The Lazarus Particle

by Logan Thomas Snyder

  “May I help you?”

  “Hello,” she said, trying to strike the right balance between cheerful and appropriately duty-bound. “Dr. Jenner, I presume?”

  “Correct. What I can do for you?”

  “My name is Advocate Roon McNamara, Dr. Jenner. I understand my client, one Fenton James Wilkes, suffered a seizure while in holding and was put in the custody of your care shortly thereafter. I need to see him as soon as possible, make certain he’s being properly cared for and so on. I’m sure you understand.”

  Jenner nodded slowly, making a show of consulting his flexpad. “Ah, yes, Mr. Wilkes… hmm.”

  “Is something wrong, Doctor?” she ventured when he hesitated.

  “Well, as you say, Mr. Wilkes suffered a rather significant seizure. I would have thought you had been informed of the implications of that by now.”

  Roon faked a look somewhere between confusion and mild consternation. “I’m sorry, no. You’ll have to enlighten me.”

  Jenner lowered his flexpad, clasping it before him with both hands. “The fact of the matter, Miss McNamara, is that this was a significant event brought about by severe neurological trauma. Based on my preliminary examination, I’d say Mr. Wilkes won’t be capable of standing trial anytime soon. Technically you are no longer his advocate, and therefore not entitled to see him. I’m very sorry.”

  This was the moment, Roon realized, when one of them would have no choice but to blink. They were playing a form of chicken, bluffing one another over a hard-fought game of cards. The chips were there for the taking, but only one of them would be able to wrap his or her arms around the pile when this little game they were playing was through.

  “Are you sure of that, Dr. Jenner?” Roon countered sharply.

  “Well, I—”

  “Of course you aren’t! Because you are not an advocate. Don’t you understand that I’m Mr. Wilkes’ advocate more than ever? Who else but me would be qualified to speak for him in his condition?” Feeling a daring surge of bravado rise up in her chest, she lifted a finger to poke at Jenner’s breastbone. “Do I tell you how to treat your patients? Do I tell you what medications to administer, in what amounts, for how long and how frequently?” She scoffed. “No, I don’t, because I have no idea what you do, just as you have no idea what I do. Now stand aside or I’ll be forced to call shipboard security on grounds of obstruction.”

  Fuming though he clearly was, Jenner finally relented. “Very well. You have five minutes, though I don’t know what you expect to get out of him in his current state.”

  Neither did Roon, once she saw him. Fenton was out and then some, wrapped in the grip of so many clear plastic tentacles feeding medication and other life-giving fluids into his arms. They didn’t seem to be doing much good, at least if his pallor was any indication. He was pale as a ghost, with thin bloodless lips and dark bags hanging heavily below his eyes. He looked like—there was no charitable way to put it—like a junkie going through an especially heavy-handed round of detox and withdrawal.

  Again, strange. This was not the Fenton James Wilkes she had conversed with—even lightly flirted—the day before.

  “I’ll need some privacy to confer with my client,” Roon said over her shoulder to Dr. Jenner. He shrugged, moving away and muttering beneath his breath all the while.

  Roon sat in the chair beside the bed. She reached out to take Fenton’s hand in hers, stroking the other over it, hoping for some response. “Fenton? Fenton, it’s Roon.” She scooted the chair a little closer, trying to keep the noise down. “Blink or, I don’t know, squeeze my hand if you can hear me.”

  Somewhat to her surprise, she felt Fenton’s fingers constrict around her own just so.

  “That’s good,” she complimented, patting his hand. “That’s really good. But I need more, Fenton. I need you to try to wake up. Just for a minute or two, just long enough to tell me what happened to you. Then you can go back to sleep. Can you do that, Fenton?”

  Fenton made a low gurgling sound. Roon nodded, squeezing his hand, feeling him squeeze back harder.

  “There you go. Listen to my voice, Fenton, follow my voice. Can you hear me?”

  It took several seconds, but at last Fenton’s eyes fluttered to consciousness.

  “Wha—whur am… ohh haiiii, Roooon.” Upon seeing her he bared his teeth in a dopey, anesthetized version of a smile. “S’nice t’see yoo gyin…”

  “Hi, Fenton. It’s nice to see you again, too, but we don’t have long, so try to focus, alright?”

  “I lye kyoo, Roon. Yoo—yoo’re vurry nice…”

  Roon couldn’t help smiling a little in spite of herself. “I like you, too, Fenton. But I need—”

  “Priddy, too…”

  Roon blinked. Opened her mouth, closed it. That part caught her for something of a loop. He thought she was pretty? Her? Roon? If she hadn’t already known he was under the influence of some serious medication, that last bit would have confirmed it for sure. “Fenton. Fenton. I need you to focus for me, okay?”

  “Kay, I’m focust.” He nodded once in what she assumed was meant to be a reassuring gesture.

  “Good. Now, can you tell me what happened before your seizure? Is there anything that stands out?”

  Fenton stared up at the ceiling, apparently deep in thought. After a few seconds his eyelids began to narrow and Roon wondered if he had slipped back into that slurried, ill-defined space between consciousness and unconsciousness.

  “Fenton?”

  He stirred at the sound of her voice, blinking incredulously. “Roon? S’zat yoo?”

  “It’s me, Fenton. I’m here. I just need you to tell me what happened before the seizure. Do you remember?”

  Fenton lifted his free hand to his chest limply, tapping just below his breastbone. “Hurst. It hurst.”

  “It hurts? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “Mmmmnn-hmm.”

  “Do you mind if I take a look?”

  Fenton lolled his head from side to side. Roon took the shaky gesture to mean that, no, he didn’t mind.

  “Okay, Fenton,” she whispered, “just hold still.” Not that that would be a problem. He was already drifting into a peaceful, medicated slumber.

  The real problem was what she found waiting for her beneath the top of his gown.

  “Oh my god…”

  The flesh of his breast was flush with a blossoming bruise, its petals a sickly mottle of purple, blue, and yellow. The bruise itself was roughly the size of her fist, centered around a small puckered welt an inch and a half below his nipple. It almost looked like…

  Like an injection point.

  “Ahem.”

  The voice came from behind her, a gravelly clearing of the throat that nearly caused her heart to leap out of her chest.

  Roon yelped with surprise, covering her chest with her hand. “Dr. Jenner!” she said, turning to find the man looming just beyond the cordon of privacy curtains surrounding Fenton’s bedside. “You startled me.”

  “It’s been five minutes,” Jenner answered impassively. “I’m going to have to ask that you leave now. Mr. Wilkes needs time to rest and recuperate.”

  Reluctantly, Roon nodded. She had no choice; her impressive haranguing aside, it was Jenner’s sickbay to run as he pleased. If he said five minutes, then five minutes was all she had. She could offer a cursory protest, but the risk of getting confined to the brig for disobeying an order from a ranking officer was hardly worth it. After all, what kind of an advocate could she be for Fenton if she got herself thrown behind bars?

  The answer was simple: Not a very good one.

  “Of course, Doctor.” She patted Fenton’s hand gently as she stood. Somehow she felt a connection with him, something more personal than just her obligation as his advocate. “I’ll be back first thing tomorrow morning.”

  She said it as much to Fenton as to Dr. Jenner.

  The next morning, Fenton was nowhere to be found.

  09 • RAD SPIK
E

  They say the sting of rejection is worse than the bite of a thousand serpents.

  Having been roundly rebuffed by the corpsman assigned to escort her back to her quarters, Xenecia could say there was some truth to that.

  Not that she had any interest in the man outside of her own personal gain. Far from it. All he was to her was a means to an end. An end that now lay unfulfilled.

  In the wake of that failure, confined to her quarters as she was, Xenecia was as much a prisoner aboard OS Tau as her once—and future—bounty.

  Oh yes, for she intended to reclaim him at her earliest convenience. In that regard, the corpsman’s rejection represented only delay, not defeat. Of that much she was certain.

  It was only a matter of time.

  Which was all well and good, except that it left her with several intervening hours—or days, or weeks, or who knows how long…—to fill.

  Having had some experience as a prisoner before, Xenecia knew better than most how to pass the time. Hone the body, sharpen the mind. For that she needed little more than to do a bit of redecorating. A cursory examination of the ceiling revealed the section she needed to expose. Panel by panel, she laid bare that section of ceiling, exposing sheaves of red-green-black-yellow wiring as well as the arterial network of pipes and conduits that nurtured Tau’s crew and civilian complement with an uninterrupted flow of recycled oxygen and water. She squatted determinedly, executing a standing backflip and coming to rest by the backs of her knees from the thickest of pipes. Without pause she set to task, crossing her arms over her chest and performing a series of rapid-fire, bat-like body lifts that should have been well beyond the limitations of the human body.

  But then she wasn’t exactly human, was she?

  Pulse screaming in her ears, muscles burning hot like white phosphorous, skin shining bright with sweat and renewed purpose, she didn’t so much as flinch when the door chimed to notify her of a visitor waiting outside. “Enter,” she called, all the while persisting with inhuman determination.

  The woman that shuffled through the doorway just stopped and stared, transfixed. She was a mousy thing. Mousy hair, mousy face, mousy body. Not wearing any sort of military ID, as far as Xenecia could discern in the course of her nearly cyclonic calisthenics.

  “Well?” she barked breathlessly in between lifts. “What do you want?”

  At that, the woman seemed to snap out of it.

  “Are—are you Xenecia of Shih’ra?” she asked meekly. As if there could be any doubt after the display she was witnessing.

  “I am.”

  “I, uh… I’m here….”

  “Let me guess,” Xenecia interjected. Unlocking her knees from around the exposed pipe, she dropped before the mousy woman with an effortless, almost terrifying grace. “You have come to tell me I am even more fucked than I could have previously imagined. Fenton Wilkes is dead. Perhaps he never existed in the first place. Am I getting, as your people say, ‘warmer?’” With each sentence she took a step closer, until she was near to towering over the poor woman. “Or maybe this is the part where your people storm in and shoot me dead before flushing my body out the nearest airlock.” She cocked her head, hairless brows notching above the polarized lenses fixed over her eyes as she appraised the spokesperson before her.

  “I’m not one of them,” she said quietly.

  “Oh? Then what are you doing aboard their station?”

  “I, ah, well, that is to say, I guess, that I am one of them. Sort of. I was never part of the group that sent you looking for Fenton, though.”

  Xenecia snorted. “Do you always speak in such clumsy riddles?”

  “Let me start over.”

  “Very well. You have my full attention.”

  “Thank you.” The woman breathed a small sigh of relief before continuing. “My name is Roon McNamara. Yes, I work for Morgenthau-Hale, but no, not the corporate or military branches. I’m an advocate. My department is strictly nonprofit in nature. I guarantee, I’m as unwelcome here as you are. Maybe more so. The uniformed personnel, at least the higher-ups, seem to deeply resent civilian involvement in, well, anything. And now I’ve been informed I’m not even needed here. That’s why I’ve come to you. Something doesn’t feel right to me. I think Fenton is in danger. Well, more danger.”

  “Go on.”

  “They said he had a seizure.” Roon shook her head. “I don’t buy it. He was perfectly lucid when I talked to him, then this morning he’s laid up in sickbay, slurring and garbling his speech like a zombie. That, and he has this huge bruise on his chest like someone injected him with something. It doesn’t add up.”

  The skin around Xenecia’s lenses creased thoughtfully. Perhaps even in contrition. “I will admit to striking him to subdue him for capture, but the bruising on his chest… no, that does not make sense. It certainly was not there when I checked him for hidden weapons or transponders afterward.”

  “Exactly. I think Morgenthau-Hale is up to something. I think Fenton discovered something so important they’re willing to take it from him at all costs.”

  “Assuming you are correct, what would you have of me, advocate?”

  “I want to hire you.”

  “And how do you know I am available for hire?”

  The advocate made a tsking sound. “You said so yourself not two minutes ago. ‘You have come to tell me I am even more fucked than I could have previously imagined.’ I’m guessing that’s because the review board denied you the bounty and the life bonus, right?”

  “Supposing they did.”

  “Supposing they did, then you’re out everything. All that time and effort. But supposing I’m willing to pay out, say, every credit I have to my name, then you’ll at least have made something out of it.”

  “How much?”

  “Eighty-two thousand, six hundred, and eighteen credits. Like I said: Every single one I have to my name.”

  “That is a fraction of what I was promised,” she scoffed.

  “It’s your choice. You can take nothing from a broken promise or you can make the people who broke it pay.” Roon folded her arms across her chest. “Either way you’ve got five seconds.”

  From behind the polarized inscrutability of her lenses, Xenecia studied the advocate woman for the full five seconds. For such a short, soft woman, this Roon McNamara certainly drove a hard bargain.

  “Time’s up,” Roon said. She slapped her sides and turned to leave. As she did, she muttered, “Guess I’ll have to find someone else. I hear Quint Samuels is making a remarkable recovery. Maybe he’s in the market for a fare.”

  It was a shrewd gambit on her part. Xenecia knew Quint was in no condition to hunt. She had seen as much for herself. Even so, the thought of Quint or anyone else stealing another fare from her was enough to override all sense and reason. “Stop.”

  Roon stopped just short of the door. She allowed a single beat to pass before turning back to regard Xenecia stolidly.

  “If I accept, how do I know you will pay out?”

  “Two things. First, if you pull this off—that is, if you get Fenton and I to safety— you’ll have earned it and then some. I know what I’m asking won’t be easy, and I know it’s worth a lot more than I can offer.”

  “And the second?”

  Roon made a face somewhere between a smirk and a scowl. “Based on what you did to Fenton just to catch him, the last thing I want is to get either of us on your bad side.”

  “Fenton was not on my bad side. He was just a job.”

  “My point exactly.”

  “Ah.” Xenecia flashed a humorless smile, showing more teeth than mirth. “Very well. I shall take your fare.”

  They shook on it, Xenecia’s grip nearly grinding to dust the bones in Roon’s hand.

  “So, okay… now what?” Roon wondered.

  “Now, we think of a plan.”

  “We? Because I don’t think Fenton has a lot of time. When I went to visit him in sickbay this morning he was gone. Dr. Jen
ner wasn’t on duty and I didn’t ask anybody. I thought it would be better for him if I didn’t.”

  “Good thinking. And, yes, we. I will need your help as surely as you need mine if we are to pull this off.”

  “Okay.” Roon fussed with the hem of her jacket, suddenly looking a lot less composed. “Do you—do you think they’re torturing him?”

  “Almost certainly. All the more reason to do what needs to be done as quickly as possible.”

  Roon shivered, suppressing a frown at the thought. “I think I’m probably going to regret this, but what needs to be done?”

  “I am going to need a distraction.”

  “How big of a distraction?”

  “Big enough to buy me time to break into the ship’s armory and retrieve my mare’s leg.”

  The advocate woman looked nonplused by the statement, as if she knew the words but couldn’t place them in context based on their proper meaning.

  “My carbine,” Xenecia clarified. “A kind of shortened rifle, but modified. It is very valuable to me, as well as entirely necessary to ensuring our safety.”

  “Oh.” Roon’s mouth twisted around itself thoughtfully. “What about a fire?”

  “Not big enough. Shipboard suppression systems would take care of it.”

  “Oh. Hmm…” Fixing her hip, Roon glared down at the deck beneath her feet.

  “It needs to be something that will clear a large portion of the ship without provoking a large-scale physical response,” Xenecia explained further. “We will need the corridors as clear as possible if we are to properly manage this. We can minimize contact by means of a strategically plotted route, but the odds of going unchallenged, especially after we rescue your Fenton, are exceptionally slim. Small engagements will not present a problem, but if the entire crew becomes alert to our intent, there is virtually no chance of succeeding.”