Farenough: Strangers Book 2

by Melissa McCann

  Familiar hands gripped her, and Mr. Ventnor said, "Stay low, Colonel." That was foolish. She couldn't get up. Maybe it was one of his human jokes. He took her under her arms and dragged her along the ground. More hands helped to drag her limp body behind a building. She couldn't breathe. Her eyes would not focus.

  "Colonel's back," he shouted.

  Tora cocked her head to hear where the bang and rumble came from, but her ears still buzzed so she couldn't make out directions. "Where are guns?" she demanded, but she thought the words did not come out clear.

  Mr. Ventnor pulled her deeper into the alley and propped her up against his knee. He rubbed her neck and shoulders roughly. Other hands rubbed the muscles in her legs. More hands kneaded her arms.

  "I've taken a bolt now and then without too much harm," Mr. Bracxs said in time to the rough massage of Tora's legs "...and I've seen people take two or three when they had a real head of adrenaline, but she must have taken twenty hits just in the last few seconds after she took down the commander."

  "She'll have a headache, all right," Mr. Ventnor said.

  Tora flexed her hands. The dragging deadness of her muscles was fading. It felt good to not be knotted with pain. She opened her eyes and was pleased her vision was whole again. "Who has projectile weapons?" she repeated.

  Mr. Ventnor said, "Welcome back, Colonel. Seems like we got reinforcements." He helped Tora to sit up and then stand.

  "What reinforcements?"

  He said, "Well, Solante doesn't want Cyrion running Murrayville any more than we do."

  That meant blue-sash enemies and probably the Cerise. That was bad. Tora's plan did not include blue-sashes or projectile guns. Now Tora had to fight the disease enemy and the black-uniforms and the Cerise all at one time and in different ways.

  "Where are humans?" she asked Mr. Ventnor.

  "Civilians are off the streets and snug at home. One thing about Solante's bulls, they can clear a street like a catpil in a sneakdilly hive."

  Tora snorted. Blue-sashes were clumsy and stupid and fought without thinking, and they followed the Solante who was a bad commander and the Cerise who was a defective lieutenant. How did the blue-sashes change Tora's credit with the Special Commander Marduk? The blue-sashes were not strong enough to fight the black-uniforms and keep them out of Murrayville. Tora had not wanted to fight the black-uniforms face-to-face. She had planned to lead them in circles, lead them into traps, show the Special Commander Marduk it would be too hard to capture Murrayville by fighting and show him Tora had enough credit to keep the disease enemy contained and the humans peaceful.

  Now the Cerise and the Solante would make the Special Commander Marduk think that Tora could not do all those things. They would take away her credit. She had to get it back.

  "What do blue-sash soldiers want?" she asked her lieutenants.

  Dess had joined Mr. Bracxs. "What do they want?" Dess repeated.

  Mr. Ventnor said, "Mostly, the sons of mudrimples are shooting at everything that moves, which means we can't use the traps we had set up. We were planning for stun rifles and clubs, not bullets, and the Cyrion police are too busy with Solante's people to notice us. The Chief has moved the runners back into the town until we figure out how to use them safely."

  Tora nodded. Liam had made good orders. The runners were humans, too young to be soldiers, and should not be where projectile guns were. She did not want her soldiers near projectile weapons either. "Civilian Support Corps?"

  "Same thing."

  That was good. That gave Tora some room to maneuver her soldiers without endangering humans. She took a few steps, testing her legs. The stun had worn off. She took a few steps back, trying to turn the situation in her head to see it from every side. She had to get her credit back. If she did not, then the Special Commander Marduk would call for reinforcements, and there would be more projectiles, and gas cannons, and detention camps, and all the humans would be in danger, and if they tried to get away from the danger, the black-uniform ships on the perimeter would kill them to stop the disease enemy from getting away.

  #

  Annia had eventually managed to wake herself up without succumbing to the temptation of a warm, male body in her bed. She closed her medical uniform over her underclothes and checked her EFK for supplies. Too few. There would be injuries coming into the interim hospital at the campsite. They still had emergency supplies of boneseal and antiseptic gel, but they would run out if injuries ran high.

  No, Cho'en would have to handle it. Annia had to get to the clinic and her equipment there. The sooner Annia built a cure for the plague, the sooner the fighting would end.

  Someone rapped on the gate, and Mr. Hollin went to answer it, still fastening his ruffled shirt over his chest. Outside, a pink little man with a prim face too small for his body stood on the street. He ignored Mr. Hollin. "Ms. Annia, I am Administrator Krotoschiner. I have come from the hospital to fetch you."

  Chapter 9

  She decided at the last minute to leave her EFK for Cho'en in case the militia started sending casualties to the camp, and went to the gate. Mr. Hollin caught her wrist and turned her to him. He took her face in his hands. "Wish we had more time right now, sweet one. I'm going to the town limit and see what Ms. Miraz needs from me. I'll know where to find you if I get a minute to stop."

  Suddenly shy again, she looked at his chin. He was still using endearments, and he meant to see her again. How strange. How nice.

  "Ferus," she whispered. His private name, only for family.

  He wrapped his arms all the way around her, and she tucked her arms between their bodies and let herself be cuddled against his chest for a moment where and she could relax and feel safer than if Tora and Liam were there to protect her.

  Solante had sent a car to take her to the new hospital. The driver was the man whose arm Tora had broken and Annia had set the day the plague victims began to flood into the clinic. He held the door of the short, fat float car for her and let Mr. Krotoschiner go around and let himself in on the other side.

  When the car began to move, the administrator cleared his throat with a little cough. "Ms. Annia, we have established a laboratory and work space for you and supplied you with a processor, sequencer and compiler, bio-simulation vials as well as food and a place to sleep. Mr. Solante wants a cure as soon as possible."

  Solante wanted a cure? Of course he did. He wanted something to hold hostage over Yetfurther. Reality settled on her neck like the weight of gravity after free-fall. "Mr. Krotoschiner..."

  "Administrator," he corrected her.

  Annia missed Ferus' arms around her. "Mr. Krotoschiner," she repeated, "Am I supposed to be under house arrest?"

  His mouth tightened into a line. "No, Ms. Annia. If you don't care to stay at the hospital, I will arrange for a driver to take you home and bring you back." But her question hadn't surprised or rattled him. He hadn't even pretended to be shocked.

  In fact, Annia probably would have wanted to sleep in her lab anyway. There wasn't time to go back and forth from the hospital to her lot. She already felt she had no business sleeping while other people died.

  They drove through the narrow, crooked streets to a converted warehouse in the north quarter of the shantytown where big, square permocrete buildings shouldered out the more typical Murrayville shacks and shops thrown together out of whatever detritus their owners could drag home.

  The driver held Annia's door while she climbed out. Mold and mud mottled the green-grey surface of the warehouse except where the dark grey of uncured permocrete filled a three-meter square space where the original doors must have been. A set of smaller vitrine doors stood open in the new section of wall, and Mr. Krotoschiner gestured for Annia to precede him.

  The interior smelled like ammonia and citrus from the curing permocrete. Permocrete could be beautiful. It could be molded, tinted, etched or poured. Light-emitters could be layered into it for all kinds of effects. No one had wasted time or energy on aesthetics here.
They had used a plain, industrial color,. The material was already hard enough to support the many tons of weight from the floors above it, but light-emitting panels couldn't be mounted until the surface dried completely, which would take another three to five days. Sheets of LEPs dangled from the ceiling or hung between temporary standards, illuminating the space but creating a disorienting glare effect when the light caught Annia's eye the wrong way.

  Stanchions indicated where new walls would enclose a large intake and triage space for patients. A permocrete desk to the right would be the intake station. The arrangement would accommodate walk-in clients from the streets whereas a normal hospital—a Federal hospital on Ifni, for example—would put intake on the top floor to process patients brought in by ambulance.

  Most of the ground floor had not yet been sectioned into rooms, but the engineers producing the thumps, groans and whines of heavy equipment overhead had left the original personnel offices in the northwest corner intact. Corner windows looked out on the main floor of the warehouse. An owner or manager could see eighty percent of the space from those windows, or maybe the point was that Mr. Krotoschiner would be able to look in from anywhere on the ground floor as if Annia were a display on an open holo'table.

  Solante's people, whoever they were, had turned the office space into a lab with multiple work stations, racks of testing vials, tribble cages stacked on a bench, high resolution scanners, a recent-model processor, a sequencer and a full-scale Charmmes Labs gene compiler. Annia almost broke into a run across the open space to the lab door.

  She had to wait for Mr. Krotoschiner to join her and add her bio-signature to the scan lock above the door. He waited a moment, probably to remind her she was merely a researcher under his authority, before opening the door and stepping inside ahead of her.

  Tribbles in a rank of cages cooed and purred, extending their stubby leg bumps and creeping up to the wire mesh. They had been engineered to perfectly mimic human biological processes. Children sometimes kept them as pets, but they weren't particularly good companion animals. Their primary accomplishments included eating and excreting, and their coo, while occasionally soothing, could become monotonous. Annia went down the ranks of cages, checking the automatic food and water dispensers were working, then she heard a familiar clicking.

  "Honeybear?"

  The brown and tan catpil rippled halfway out of its hiding place and raised its forward segments. It turned its "head," scanning the room with eyes and trunk.

  Annia scratched behind its lung vents, and Honeybear climbed to her shoulder.

  "This is fine, Mr. Krotoschiner. Can I get to work now?"

  Mr. Krotoschiner stationed a pair of guards outside her door—to keep her from being bothered, he explained—and left her alone with her new lab.

  Annia opened the interface of the new processor and scanned the spiral of data in the monitor field. Someone had copied over her data from the older processor and sequencer at the clinic, probably made several copies for their own use, but she didn't care. The more copies in existence, the better chance of someone engineering a DV that would attack the plague. Honeybear draped itself around Annia’s neck the way Candy sometimes did at the camp. She scratched the short fuzz around the base of its trunk.

  First, she studied the results of the simulations she'd programmed the day before. She blinked at the results. A few of the simulated DVs didn't recognize the simulated plague, which wasn't unusual. Not every DV could recognize every organism, but most of them attacked the plague organism, broke its shell and released its DNA into the host bloodstream where it was captured and absorbed by the leukocytes. A perfect performance from the DVs. She could probably design a hundred different variations of the successful viruses in an hour. Planetary Health should already be treating the plague victims here in Murrayville. Why weren't they here? Why had Solante lied to her?

  Why would he lie to her?

  If the DPH hadn't brought the cure, they didn't have it.

  She had to start at the beginning. The simulated virus had to be right. She'd sequenced it directly from the live organism. Maybe DPH didn't have a live virus after all. Solante had told her that infected patients had surfaced in Cyrion city, but he might be wrong.

  How much live virus did Annia have? She scanned the shelves and tables around the lab for blood vials she had used to extract and sequence the plague organism. She went to her door. The guards turned as it opened.

  "Where's the administrator?" she asked.

  One of the men shrugged. The other turned his face back to the main room.

  "Well, get him," Annia barked.

  "I'm not supposed to leave my post, Ms. Annia."

  She ground her teeth. "Are you supposed to die of the plague? Stop standing there, and do something useful."

  Mr. Krotoschiner paused on a stairway from the upper floor. "Is there something I can do for you, Ms. Annia?" He sounded as if he disapproved of doctors who did not stay quiet and do what they were told.

  Annia forgot about the guards. "I need live samples. Hundreds."

  He resumed his descent. "You have a compiler. That is what it is for."

  "It's no good. The simulated version of the virus is wrong. Mr. Solante says the DPH can't get a DV to kill it, but the simulations all say they should."

  "A better simulation..."

  "If this simulation is wrong, I have no way of knowing whether the next one is right. Live samples. Now."

  He folded his arms and slitted his eyes at her as if he thought she was being difficult on purpose.

  Annia could have stamped her feet with frustration. "Now. Not when someone gets around to it. Not when it is convenient. Now."

  He must have decided his instructions from Solante entailed indulging her no matter how spoiled and demanding she became. He dropped his hands to his waist and folded his fingers together. "As you say, Ms. Annia. I will arrange it."

  "Now," she repeated, and closed the door.

  While she waited, Annia entered her trial run of simulated domestic viruses into the compiler, which would build the viral chromosome and hold it in solution until it formed its protein shell. When fully mature, the virus would be sealed into sterile vials about the size of Annia's fingernail. The compiler could run five-hundred samples at a time. Annia set it to produce five samples each of a hundred different DV variants. That would give her enough redundancy to confirm results and a wide-enough range to confirm that the problem wasn't confined to a particular family of domestic virus.

  While the compiler built the domestic virus samples, Annia reviewed the data from the patients at the clinic. They showed more or less what she had expected: viral infection. The processor identified the agent in each case as century plague. She ran the viral counts. Cho'en and Maycee's patients had consistently lower populations of the virus in their systems. Younger patients had lower resistance, and consequently higher virus counts. Except one.

  The baby girl in the examination room, the one with the wet cough had a greatly reduced viral load, half that of Maycee and Cho'en's other patients of the same age and hour of admission. The processor had found no unusual genetic variation. The baby wasn't from the procreationist subgroup, but very few of the believers had brought children to the clinic. Of the few that had, their disease progression was identical to that of the other patients.

  Annia brought up the details from the child's most recent sample and searched on all other disease agents. The sequencer identified a simple cold virus, a yeast imbalance, a mild allergic reaction to something in the environment, and an amoebic infection. The organism was tagged as a match.

  Annia recognized the amoebic organism that had infected Honeybear. It shouldn't have been transferable to a human host. It hadn't survived in the bio-simulation vials. It couldn't absorb human tissue or resist human T-cells or antibodies, but it continued to try to ingest the human tissue, attaching itself to the walls of the child's lungs and heart and trying to eat. The proteins it could dig out of the hum
an tissue, it spat back out again, but the damage was already done.

  Even with the baby's immune system suppressed by the plague, the amoeba should just starve. Annia enlarged the image from the little girl's tissues. There were several live amoebae in the sample and a handful of plague organisms. The plague virus looked battered. Its spokes had been worn away, and part of its outer shell had crumbled, allowing its internal fluids to leak out. Annia turned to the processor and ran an extrapolation program. The virus was slowly winning the war for the child's body, but as Annia watched, a minute viral drifted into range of a sluggish amoeba. The single-celled animal threw out a pseudopod, surrounded the virus and ingested it. The amoeba was feeding on the protein shell of the virus instead of the indigestible human tissues.

  Annia's station faced the windows overlooking the main floor where construction workers began to pour permocrete walls for interior rooms. They had laid out a reasonable space for admissions and what were probably meant to be administrative offices behind the intake desk. Once they were finished, Mr. Krotoshiner would probably disappear into them and never emerge.

  The front doors opened, admitting a young man supporting a much older one. The older man's head hung down on his chest. His younger companion looked around the barren space and the busy engineers and slumped himself. He began to lower the old man to the floor.

  Annia grabbed her scanner and left the lab, half-running to the two men. "Doctors," she shouted to the room in general. "Where are my techs?"

  She squatted and scanned the old man. Rash, heightened immune response, weak, rapid heartbeat, fever. The plague had found her.

  The younger man said, "I thought this was a hospital. I brought my dad." He looked around at the room with hopeless eyes.