The Recovery Man's Bargain

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “That you’re a hypochondriac.”

  “What?”

  “You got a headache when she started pounding. Then the canny woman mentions contaminants, which all ships have, and you go off the deep end. You put on that suit which, by the way, looks like it might have some integrity issues, and you go all over the ship looking for contamination, forgetting that the suit is probably contaminated from its contact with the hold.”

  Nafti looked down. The suit creaked as he did so, and Yu saw a rip along the neck.

  “I did carry the wrong cargo in the hold,” Yu said, “and I clearly didn’t double-check whether or not the bots were full. I thought they worked. Obviously they didn’t. But the ship is fine or we wouldn’t have been allowed in and out of the ports, especially the ports in the Earth Alliance.”

  Which wasn’t really true. He had dozens of ways to make sure his ship wasn’t thoroughly inspected.

  “Honestly?” Nafti sounded vulnerable.

  “Yes, honestly,” Yu said. “Remember that the holds have their own environmental systems. I showed you that when I hired you years ago. You asked about it.”

  Nafti reached up and removed the helmet. His face was covered with beads of sweat and his skin was red. Obviously the suit’s environmental system hadn’t worked properly either.

  Yu tapped a few areas on the security monitor, trying to get access to the medical lab.

  “I did ask, didn’t I?” Nafti said.

  “Yes,” Yu said.

  “I’m not a hypochondriac,” Nafti said.

  “Then what are you?”

  “A worrier.”

  “What would you have done if this entire ship were contaminated and I refused to pay for your medical help?” Yu asked.

  “It’s not, right?” Nafti asked.

  Yu ran his hand along the security board. “What did I just say?”

  “You said it wasn’t.”

  “Then maybe you should believe me,” Yu said, “and stop thinking about the authorities.”

  “I wasn’t,” Nafti said.

  “Deny that you would demand a full decontamination of the ship when we got to the next port,” Yu said.

  “It was only sensible if the ship’s contaminated.”

  Yu leaned forward. “Think, you dumbass. What happens when you get a full decon?”

  “The ship gets inspected….” Nafti’s voice trailed off. “Oh.”

  “Yeah, oh. Do you know how many unapproved systems I have on this ship?”

  “Is that why you’ve never had an inspection?”

  “What do you think?” Yu snapped.

  Nafti wiped at his face with his gloved hand. “Sorry.”

  “You should be,” Yu said. “When I hired you, I demanded your full trust. You violated that today.”

  “I got scared.”

  “I know.” Yu double-checked the security board a final time. “Take off the suit.”

  “I’m not sure I should.”

  “It’s got a rip in the back. It never worked right. We’ve got to destroy the thing.”

  Nafti reached around back, then stuck a gloved finger inside the rip and started. Apparently, he had touched his own skin. He cursed.

  “Next time, let me do the thinking, okay?” Yu said. “I didn’t hire you to think.”

  Nafti unhooked the front of the suit. The fasteners still worked. They opened themselves quickly once he started the sequence.

  “Sorry,” Nafti said again.

  He stepped out of the suit and left it in a pile near the navigation controls.

  “I need you to get back to work,” Yu said.

  “Can I go to my quarters first? I’d like to change.”

  And he’d probably shower and linger, making sure he hadn’t contracted anything from the flawed suit.

  “No,” Yu said. “Get to the medical lab.”

  “Why? They’re diagnosing her. She should be there for a while.”

  “She should,” Yu said, “and so far as I can tell, she still is.”

  “What do you mean so far as you can tell?”

  “The lab isolated itself.”

  “What does that mean, isolated itself?”

  “Maybe the three medical programs we just bought overloaded the system. That’s what I hope it means.”

  “You think she could’ve done something.”

  “I doubt it,” Yu lied.

  Nafti squared his shoulders. He looked reluctant to leave.

  “When you’re there,” Yu said, “you can have the medical system make sure you’re healthy, okay?”

  Nafti brightened. “Okay.”

  He kicked the suit aside and left the bridge.

  Yu summoned one of the cleaning bots, and gave it orders to pick up the suit and send it through the ship’s disintegration unit.

  Then he tried the security monitor again. Nothing. He couldn’t get through to the lab. He tried opening a back door and going at the lab from the basic part of the system. Still not possible.

  He might have to dismantle the system from the outside just to get to her.

  Yu sighed. That would be too much work.

  If she wasn’t out by the time they got to the rendezvous point, he would dismantle the system.

  Otherwise, he would wait to see if Nafti could bully his way inside.

  If anyone could do that, it would be his hypochondriac employee. Nafti was too scared to be denied access for long.

  ***

  Yu was beginning to panic.

  The medical lab had been on its own for almost an hour which was long enough for someone with hacking abilities to find links to the ship’s control panel.

  Yu had realized that about ten minutes ago and set the panel to respond only to his vocal and touch commands, hoping he wasn’t too late.

  Damn that woman. She was smarter than he had thought.

  And Nafti hadn’t contacted him, which Yu had thought he would. The moment Nafti had gotten a diagnosis from the medical personas, he should have told Yu. He would have told Yu.

  Which led Yu to believe that Nafti hadn’t gotten into the lab yet.

  Then the door to the bridge opened. Finally. He checked the controls and saw that the lab was still off-line.

  “Took you long enough to get here,” Yu said. “What’s she doing down there?”

  Something felt wrong. He couldn’t quite say what it was—a faint scent, a sound—but whatever it was, it made him turn.

  Just in time to avoid being jabbed with a hypo.

  The woman was in front of him, her hair falling across her face, her skin covered with reddish blisters, her eyes wild. She dropped the hypo and grabbed something from her belt.

  He reached for her.

  She slashed at him, and he yelped. Pain burned through his palm.

  She was holding a laser scalpel.

  He cursed and backed away. A laser scalpel was a close-up weapon. His hand was useless. His fingers ached, and two of them wouldn’t bend.

  She’d severed something.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked as he continued to back away. She came forward, the scalpel extended as if it were a knife.

  “Saving myself,” she said.

  “Where’s Nafti?”

  “In the medical bay,” she said. The tone of her voice was odd.

  Yu’s heart started to pound even harder. Nafti had confronted her, and he wasn’t here. Had she attacked him too?

  She lunged at Yu, and he moved to the right, grabbing her shirt with his left hand. More hypos fell onto the floor. She whirled, slashing with that vicious laser. It nicked his side—he felt the burn, knew it wasn’t as deep as the cut to his right hand.

  He had to do something, and quick.

  He yanked her toward him with the shirt, let go, and for a brief moment, thought she’d regain her balance. She didn’t. He grabbed her by the hair, and forced her head back.

  He shoved his foot into her knees, forcing her down. She slashed, getting a thig
h this time, and the wound brought tears to his eyes.

  He felt a moment of surprise—she might actually win this fight—and then he smashed her face into the side of the console.

  She went limp, but he didn’t trust it, so he smashed her face again. Then once more just because she had pissed him off.

  Stupid woman.

  He let go of her hair and she toppled.

  She didn’t move.

  He hadn’t expected that. He stood above her for a moment, catching his breath, feeling the ache from his various wounds.

  She had no training as a fighter. It would have shown up in her records.

  But then she’d had no computer training either that he’d known of and look at what she had done in the medical lab.

  The medical lab. Where she had gotten her weapons.

  Then somehow she had snuck up here without letting the computer know where she was, and nearly took over the bridge.

  Nearly took over his ship.

  He was shaking. She could have killed him.

  He collected the laser scalpel and its friends—she had hidden two more—as well as the hypos. He found cydoleen pills in her pocket and recognized them as extreme anti-toxins. He put those back. The medical personas had probably given them to her to help with the contamination.

  Then he searched the rest of her, finding two more scalpels—one against her ankle and another between her breasts.

  He set all the makeshift weapons aside, dragged her to a chair on the far side of the bridge and threw her in it. She listed to one side. She was covered in blood—and it looked like he had broken her nose.

  “Computer, lock her into zero-g position in Chair Six.”

  The chair closed around her, so that she couldn’t float. Zero-g position also kept her a prisoner, unable to move, unable to set herself free without the proper commands.

  Still, he made sure. This woman was smarter than he had given her credit for.

  “Release her on my command only.”

  The computer cheeped its affirmative.

  Her head lolled forward, hair covering her face.

  Yu studied her for an extra minute, stunned she had gotten so close.

  Then he examined his wounds.

  His thigh was cut open. She’d barely missed the artery. He would need some medical attention to close the wound properly, but that one wasn’t life-threatening.

  Neither was the wound on his side. He’d lost a chunk of skin, but nothing else. He didn’t know enough about his own internal anatomy to know if she’d gotten close to anything important.

  But his hand was an issue. He could see the bones and the connective tissue, some of it severed. The pain was exquisite.

  Repairing that might take more than three cheap medical programs and some bandages. He’d probably have to stop at some space dock, and have a real expert repair his hand.

  Or replace it.

  He shuddered, then he kicked Chair Six. The woman’s head lolled to the other side. Blood dripped from her nose. Yu’d done some damage of his own.

  He was pleased about that. He’d leave her untreated. She could feel the pain for a while.

  Behind him, the computer cooed. That was a different kind of alert, to let him know that whatever he’d been working on had succeeded.

  In this case, he’d been trying to get into the medical lab. The computer had finally broken through whatever she had set up.

  He turned to the nearest console, and saw images of the medical bay.

  Nafti was crumpled on the diagnostic table, clearly dead. None of the medical avatars had appeared around him. So much for state-of-the-art. Somehow Nafti had been murdered in the very place that should have saved his life.

  Dammit. Yu had liked Nafti, no matter how much of a worrier the man had been. The big dumb lug wouldn’t complain any more. He’d been so worried about dying from a disease that he probably hadn’t realized he was in more danger from the woman.

  Nafti had underestimated her.

  They both had.

  And Nafti had paid for it with his life.

  ***

  Yu limped to the medical lab. He thought about having the bots bring the medical supplies to him, but he wasn’t sure it was a good idea. The medical lab had been off-line and he wasn’t sure if Shindo had tampered with more than the security protocols.

  Maybe she had damaged the bandages or the medicine. He wanted to see for himself.

  And he had a hope—a tiny hope—that Nafti wasn’t dead, just unconscious. Or maybe even imprisoned, the way that Yu had imprisoned Shindo. Maybe she had somehow rigged up the cameras so that the image Yu saw of Nafti’s body was a false image.

  Yu had left her on the bridge, imprisoned in the zero-g chair. He’d also put a security bubble around her, so that she couldn’t wake up and start talking to the ship. No matter what she had rigged—if she had rigged anything—she wouldn’t be able to access it from inside that bubble.

  He was so light-headed by the time he reached the medical lab that he thought he was going to pass out. The lab’s door stood open, and he could see Nafti, sprawled on the diagnostic table, just like he had been in the image.

  Nafti’s eyes were closed, but his skin was an unhealthy shade of whitish blue. The diagnostics were running on the screen behind the table, and all of them read flat.

  Nafti was dead.

  Still, Yu touched his hand ever so lightly. The skin was cooler than it should have been. Nafti had been dead for some time.

  Yu stood over Nafti for a long moment. The man looked lonely in death. Lonely and terrified, even though the dead human face never held an expression.

  Yu clenched a fist. Damn Shindo. Killing Nafti like that. Cold-bloodedly. No wonder she had been able to kill the Gyonnese larvae, if humans meant so little to her.

  He touched Nafti’s hand one final time. “Sorry,” Yu whispered.

  And he was. As irritating as Nafti could be, Yu didn’t mean to get him killed.

  Black spots appeared in front of Yu’s vision. He was going to pass out soon if he didn’t do something.

  He scanned for a chair, and saw one not far from the diagnostic table.

  The rest of the lab looked like it was ready for use. He’d been expecting a war zone. Instead, he saw medications lined up on a nearby table, laser scalpels and bandages sticking out of drawers and a drug list cycling on a screen nearby.

  “I need assistance,” Yu said as he slumped into the chairs.

  A medical avatar appeared. It had the form of a woman. The avatar was carefully formed so that she wasn’t too tall or too thin. She had light tan skin and eyes which were rounded with a touch of angle at the edges. Her hair was a neutral brown, her eyes also brown, and her features spaced in that precise way that computer programmers thought average. The avatar wore a white smock over her brown slacks, and fake compassion filled her fake eyes.

  “What happened here?” she said.

  “Drop the patter and treat me,” he said.

  She examined his wounds, picking at the edges of each carefully. After a moment, she said, “None of your wounds are life-threatening. But you need more than a medical avatar for that hand. I can bandage it up, but I cannot make it useful.”

  “I just need it functional enough to get me to the next base,” he said, even though he wasn’t going to the next base. He was going to drop off Shindo and get the hell out of the sector. Then he would deal with the hand.

  “Understood,” the avatar said.

  She cleaned the hand and put some kind of disinfectant in it, shooting him up with all kinds of medicines that she explained as she worked.

  Finally, he said, “I don’t care what you’re doing. Just don’t tell me about it.”

  He didn’t even want to watch her work. If she did it wrong, she did it wrong. The doctors on whatever base he stopped on could fix the mistakes the avatar made.

  So Yu ordered up a visual of Nafti’s last moments. The poor guy seemed to have had no trouble get
ting into the lab. Shindo had been staring at the laser scalpels, probably planning to use them as a weapon. She had turned when the door opened.

  Nafti had looked like the patient, not her, despite the pustules forming on her face. He just looked frightened.

  He said, I thought we got medical programs.

  You did, she said. I turned them off.

  Why? The word was plaintive.

  Because they have no more training than I do, she said.

  “Stop playback,” Yu said. His stomach turned. That was how she had gotten Nafti onto the diagnostic tables. By pretending an expertise that she didn’t have.

  Or maybe she did have that expertise. She specialized in biology and chemistry after all.

  Yu looked at his hand, now carefully bandaged. The medical avatar was working on his leg.

  Shindo certainly seemed to have a lot of knowledge about where to damage him. He had been twisting away from her. If he had faced her, she might have sliced right through him.

  She was dangerous, more dangerous than the Gyonnese had led him to believe. She had seen Nafti’s weakness, exploited it to get him to trust her, and then she had killed him.

  Big, dumb bastard.

  “Hurry up,” Yu said to the medical avatar.

  He didn’t dare leave Shindo alone too long.

  ***

  He managed to make it to his cabin, clean up and change clothes long before Shindo opened her eyes. When he got back to the bridge, she was still unconscious. He took down the security bubble, made sure that the ship was still on course for the rendezvous, and then set about finding any modifications that Shindo had made to his ship’s systems.

  He had been working for an hour before she woke up.

  “I could have suffocated.” Shindo’s voice was nasally and thick. Her broken nose was making it difficult for her to talk.

  He turned away from the console and crossed his arms. The movement hurt, but he didn’t let her see that. He didn’t want her to know how badly she had injured him, although he figured she probably had a clue from the heal-it field bandages the avatar had placed on him.

  “You didn’t suffocate,” he said.

  Her face was black and blue, and so swollen that she barely looked human. But those eyes were the same. They flashed as they met his.