised it to her mouth and took a big drink of it. She held it in her mouth with twisted glee, then pissed it out of her mouth in a long, thin stream from Smith to Wethers. She ran out before getting to Lindstrom. “Got lucky there, Lindstrom, no Villaroos juice for you today. It’s just water, you stupid bastards,” she said and got up. “This time … but I’m working your case every day, so don’t worry. I’ll see that you get what you deserve. That’s a promise.”
She put back the chair and walked out of the brig. On her way out she thanked the guard at the entrance. “That must have felt good,” he said to her.
“Nah. Not so much really,” she replied. “A bit of a let-down, actually.”
She headed to the clinic, but decided she would stop off at the commissary first for a bite to eat before taking on the stream of patients she knew she’d find waiting for her when she got back. Her phone hadn’t rung in the last two days with any emergency calls, but she knew it would just be a matter of time before it did. Spend ten minutes in the green and something would find you, try to make a meal out of you, or use you for an incubator for its nasty progeny.
They’d set up the clinic and the biology labs adjacent to one another so that she and Rachel could exchange information better. The concept was simple. Rachel was making daily excursions with the two volunteers she’d Shanghaied to help her. Rachel's job was to continue to inventory the biological hazards and put out releases through the communication system with any information gained about the hazards and how to avoid them. Rachel’s sample collection work required a certain amount of scientific rigor to classify the risks. Donna’s sample collection system was far more efficient. The infected colonists themselves were the collection vectors. All she had to do was go to work each day and let the colonists’ bodies provide the perfect collection mechanisms for the jungle’s virulent life forms. They had a nearly constant flow of new hazards whose modus operandi they could view firsthand. And since so many of the incidents were duplicates, there were often some additional details revealed that helped round out their knowledge over time.
The commissary was comprised of two long rows of open-air tables and benches all covered with a suspended and stretched fabric roof to shield the sitters and standers and talkers from the hot Verdian sun or sudden downpour. Against one side was another long table stacked with the day’s fare and tended by a Bobby Cooper, a cheerful and dutiful son of one of the Bondsmen. Bobby’s job was to keep the food organized and sanitary enough to eat during the day. The job wasn’t too hard when the sun was up, but by the time the sun started down, it was time to seal the containers and put the remains of the day’s offerings in the metal larders behind the table.
The commissary was the informal gathering place for the colonists where they’d breakfast before pursuing the day’s work or break when the sun was high for lunch; or if not too late in the day, stop off for dinner before going home. It was the community gathering place and the site of daily, informal town meetings. Here, rumors were exchanged or squashed flat, and the latest news always communicated in the fastest known way: mouth to ear.
Donna picked up a meat and vegetables platter from Bobby and headed over to sit with John and the other shuttle pilot, Tom Yelton. Donna didn’t know Yelton very well, and had never spoken to him, but she knew him as a friend of John’s. And any friend of John’s was a friend of hers and came with an automatic endorsement.
She sat down with a glance of approval at Yelton and took a swig of coffee.
“Nice hot day, huh?” she said to either of them.
“Nice hot day,” they said almost in unison.
“Seems a little cooler than yesterday,” John offered.
“Who can tell?” Donna said.
“Who can tell?” Yelton agreed and sucked his teeth with a pleasant expression. Donna considered him with a candid look with her blazing eye.
“Whose your pal?” she said to John. “Introduce us.”
“Oh, yeah,” John said hustling through it. “Damn. I’m sorry. This is Tom Yelton, Shuttle Pilot Grade Four. He’s an old friend of mine. Tom, Donna Applegate, Nurse Grade. .whatever. You’ll have one of her needles in your ass eventually, for something.”
“I’ve heard of her,” Yelton said.
“Yeah?” Donna replied, “What have you heard?”
“Just what everybody else has,” he said. “That you’re a damned good doctor.”
She offered him a sideways grin. “Well, that part’s true, I guess. Anything else you hear is a lie.”
“That works for me,” Yelton said.
Donna had Yelton sized up immediately. He would be one of those rare and truly easy-going persons, relaxed and unflappable under even the most demanding conditions; the kind who would sleep through a thunderstorm, she was sure, or one who would keep his head to the very end, running coolly and efficiently through each logical corrective action in step-wise fashion as his shuttle crashed nose-first into the sea. She liked him. But that could change based on his next answer.
“So what brought you to Verde?” she asked him. “Your contract or your religion?”
“Contract,” he said flatly. “Not much into religion. What about you?”
“Then we have something in common,” she said. “I came here to run Health and Safety. Turns out I still have the job. Not that Smith’s too pleased about it about now.”
“Why’s that?” Yelton asked.
“The bastard tried to kill me,” Donna said. “And now he wants me dead more than ever. But that ain’t gonna happen.”
“Well, he’ll get what he deserves,” Yelton said easily. “Guys like him always do.”
Donna nodded and forked up some vegetables. “You got that right, she said. She took a bite and chewed. “Hot sonofabitch today,” she said past her food.
“Cooler than yesterday,” Yelton added, taking a pull on his coffee.
23
Donna’s face had that “another really bad one” look on it and Rachel sighed and steeled herself for the news she knew was coming.
“You’d better come over here and look at this one,” Donna’s little face in the phone said. “Bring your tools, too. You’re going to have to help me with this one.”
Rachel picked up her kit, slung it over her shoulder and headed out the door. “Mind the shop while I’m gone,” she said to Beverly Hobbs, her newly-acquired assistant. “And stay away from those big ants I just dumped in that container. They sting like fire and squirt acid out their asses.”
Beverly eyeballed the big greenish ants in the plastic bottle with a frown. Ants had never been one of her favorites. “Sure,” she said.
When Rachel entered the clinic, she was greeted with a cloying and pungent odor that clung to the back of her throat. She contorted her face at the smell. Donn
a was standing next to a middle-aged male patient on an operating table under a bank of lights. The patient had a respirator over his nose and mouth. His eyes were closed. The white sheet that covered his body was stained with a wet yellow material near his right side. Donna was already suited up, her hands gloved with a surgical mask on her face. More of the yellow material stained the front of Donna’s gown and her gloved hands. In one hand, was a gleaming surgical scalpel.
“What’s that smell?” Rachel asked her.
“It’s coming off the juice from this damned thing,” Donna said and pulled the sheet back from the man’s torso.
As if glued to the man’s right flank, just above the hip, was a dark and shiny organism about the size of a rat. Where the smooth seam of the organism met the man’s flesh, a red and angry welt had raised. The life form reminded Rachel of an ancient trilobite, the dorsal area striated with thick curved plates. The thorax was thick, too, and ended abruptly at a blunt head. Small compound eyes stared out from the sides of the head. Dark antennae lay flat against the organism’s back.
“There’s one we haven’t seen,” Rachel said frowning.
“I think I have,” Donna said. “I think I saw one of these attached to the flank of an ungulate one night in the green.”
“Have you figured out what it’s doing to him?”
Donna shook her head. “Not yet. But one of the scans seems to show tendrils around his liver originating from the organism. He was agitated and in pain when he got here. I put him under so I could work on him. Every time you touch the damned thing it oozes this smelly shit.” She showed Rachel her ooze-wet gloved hands. “It comes from glands or something under the carapace. I’m betting it’s toxic, but I haven’t analyzed it yet.”
“Hm. So what do you want to do?”
“Take it off him.”
“Lance it off? What about the tendrils?”
“I’ll deal with those later.”
“Hm. Where did he pick up this thing?”
“The guy who dropped him off said he saw him stumble out of the green a couple of kilometers down the road. Looks like he stopped his truck and walked into the jungle for some reason, maybe to relieve himself, and came out with his little buddy here stuck to his side.”
“Who is he?” Rachel asked.
“Tim Collins. He’s a truck driver. And a Bondsman.”
“Hmm.” Rachel pulled up a wheeled stool, leaned in and took a closer look. “Lemme see your blade,” she said. Donna handed it to her handle first.
“Don’t get that shit on your skin,” Donna said. “Here, put this on,” she handed Rachel a clear face shield. “And these gloves, too.”
Rachel put on the gloves, slipped on the face shield, leaned in and touched the organism with the tip of the scalpel. Immediately a thin stream of pale yellow liquid appeared at the seam of parasite and human flesh and ran down in a slow-moving rivulet. “God, that stuff stinks!” she said and gagged almost simultaneously. “I wonder what it does? Have you collected any of it yet?”
“Nope,” Donna said. “Have a ball.”
Rachel wiped a few swabs-full of the stuff off the table and stuck the swabs in a glass vial. “It could be toxic, but I’ll bet its most toxic characteristic is its stench. It’s probably designed to warn you off when you try to remove the organism. It’s noxious for sure. Toxic, we don’t know yet. I wouldn’t want to eat any of it, though, or get it in a cut.” She picked around at the organism’s hard surface with the tip of the scalpel. “Hm. These are interesting,” she said. “These look like sockets for wings. I’ll bet this thing was airborne until it landed on the victim. It probably shed its wings after attaching to him. Ant and termite alates do the same thing when they land after swarming. Once the wings have served their purpose, off they come. Hmm.”
“What?”
“So it’s not just going to cop a meal from the guy and fly away. It looks to me like it’s following an all-to-familiar pattern for this planet.”
“Using the other species as a breeding substrate,” Donna said.
“No surprise there, I suppose,” Rachel added.
“None at all,” Donna agreed. “Let’s get that damned thing off him. Give me the scalpel.”
“Hang on,” Rachel said. “I’ve got a better idea.”
“What?”
“Let’s try to make it want to let go on its own,” Rachel said.
“Why?”
“To see what it does,” Rachel said.
“This poor bastard could die in the meantime. What do you want to do, just pester it a little until it lets go?”
“Exactly.”
“No way. That damned thing is coming off him right now.”
“We could learn a lot more from it alive than dead,” Rachel said. “For all we know, this thing could be in the middle of its lifecycle, not the end. Its lifecycle can tell us more about how to avoid it than anything else.”
“Maybe,” Donna said firmly. “But we’re not taking the chance. It’s coming off.”
Rachel handed the scalpel back to Donna, rolled back from the table a couple of feet and pulled up her face shield. “Okay. You’re the nurse,” she said. “It’s your call.”
“That’s right. You can play with whatever’s left of it,” Donna said. “I can’t wait to kill this thing.”
Donna moved around to the other side of the table and went right to work. She placed the scalpel’s tip on the center of the organism’s head and pressed the tip firmly in. With a slight snap, the blade pierced the parasite’s head. Instantly, a gush of yellow fluid flowed out from around it, running onto the table and forming a putrid pool under the man’s hip. Donna pulled the blade back across the parasite’s midline with a jerking, sawing action, opening a deep slit in it, head to end. Dark fluid leaked from the gaping cut framed by the sharp edges of the opened carapace. She repositioned the blade in the cut where she started and drew it down the thing’s length again, deepening the cut. This time when she reached the juncture of head and thorax, the organism seemed to shudder slightly, and the posterior end of it arched up and away from the man’s body. “That must have hurt some,” Donna said to it. “Too bad for you.”
She took hold of the end of the organism with a pair of heavy hemostats and pried it up even further. She looked underneath it. “Yep,” she said. “Got tendrils penetrating the skin here. And it’s got no signs of letting them go.” She worked the blade in against the tendrils and with mincing little cuts nipped away at the tough tissue. She had soon sawed through the two penetrating tendrils. Trying not to tear the little holes in the man’s skin left by the claspers any larger than they already were, she loosened the organism. She wriggled free the rows of tiny clasping hooks that ran around the parasite's perimeter; and in a minute, she had it loose.
She dropped its ruined body in the sample tray held up by Rachel. “Well, at least you left it in one piece,” Rachel said. “More or less.”
“You’re lucky I didn’t stomp it flat after I got it off,” Donna replied
Donna cleaned the area where the organism had attached to the man. When she was done they could see a neat ring of little penetrating wounds in an elongated pattern surrounding two severed tendrils sticking up a centimeter or two out of the man’s side. The little wounds wept blood, and Donna blotted it away.
“Nasty,” Rachel said.
“Nasty,” Donna agreed. “I can’t believe how many organisms there are on this planet that want to stick something dreadful in something else.”
“Now what?” Rachel asked.
“Now I’m going to try to pull out these tendrils and hope I don’t break them off. I don’t want to go in after them.”
Rachel spotted something. “Hang on,” she said. She reached in and squeezed the end of one of the tendrils. When she did a pale, translucent object the size of a pinhead squeezed out of the severed channel in the tendril. Rachel captured the object on a glass slide in a drip of accompanying whitish liquid. “Gotcha,” she
said.
“Egg?”
“That’s my bet,” Rachel said.
“Great,” Donna said. “Let’s hope we killed it before any of them worked their way down the tubes and into this poor sucker’s body.”
“Right,” Rachel agreed. “If it is an egg, I might be able to incubate it and hatch another one so we can see what the first-stage larva look like.”
“Oh, what fun!” Donna said, testing one of the tendrils with a pinch of her gloved fingers. “Just flush it down the toilet.”
Rachel smiled at Donna behind her mask. She knew Donna knew better than to deliberately destroy an opportunity to learn something significant about the hazard. “Not a chance. When the baby’s born, I’ll name it after you. How’s that?”
“Call it Smith instead,” Donna said.
That brought a peal of girlish laughter from Rachel.
* * *
“How’s the new patient?” Rachel yawned at Donna. The sun was going down, and soon the planet would come to buzzing, spinning, window-banging life, but Rachel needed no bug-filled excuse to head for the safety of her shelter and the comfort of bed. She was exhausted. She had been idly watching Bobby pack away the food, and his rhythmic actions had made her even sleepier. It was dreamy to sit there, not move and watch someone else work.
“Which new patient do you mean?” Donna replied. “I’ve had a dozen today.”
“Oh, um…Collins,” Rachel said, resting her head on her fist. She felt like she could sleep just like that. “The truck driver guy, you know, stinky whatsit attached to him.”
“Oh, you mean with the Smith attached to him. That one. I dosed him with antibiotics and sent him home,” Donna said. “He seems fine, but I’ll check on him for the next week or so. Presuming the Smith didn’t get a chance to lay eggs in him, he’ll be fine. I hope.”
“Smith. That’s rich,” Rachel said with a grin, then yawned. “I’m done in. I’m going.”
“How are you feeling,” Donna asked.
“Tired,” Rachel said pushing the empty platter away and getting up.
