by S. L. Viehl
“I cannot say. You must ask the Jorenians. How are Garphawayn and your sons?” I asked, trying to distract him from the subject, which had drawn the attention of several of the nurses.
“My mate is fully recovered. The boys are thriving but need constant care. We enjoy little sleep.” He sighed. “Fasala volunteered to help during the day to give Garphawayn an additional rest interval. I had no idea that two infants would require so much attention.”
“Two are twice the work and joy of one.” I retrieved a biopsy kit and checked it. “We are going to take samples of his nasal membranes. Do you wish to participate?”
“No, I will leave that to you and the Hsktskt. ChoVa,” he corrected himself at my look. “Reever has been here three times since you returned from the surface. What is wrong with him?”
Reever felt as nervous as everyone else was, but for different reasons. “Kao Torin and my former self were lovers,” I said. “Evidently Cherijo chose Kao over Reever. PyrsVar’s presence brings back unhappy memories.”
“Ah.” Squilyp grimaced. “That all happened before I joined the crew.”
“Imagine how I feel.” I went into the isolation room, where ChoVa was arguing with PyrsVar over removing a talisman he wore around his neck. I had to clear my throat twice before they fell silent. “I would like to take this biopsy before there is no reason to find a cure for this epidemic,” I said. “Can we proceed?”
“I want you to do it,” PyrsVar said to me. “I do not want her to part me from any of my flesh.”
ChoVa chuffed her amusement. “So speaks the fearless outlaw.” Her eyelids drooped. “Perhaps not the best choice of words. Of course Dr. Torin will take the biopsy. I might mistake that tiny brain of yours for the needed tissue and extract it instead.” She stalked out of the room.
PyrsVar settled back on the berth. “She does not despise me as much as she thinks she does,” he said with a certain amount of satisfaction.
“Don’t push it,” I said, and frowned. Some of the words and phrases coming from my mouth since being exposed to the dust were beyond odd. “What I mean is, do not provoke her. She may be slow to lose her temper, but I have seen what she can do when she does.”
“Indeed, and what can a female healer do?”
“She can perform this biopsy,” I told him, showing him the tissue probe. “Without giving you anesthetic. And with the application of a little pressure, can drive this instrument up into your brain.”
The sight of the thin, sharp-ended, hollow biopsy tube made PyrsVar swallow. “So I will not provoke her or you.”
I smiled. “That is best.”
Complete scans of PyrsVar’s body had to be performed before the biopsy could begin, and when they were finished I transferred the results onto a data-and-image projector so ChoVa and I could analyze his unique physiology.
“I have never seen the like,” ChoVa said with a certain amount of awe as she inspected the data. “Outwardly he is little different from these Jorenians, but inside, he is a warm-blooded version of a Hsktskt.”
“The organ arrangement is not Jorenian,” I agreed, “but it is not altogether Hsktskt, either.”
“You are correct.” She peered at the circulatory scans. “He has humanoid vessels and several organs we do not possess. But look, his bone structure and muscle mass match that of my kind. How did this SrrokVar achieve such a sophisticated integration?”
“He had much practice experimenting on humanoid slaves on Catopsa,” I told her. “Then there is this new alterforming technology. Genetically PyrsVar is exactly between Jorenian and Hsktskt. I wonder if SrrokVar purposely left enough of him unchanged to someday return him to his original form.”
ChoVa shook her head. “Alterforming is irreversible; it would kill him. Then, too, there is this peculiar crossing of the two species’ physiologies. Look at the heart and lungs. They are fully integrated with these other Jorenian organs. To alter them back to those of the Hsktskt would cause immediate renal failure. His liver would enlarge and likely hemorrhage. We could not transplant replacement organs in time to prevent it.”
“He will always have to be like this,” I murmured. “A true crossbreed.”
“His children would not,” ChoVa said as she pulled up the reproduction system analysis. “He is fertile. His children would inherit some of his Jorenian characteristics, but if he mated with a female Hsktskt, three-quarters of their DNA would match my species.”
I chuckled. “There is only one way to know.”
“What do you mean? It does not bear thinking about.” ChoVa’s expression indicated the exact opposite, and several other times during the course of the procedure I caught her eyeing our patient with a less than professional scrutiny.
The biopsy of the nasal membrane produced small samples of tissue that had darkened but were not yet black. All were liberally impregnated with the bone dust, and the levels of tohykul in his gland cluster were rising. I administered another dose of blocker before ChoVa and I went to consult with the Senior Healer. Given our experience with the progression of the disease, we could make only one diagnosis.
“He will succumb to this, more slowly than a pureblood Hsktskt, but in time as fully,” I reported to the Omorr. “Given the rate of escalation in his enzyme levels, I would say we have four, perhaps five days at the most, before the final-stage symptoms are presented.”
“As we speak on symptoms, I have a request.” ChoVa handed a datapad I had not seen to Squilyp. “These are my readings, taken just before we left the surface. “If they elevate to the saturation level, you are to sedate me and put me into cryopreservation.”
The Omorr shook his head. “That will kill you.”
“There is nothing else you can do, except let me run rampant on this vessel. No one would be safe from me,” the Hsktskt female said in a practical tone. “Whatever you may think of my kind, I did not deliver your brood to see them die under my claws.”
Squilyp looked uncomfortable. “I spoke in anger. I have apologized for it.”
“But you still think the same way,” ChoVa said. “I saw how you looked at my brother and PyrsVar. You see us and you only see slavers beneath the scales. I suggest that for once you heed your own prejudice.” She rose from her chair. “Excuse me. I will check on the patient.” She left.
“Nice going, Squid Lips.” I took in a quick breath and touched my fingers to my mouth. “Why do I say these things? I am sorry, I never meant—”
He smiled at me as if he were pleased. “Your memories are speaking for you. Cherijo used to call me that when she was annoyed with me.”
“You see?” Maggie, silent for so many hours, suddenly laughed inside me. “You may think you can kill her by ignoring what few memories I passed to you, but you can’t. She’s still in here somewhere. She’s still part of you.”
“She should let me run my own mouth,” I muttered. I saw the Omorr frown and got up quickly. “I’ll go and report our status to the captain.”
I spent the next two days in Medical, working around the clock in the lab with ChoVa and testing various compounds on the bone dust and PyrsVar. When I tired, I went to rest in one of the patient berths, but rarely slept for more than an hour. I was too conscious of the time slipping away, and we knew from sporadic reports from the surface that the situation on Vtaga was growing worse by the hour.
Reever stopped in frequently, sometimes bringing Marel for a quick visit, and other times to stand outside the lab and watch ChoVa and me as we performed tests. Often I would look up and prepare to set something aside so I could go and speak to him, but he would only shake his head and retreat.
“Your mate watches you a great deal,” ChoVa mentioned after the fourth or fifth time she saw Reever outside the observation viewer. “Does it not irritate you?”
“Not especially,” I said. “He is worried about me. He does not like it when I work extended shifts.” I rubbed the side of my head. “It is a show of affection.”
“Ah.” She
nodded. “He wishes more attention. My mother can behave that way when my father becomes consumed with his work.”
I didn’t tell her that Reever spent as much time, if not more, watching PyrsVar. When he did, his expression was far from pleasant. He had a deep and abiding dislike, if not hatred, for the renegade Jorenian, and I knew it was because of my past relationship with Kao Torin. Had he hated Cherijo’s first love just as fiercely?
I could not bring myself to ask.
The equipment speeded up the process somewhat, but after ChoVa and I had tested two hundred unique chemical compounds, we still have no viable treatment for the bone-dust infection.
“Nothing neutralizes the effects or flushes it from the body,” ChoVa complained as we left Medical to have a meal in the galley. “It will dissolve in nothing but the most corrosive acids which, as much as I would like to apply them to the patient, is not a treatment option.”
“It is bone. Bone is usually the hardest and most resilient tissue in any organism’s body.” I nodded to two passing crew members as we entered a lift they had just occupied. “I think we are taking the wrong approach. We are treating this dust like a viral infection when we know it is not.”
“What else would you have us treat it as?” she inquired as she walked up to the food machine and examined the menu. “Dirt?”
“That is all it is, when you stop to think about it,” I said, leaning in front of her and pulling up the specialty menu for reptilian visitors. “Inert dust, impregnated with an organism that provokes a specialized autoimmune response. Like an allergen in humanoids. When certain Terrans aspirate plant pollen, for example, they sneeze violently and become congested. It is a defense mechanism on the part of the body, to eject the invader and protect the membranes from being further exposed. Were it viral or bacterial in nature, it would multiply. It does not reproduce.”
“But if you are right,” ChoVa said, taking the bowl of synthetic, shredded, raw flesh she had selected from the unit, “why would our symptoms manifest as extreme fear, suicide, and general insanity?”
I dialed up a traditional Iisleg stew and followed her to an empty table. “What if these ancient terrors your people feared, like the rogur, shed chemicals, or cells, or some other sensory evidence of themselves? The Hsktskt of that time would have inhaled them. We know that the body’s response was to induce panic so that the victim would run away, or fight to get away.”
“That does not explain the feelings of suicide.”
“What awaited the victim who did not get away from the rogur? A lingering and horrible death. Perhaps it was a last-resort defense mechanism, to spare the victim and spite the monster.”
“Spite the monster?”
“You told me that the rogur was said to have digested live prey slowly,” I reminded her. “Perhaps it would not eat the dead.”
ChoVa looked down at her meal. “Suddenly I am not very hungry.”
I pushed my bowl toward her. “It’s cooked, and it’s synthetic for humanoids, but it was never anything but anonymous organic matter.”
“I cannot digest any manner of cooked food.” She poked at the raw flesh in her bowl. “It makes me regurgitate.”
I gave her a sympathetic look. “I feel the same way about vegetables.”
Her head snapped up. “That is it. Regurgitation.”
“Not here,” I said, alarmed, and pointed past her. “There is a lavatory unit just around the corner.”
“No, I mean the process. What my body will not accept it rejects, as you said, like an allergen.” She tapped the side of her head. “Only the process in Hsktskt is not the same as it is for humanoids.”
“You vomit differently?”
“No, we vomit the same. It is just that a pair of enzymes is released in our brains before we vomit,” she explained. “One triggers the sensation of nausea, warning us that we are about to purge. The other causes the physical act of regurgitation.”
“In humanoids, stomach fluids do both.”
“I know. In my kind, however, we cannot vomit unless both enzymes are present. All such reactions in my people are created by enzyme pairs.” She took out her scanner and showed me the latest of PyrsVar’s brain scan results. “Inhaling the bone dust released the tohykul enzyme. That we know. But the enzyme it was paired with in ancient Hsktskt, barolyt, has not manifested. The result is the brain disorder. Our minds are being told to do one thing, but our bodies are not coping with the mechanism delivering it.”
I understood her point. “If you have one enzyme for regurgitation, you feel sick, but you can’t vomit without the other, so the sickness never goes away.”
She nodded. “Here is what I think. The enzyme being produced is only present in our bodies when we are infants, and then it disappears. A tiny amount of barolyt, the other half of the pair, is what makes it vanish. Like tohykul, it is only produced in healthy Hsktskt immediately after birth.”
I felt skeptical. “Why have you never detected it?”
“We have had no reason to go looking for it,” she said. “I believe it is produced, but in such small amounts and for such a short period of time that it is almost undetectable.”
“The only way to know would be to test the brain of a healthy, living Hsktskt infant,” I pointed out, “which we do not have and I would not let you do if we did.”
“The number of enzymes the Hsktskt brain is capable of producing is finite,” ChoVa assured me. “And even better, the ones we know of have the same basic chemical structure. All we need do is recombine enzymes until we find the one that neutralizes the tohykul, and that should cause the body to eject the bone dust from the respiratory tract.”
My wristcom light came on, distracting me. I switched on my personal com. “Yes?”
“Jarn, I need you and ChoVa back in Medical,” the Omorr said. He sounded breathless, and someone was shouting in the background. Someone using the Hsktskt version of profanity. “At once.”
We abandoned our unwanted meals and hurried back. I heard the banging of alloy and shattering of plas from outside in the corridor, and had to duck as we entered to avoiding a patient’s chart flying through the air.
In the center of Medical stood the Omorr and PyrsVar. PyrsVar was bleeding from his neck, arms, and chest, where he had wrenched out the intravenous tubes we were using to administer test compounds.
“The enzyme-suppression therapy isn’t working as well as we hoped,” Squilyp said as he hopped to avoid one of PyrsVar’s fists. “Our patient seems to have developed a tolerance for it, and has indicated that he would like to leave ship at once.”
ChoVa stepped forward. “Outlaw, control yourself.”
“Hold your tongue, female,” PyrsVar shouted. “I am not staying here another moment. Get out of my way, Warm-Blood, or I will dine on your flesh.”
I picked up an infuser and dialed up a powerful sedative used primarily on Jorenians, and tossed it to ChoVa before I approached the pair.
“PyrsVar, I will escort you to the surface.” I held out my hands so that he could see I held nothing.
“You.” He pointed an enabled lascalpel at my head. “You stay away from me.”
He did not understand the power of the surgical instrument he held. I did. “If you trigger the cutting beam and sweep it across my throat, you will sever my head from my shoulders. Hold it steady, and it will bore through my skull and brain.” I lifted a hand to my hair, touching the spot where Daneeb had used her pulse weapon on me. “Use it here, and my body will live, but I will die. As you died, Clan-Son Torin.”
“I am not one of them,” he shouted.
A curious tenderness for him came over me, what a scarred adult would feel for a bleeding child. “I know, PyrsVar. I know, better than anyone.”
ChoVa came up behind PyrsVar, pinned him back against her with two limbs, and infused him with the drug. He roared, groaned, and then slid down to the deck. She picked him up with some difficulty, hoisted his body over her shoulder, and carried him
back into the isolation room.
“He has been displaying signs of aggressiveness since yesterday,” she said as we strapped him down in restraints. “But I had thought he would last longer than I.”
“He received a much higher dose of the bone dust than you or the other Hsktskt. He was covered in it.” I looked down at his closed eyes, and brushed a tangle of black hair away from his brow. “He has some humanoid characteristics. As a warm-blooded being, he may fare better in cryostasis.”
“No.” The ferocity of her reply seemed to surprise her as much as it did me. “No,” she said, more gently. “We will find the right combination for the neutralizer. We will keep him sedated until we do.”
I nodded and saw Squilyp in the doorway. “Did he hurt anyone?”
“Not this time.” The Omorr looked grim. “Jarn, TssVar signaled. The rioters have surrounded the Palace. He is barricaded inside, but it is only a matter of hours before the fires they are setting overwhelm the Palace defense system.”
Time, our most precious commodity, had just run out.
NINETEEN
Skipping the meal interval had no effect on me for several hours, but the close proximity to ChoVa did. She had begun muttering to herself under her breath, and cursing softly when the bone dust and PyrsVar’s biopsies showed no reaction to the synthetic enzymes we were testing.
“I think I will go and visit my daughter for a short time,” I finally said after she called the fourteenth enzyme the sort of names I would not have used to describe a Kangal prince, the lowest order of life-form that I knew. “I miss my kid. When I get back, you should also take a rest interval.”
She glared at me. “I am not insane yet, you know.”
“I know. You’re worried about your dad.” The fact that Cherijo’s speech patterns were taking over my own didn’t bother me anymore. They felt right, mixed in as they were with my own manner of speaking. “He’s an experienced warrior. He’ll be smart, and he’ll fight to the end.”
