Four

 

Four days later – Caliban

Caliban’s system consisted of five planets – one tiny cinder near the sun, the inhabited ocean world itself, and three Jupiter-sized gas giants. The twisted, distorted gravitational fields of the three giant planets interacting with the star made navigation tricky for anyone coming in across the plane of the system’s ecliptic, as the Shade Tree was, but they couldn’t afford to maneuver for a better orbital path – time was too short.

“Past the innermost giant’s gravity well now,” Paolo Guerra reported. “Ready to shut the drive down.”

“Stand by.” Indira Krishnavarna had a crushing headache – one of the early signs of Bayer’s Plague. Well over half the crew was showing some symptoms now.

“Speed down to two hundred thousand kph,”

Krishnavarna tapped a contact. “All ready down there in the shuttle?”

“Ready here,” second watch helmsman Sean Weaver called back; he had drawn the straw to pilot the shuttle to the surface. “Captain, Gomp, McNeal and Doc Dodd are strapped down in back.”

“All right.”

“One hundred eighty thousand kph.”

“Shut down the drive,” the XO ordered. Paolo Guerra tapped several contacts. Below the deck, the mass tunnel of the Gellar drive fell silent. The ship was coasting, with no drive signature to alert Caliban Ground Control or the Skyhook that there was a ship in the area.

“Sixteen minutes to optimal launch point,” Giorg Constantine called from the navigation station.

The minutes ticked by like hours. Finally, Constantine spoke up again: “Launch point!”

Indira Krishnavarna hit the contact on the command chair again. “Sean,” she called, “Launch now-now-now.”

“On our way.” There was a slight shudder as the shuttle’s ion drive lit up, kicking it free of the ship.

The XO breathed a sigh of relief. “Are we still on course?”

“As before. We’ll arc into a decent high orbit, assuming nothing hits us, without using the main drive. We can adjust as necessary with maneuvering thrusters.”

“Very well.”

Beneath and behind the Shade Tree, the ship’s small landing shuttle dropped into Caliban’s atmosphere, extended its wings, and began the hammering drop to the surface.

“Hang on,” Weaver called back into the passenger compartment, “I’m going down fast, but that’s gonna be rough.”

In the back of the shuttle, Jean Barrett was preoccupied being sicker than she’d ever known possible. Her face was mottled with bruises, her lungs clogged with thick phlegm, her throat raw from a racking cough. The fever wracked her entire body with pain, making her feel as though she’d been beaten with an iron bar. Across from her, Hector Gomp huddled in his bucket seat, the burly ex-Marine almost doubled over in pain. Tim McNeal was even worse; slumped in his seat, semi-conscious. Only the doctor seemed alert, and she was coughing, too; her constant care for the three worst cases had taken their toll.

“Ten minutes,” Weaver called out. His head hurt, and he had fought a nagging cough for a day now. It was night over the Capital Archipelago; they had passed over Caliban’s one city, Capital, a few minutes earlier. He flipped on the shuttle’s navigation and landing lights, and picked up the radio mike, dialing the set into the frequency McNeal had given him.

“ViraTech Research,” he called the lab directly, since they controlled the island and its tiny landing field, “This is the Shade Tree shuttle, we are nine minutes out with the ship’s doctor, captain and two crew, all symptomatic. Request emergency landing procedures.”

A cool, calm voice came back immediately. “Roger that, Shade Tree shuttle. You are cleared for emergency approach on Landing Pad Three. Pad is the only one lit up. An emergency medical isolation team is waiting for you on the pad.”

Several kilometers ahead, Weaver saw a tiny square of light. The landing field.

“I have visual contact,” he called back. “We are now seven minutes out.”

Six minutes and forty-eight seconds later, the shuttle settled to the tarmac in front of a brightly lit hangar. Sean Weaver popped the hatch open to see several figures in environmental suits.

One of the figures pointed at the others. “Get the patients over to Isolation Two stat,” its voice boomed out over an amplification circuit. “Someone get this shuttle out of sight – get a tractor, get it in the hangar and close the door. Full decontamination on the shuttle – scrub it clean, UV and chemical. Move, people!”

In the shuttle, Doctor Janice Dodd listened, and smiled. They were still alive – and there was a doctor out there, one who sounded like he knew what she was about.

Maybe, she thought, just maybe we’ll live through this after all.

Hector Gomp and Tim McNeal had lost consciousness on the rough descent. Two medics loaded them on gurneys, and floated them away towards the laboratory. Jean Barrett, Doctor Dodd and Sean Weaver were led away by another enviro-suited figure.

In the laboratory, Doctor Katrin McNeal waited, all of her staff on alert, all computers, gene-sequencers and protein replicators running.

“Gene,” she told one of the techs, “I want blood drawn from each of them the moment we get them in isolation. Di, Jules, start isolating the virus immediately for analysis.”

“Doctor McNeal,” someone said, “we haven’t tested any of this, not even on mice.”

“I know that. Just do what I say,” the doctor snapped. “We’re just going to have to move our first clinical trials up a little bit.”

Out of the frying pan, she told herself, and into the fire. Needs must when there are lives to save – and if we can reverse Bayer’s Plague… The implications, the possibility that they may be able to cure viral diseases, were staggering to think of.

I sure hope this works.

***

The next day

Jean Barrett woke slowly. Her head ached cruelly, and her body still hurt, but she didn’t feel feverish any more.

A face hovered over her. She squinted, trying to make her eyes work. Reluctantly, they focused on a face that was somehow strangely familiar.

The face wasn’t masked. The half-seen form beneath the face wore only a white lab coat, no enviro-suit.

“Captain Barrett?” the face asked.

Jean finally recognized her; the woman looked like Tim McNeal, her Security troop. “Mmm,” she mumbled. “Doctor McNeal, I presume?” A weak smile.

“That’s me,” the face smiled back.

“What happened? Where are my crew?”

“Look to your right.”

Barrett turned her head slowly, painfully, and strained her eyes to focus. Hector Gomp lay in the next bed, grinning broadly at his Captain.

“Morning, Cap’n,” he said, and lapsed into a bout of coughing. “Great day to be alive, eh?”

“Yeah,” Barrett answered. “Where’s Tim?”

“Over here to my right,” Gomp said, “Sleeping like a baby.”

“I take it we’re going to live?”

“You’re going to live,” Doctor McNeal said. “Your Doctor Dodd is up and on her feet already – she wasn’t as sick as you and the other two. She’s helping administer our HKAV to the rest of your crew.”

“Aitch-kav?” Barrett asked.

“Hunter-Killer Anti-Virus,” Doctor McNeal answered. “A neat trick we only just figured out. A nano-machine, a bit of RNA with a protein sheath, like a virus, but programmed to find a specific virus and bind to it, effectively killing it. We were able to develop an HKAV specific to the plague virus from samples of your blood; you and the others got a massive dose. You’re clean, Captain; you just need to rest for a few days while your body recovers from the damage the virus did.”

“My ship?”

“Your XO and your Chief of Engineering are supervising decontamination as we speak, Captain. You had the worst case; well, you and Gomp. Any idea why? Were you more directly exposed?”

“We actually saw two of the bodies. Nobody else was near them, just near us.”

“So, you two were the index cases for your ship, and probably spread it from there – everyone else was secondary. If you hadn’t been directly exposed, the disease may have taken another two or three days to show up.”

And we would have been at or near Halifax by then. The thought was enough to make Barrett’s headache worse. Baxter was planning on that.

Barrett relaxed. She was still very tired. There was still one more thing…

“Gomp,” she called out.

“Cap’n?”

“Philemon Baxter. He tried to fuck us over, didn’t he? He had to know that the Orlando was infected. That’s why he sent us out after it, instead of his own people.”

“Can’t see any other way ‘round it, Cap’n.”

“When we’re up and around again…”

“Yeah, Cap’n?”

“It’s going to be payback time.”

Gomp grinned. “You betcher ass, Cap’n.”

“Thought you’d like that,” Barrett murmured, even as she faded off to sleep.

***

The Grugell frigate K-110

Six days –Grugell Standard Days, rather than the one-third longer Confederate Standard Days – had passed while the ­K-110 carefully backtracked from the assigned rendezvous point towards the mining colony at Adamstown. Finally, Group Commander Kestakrickell IV had found what he was looking for. Following a page from the frigate’s commander, he swept onto the ship’s bridge and demanded an update.

“You were right to order a backtrack towards the mining colony, Group Commander. It’s definitely a debris field,” Commander Chiksteskattitk II reported from the frigate’s Scanning station, where he stood looking over the technician’s shoulder. “Evaluate as wreckage from a Confederate cruiser, probably surplus from the war as there are no traces of any weapons in the wreckage. There are bodies in the debris field – the ship’s crew was destroyed as well.”

“What destroyed it?”

“Either an internal explosion – unlikely, that, like our own ships the Confederates build multiple redundant safeguards against such a thing – or an anti-ship missile.”

“This is the Orlando,” Kestakrickell announced. “The ship that has been delivering our diamonds. That was a converted cruiser.”

“That seems more than likely,” Chiksteskattitk agreed.

“Who would have destroyed an unarmed ship in the middle of this belt?”

“The Confederacy has a growing problem with piracy,” Chiksteskattitk said. “But given that message we received from the Confederate Baxter…”

“He ordered this done,” Kestakrickell concluded.

“It seems the only logical conclusion, Group Commander.”

“It is as I said it would be,” Kestakrickell mused. “It is a plot almost worthy of a Grugell, isn’t it? Baxter obviously had some intelligence of a diamond shipment coming across the border, and dispatched a ship to steal it – and he proposes to sell it to us at a discount, knowing that even so he will reap a greater profit than in the mineral-rich worlds of the Confederacy, and that he will have to explain to no one where the diamonds came from. Brilliant man, this Baxter; I would enjoy meeting him in person.”

“Perhaps that chance will come one day, Group Commander.”

“Perhaps.” The Group Commander stood silently for a moment, thinking. “We would seem to have the luxury of time; take us to the mining station. I believe I will harass Bolin over the loss of this shipment, and demand a second at a considerable discount. That will take some time, during which we can go to the rendezvous and pick up the first shipment.”

“Brilliant,” Chiksteskattitk fawned.

“Have your helmsman plot out the course to the mining station and from there to the designated rendezvous point. Baxter will no doubt contact us soon to explain what the delay in shipment is all about – and, while we wait, we will do some scheming of our own. Since Baxter has obviously stolen this shipment, what better price for his crime than to have the shipment stolen from him in turn, is it not so?”

Chiksteskattitk laughed. “It is indeed so, Group Commander.”

“This Baxter,” Kestakrickell smiled cruelly, “will have to learn to scheme some better schemes.”