by P H Campbell
"Wow, I'm drunk enough to be turned on by that," Ash admitted.
"Should we get you two a room?" Sasha asked.
"Only if you both come in with us," Ash replied with a grin. "I know Seren's not Mom, but any woman who can cum just from having her nipples sucked on alone will be fun to have sex with."
"I'm game," Seren agreed.
The rest of the evening went more or less uphill from there, leaving all four exhausted, sweaty and with goofy, satisfied grins on their faces and very tender, but fulfilled, sex parts. They dispelled the hangover with a pill, and Seren decided there were definite advantages to contact with advanced outside civilizations.
CHAPTER 4
The following day, Seren and Sasha helped deal with the alcohol overdose all of them experienced from the previous night. Fortunately, despite lowered inhibitions the night before and the return of rational thought the next day, the four had no regrets, and fond, if hazy, memories of the previous night.
The comm chimed as Ash was getting her hangover treatment.
"Hi dear," Cinder said, then looked at the way her daughter's ears were canted and asked, "Long night?"
"It was a kind of celebration," Ash told her as the restorative was began to take effect.
"A celebration of…?" Cinder probed.
"We've treated about half of the sick, and have the least sick half to go," Ash informed her mother.
"How did you manage that?" Cinder asked. "You've got a prospector ship, not a medical ship."
"We had the idea that maybe the ships have built in ways to keep bad bugs from hitching a ride from planet to planet," Ash explained. "Ours does. We've been bringing people through the hatch and back out for almost a week."
"So, we're completely not needed?" Cinder asked.
"Hi, Cinder, is it?" Sasha interjected as she entered the field of view. "I'm Doctor Sasha Wilson, director of the medical division dealing with the crisis. Believe me when I say we definitely still need help. We still have a hundred thousand very ill kids who need treatment for secondary complications because of the virus. We're keeping them stable for now, but we had to hook up power from this ship to make sure they all get treatment. And we're way too concentrated here to do much more than keep them stable. So any help you can give in that is still vital, otherwise, although we're not losing anyone to the disease anymore, they're still not out of danger."
"I understand, Doctor Wilson," Cinder agreed, noticing that this Doctor Wilson was looking at her with an odd expression. "From what Ash told me, I expect I must speak to a woman named Seren about the logistics. I was just calling my girls to get an idea of the status of things now."
"She's here, Cinder," Sasha assured the woman.
"I'll call her," Ash volunteered, issued the summons through the comm system.
"I think you should know, Seren and you look a lot alike," Sasha remarked to Cinder.
"Ash said as much when we last talked," Cinder confessed. "Maybe we can run a genetic scan and see if we're related once we have the time for that."
"It would be an enormous coincidence if you were," Sasha mentioned.
"I never knew my real family, so it'd be nice to have a family tie to someone still alive," Cinder replied, then added, "present daughters included, of course."
"Thanks, Mom," Looie stuck her tongue out at her.
A moment later, Seren came into view.
"You must be Cinder," Seren remarked, seeing a mostly familiar, if somewhat older, face on the view-screen. "I'm Seren. I'm in charge of dealing with the crisis. I take it you're in orbit?"
"And looking for a place to land," Cinder nodded, realizing that her daughters were right. Except for the distinct cleft in her chin, and the color of her hair and eyes, the two women could be age-separated twins.
"We don't have a lot of space topside for spaceships, unless you can clear an area to land yourself," Seren confessed. "Until a few years ago, living openly on the surface wasn't much of an option, and the cities don't have large tracts of land where a spaceship the size of this one can just drop in for a visit without bending a lot of trees, or getting hung up on uneven ground."
"The coastlines seem to be relatively open…" Cinder suggested.
"Do not, under any circumstances, land within two kilometers of the oceans," Seren warned her. "There are very large oceanic life forms that will eat your ships."
"How large is large?" Cinder wondered.
"I measured one of them at five kilometers long," Ash confirmed the size issue. "We noticed them when we were scanning the planet."
"That's… impressively huge," Cinder agreed. "Other than the coastlines, there's pretty much only forest, except for a large clear area on the western side…"
"If it's circular, it's a burial ground," Seren told her. "It's highly radioactive. You'd be safe on the ship, but you don't want to walk around on it for very long."
"What's buried there?" Cinder asked.
"A couple hundred thousand of the colonists killed by high-level radiation thousands of years ago," Seren replied.
"Ash mentioned that something compromised the ecology on your planet," Cinder remarked. "I take it that this radiation thing did that?"
"Yes, but that's not what we're dealing with now," Seren confirmed.
"Alright, so what do you need from us right now?" Cinder asked.
"Our immediate needs are tending to the critically ill," Seren replied. "Most of them are disease free, but the secondary effects, mostly pneumonia and organ failure, still have to be treated. We're also seeing lag times in getting people from where they are to here for treatment and sending back the ones who can pick up where they left off. We don't see many of the most critical going through anymore, but some may still be out there, having trouble getting here."
"If we can treat them where they are, and don't need more care, would that help?" Cinder asked. "I can send down a relatively small shuttle with supplies and techs to help you with your critically ill, but if there are other critically ill people out there, we should be able to find them and bring them and bring them to your site."
"That's a good start, but they'll have to coordinate with the locals, and they don't generally speak English," Seren knew. "You'll need a translation device."
"We have Methmen," Cinder told her. "As long as the species is one they've communicated with before, we can understand them, and they'll understand us once the computers get a translation program going. That shouldn't take long. We've been listening to the radio traffic since we got here and priming it with information taken from that."
"Be careful, though," Seren urged. "The people you'll be dealing with are not very tolerant of others who don't look mostly like they do – Humans being the only exception at the moment. If they look like Looie, who she said was a Humonian, and can do mindspeech, then that may be safer for your people."
"Thanks for that heads up," Cinder nodded. "Between the translation program and the Methmen and Humonians, we should be able to talk to people without getting lynched."
"Most of The World knows about the help from the stars," Seren mentioned. "If your people make it clear that's who they are, it may help keep animosity to a minimum."
"I'll pass that along," Cinder agreed. "Anything else you need?"
"I think we can handle the crowd control, as long as we have help with the most critical," Seren decided. "We had to co-opt people from crowd control order to keep people alive. Give us a day to move out enough people for your ship to land and please be sure to land in the designated zones. Most of the Borderlands here are full of tunnels and caverns, so if your ships are too heavy, they could collapse them, and kill a lot of people underground."
"Landing a ship on an unknown planet is always done with full scanner readings," Cinder assured her. "We won't be breaking anything when we come in.
"Let us know when you're ready for the main ship to land. In the meantime, I'll get techs and gear to you, and arrange for a comprehensive search for ill surviv
ors out and away from the population centers."
"That sounds great," Seren smiled.
Cinder was about to sign off when someone off-screen caught her attention. Seren didn't know what they said, but Cinder didn't leave her wondering for long.
"Well, it seems the United Galactic Worlds sent a ship after all," Cinder told her. "I've just been told we detected an H-Space breakout, we're talking to a UGW medical frigate. That would be a small ship that handles medical emergencies. Considering what I passed along, I'd have thought they'd have sent something bigger."
"They're calling us," Ash reported.
"I'll talk with you when you're ready," Cinder said to Seren, and disconnected.
"Let's talk to the other guys," Seren suggested to Ash.
The woman who appeared on the screen could have given Looie a serious run for her money regarding physical beauty. She also looked somewhat like Ash did – with white hair and blue eyes, but she was much more slender and with a different, if equally beautiful, face. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties.
"I'm Doctor Treah, of the United Galactic Worlds fast medical response force," she said in an impossibly lyrical voice. "We were told that you are experiencing a medical emergency and have arrived to render aid. May we land?"
"Doctor Treah, I'm Seren," Seren introduced herself, pronouncing the woman's name as she heard it, "tray-ah". "This is Ash, and my cohort Doctor Wilson, who's in charge of the medical division overseeing the crisis. Your aid is well and truly appreciated. Is your ship small enough to land near where this ship is?"
"I believe so, but I must inquire why you do not move your ship out of the way so the Shade Alliance can land," Dr. Treah replied. "They have more resources at the moment than your ship does."
"We've been using the ship's automatic systems to kill the disease in these folks," Ash told her. "It's apparently a primitive virus and the automatics handle it."
"Indeed?" Dr. Treah seemed surprised. "That is an ingenious application of your available resources, and makes the task much less difficult, thus saving lives. Assuming room is available, may we land? We will follow the Shade Alliance shuttles down."
"By all means," Seren agreed. Any help would be hugely beneficial while the critically ill still needed life-support."
"We shall land shortly," Dr. Treah nodded, and the connection was closed.
"Let's go greet our new guests," Seren suggested.
"Why do I feel like I've heard that doctor's voice before?" Ash muttered.
"No idea," Seren replied, heading for the airlock.
The Shade Alliance shuttle and UGW frigate both arrived side-by-side, far apart enough from each other to disembark and do what they needed to do.
"Newer ships," Ash remarked as the two descended soundlessly. "Time was, the N-Space engines were like thunder. Scoutships could rattle the teeth out of your sockets. Most of the ships out there do that, too.
"Now, they've got new dampening fields that reduce the graviton fluxes to directly below them. If they flew directly overhead, yeah, you'd have a headache. But it's not like how it used to be when you'd have a headache no matter where they flew. Makes them more efficient, too."
"Are new ships common?" Seren wondered.
"Well, we had ours specially built for us, so nothing but the best there," Ash admitted. "That they're bringing in their newest means they're putting their best foot forward, wanting to make a really good impression."
The frigate was much larger than the shuttle, but was dwarfed by the size of the ship Ash and Looie arrived in. Then again, the frigate had been designed for speed, so the less mass involved there the better.
Seren, Sasha, Ash and Looie all waited for the occupants of the vessels to disembark.
Coming out at about the same time, Cinder and Dr. Treah headed directly for the four awaiting them. Transports were disembarking from the shuttle, and cargo was being unloaded from the frigate.
Dr. Treah's face seemed to show a distinct expression of recognition as she got closer.
"Hi, I'm Ash…" Ash started off, and Dr. Treah interrupted.
"Hello Ash, I remember you," she said with a smile. She turned to her sister saying, "You're Looie, and you must be Ambassador Cinder."
"It's been a while," Cinder nodded. She recognized the voice, too.
"We haven't met in person before, but we have spoken with each other some years ago," Dr. Treah agreed. "It is a delight to be reacquainted with you, however somber the occasion."
"You're the comm officer of the Talon," Looie realized, recognizing her voice.
"Formerly, yes," Dr. Treah acknowledged with a smile.
"Is Lyle here?" Ash asked.
"Unfortunately, no," Dr. Treah replied. "I'm afraid all we brought were medical personnel and MGP techs."
"MGP?" Sasha echoed.
"McGrew Port technicians," Dr. Treah explained. "They'll be setting up a McGrew Port to bring your people to a facility that is standing by to help them."
"That's wonderful," Seren said, seemingly excited by the news, then asked, "What's a McGrew Port?"
"It's a way to directly connect two locations for instant travel between them," Dr. Treah explained. "Once we have established the portal, and implement necessary isolation precautions, we can begin moving anyone who needs care, starting with the most critical, to our facilities."
"We have over five hundred thousand sick people," Seren mentioned.
"The facility can accommodate an influx of a million per day," Dr. Treah assured her, adding, "that is irrespective of their actual condition. The McGrew Port is only used to transport large numbers of people and/or materials from one planet to another when the doing of such is time sensitive and critical to saving lives. We do not use it for ordinary travel."
"That's… quite a trick," Seren nodded, trying to absorb the ramifications of such a device. "Where, exactly, are you taking our people?"
"To UGC zero zero zero one charlie," Treah replied, then remembered that her audience may not understand the galactic designation of the planet. "It's probably better known to you as Earth."
"It took us nearly fifteen hundred years to get to this planet," Sasha remarked. "And you can just step through a portal and be on Earth instantly?"
"Yes," Dr. Treah nodded. "But it's rarely done, mostly because it adversely impacts the fabric of space/time if done to excess."
"And folks thought my magic was powerful," Seren remarked, then added, "Why don't we get more comfortable? Your people can talk with my people, I assume?"
"We will need some time for the translators to absorb the local language, but yes, we should be able to make our intentions known," Dr. Treah nodded. She cocked her head and said, "You are a local, as are you, Doctor Wilson, but you both speak English well. How is that if most of the population do not?"
"I hope you brought popcorn, because it's an interesting tale, Doc," Looie grinned.
"Is your immediate presence needed to get this rescue going?" Cinder asked Seren.
"Mine is," Sasha smiled. "I need to talk to my people about getting the patients ready for transport."
Dr. Treah pressed a button on her comm-link then looked at Sasha and said, "The Methonian coming out of the frigate shortly will coordinate with you, Doctor Wilson. We have gear that will make the task easier on your people."
"Are you not going to oversee things yourself?" Seren asked.
"Much like Ambassador Cinder, my duties here extend beyond aiding your planet's stricken," Dr. Treah admitted. "To be blunt, your crisis here is a very simple, easily remedied problem, that should be completely resolved within a local day or two. It will be an exceptionally active two days, but should take no longer than that."
"Wait, everyone will be perfectly healthy in only two days?" Sasha was astonished.
"We will coordinate with the Shade Alliance to have them help provide the transport and support needed to get all the victims where they need to go for treatment, and ensure our efforts avoid unnecessary over
lap or redundancy, but yes, two days should be about as long as it will take to cure everyone," Dr. Treah nodded.
"I'll have my number two talk to your number two," Cinder allowed, not liking that the UGW got there so fast, before she started any talks with Seren. But she knew that cooperating and working together would reflect better on both of them, and no one could deny that the Shade Alliance had the means to get more people to more places faster than the UGW did – at least on The World. Between the two rescuing organizations, Seren could only hope they could do the job within the time frame Dr. Treah had predicted. But she had no reason to doubt them.
"My number two should be emerging now," Dr. Treah smiled, and about that time, a tall, tawny-haired Methonian disembarked from the medical frigate. "He'll see to your needs, Doctor Wilson. He uses a method of communications called mindspeech to speak. Please don't be alarmed by it."
"I'll try to keep my panic to a minimum," Sasha promised. "Thank you, Doctor Treah."
"You're very welcome," Dr. Treah smiled.
"And thank you, Cinder, for your help, too," Seren knew that there was a rivalry between the two sides. "It looks like both your organizations make a very good team to deal with our immediate problem."
"Anything we can do to help," Cinder allowed. "But there are other things we can do that may make life easier on your people, too."
"As can the UGW," Dr. Treah added.
"I've got this," Sasha assured Seren. "You take care of the future."
With the rest of Topside Village devoted to dealing with the medical crisis, the only neutral ground upon which they could hold talks were Seren's quarters, or the twin's spaceship.
They opted for the spaceship.
Ash and Looie hastily ran ahead to clean up after the celebration party the previous night, much to the amusement of Seren and Treah, and to Cinder's annoyance.
Once the three settled in and were comfortable, the informal talks began. The twins hovered around the periphery, ready to jump in to help keep the talks going howsoever they could.
"I'm just a backward, technologically deficient, and probably massively ignorant inhabitant of a really fucked up planet," Seren started out with. "But, it's our planet. From what I've been told, that means we have the right to self determination."
