Gravlander

by Erik Wecks

  “I will be alert. Given what happened to the lab, I have already taken steps to isolate the data from the rest of my system.”

  “Thank you.” Jo couldn’t shake her anxiety that something was going to go horribly wrong—more than was already the case. What the fuck am I going to do about my research? How do I help now? “Computer, be advised that the escaped contaminant was able to move on its own and seems to have bored through the case of the lab. We need to make sure that it can’t escape from the OR.”

  The computer chirped its understanding.

  The whole lab lay nearly flat now, with only a few centimeters of air still to escape. Automatically, the whole room started to wrap itself into a cube with the now-destroyed lab in the center.

  Jo stood, still nervous. “You’re sure that the ceiling on that thing could filter out micro-viruses and things that small, right?”

  “Yes, the lab is designed to filter contaminates down to five pico-meters.”

  Jo sighed and nodded her head.

  “The lab is now secure,” said the computer. “I recommend immediate disposal in a safe environment.”

  Jo hurried forward and grabbed the lab, which now resembled a tightly wrapped package, only a couple of inches larger than the mobile lab it contained. Already moving toward the door, she commanded, “Heads-up, make me a map to the closest available airlock and display it!”

  Her heads-up chirped, and a bright yellow line painted the floor in front of her. Jo hadn’t really given any thought about what she would do if the Timcree tried to stop her. No matter what happened, she knew that she couldn’t take no for an answer. In just over forty-eight hours, the sample blood had converted itself into almost all nanites and had executed a plan to escape her lab. There was no besh in the galaxy that would let her accept leaving this dangerous stuff on board.

  Jo trotted out into the hall, deciding that if she moved quickly, no one would have a chance to react or try to stop her. When she reached the main room of the derelict they now inhabited, three of Kolas’s male companions sat there talking among themselves, including the one that had punched her on the day she had arrived on Korg Haran. She ran faster, bracing herself for their opposition.

  To her surprise, no one tried to stop her. In fact, they seemed more surprised to see her running than they did to see her go out the airlock.

  Just when I think I understand these people! Jo said to herself before turning her attention back to the package. When she picked it up, she thought the bottom corner seemed to be turning pink, indicating a breach. Now she was sure of it. The sample was penetrating the layers and layers of plastic between it and its freedom to infect those on Kolas’s ship. Jo ran in earnest.

  Her heads-up beeped, and a message flashed in front of her eyes.

  WARNING! Biohazard Containment Failing!

  No shit! Jo thought. Lungs burning, Jo came around the corridor and almost ran headfirst into a very tall Timcree, who barked something at her she didn’t understand. He didn’t sound happy.

  Jo didn’t care. Halfway down the corridor, the bright yellow line stopped in front of a door. Jo palmed the lock, and the door opened to let her in. Jo threw the cube into the middle of the small room and then shut the door again. Looking at the controls, it took Jo a minute to understand what buttons to use to accomplish her task. She looked inside the door as a red light started to flash, and a warning chime sounded in the hallway.

  And then she saw it. A grayish thread swirling its way out of the top of the biohazard container, twisting in the wind like a vine looking for something to grab, or a worm feeling around outside its rotten home. With a whoosh, it all disappeared into the vacuum of space.

  Jo sat down for a moment in the hallway and tried to breathe.

  Her heads-up pinged her. “I have the results of the last set of tests by the AI.”

  Jo didn’t answer. Now that the threat was over, she felt like crying. She’d just flushed into space her best chance of stopping the Timcree plague.

  When she didn’t respond, the heads-up continued. “Data has been retrieved from the lab. Successful treatment for the infectant has been found.”

  Jo frowned, too whiplashed to hope. “I thought I just airlocked the damn thing?”

  “That was only part of the sample. The remaining third was successfully neutralized just after it escaped containment.”

  Jo pushed off the ground and stood up. “Show me.”

  Tanith began giving willing patients nanite treatments a few days later. At first, there were only a small handful who would take the hize’s medicine. Even when the first few patients seemed to miraculously recover, most still held out. The story of the girl that the witch killed spread far and wide.

  By that point, Timcree society seemed on the brink of something scary. It wasn’t uncommon for anyone who was the least bit sick to be abandoned somewhere. Bodies had started to stack up, as no one would touch them for fear that they, too, might be struck down.

  After the disease turned her own blood sample into a moving gray blob that tried to attack her, Jo’s couldn’t say that she disagreed any longer. One night she dreamed that all the bodies of the dead suddenly stood up and wandered the halls of Korg Haran, trailing a gray ooze that infected all it touched. She’d woken screaming.

  There was one grizzly moment when Jo turned a corner while heading back from the isolation ward and came upon a bloated, stinking body being gnawed apart by a group of rats. Having no other way to get home, Jo had no choice but to rush past, holding her breath.

  I’ve got to do something about the bodies! she thought, but it would be several more days before an opportunity presented itself.

  The day after she had first run into it, the bloated body had mysteriously disappeared, but its waft still left a tang in the air. Jo guessed that Tanith or someone had sent one of the younger Timcree in Kolas’s household to take care of it. At first Jo shivered each time she walked past the spot, but after awhile she hardly noticed. In the face of the grim reality around her, her emotions were like distant echoes.

  The first crack in the Timcree fear came about a week after the initial treatments. Jo was working behind the bronze glass when a young Timcree male walked into their makeshift clinic and, instead of waiting placidly for Tanith, walked right up to the mirror and started talking in Kree. By this time, Jo was getting some handle on conversational Kree, but the window was too thick for his voice to carry through. Tanith was on the other side of the room with his visor-cam mic pointed in the wrong direction, but she did have some knowledge of the control panel in front of her. It took her only a moment to turn on the internal speakers.

  “Hize! Hize! You are not a bad hize. Give me your medicine, or I will die.” The scary part for Jo was that the young man didn’t look sick at all. In fact, he looked rather healthy. He just seemed frightened. His yelling attracted Tanith’s attention, and the young Timcree medic rushed across the room.

  “Shush. Shush,” he hissed. “You will wake the patients. Please be calm.”

  Jo had to smile at Tanith’s gentle bedside manner. The Athenian military would have ground that into a pulp.

  As she watched Tanith, an idea occurred to her. She whispered into Tanith’s ear. “Tell him that I will give him the medicine, but he must promise to do what I say.”

  It was a measure of the trust that had grown between Josephine and Tanith that he repeated her words without question.

  “If I give him medicine, he must take all the bodies to the airlocks and put them into space. He will be unclean with besh, but that will happen anyway if I give him medicine. Tell him not to be afraid. The medicine I give him will protect him from the dead.”

  Jo chuckled cynically to herself. If I’m going to be a witch, I might as well use my power for good.

  In the last few days, the bodies had been an obsession for Jo. Especially after the one being eaten by the rats. Decomposition brought with it other problems, but Jo was most concerned that the infectant
would escape into the environment, only to appear again later. Jo already had to assume that the rats of Korg Haran were now carrying the Unity disease factories in their own blood and tissues. Jo could only hope that the infectant factory wasn’t smart enough to see the difference between the rat and a Timcree, in which case the rats might also die and solve the problem, but she didn’t hold out much hope, considering that the disease seemed to be able to distinguish between human and Timcree DNA.

  She was half surprised when the young man agreed that the price for her medicine was fair, but she was shocked when he returned with six more healthy young men later in the day who all agreed to the same bargain. Jo didn’t hesitate. Considering the nature of the infectant, Jo needed to inoculate anyone who agreed to deal with the bodies. Fear—and reasonable fear at that—had given her the volunteers she needed.

  Tanith was just finishing up the last inoculation when Jo realized that she had a problem.

  She had no guarantee that the young male Timcree would follow through with their promises. In fact, she had no doubt that it would be considered almost heroic to weasel out of the besh by cheating the Gravlander witch out of her medicine by not doing what she made them promise to do. They would be, in essence, stealing from the Gravlander.

  Jo felt her cheeks redden. Now that the thought had occurred to her, she felt sure that this was exactly what was taking place. She could even see the high chin, straight back, and squared shoulders that she was learning to read as a Timcree sense of pride. That didn’t make sense at all if a Timcree were about to agree to take on a deep bit of besh. Now she was sure that she was being had.

  The last Timcree had just finished his injection when Jo—thinking fast—spoke up. “Tanith, tell them all to wait.”

  Tanith called them all to a halt, telling them in Kree that the hize had a message for them. Even Jo could hear the emphasis that he put on the word hize, and Jo wondered if he knew what she was thinking. Mind racing, Jo chose her words carefully. Her first thought was to lie and tell them that she could read their thoughts and that she would know if they weren’t going to follow through on their promise, but in the end she decided that the truth would be almost as effective. She told them that she knew how to talk to the medicine in their body, and that she could, at any moment in time, turn off their protection from the plague. Her tablet would allow her to do both.

  She wasn’t at all sure that she meant the next part, but she made it sound as truthful as she could. “If you don’t follow through and take care of the bodies in all the hallways, I will know, and when I see them, I will turn off your medicine and let you get sick.”

  Even as she talked, Tanith was already translating for her. Jo could hear the flat tone with which he spoke. It sounded very much like one of his chanted prayers. When she saw one of Timcree boys start to shake, she knew that the effect had been to turn her warning into a kind of spell or curse. She knew that the young Timcree would do exactly what she asked.

  Taking off her visor-cam, Jo flopped back into a chair and laughed.

  That couldn’t have gone better if I’d planned it. Now if I can just cast a spell to force someone to hunt down all the rats carrying the disease.

  Sometime later, she and Tanith wandered back home from the isolation ward, leaving some of the younger clan women to tend the sick overnight.

  Tanith looked at her sideways as they walked.

  Jo answered the look with her best Kree. “What?”

  Tanith answered in his native tongue. “You’re summiche.”

  “What is summiche?”

  Tanith continued in Kree. “I don’t know the English word. How do you say singing with your lips closed?”

  “Oh. We say humming.”

  “Okay. You’re humning.”

  Jo laughed at Tanith’s mispronunciation. “I guess I am. I was happy with the ‘hex’ we put on the young men today.”

  Tanith nodded thoughtfully. “Did you mean it?”

  “Mean what?”

  “The part about turning off nanites if they not do as you wished.”

  “No.”

  “I thought not.” Tanith didn’t share Jo’s mirth, but that wasn’t so unusual. Jo didn’t think anything of it.

  Having had it pointed out, Jo decided not to continue her “humning.” The Timcree seemed to have an infinite respect for silence.

  “We Timcree have a saying, you know.”

  “Yes?”

  “Shame given once, comes back twice. It was a powerful spell.”

  “But it wasn’t real, Tanith. I didn’t do any magic.”

  “That isn’t true, Meeta. You used powerful magic. The fear of the Gravlander and what they can do to us is the most powerful magic a Timcree knows.”

  Jo wasn’t ready to have her good mood spoiled by another dour Timcree moment. “Well, that’s okay by me, as long as it gets the bodies cleaned up so that there isn’t any more danger to the Kree.”

  Tanith frowned. “If that’s what you believe, Josephine, you have little understanding of our ways or the reasons behind them.”

  Six weeks after the first treatment, Jo found herself hunched over her tablet in the control center, watching carefully as her nanites worked out another case of the disease for an elderly Timcree man who had arrived just a few hours before. He was one of four patients in the ward. One of them, a Timcree woman from Kolas’s clan in her early twenties, had arrived shortly before the old man. She was sleeping comfortably, giving her body a chance to recover from its rather difficult ordeal over the last forty-eight hours.

  She was the first case of the disease in a healthy non-geriatric adult in six days. The other two patients were also young Timcree women, but they remained very ill. For these two, an immune disorder that Jo had yet to discover left them compromised and particularly vulnerable to the infectant. Jo was using the immuno-support functions of the nanites to keep them alive. Even so, their situation remained touch and go. If things went right, they might go home in a few days, but that outcome was far from certain.

  Overall, the weeks since treating the group of young men had passed in an unfocused fog of nanite sneak attacks, frontal assaults, and suicide missions, all contained in the dark corners of Timcree flesh. Specific memories of her command decisions were hard to distinguish for Jo, who found herself curled up in the perpetual glare of her tablet for long hours each day. Jo sat up and stretched. The old man would recover.

  The war wasn’t over. There was still a danger that a flareup among those holding out against the hize could endanger the whole community, but for now it felt like a mop-up operation. Jo was never sure exactly why, but it seemed to her that somehow her treatment of the young men had been a turning point. There was a chance that it was all coincidence, but Jo suspected that her willingness to make a “wicked” deal with the Timcree—in essence, to fulfill her role as a witch—had made her more predictable and safe.

  In a moment of honesty, Jo realized that thought angered her. She had come here to help, to serve, and still the Timcree couldn’t see her as anything other than hize. She had no idea how long it would take for them to finally accept her, but she was determined to stay until that happened. She wasn’t going anywhere until the Timcree were grateful that she was here.

  Jo stepped away from the window for a moment and paced back and forth across the long room. She had no idea how much she had slept recently, but it wasn’t nearly enough. Last night she’d had her first extended sleep—more than four hours—in at least two weeks.

  Until that moment, she’d been entertaining the idea that she might go back to the Ghost Fleet sometime reasonably soon, but now that didn’t seem right. She had a job to finish. If she was supposed to be the ambassador between the Ghost Fleet and the Timcree, then she couldn’t leave until she would be welcome back when the fleet asked her to do so. She had to find a way to be accepted here.

  She was just turning around at the far end of the long chamber when one of the young women from the Kolas
clan burst into the room. Jo recognized Oultia, the young woman that Jo suspected of carrying on with Tanith, though she couldn’t prove that. Somewhere in the last few weeks, her own relationship with the woman had warmed. For whatever reason, Oultia no longer found Jo to be a threat.

  “Gravlander, you have to come! The baby is coming! Zonezah, her baby is coming!”

  Jo perked up at this. There had been a spate of miscarriages that coincided with the rise of the plague.

  Without an exam, Jo had no idea if the baby was near term. Zonezah wasn’t exactly a small woman, even by taller Timcree standards. However, to Jo’s trained but unpracticed eye, she didn’t carry the baby as if she was full-term by human standards. On the other hand, Jo had no idea if forty weeks was a good measure of a full-term Timcree infant and no idea how many weeks along Zonezah might be.

  Oultia ducked back out of the room, probably to tell Tanith.

  Jo had no illusions that she would be allowed near the birth. Zonezah had flatly refused all help from the Gravlander. In fact, she hadn’t warmed at all toward Jo. Jo even wondered if her more welcome status with the rest of the clan resulted from the hardness of the matriarch. One of the nightmare scenarios for Jo was a sick or dying infant, with Zonezah refusing to let her treat it.

  Setting up her heads-up to warn her if anything changed with her patients, Jo returned to the Kolas household and held vigil with the rest of the clan. Large numbers of people shuffled in and out of the room with Zonezah, at least until things began to get serious toward the end. Jo kept her distance. She had no intention of being anywhere nearby if something started to go wrong. Late in the process—probably somewhere in transition—the men were shunted out to Jo. Together they waited while Zonezah wailed her distress. This didn’t seem to faze the men at all, except perhaps Kolas, who appeared even more stoic than usual, if that were possible. One of the younger men even commented on the strength of her cry.

  In contrast, every cry made Jo wince. She knew that she ought to be in there. She wanted to be in there. Even though she had only participated in a handful of births as part of her training, she had the expertise, and she couldn’t share the men’s apparent laissez-faire attitude.