Farenough: Strangers Book 2

by Melissa McCann

  Annia said, "There's an operating room on the second floor. Get it ready for me. I'm going back to my lab. Someone get those three out of the way. There's no reason to expose them to infected blood and fluids if they aren't infected already. And there should be decontamination and prophylactic stations set up on every floor and near every exit. Use them."

  She set the scavenged modulator beside the processor, sticky with blood and tissue. She would have to clean and sterilize the modulator before she installed it in Maycee's head.

  She played the modulator's memory through her processor. No wonder the hunter had moved with such peculiar jerks and twitches. Its brain scan circled the monitor field in a hash of sparks and static. The line had been over-tinkered and should be scrapped. Annia cleared the modulator's memory, and the screen settled to a flat line.

  Annia called up Maycee's scan data. She overlaid it with Elizabeth-Belle's scan and finally Johanna-Eunice's. The processor returned a single pattern that rippled across the screen of the little scanner. Annia identified the q-wave common to all three scans. In Elizabeth-Belle, the carrier wasn't strong enough to trigger a seizure unless she deliberately exercised it. In Cho'en's scan, the third lobe of the gaean brain controlled and suppressed the seizures, but it also suppressed the carrier. Cho'en's display showed in yellow the point where a gentle current generated by the gaean brain interrupted the seizure before it started. Someday she, or more likely someone from Maycee's family, might adapt Annia's virophage to reprogram Maycee's DNA and remodel the defective regions of her brain, but Maycee didn't have that much time to wait.

  Annia transferred the program from the processor into the modulator. The machine now contained the suppression program for Maycee's condition and the installation program with a map of Maycee's brain. Annia would have to fine-tune the installation itself, but she had performed the same procedure on malfunctioning cyborg series. It should take less than an hour. By that time, Honeybear would be found and the phage extracted, and the DPH would start compiling the treatment in planetary volumes.

  She ran the gory modulator through an antiseptic agitation bath and set it in the sterile dryer just as Liam came into the room, still stiff and bruised from his fight with the hunter. "Fix Maycee now."

  "I'm coming," she said. She found and pasted an analgesic patch on the back of her neck to kill the headache left over from the hunter's stun. Her eyes had begun to feel gritty again, and her joints ached. She sprayed her hand with antiseptic gel and took the modulator from the dryer.

  Maycee lay on a narrow bed in the surgery on the second floor. The life-monitors were already chirping in time to her pulse, and her erratic, staticky scan pattern crackled across the monitor above her head.

  There were too many people in the room. Cho'en stood with one fine-boned hand on Maycee's forehead and all four of her light-sensitive eyes closed. She should stay. Elizabeth-Belle should remain. She knew as much about the Charmmes brain as anyone except Cho'en. Tora would have to go—along with Mr. Ventnor and a handful of militia. She ordered them out.

  Tora jerked her head at the door, and Mr. Ventnor herded the militia out of the room. Tora stopped to give Maycee an awkward pat on the ankle. "Fix Maycee," she said to Annia who interpreted her to mean, "Good luck."

  Annia stopped her. "Tora, take Liam with you and get someone to glue his ribs back together and treat his bruises."

  Liam folded his arms across his chest."I stay," he said. "Guard prisoner enemy." He gave Elizabeth-Belle a suspicious look.

  Tora eyed him. "Damaged. Go to C-med."

  He scowled.

  Annia said, "Maycee is safe with me and Cho. I need you at full strength."

  Tora said, "Annia is primary."

  Liam huffed and rolled his shoulders as if he was trying to shake off a clinging catpil, but he finally acquiesced and left the operating room with Tora.

  Annia set the modulator on a side table and scooped a handful of gel from a dish beside the surgical table. Someone had set out a full complement of surgical tools—adhesives, probes, manipulators as well as more primitive clamps and drills. She rubbed the gel over her hands, careful to cover each finger completely from fingertips to the webbing between and all the exposed skin up to her elbows. She waved her hands until the gel thickened into sterile gloves. She stepped up to the table where Maycee lay.

  Elizabeth-Belle said, "What are you doing to her?"

  "I'm going to suppress the seizures interrupting normal brain functions."

  "You can't do that." Elizabeth-Belle sounded genuinely concerned. "She'll be out of control. You have no idea what kind of powers they possess. Tell her, Mother Cho'en/Ka."

  Cho'en hesitated, her bells completely silent.

  Annia said, "This is what you've been grooming her for all her life."

  Then Ka rippled the bells up Cho'en's back from tail to head. "She will be in control of herself."

  A dissonant jangle answered, and Johanna-Eunice, separate from Ka for the first time since Annia had known the gaean, said, "She is too erratic. She can't control what she already has."

  "That's the seizures," Annia reminded her. "That's what the surgery is for in the first place."

  Johanna-Eunice jerked Cho'en's bells in protest. "She is too reckless."

  "Passionate," Ka said.

  Annia reached for the modulator. "If I'm the deciding vote, I'm going ahead."

  Elizabeth-Belle said, "As the designated representative of the Family, I forbid it."

  "I'm not a member of your family, and neither is Ka. Turn her head for me, Cho'en. We'll have to immobilize her for the surgery."

  The hybrid alien hesitated, her human second eyes unfocused, her bells flicking meaningless sounds while the two personalities remained in deadlock, then she relaxed. Her bells rippled a soft carol. "We will proceed," both parts of Cho'en declared.

  Elizabeth-Belle took one step toward the surgical unit, but stopped when Cho'en cocked her tail at a defensive angle. She could knock Elizabeth-Belle halfway across the room with one swing.

  Cho'en rotated Maycee's head to the right and engaged the restraint field to hold her in position. Annia programmed the monitor and projector with the surgical plan.

  The holographic field project atop the surgical unit changed from Maycee's scan to a graphic of Maycee's brain mapped by the instruments in the surgical bed. The scanner exchanged information with the processors, and a yellow dot appeared on the graphic. The marked section enlarged, and the yellow mark refined itself until the processors were satisfied. The dot turned blue. A second yellow mark appeared in the motor cortex. The focus changed. The new target expanded. The second misfiring cluster turned blue in the monitor.

  The image shrank until the entire brain showed, rotating. Where was the third site, the one that caused the deep sleep, the near-coma that kept Maycee insensible? Annia skimmed the rotating image and the data cloud in the monitor. It should be in the anterior reticular formation above the basal ganglia. She focused the monitor on the area and switched to a map view of neural-activity in the brain. The two seizure sites already identified flashed bright orange. The motor cortex, cerebrum, left and right hemispheres were barely active. Visual and auditory cortex were amber. Maycee was dreaming even in deep sleep. There. The posterior reticular function appeared in bright yellow, pushing out its paralyzing delta wave. The anterior section...black. It had burned out under the combination of the stun bolt and the seizures. It no longer had the capacity to balance Maycee's wake/sleep cycle.

  She had to reprogram. The modulator could compensate for the dead region, but it wouldn't be as simple as suppressing neurological misfires. Annia knew enough about neural modulators to perform general maintenance on the clones that used them. Actually programming something this complex... Maycee could do it. She looked at Elizabeth-Belle. Both Maycee's cousins had been watching the monitor. Elizabeth-Belle looked satisfied.

  Annia said, "Elizabeth-Belle, can you program a work-around? Something that will blo
ck the delta-wave so she can regain consciousness. Even if we have to tinker with it later."

  "No, I won't do any such thing. This is a travesty—turning a member of my family into one of your cyborg things."

  Annia sighed. "It's a common procedure. If she'd been injured in an accident, you wouldn't hesitate."

  Elizabeth-Belle replied, "Even if you could activate the anterior reticular formation, you wouldn't be able to fine-tune its activity. She'd be either comatose or manic—completely open to every input with no way to filter it."

  "Can modulate," Cho'en chirped. Her bells jangled correction, rebuke.

  "It's done all the time with clones," Annia said. "It just takes fine-tuning."

  Cho'en slid her fingers into the waldo field. "I will program." She called up the modulator's internal programming and studied the map of Maycee's brain.

  Elizabeth-Belle stamped up to the side of the bed and pushed Cho'en aside. "Stop that. You'll make a mess of it. Here." She began to sort and compile logical elements.

  Annia followed her progress as programming phrases spiraled round the monitor over the surgery. She recognized a few units from common clone programming and some conditional linkages, but she wasn't logical engineer enough to follow the growth of the program. She overlaid the logical architecture with the image of Maycee's brain, waiting for the processor to extrapolate an outcome from the growing program. She didn't completely trust Elizabeth-Belle not to sabotage the experiment, but from what Annia could interpret, the program should work.

  In the monitor, the dead black region turned blue.

  "That's it," Annia said.

  Cho'en chuffed, and stepped back, cocking her head from side to side to examine the primary monitor.

  Elizabeth-Belle nudged Cho'en back. "Wait a minute. I'm trying to install a recursive editing subroutine."

  Annia ran through the entire program, checking the first two interventions. They remained stable. The seizures would be suppressed by the modulator. The third probe would take over the functions of the damaged section of the reticular formation. It would continue to need adjustment even with Elizabeth-Belle's subroutine, possibly throughout Maycee's life, but she would be awake and aware.

  "Can we do anything about the q-wave?" Annia asked.

  Elizabeth-Belle snorted.

  Cho'en jingled a negative. "Too diffuse," she said.

  Annia had already concluded the same—the q-wave originated from too many points. Maycee might as well have been bathing in it. "Then we have to start."

  The holographic projector measured Maycee's head with a laser bounce and projected a yellow rectangle above her left ear. Cho'en sprayed depilatory over the yellow rectangle and scraped Maycee's scalp clean of hair.

  Annia used the laser scalpel to remove a neat rectangle of skin and stood back while Cho'en dabbed surgical gel on the edges of the wound. The alien suctioned and polished until white bone showed. Then Annia changed the cutter for a drill and bored a tiny hole through Maycee's skull. She watched in the monitor field where the hole looked frighteningly large. In reality, the diameter of the drill bit was measured in micro-millimeters, and the opening would be invisible to the naked eye.

  On the ship, the procedure itself would be performed by a mechanical surgeon. Annia had been required only to monitor the placement of the neuro-probes. Her head ached in spite of the analgesic patch, and she rubbed sweat out of her hairline with the back of her arm.

  When the site was clean and the entry point placed, Annia retrieved the sterilized and reprogrammed modulator unit while Cho'en dabbed the exposed bone with adhesive. Watching the enlarged image in the monitor, Annia lowered the modulator into place over the access point, nudging it while the glue still had some fluidity until the monitor flashed blue to indicate that the access and the modulator's port now matched within tolerance. More lights went from yellow to blue one after another as the modulator set its clamps into the bone and found the entrance for its micro-filaments to invade Maycee's brain.

  The monitor switched to a frame view of Maycee's head with the modulator outlined in blue and the target sites in orange. Yellow patches indicated active neural pathways the modulator's filaments should avoid.

  The processor now took control of the modulator. In the greatly enlarged image, the carbon filaments snaking through the hole in Maycee's skull looked enormous. Annia reminded herself they were, in fact micro-thin. Two of the three probes slipped directly into the brain and glided between pulsing yellow regions. The third groped along the inner surface of the skull for what looked like at least three centimeters on the monitor, then turned and penetrated.

  Annia could only watch and will the filaments to follow their programmed course. At any moment, she expected them to dart off in three different directions slicing through healthy neural tissue and setting off deadly storms in Maycee's brain. It seemed almost astonishing that they continued their slow advance—a turn here, a kink there—and the processor never gave so much as a beep or chuckle of alarm. The first of the three filaments closed on its target.

  It stopped with its end buried in the furthest orange dot. The monitor scrolled a series of measurements and concluded, "Target achieved. 99.797% accuracy."

  The modulator now had feedback directly from the site. Maycee's neural activity appeared in the field as an undulating wave form. This time, the seizure pattern appeared in yellow. The field split. The upper half showed Maycee's original scan. The lower now displayed a slightly altered wave. Down the right-hand side, circled a list of co-ordinates and nano-voltages. The bottom half of the display changed constantly: first one section lit, then another as the modulator tried various combinations of micro-stimulation. Finally, part of the rotating list turned blue. Some of the static cleared, and a steady blue wave rolled through Maycee's scan.

  Cho'en's head jerked. Her bells jangled. "Better."

  "Not quite," Annia murmured.

  The second probe had reached its target. It began to send information to the surgical processor. Another section of code went blue, and all the static dropped out of the scan.

  Cho'en's crest flattened and rose and rippled.

  "One more," Annia muttered. The final probe reached the base of Maycee's brain and extended a web of nanofilaments, a net that mimicked the reticular structure of the region itself.

  Suppressing a seizure was so simple, it required no specialized programming. Here, though, the modulator had to take over the processes of a crucial part of Maycee's brain. The monitor centered the region and enlarged it. The webwork of nanofilaments flickered, trying various combinations of frequency and amperage to overwhelm and suppress the deadly delta-wave. When it had accomplished that part of its program, it would then have to establish a balance between her present catatonia and a manic arousal in which every sensation and stimulus would impinge on Maycee's conscious awareness at once.

  Gradually, the delta-wave receded.

  Cho'en, with her hands on Maycee's head, raised her chin to chuff through her throat nostrils. Relief, rejoice. "She is better She will wake up."

  Annia could not see what Cho'en could read through through her healing trance. She had to rely on human senses, and to her, Maycee looked no different. Then alpha and beta waves formed in the monitor. The judder of a sleep spindle interrupted the delta-wave, and a theta wave appeared. "I think she'll be all right."

  The gaean rippled all over with relief. Annia said, "You'll have to stay with her. I have to see if someone has found that catpil yet. We need it."

  Cho'en's crest flicked up and down. "You have a cure?"

  Annia explained in a few words how she had combined the catpil parasite with a common DV to produce something that could attack the plague, how Mr. Solante had taken the hard copy and destroyed every other reservoir of the live virophage, and how she had injected one sample into Honeybear and sent it out of the hospital.

  Cho'en turned her head to one side to look at Annia from one full set of eyes, then her bells jingled u
p and down her body in a wave of laughter. She extended her neck out over Maycee's body, and the lids of her big first-eyes swelled half shut with amusement.

  Elizabeth-Belle stared at the gaean and shook her head as if she couldn't understand how any thinking being could laugh in their present circumstances.

  "You." Annia stabbed a finger at Elizabeth-Belle. "Do something useful."

  Annia picked a path through the dying. Patients crowded every room. More had come into the intake area and been caught up in the congestion there. The smell on the street had grown stronger. At least the temperature had dropped as the sun began to sink toward the spaceport on the mountaintop. Would there be enough people alive to attract sneakdillies?

  She stopped the first runner she saw, a pale, lively boy with nappy red hair and rusty freckles. "Has anyone found the catpil? The brown and tan catpil?"

  "No, Doctor Annia. We're looking. The chief has a search pattern, but we haven't found your catpil yet."

  She let the boy dash away on whatever errand she had interrupted. She had expected Honeybear to stay near the hospital. It wasn't strong enough yet to hunt for itself, and the human-acclimated catpils tended to stay near the human they identified as a tangle-mate. Maybe Honybear had gone looking for a little girl it remembered.

  How long could it possibly take for thirty kids to find one catpil?

  Annia snagged the shirt of another runner, this one a lanky teenager with long braids. Annia had seen her with Liam and the other older runner with the very dark skin. "Where's Liam? I need him."

  "Come on." The girl grabbed Annia's sleeve and pulled her toward the corner of the converted warehouse as if she didn't think she really had time to cater to spoiled adults. The girl steered Annia into the alley along the side of the hospital and released her with a little push as if she were setting a leaf afloat on the lake, then she left again for her original destination.

  Liam stood halfway down the alley listening with his head cocked to a pair of gesticulating teenagers. Annia joined them. Liam was moving his arms and breathing freely, so he must have found someone to repair his ribs and treat his bruises. He looked worried. "Maycee is fixed?"