Impact Imminent - The Kylie Rhoads Space Adventure Continues (Aeon 14: Perilous Alliance)
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Kylie walked through the ER, trying not to feel guilty over the people lining the halls in various states of triage. What she was worried about more was the message that Rogers had managed to get out of Chimin-5.
He’d found Winter, but it wasn’t good.
She’d tried to reach the hospital to find out what they’d learned about the gas, but with its NSAI offline, and the staff slammed, she couldn’t get through to Dr. Nicole, let alone find the lab technicians.
After asking around, Kylie and Bubbs entered an examination room where Nicole was applying a bone-setter to a man’s broken leg. She barely looked up as she worked to address Kylie. “I’m a little busy here.”
“Please, I need your help,” Kylie said, “my crew-members have been directly exposed to the gas. Have you learned how to reverse its effects yet?”
“Are they presenting symptoms?”
“I don’t know details. They’re on their way back from Chimin-5. On their way to my ship. I need you to come look them over as soon as they arrive.” Kylie’s voice rose in pitch as she spoke.
“Seriously? You’re asking me to make a house-call now? Have you seen what we’re dealing with here? Chimin has no AIs anymore, our hospital NSAI went on the fritz yesterday, so all our information sharing systems are down. Nearly half the staff is missing, or just didn’t show up, and we have dozens more to see.”
Bubbs glowered. “She said please.”
Nicole directed her own disparaging look Bubbs’ way. “Well, I’m sorry but ‘please’ doesn’t always get you your way.” Nicole pulled the bone setter off the man’s leg—a thick plas splint now attached to his leg—before addressing him. “You’re all set but give it thirty minutes before you try to stand on it.”
The man nodded, and Nicole placed a few items into a case, preparing to leave the room.
Bubbs lifted her gun arm and aimed at the doctor. “This is how I say please.”
Kylie would have said she was surprised, except she wasn’t. That didn’t stop her from letting Bubbs threaten violence.
The man on the examination table let out a frightened squeak as Nicole looked at Bubbs, shook her head and turned to Kylie. “You’re going to allow this? You’ll let that thing threaten me unless I go with you?”
“Well, we’ve both said please,” Kylie said and stepped forward. “And Bubbs isn’t a thing. She’s a person, same as you or I. Also loves cats, long walks on the beach, and is all-in-all a very personable person who just happens to have a gun arm. Though in her defense, she has more than just a gun for that arm.”
Bubbs clenched her jaw. “I do not like long walks on the beach, Captain. I’m not sure where you got the impression—”
Kylie raised her hand to silence her. “Come with us, Doctor. Soon as you give my crew the all clear, you can come back here.”
“And if I can’t? If that frickin’ gas has done a number on them too?”
“Then you’ll propose treatment ideas. Either way, I’ll return you here as soon as I can. You have my word.”
Nicole picked up her case. “And your word…it actually means something?”
Kylie raised an eyebrow. “It means everything. It’s my honor, and my honor is the reason we didn’t shoot our way off this rock and abandon it before all this shit went down yesterday,” Kylie said.
“You stole the body from the morgue. How can I trust you?”
“Ricket did that,” Bubbs interjected. “Captain just ordered her too.”
Kylie winced. “How about we try not helping me for a little while, Bubbs?”
Nicole glanced between them. “Nice to see it’s some sort of joke to you. I know we seem like a bunch of nobodies to you. You live among the stars, and we live inside this ‘rock’, as you put it, carrying out our simple lives…. Are you ever going to ask her to lower that thing she has pointed at me?”
“No,” Kylie said simply. “I’m going to tell her to shoot you if you don’t agree to come with us.”
“Then I guess I’m coming,” Nicole said. Her eyes narrowed, alive with fury.
“Too bad,” Bubbs said, lowering her arm.
Nicole glared and turned to Kylie. “To think that I liked you when I first met you. I thought, there’s a woman struggling against her family expectations, a woman who actually cares.”
“I care, I care more than you can know. But when my crew is hurt or threatened, they come first. Come with us, Doctor. And don’t try to gather anyone to stop us. It won’t go well if you do.” Kylie gestured for Nicole to follow after Bubbs. Nicole snapped off her surgical gloves and did as she was told. She was shooting daggers, but she was doing it quietly.
* * * * *
Kylie paced impatiently as the Shotgun’s shell settled on to the platform and the top lifted off. Rogers and Ricket maneuvered the cryopod out of the back of the shell and pushed it through the airlock toward her.
“Are you all right?” Kylie slid her hand on the pod that contained Winter. She cringed at the sight of him; the split skin, the oozing boils, the deathly pallor. He looked like he was already gone—a macabre corpse, not the vibrant man she’d seen the day before.
Ricket and Rogers both took their helmets off, appearing no worse for wear.
“Fine,” Rogers said. “Let’s just move.”
Kylie could hear the anguish in his voice and didn’t speak further. There was no use in speculating.
“That crew’s working on stabilizing Chimin-1,” Kylie said as they walked toward the lift. “They said that they should be able to save the whole asteroid.”
“Shit, that doesn’t sound good,” Ricket said with a whistle.
“Yeah…I’m pretending it’s just engineers’ pessimism for now,” Kylie replied. “I have enough dire crises hanging over me for now.”
They reached the lift where Bubbs and Nicole waited. “This is Dr. Nicole,” Kylie said as they pushed Winter onto the lift. “She’s going to examine both of you, then see what we can do for Winter.”
Rogers nodded his head at her and Ricket gave a faint, “Hello.”
Nicole raised her eyebrows. “So, you’re the one stealing dead bodies out of the morgue?”
Ricket gave a rueful laugh. “She won’t be dead for long.”
“Excuse me?” Nicole asked. “The dead don’t come back to life.”
“Maybe not around here, but people with nano like Liberty’s…they sure as hell do.”
Kylie glanced around at the shocked expressions of her companions. “Seriously? The pod’s over a hundred degrees below freezing. Will it hold?”
“Not forever,” Nicole said as she bent over the pod. “These things freeze stuff, they’re not pressure vessels. Granted, they are built to handle exterior vacuum, so it can handle an atmosphere’s difference at least.”
Rogers ran a hand across his forehead. “Once we get it on the ship, I can use the a-grav systems to build a high-grav pocket around the pod. If the pressure outside equals the pressure inside, it won’t leak. That will buy us some time.”
Nicole gave Rogers an appraising glance. “A bit, till the pressure crushes him.”
“Then we’d best work quickly,” Kylie replied. As the lift doors opened. “Let’s go!”
They raced down the concourse to the North Docks, pushing the stasis pod as they went. Bubbs ran at the fore calling out for the few civilians present to make a path.
They were exiting the final lift to the Barbaric Queen’s platform when Kylie saw a fracture appear in the plas on the top of the pod. For a moment it looked like the crack wouldn’t spread, then it raced to the edges of the lid, and the clear covering exploded, blasting plas and the reeking gas in every direction.
Kylie pushed the pod across the platform, trying to ignore the gasping moans coming from Winter as it performed an emergency resuscitation on him.
She di
dn’t even look behind her as she pushed the pod onto the ship and through the passageways to the medbay.
Once she got the pod inside, she rushed around and looked at Winter’s ruined body, a final few tendrils of the gas drifting off his skin.
Kylie had never felt more impotent—she had no idea what to do.
Then she realized that his wrists were strapped into place, and released the restraints, whispering his name as she did.
“Winter? Hang in there Winter, hang on.”
His eyelids cracked open, blood seeping out around the edges. “Captain…” he gurgled, blood in his throat.
“We need to put him in a coma,” Nicole said from Kylie’s side.
“How?”
Nicole looked around. “We…. Shit. How does a ship that looks like yours have a medbay that looks like this? I’ve never seen anything like it!”
“You’re going to need to put him into a medically induced coma,” Nicole said, before her mouth fell open as she glanced at the medpod. “You know what a med-bay like this could do? How many it could heal on rotation? It could save dozens of lives, depending how fast we work. You’ve had this all along and—”
“Are you going to help me move him or not?” Kylie asked, feeling guilty about not sharing—though it hadn’t been front of mind during the search for Winter.
Kylie and the doctor were about to pick Winter up when Rogers burst into the room. “Stars, Kylie, if you weren’t moping around so much, you’d know what your own ship could do.”
He stood at a console and keyed in a series of commands. A moment later an a-grav arm swung over Winter, lifted him from the ruined cryopod then swung him over and into the medpod.
Once the lid sealed, the pod lit up and visible tendrils consisting of nano flowed from ports on the pod and into Winter’s body.
Rogers stepped to Kylie’s side and squeezed her hand for a moment.
Nicole ran a hand along the medpod. “This looks like something from the future. Maybe I’ve been on Chimin too long.”
Maybe she had. “Examine Rogers and Ricket for me, please Doctor.”
Nicole glanced at Rogers, then at Ricket, who stood just inside the medbay’s entrance. “I don’t have to. I can already see rashes forming on your skin. After that cloud engulfed us on the dock, it won’t be long before we all are symptomatic. Everyone on this docking bay is at risk. Given how the vents on Chimin-1 work, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s already spread a lot further. Death won’t come fast, and it won’t be pretty.”
Kylie swallowed hard, knowing how at fault she was. “I’m sorry.”
“Anything that’s easily permeable can pick up the gas and transfer the virus it carries on contact—at least that’s what we’d determined before you grabbed me from the hospital.”
“But what does the gas do?” Ricket asked. “So far—from what my internal nano can tell—it just acts like an infection, one that my nano might be able to fight off.”
Nicole snorted. “Well then, aren’t you just a lucky woman. For the rest of us it seems to specifically attack our epithelial cells, breaking down their cohesion in a way that we can’t seem to counter.”
Kylie was about to lash out at Nicole, tell her what she went through to get her nanotech, but Rogers spoke up first.
“OK, I read the manual on the bay’s equipment, but I’m no biologist,” Rogers said as he leant against Winter’s medpod. “What’s an epithelial cell?”
“Cells that form boundaries between things—like your skin. It’s made up of epithelial cells.”
“And lose cohesion…I assume that means fall apart? Our skin is going to slough off?”
Nicole nodded. “Yeah, though skin is tough stuff. It’ll make it ‘til the end. However, the ‘skin’ of your organs, and your glands are all made up of epithelial cells as well. Your body will just be a big sack of soup before your epidermis ‘sloughs off’, as you put it.”
“OK…I don’t want to die like that,” Rogers said, glancing at Kylie. “What are we gonna do?”
“Well,” Nicole glanced at Kylie, “if you let me work in this fantastic medbay of yours, I can see if I can do what our hospital has been flailing at for the last day. If that’s OK with you, Captain Rhoads.”
“What about your lab techs?” Kylie asked. “The ones who have been studying the gas.”
Nicole blew out a long breath. “Remember how I said our lab NSAI is offline? Well, since then I’ve come to realize I know more about this than they do…which isn’t saying much.”
Kylie gave a resigned shake of her head. “Marge, make sure Nicole has whatever access she needs.”
“Great,” Nicole muttered, already focused on her task as she sat the console Rogers had used earlier. “Now, from the looks of it, your fancy blue suits are all armor, so probably not porous, but you should take it off and store them somewhere separate so that they won’t infect others, or cause reinfection—provided we beat this thing.”
“Should we shower?” Rogers asked.
Nicole glanced up at Rogers. “You have water showers on this ship?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want to turn your entire water reclamation system into a petri dish for this stuff?”
“OK.” Rogers scowled. “No need to be such a bitch about it. We do have a decontamination station in engineering. It doesn’t feed into regular reclamation.”
“Go use that, then.” Nicole waved Rogers off. “Oh, and when you get abducted, you can be just as bitchy as I’m being right now.”
Rogers turned and walked from the medbay, muttering, “Been abducted plenty. Was never bitchy about it.”
Kylie opened her mouth to lay into Nicole, but a soothing feeling from Marge gave her pause. She swallowed and took a deep breath before continuing. “OK, Nicole, I’m sorry I grabbed you, and whisked you off like this. If you want to go, go. I won’t hold you captive, but just in case you actually care about stopping this thing, how’s about you quit your harping and let’s get working on a solution.”
Nicole shot a narrow-eyed look at Kylie, but then her shoulders drooped. She nodded wordlessly and turned back to her console.
Kylie and the remaining crew filed out of the medbay, leaving Nicole to her work.
“I feel useless,” Bubbs said to Kylie. “I can’t do anything about this.”
Kylie knew how Bubbs felt. She also knew she shouldn’t have forcibly abducted the doctor and exposed her too. Kylie should’ve known there would be a problem.
“I’m sorry, Captain. If I hadn’t been in such a rush to rescue Winter….” Rogers shook his head.
She placed a hand on his shoulder. “He’s your friend, my crew, I know why you were in a rush. There’s nothing we can do about this now but face it head on. Like we always do. Tell me how you’re feeling.”
Rogers shrugged. “Not so bad yet. My skin is tingling, but not melting off my face, and my eyes still work, so that’s all good, right?”
Kylie nodded. “Let’s all follow the doctor’s orders and use the decontamination booth down in engineering. Then maybe we should get some rest before things take whatever turn they’re going to take.”
“Aye, Captain,” Rogers whispered. “It’s good to have you back. You and Winter, despite the circumstances.”
“Go on ahead,” Kylie said to the others. “I’ll be along shortly.”
She pulled up a feed from the medbay and centered it on Winter’s medpod. The ISF’s mednano was working its miracles, already making visible progress in fusing his skin back together. “Hang in there, Winter. We need you back.”
Nothing it couldn’t do? Kylie was hit with an idea so radical, she wondered if it was fever-induced.
Marge seemed to consider that.