by KATHY OLTION
“Not yet. We got some unusual readings at first, but now diagnostics reveal nothing wrong. Reynold seems to have recovered on his own, but the case was unusual enough that I wanted to check with you in case I’ve missed something.”
The name made McCoy sit up even straighter. “Reynold? Reynold Coates? Lilian’s boy?”
“That’s the one.”
“I’ll be right there. McCoy out.” He snapped his communicator shut, and with a heavy sigh rolled out of the hammock. His julep glass sat in the grass, beads of moisture grown heavy on its sides. He picked it up, took one more small sip of the sweet iced whiskey, then dropped it in the recycler on his way out of the park. He promised himself that he’d throw his communicator away next time he came here, just so he could enjoy his next mint julep to the end.
Neville had been right, though. This was one situation he wanted to see for himself.
Over the duration of this interminable mission, he’d had ample time to get acquainted with most of the colony’s members, but few of them had impressed him as much as Reynold Coates and his mother. In many ways Reynold was a typical ten-year-old boy, full of curiosity and spunk, but after his father was killed in an ambush during the journey to Belle Terre, he had been forced into a much more adult role than most kids his age. Lilian possessed a true pioneer’s spirit and determination, carrying on after her husband’s death without complaint, but raising a son on her own was a tough job even with a boy like Reynold. Her family’s dreams had been shattered during that one tragic moment in space, and McCoy wasn’t about to let some errant meteor deal them any more problems.
He could see the hospital’s flat roof from where he stood. Governor Pardonnet had ordered that each of the major settlements on Belle Terre should build their medical center close to the middle of town, figuring it should be near as many people as possible. There was a transporter on site, but you couldn’t always count on a transporter working when you needed it, especially here. For ten hours of every thirty, a stellar phenomenon called Gamma Night disrupted the signal so badly you couldn’t transport a jug of water a quarter mile. The source of the interference was a neutron star orbiting a black hole a few light-years away and spraying a beam of charged particles into the Belle Terre system with each revolution, but knowing the source didn’t help shield against it.
Nor did it improve McCoy’s skepticism about transporters in general. He had never liked having his body converted to energy and squirted through space, but having it done unreliably held no attraction whatsoever.
Fortunately, there were other means of transportation. Most colonists traveled by foot or bicycle, or even horseback, especially if they were homesteading in the green rolling hills. It wasn’t so much because of the Gamma Night, either. The colonists’ intentions had always included a simpler, more peaceful lifestyle. McCoy applauded their efforts and walked as much as he could. But just now he needed to get to the hospital faster than his feet could take him, so he opted to use one of the colony’s publicly owned bicycles. They were scattered all through town, three or four of them on average in every bicycle rack. It was easy to tell which bikes were public ones by the eye-burningly bright yellow paint. Nobody in their right mind would own a bike that color, which was exactly why they had been painted that way. Despite their prevalence at every street corner, nobody ever stole them.
Nobody ever maintained them either, it seemed. He had to reject two with flat tires before he found one in good working order, and its seat was stuck in the lowest position. He shrugged and climbed aboard anyway. It was all downhill from here; as long as he was just coasting he could scrunch up.
The road followed the brook that trickled out of the foothills into the lake. McCoy loved to feel the wind in his hair and listen to the water splashing over rocks beside him as he rode into town. The vegetation on the hillsides was green again, recovering nicely from the explosion on the planet’s moon that had flash-burned the entire continent shortly after the colonists arrived. The weather had settled down to the point where a person could count on it for days at a time, and people were outside enjoying it.
McCoy smiled and waved at them on his way past, and they returned his greeting with friendly “hellos” and waves of their own. He felt just like a local, and it suddenly occurred to him that he was a local. He’d been here just as long as anyone. The Enterprise had escorted the colonists out here from Earth, and ongoing problems had kept the ship attached to the colony ever since. McCoy had been treating the situation like a temporary assignment, but it had been over a year now and there was no sign that they would be leaving anytime soon. This was as much a home as he had experienced since joining Starfleet.
He found that thought both comforting and disquieting. A whole year of his career spent guarding a single colony from hostile natives. No wonder he wanted Dr. Neville to fill his own shoes as chief medical officer.
He found the doctor and his young patient in a small exam room near the back of the hospital. Even before he entered, he could hear Dr. Neville asking Reynold for more details about his swim in the lake. Reynold was a good kid, but he was still ten years old, and now that he was feeling fine again his attention span was definitely reaching its limits.
“Afternoon, Dr. Neville. Hello there, Reynold,” McCoy said as he stepped into the room.
“Hi, Dr. McCoy,” Reynold said. He sat on the examination bench, shirtless, his bare feet swinging back and forth. His thick dark hair, cut short enough to stay out of his eyes, stuck up at odd angles from his head, a result of his interrupted swim in the lake.
“Doctor, I’m glad you could come,” Neville said as he stood to shake McCoy’s hand. He was a tall, slender man, just as his voice might lead one to imagine. His hands were long and thin, but his grip was firm. A good sign that he could hold his surgical tools with fine control.
“Yes. Well, Reynold, I hear you were feeling kind of punk a little bit ago,” McCoy said. He sat down on a stool in front of the boy.
“Yes, sir. I’m feeling better now, though.”
McCoy waved his own tricorder across Reynold’s body and studied the results. “That’s what my instruments tell me, too.” He smiled, then said, “Dr. Neville said you were swimming in Lake Lytle when something fell into the lake and you went after it.”
“That’s right.”
“Did you manage to retrieve whatever it was?”
“No, sir. I didn’t even get close to it before my head started hurting.” Reynold looked up at the clock on the wall and said, “Is it okay if I leave? Mom’s expecting me to finish my chores before dinner.”
“Oh no you don’t,” McCoy said sternly. “I notice you carefully avoided saying that you would be going straight home to do those chores. I don’t want you going back to that lake until we’ve found what made you sick.” He turned to Neville. “Anybody else, either. Is anyone down there checking it out?”
“Er . . . not yet,” said Neville.
“Get someone on it. Reynold, can you show them where it landed?”
“Yes, sir!” said the boy, even more excited to be included in an official search than to do it on his own.
Dr. Neville nodded. “Very well. I called your mother when you first got here, so she should be here any minute to pick you up. I’ll ask her to take you back by the lake, and I’ll send a science team down to meet you there. Don’t go in the water again! Understood?”
“Yes, sir.” Reynold squirmed uncomfortably on the exam table, then said, “And thanks for calling my mom, but I didn’t want her to get worried. Especially since I’m better now.”
“I’m sure she’ll want to know what happened, even so. And I didn’t want you walking home alone, in case you started feeling bad again.”
“Yes, sir. It’s just . . . well, I don’t—”
“Dr. Neville’s right,” Lilian Coates said. She stood in the doorway, her eyes moving from person to person in the room, assessing her son’s physical well-being by the doctors’ stance as well as his
own appearance. Her shoulder-length blonde hair had been swept up into a ponytail held in place by a blue kerchief, and she wore a cotton workshirt and a pair of jeans, the knees of which still had rich, brown soil caked on them. She must have been working in her garden when she got the call that her son was at the hospital.
She stepped into the room and smiled at both of the men as they stood, but her first words were for Reynold. “You look fine now, but until we know what made you sick in the first place I want to keep an eye on you. Doctors? Do you have any more information than when you called?”
“I’m afraid not,” said McCoy.
“But we’re looking for the meteor,” Neville added quickly. “That may tell us something.”
“They want me to show the search team where it landed,” Reynold said, his voice filled with pride.
“Is it okay for him to go back there?” she asked.
Dr. Neville looked at McCoy, but McCoy waited for him to answer. Reynold was his patient. At last Neville said, “We think so, but the cause of his sudden illness is still unknown. If you don’t want him to go, that’s understandable.”
She ran a hand through her hair, loosening a strand from her ponytail. “Of course I don’t want him to, but I suppose he should. The sooner we find out what happened, the better we’ll all feel.”
McCoy agreed wholeheartedly. There was nothing he hated quite so much as an unknown pathogen loose in a population he was supposed to keep healthy. The stream that fed Lake Lytle also provided the town’s water; if something happened to that, everyone could be in trouble in a big hurry.
“Thank you,” he said. “We’ll check back with you tonight.”
Reynold jumped off the table and headed for the door, pulling his mother behind him in his eagerness to go help the search team. As they receded down the hallway, his voice echoed off the walls: “You should’ve seen it, Ma. It made a splash that went halfway across the lake!”
Both men looked at the empty doorway a moment or two longer, then McCoy turned back to Neville. “Well. Don’t just sit there with your teeth in your mouth. Show me the readings you got earlier from this ‘space pathogen.’ ”
Chapter Three
DELORIC WAVED his fellow Kauld workers aside, aimed his energy pick at the comet’s surface, and drew its disruptor tip in a line down the face of the ice wall in front of him. Chips of frozen carbon dioxide flew past him, flashing white in the beam of his helmet light for just a second as they shot out of the crevice, propelled by the vaporized material in the direct path of the disruptor. He tried to hold it steady, carving a straight line an arm’s span away from the last cut and defining a block about the size of a coffin standing on end—a block just like the hundreds of others he and the two others in his mining team had already sliced free today.
Join the fleet, see the universe! He snorted at the thought. So far, all he’d seen was the operator’s end of a lot of hand tools. He was the foreman of his team, but that only meant he had responsibility as well as hard work to deal with. What a joke! If he’d wanted to be a miner, he could have stayed back home, made twice the pay, and had a comfortable bed to sleep in at the end of the day.
Instead here he was, anchored to this dirty travelling dry-ice cube, carving it up and sending the pieces off to make a chain out in the middle of empty space. There were dozens of other teams doing the same thing, enough to create a steady stream of ice blocks stretching off into infinity.
He gave the dirty white chunk before him a kick, thankful for the gravity boots that kept him from flying off into space himself, but he failed to dislodge it.
Terwolan’s voice hissed in his ear through his helmet’s intercom. “You missed a spot.”
She was standing atop the block. He looked up, his light sliding up her legs and across her spacesuited body until he could see her arm pointing into the crack he had just cut. He peered back into the crevice. Sure enough, his pick hadn’t reached deep enough to finish the job. He checked the recharge light on the handle. It was going to take another half a minute to come up to full power.
“Get the directional jets attached while we’re waiting,” he ordered her. She and Nialerad, the third miner in the team, moved to the task, and he took the moment to back away from the ice face and look up. There wasn’t much nearby; they were five light-days away from the nearest star—forty times as distant as its farthest planet—which made the view all the more breathtaking. The velvety blackness of space was interrupted only by the glittering sprinkle of jeweled stars. This, he reminded himself, was why he had joined the fleet, not for the heroics or—
“Hey, dreamer! Wake up! Your pick’s charged, let’s get on with this!”
—or the drudgework. The others had finished their job; the jets were in place, screwed directly into the carbon-dioxide ice. Deloric aimed the pick again and fired into the offending crack. It took two more passes before the block broke loose.
“Stand clear!” Terwolan called. The control unit blinked with red and blue status indicators in the palm of her gloved hand. Deloric and Nialerad backed carefully away from the slowly tumbling cube they’d created while she triggered the command that would send the ice block to join the others.
With a flash of white light from the tail ends of the jets, it oriented itself and sailed away. All three miners watched as it set out on its journey: Terwolan to be sure that she’d programmed the jets correctly, Deloric because it was the sign of a job well done—not to mention that it was a beautiful sight. He could only guess at what Nialerad thought. He wasn’t the talkative sort.
They allowed themselves those few moments of rest, but their orders were explicit: keep slicing up this dirty ice ball and sending the pieces to their new coordinates until they were told to stop. Even before the block they had just released grew too small to see, Deloric said, “All right, let’s get back to it.”
The crew started working on the next block in line. They had already removed the comet’s irregular surface, and were now peeling it a layer at a time, spiraling their way from the sunward point to the terminator. Deloric couldn’t help but wonder what was going on, but he knew enough not to ask the reasons for their assignments. He might be a dreamer, but he was no fool. His job was to do what he was told, no questions asked. All the same, it was intriguing, all this activity. Though what made it even more intriguing was the added order not to go to the other side of the comet. What? Was the ice over on that side inferior? If ever there was a way to raise curiosity, it was to issue an order like that.
It was all he could do not to discuss it with his crewmates. He’d worked with them for weeks now, but he didn’t know them, not like that anyway. Some people thought it subversive to speculate on the reason for any order. They might report such speculations to a higher authority, and nobody wanted that to happen. A soldier true to the cause didn’t question orders. Not everyone felt that way, he hoped, but enough did to keep everyone’s mouth quiet.
It wasn’t enough to keep his mind from running through the possibilities while he worked at liberating the new piece of ice, and the piece after that, and the one after that. He knew this star system: it was the one that held the olivium moon mine. All of the Kauld efforts of late had been attempts to reclaim the moon from the invaders. So far all their attempts had failed, but that was something else good soldiers never discussed.
Deloric wasn’t a scientist, so the finer aspects of what the olivium was good for were lost on him, but the bottom line was clear. It would give great power to whoever controlled it. That was all he needed to know in order to understand his leaders’ motivation. And when they wrested the moon free from the humans, he would no doubt have a new job: mining olivium.
He needed to make a clean break. Do something heroic and get promoted, or do something stupid and get kicked out of the fleet, but this was a dead end. He had better things to do with his life than wield an energy pick. He wanted to help crew a scout ship, seeing strange new worlds and meeting exotic new aliens. He ha
d heard stories of blue-skinned Andorians with antennae on their heads, green-skinned Orions whose women were reputed to be the most alluring in the galaxy, and other beings without even bodies in the normal sense.
He imagined himself as an ambassador to new races, learning how to cooperate rather than fight with them. That would be far more difficult than mining comets, but far more rewarding. He could see himself, Deloric the Great in his elder years, dispensing the wisdom of a long, exciting life to young new recruits about to embark on their own voyages into the vastness of space. That was the life for him!
“Twenty minutes to nighttime,” Terwolan announced.
He looked up. They had worked nearly a third of the way around the comet. The relief crew would be here shortly, so that Deloric’s crew could leave and get back to the bunk ship before the Blind made navigating between the comet and the ship too dangerous to attempt. He was glad that someone kept tabs on things like the time. Once he got into a job, he just kept at it until it was finished. That was no doubt why he had been made foreman, but it probably irritated his crew, who didn’t seem to have his daydreams to keep their minds occupied while their bodies were providing cheap labor for the cause.
He packed up his tools and watched as the shuttle deposited the next batch of workers. The commander had forbidden any energy use that could be detected from within the star system, so all travel was to be done by rocket—chemical rockets at that!—and all communications kept to minimal power, detectable only within a few light-seconds.
He stole one more look at the space around him. He couldn’t see the pearly string of comet chunks, but he knew where they were. And he knew what they were aimed at. It was just a point in space a few light-minutes to the side of the sun at the moment, but in fifteen days Belle Terre, the world around which the olivium moon orbited, would sweep through that spot.
