The Symbionts of Murkor

by Tarulli, Gary

  He tried to reassure himself. Anyone can have a bad day powerlifting. Rising, he removed one mesh bag from each end of the bar. Feeling drained, he made a few nervous circuits of the room, then returned to the exercise bench to rest. Staring up at the apex of Nadir’s pyramid, his mind wandered to events of the previous evening.

  Amanda had come to his cabin. To discuss air chemistry, she had claimed, examining him closely. The lateness of the hour made him immediately wary of her intentions. He got that right. They exchanged a few cursory words. Then, matter-of-factly, she reached beneath the neckline of her loose-fitting T-shirt, slipping it slowly over one exquisite shoulder and down the side of her arm until one breast was exposed. Her glare became a challenge. No, it was more than that. It was arrogant.

  “You better leave,” he had said. Those were the words he could remember. “You better leave.”

  At first, she didn’t believe him. Not until he reached out, gripped the fabric of her T-shirt and carefully pulled it back up over her shoulder.

  She became angry. Up-in-his-face angry. The last thing she hissed was, “When you regret this, and you will, they’ll be no second chance.”

  In the obvious way, he already regretted it. Badly.

  He would have regretted it more if he had acted on the urge.

  He had finally figured it out, he should have sooner, that Amanda was using him to get at the Comandante. What had Gustavo once warned? Keep far away, she sucks up emotions like a black hole. Her behavior last night made that seem like pretty good advice. If she and the Comandante had problems to work out, fine. He would refuse to be drawn in. He owed his friend at least that much, especially when he might be forced to prematurely abandon the last command of a long and distinguished military career.

  All because he had let him down. He had let everyone down.

  In frustration and anger, he grabbed the bar perched above him and abruptly shoved, expecting to lift it handily.

  The bar barely moved.

  A bolt of fear shot straight through him.

  The weight was half the amount he had benched five days ago.

  What in hell had that Coalition bitch done to him? Carlos lamented as he descended the stairs leading to L2. One step from the top he lost his balance.

  For a brief moment he teetered, trying desperately to save himself. There was nothing to prevent or obstruct a fall: The spiral staircases had been designed, like much of Nadir, with the crews’ safety subordinated to the speed and cost of construction.

  Clutching the air where a safety handrail should have been, he went pitching forward, tumbling head over heels, gaining momentum until he went spilling over the stair’s open side. Falling three meters, he landed with a bone-jarring thud onto the unforgiving floor, where he lay, unmoving, on his back.

  Garcia, searching for Carlos with the intention of broaching the news of their impending rescue, saw the accident unfold, in slow motion, directly in front of him. Although close enough to break the engineer’s fall, he had lost the alacrity, both of body and mind, to do so. Now the best thing was to not move him.

  Mariana arrived moments later, the mishap causing the poorly built staircase to shudder violently, creating an ominous vibration felt, if not heard, throughout the base. Coming up behind her, distress registering on their faces, were Gustavo and Roya, followed by Amanda.

  “Did you see what happened?” Mariana asked, moving Garcia aside. Crouching, she pressed her middle and forefinger and against the back of Carlos’s jaw, feeling for a pulse.

  “He fell off the stairs,” Garcia replied, stating the obvious.

  “I mean did you see how he landed?” she asked, scanning the bleeding gash on the engineer’s forehead. Internal injury was her principle worry. “How did he strike his head?”

  “On the treads. While he fell,” Garcia replied. “His back and right side absorbed the brunt of it when he struck the floor.”

  “His pulse is faint, but steady,” Mariana said, standing. Her medical facilities, modest as they were, were steps away. “I need a few items. If he revives, make sure he doesn’t move.”

  “Poor Carlos,” Roya said, the sight of the vital young man brought low arousing her sympathy. “Do you know why he fell?”

  Garcia shook his head. “I should have cushioned his fall.” While he was speaking the injured man opened his eyes, blinking a few times as recognition of what happened grabbed hold.

  “My friend,” a worried Garcia said, leaning in. “How are you?”

  “Been… better,” Carlos replied in a faltering voice, Garcia’s firm hand prevented him from rising.

  “Apply this compress against the wound,” Mariana directed, having returned with her medical kit. She handed Garcia a moist pad impregnated with synthetic platelets. “It’ll help stem the bleeding. Gustavo, bring a chair from the conference table—now, please.”

  “Sorry. Straightaway, doctora,” Gustavo replied, moving slowly.

  “Where do you hurt?” Mariana asked her patient.

  Carlos touched his head.

  “Anywhere else?”

  “Everywhere else,” Carlos replied, trying to make a joke of it.

  “I see you can flex your fingers,” Mariana observed. “How about your toes?”

  “I’m okay,” Carlos insisted, complying with the directive, noticing for the first time that one shoe had dislodged.

  “You’re okay when I say you’re okay,” Mariana insisted, continuing her cursory physical exam, judging the low vital signs to be typical of a mild concussion. Nothing led her to believe the fall was a direct result of oxygen deprivation.

  With a nod to Garcia, an aching Carlos was assisted into a waiting conference chair where he had to content himself with being the center of unwanted attention.

  “You gave us quite a scare,” Roya said, fumbling Carlos’s shoe before slipping it onto his foot. “What happened?”

  “I missed a step. An accident.”

  “Next time try missing the last, not the first step,” Gustavo said.

  “What were you doing on L3?” Amanda asked. “I thought the area off-limits.”

  “I wasn’t working out, if that’s what you mean,” Carlos said, making no mention of his waning strength.

  “Oh, so you were up there working hard on our little problem,” Amanda said, a sly smile amplifying her taunt. “So how’s that going?”

  Garcia could plainly see the hurt in the young man’s eyes. “Give it a rest, Amanda,” he emphasized in a firm voice. He had his back to her. Raising his head, he kept his body still and waited. An unmistakable warning for her to desist.

  “Just pointing out what needs to be said—now that we’ll be departing this dump.”

  Angered, Garcia rose to face her. “So there’s no misunderstanding,” he said, standing so close he could feel the heat from her face, “I’m giving you an order. Keep still.”

  “I won’t breathe another word,” Amanda replied. And in so saying, made a hasty retreat.

  Roya and Mariana exchanged glances. It had been a long time since they heard the Comandante give a direct order. Who he gave it to made it more interesting. Certainly more satisfying given the circumstances.

  “Is it true, Comandante?” a dispirited Carlos asked.

  “Yes, Carlos, it’s true,” Garcia replied. “We have received assurances from the shuttle pilot. In two days we’ll be out of here.”

  “And if his message is a delay tactic?”

  “I fail to get your reasoning,” Garcia said.

  “Two days. No shuttle. What then?”

  “I think you know the answer,” Garcia responded. “You see what’s happening to us. Waiting for our supply ship is not a viable option.”

  “Never really was,” Mariana added.

  “Better than the alternative,” Carlos persisted.

  “Ask yourself, by leaving, what do we relinquish?” Garcia urged.

  “If we are forced out—our pride.”

  “Is that worth ris
king our lives?”

  “If it deprives the enemy of the water they need.”

  Garcia kept his patience. He had great affection for his tormented friend. “The shuttle pilot’s message is in your mindstor. I suggest you replay it.”

  “And don’t forget to repair the dent,” Gustavo said, earning himself a blank stare. Pointing up at the stairs, he smiled. “Where your fucking head contacted the metal tread—cabeziduro!”

  All present, even Carlos, had to laugh.

  It was a commodity, like oxygen, that would soon be in short supply.

  ***

  It had been perfectly natural for Doctora Mariana Perez to feel a surge of nervous excitement when she first heard of her two-year commission to a distant world. Discounting brief excursions to Unión’s huge armada of orbiting “monitoring” stations, she had never left the confines of Earth. Upon learning the exact destination and constraints of her new assignment, only the nervousness remained.

  Foremost, she had virtually no say in the equipping of Nadir’s medical facilities, the majority of decisions having been perfunctorily made by others during the base’s planning stage. Despite her protests, none of the sophisticated and expensive diagnostic equipment common to Earth-based medical centers was being transported to Murkor. Treatment options were also to be limited, little better than the primitive medicine of a prior century when some of the most efficacious tools were cocktails of crude chemical compounds.

  Justification was offered for what she believed to be the mission planner’s callous disregard for safety. Each member of the crew, herself included, had undergone genetic screening for inherited disorders and, like so much processed meat, been certified to be disease-free for a minimum of three years—their maximum term of service at Nadir. During training, they were routinely scanned, probed, and poked to safeguard against the introduction of outside pathogens. The personnel transporting them to Murkor were similarly screened. Lastly, Murkor’s biota had been declared safe for humans and, in the unlikely event that turned out to be wrong, Nadir had been equipped with an advanced foreign-body detector/sterilizer.

  In theory, all that remained as a viable health threat was an accident or a deliberate act of violence. Both possibilities, she was assured, were statistically remote. Nevertheless, yielding to her very vocal insistence, she was allotted a precautionary quantity of bio-engineered cellular repair nanobots.

  The irony was lost on an aching Carlos when she had injected, post-accident, a bolus containing ten to the ninth power of these industrious agents directly into a vein of his muscular arm. With coaxing, Mariana learned that his fall had been precipitated by a temporary loss of balance. There was more. Caving in to her dogged persistence, he admitted to a growing lethargy and a hearing impairment. The young man, whose pride in physical conditioning was arguably excessive, foolishly tried to hide his loss of muscle strength and, one day later, the intermittently blurry vision that he attributed to the knock on his head. Despite his age and peak conditioning, he was worse off than the five older members of the crew.

  Mariana had access to baseline medical data for all of them—much of it useless in the absence of the diagnostic equipment necessary to make real-time comparisons. Nevertheless, she delved into Carlos’s medical history, confirming that his auditory faculty was exceptional. Viewed through a crudely effective otoscope, his outer and middle ear exhibited as normal. From this and a few other rudimentary tests she was able to rule out possibilities and deduce nothing regarding the cause of his impaired hearing and loss of balance.

  She anticipated more of the same obstacles in diagnosing her current patient.

  “What did you do, Mariana?” Roya, being her normal inquisitive self, inquired while being subjected to yet another physical exam.

  “About what?”

  “You know exactly what. He was right in Amanda’s face.”

  “And you think I had something to do with that?”

  “C’mon. Share.”

  “Really, there’s nothing to it. A late-night game of Dendrite in the Comandante’s quarters. Amanda walks in. Sees me. Amanda walks out. Credit him with anything else.”

  “Uh huh. And her nuclear winter attitude toward Carlos?”

  “That has me stumped,” Mariana replied.

  “Not me. Especially after what you just told me. As incredulous as this sounds, I’m betting she’s finally run out of options.”

  Mariana considered her crewmate’s statement. “Why not Gustavo?”

  “Say again.”

  “Yeah, I know. That was ridiculous of me.”

  “No. I really didn’t hear you.” Roya’s face was somber. Her hearing ability had worsened. “I had to listen carefully to distinguish every word you said.”

  “And your appetite?”

  “Like yours. Nonexistent. How are the others faring?”

  “Not well, I’m afraid. Tell me the levels again—”

  “Sixteen point four,” Roya responded, repeating the ambient oxygen levels she mentioned earlier in their conversation.

  Mariana had already begun to question why some of symptoms of hypoxia had demonstrated early, diligently plumbing the mindstor for an explanation, concentrating her efforts on the combined effect, if any, from Murkor’s reduced gravity and sunlight, and the base’s elevated carbon dioxide. The mindstor contained nothing revelatory about the subject. Under the circumstances, she was forced to entertain the notion that all the symptoms they were experiencing were within the realm of the possible.

  Her confidence in this assessment was severely shaken upon administering two simple tests on Roya and comparing the results to historical norms. Mariana knew, or thought she knew, one physiological principal to be invariably true: In a low-oxygen environment, heart and respiratory rates increase as the human body struggles to acquire and assimilate more of the life-sustaining element.

  Inexplicably, Roya’s heart and respiratory rates had decreased.

  “You look confused,” Roya said, observing Mariana’s puzzled reaction to the results.

  “Confused and frustrated,” Mariana replied, believing that if the modern tools of medicine were at her disposal, or those available a mere one-hundred kilometers away at Zenith, she would have a clearer picture of what was happening to them.

  In this, she was wrong.

  ***

  The same day the shuttle was due to arrive, Carlos had to be roused from a deep sleep. Later, when he approached the table where the crew had gathered (for a breakfast none would eat) he absently kicked into a chair leg, briefly stumbling.

  “Easy, my friend,” Garcia said, reaching out to steady him with a hand under the elbow. Garcia looked inquiringly at Mariana, confirming that she took note of the incident.

  “Let’s start with what we know for certain,” Garcia urged. “Carlos?”

  “Yes, Comandante?”

  “Bring us up to speed.”

  “Oxygen 16.1,” Carlos said. “Falling as predicted.”

  “Anything else?” Garcia prodded.

  “Anything—?” Carlos repeated, dismayed by his inability to provide whatever his CO wanted. Roya, upset that the engineer was hopelessly confused by the simple question, leaned in and sympathetically whispered loudly in his ear.

  “Oh, yeah,” Carlos continued. “Carbon dioxide 1245. Steady. Maybe falling. Don’t know why. No progress to report on ESS/Nexus.”

  “I know you won’t give up,” Garcia said reassuringly, having decided that his struggling crew, Carlos especially, were not to be admonished for sub-par performance of their duties. “Roya, what news do you have for us? Do you have results of the water analysis?”

  Garcia had ordered testing of Nadir’s water, air, and food supply when Mariana privately expressed her misgivings about what was affecting the crew.

  “Ultrafiltration and the UV sterilizer both functioning at specs,” Roya responded. “Our water is pure.”

  “As expected,” Garcia said, attempting to remain positive.
“Amanda—how is the air we can’t get enough of and the food we have no desire to eat?”

  “I can report there’s nothing to report,” Amanda replied in a tone vaguely suggestive that her effort was a waste of time. “No toxic chemicals. No foreign substances. No pathogens. Sorry to disappoint you, Mariana. You’d probably be grateful if I had found something to entertain you.”

  “Damned right I would,” Mariana replied. “Wouldn’t you, if it would help us to better understand what’s afflicting us?”

  Amanda eyed Garcia, then self-censored a terse reply. A line had formed she was now reluctant to cross.

  “Look at us,” Mariana continued, gesturing. “Loss of appetite, headaches, lethargy, changes to vision and hearing—the effects of hypoxia. So why aren’t we struggling to breathe? Why have our heart rates decreased?” Reaching into a pocket of her lab coat, she pulled out a pen-sized instrument, and pointed it directly at Amanda’s exposed throat. “And if that isn’t bizarre enough, this morning I took my temperature. It’s nearly two points below my norm.” Squinting, she read the instrument’s small digitized display. “Exactly like yours, Amanda. Oh, and one more thing—I entered everything on my mindstor so I wouldn’t forget—there may be an inverse correlation between advancing age and onset of the worse symptoms.” Mariana forced a smile. “You’re going to outlast us after all, Comandante.”

  Garcia thought of the youngest, Carlos, who, with puzzled expression, was gazing down at his own hands, repeatedly clenching them into tight fists then opening and spreading wide his fingers in what was apparently a test of dexterity and strength. “Does anyone wish to advance a theory to explain what the hell is going on?” he asked.

  Roya risked a response. “What happened in that tube a few days ago coincides with our decline. Did Amanda and I bring something inside with us?”

  It was the first time such a connection was proposed and it marshaled everyone’s attention.

  “And what exactly happened?” Garcia asked.

  “Nothing,” Amanda blurted out, surprising everyone. “I got spooked, that’s all.”