Eternity Row (41 page)

“They are given Sensblok once per cycle. It is all the people can afford to do now.”

“Your people could stop taking the drugs themselves and use them to put these poor bastards out of their misery!” I shouted.

“We’ve tried.” Dhreen bowed his head. “Nothing kills them.”

I took the syrinpress Squilyp had put in my tunic and strode out to the ward, stopping at the bed of a mangled Oenrallian male who was literally encased in sealant. I broke the seal over an intact blood vessel and dialed up a fatal dose of narcotic that would kill him within ten seconds.

“It won’t work,” Dhreen said behind me.

My hand faltered as I pressed the instrument against the vessel.
It’s not murder. Not like this
. Something inside me snapped, and I administered the lethal dose.

Ten seconds went by. Then twenty. Then forty. The patient only stared at me with the one eye he had left, and made low, moaning sounds through the open gaping hole in his throat.

Shaking now, I infused him with a second dose. Then a third. I was dialing up the fourth when Squilyp appeared at my side and took the instrument from my hand.

“Give it back to me.” I swiped at it.

My boss held it out of my reach. “You’re wasting it, I’ve already tried it on another patient myself. He won’t die, Cherijo. Dhreen’s right. None of them will die.”

“They have to,” I said, and my voice cracked. “Oh, God, Squilyp, we can’t leave them like this. Not like this.”

“Now you know what I feel, Doc.” Dhreen joined us, and took the hand of the patient in his. The mangled man’s two remaining fingers curled around his. “This is Nojan. He and I grew up together on Traders Row. His glidecar malfunctioned and crashed into another. It took them hours to pull him out of the crushed alloy.” Gently, he lowered Nojan’s hand back down to the bed. “He deserves better than this. They all do.”

Something struck me. “This is why you kept denying Ilona’s pregnancy.”

“Yes. Even when I couldn’t remember they were mine, I knew I didn’t want them.”

“But it should have given you hope.”

“Hope? For my children to end like this?” He gazed steadily at me. “Could you bear to see Marel here? Strapped to some bed, suffering for eternity?”

“No.” I wiped the tears from my face. “We’re not letting these people suffer any longer, either. Let’s get started.”

Scanning the total inhabitants of Eternity Row was impossible, so we performed comprehensive exams on patients showing a variety of terminal conditions, due to injury, disease, or old age.

Initial scans revealed completely normal readings, with one major exception: None of the living dead showed any metabolic activity, which explained why their bodies no longer needed to be fed. It also created a new problem-if they didn’t require caloric intake, what
was
keeping them alive?

“It’s as if they’re in some kind of stasis,” I said to the Omorr as we finished with a young male who had been exposed to massive radiation. He’d been on Eternity Row for so long that his blistered body no longer contained any traces of the toxic heavy metals that should have killed him. “No digestion, no excretion. But they’re sustained by something.”

“How often do you go without eating?”

I scowled. “Not years, that’s for sure. And I still lose weight if I skip meal intervals.”

“But not as much as before. I’ve noticed that.” Squilyp hesitated, then added, “This could happen to you, couldn’t it?”

I started to deny it, but the potential was there. “I hope my friends would make sure it never did.”

He nodded, and hopped away.

Squilyp’s comment haunted me for the rest of the day. As I went from bed to bed, I thought about my own dilemma. My creator had engineered my body to withstand any biological assault, and repair itself so perfectly that I never even scarred. I’d been subjected to repeated severe trauma, so I knew something of my own physical limits.

As far as I knew, I had none.

Whatever Joseph Grey Veil had done to me, the process was also getting faster. Right after I left Terra, a wound I sustained might take several days to heal. Now I could almost watch any injury I received knit itself back together within an hour or two.

“Help me,” a woman’s voice begged.

I went over to the next bed, and found an elderly female covered with cancerous tumors. “Here, let me take a look.”

“Doc.” Dhreen came over, then quickly turned around. His voice choked as he asked, “Anything you need?”

“More of this sealant.” I peeled back a layer to scan the surface of an enormous malignant tumor that had erupted through the dermis over the old woman’s torso. The voracious mass was spreading over her entire body, but seemed to be growing on top of her rather than consuming her own cells.

“I’ll go get it for you.”

“Has Squilyp gone to check on Qonja?” When he nodded, I straightened and shut off my scanner. “I also need to know what’s happened to Duncan and Xonea.”

Dhreen had the grace to look slightly ashamed as he brought me the topical sealant applicator. “They will be taken to the slave pens, and prepared for auction.”

“We need to get them back, Dhreen.” I glanced at him. “Can you find out exactly where they are?”

“I will.” He left.

I moved to the next patient, a small girl whose bones had been pulverized after a terrible fall from the top of her row house. My hand shook as I drew back the linens, and saw the sealant gleaming over the jagged edges of the bones sticking through her flesh.

Someone had been caring for her, judging by the clean condition of her linens. A small vase of fresh flowers sat on a table where the child could see them. Her hair had been carefully brushed, and her face washed.

Amber eyes met mine, and what I saw in them made me swallow, hard. “Hi, I’m Dr. Cherijo. What’s your name?”

“Gerala.” She didn’t grab at me, but lay quiet as I scanned her. “Are you going to hurt me?”

“No, honey, I’m going to help if I can.”

That was when she latched on to me, crying as her broken hands grasped my arm. “Can you give me the medicine to make me sleep? I’ve been trying to wait for my mother, but it’s been so long.”

I had already tried different compounds on other patients, desperate to find something to ease their pain. Nothing had worked. Then something my first-year Medtech instructor had lectured on came back to me. “Sweetie, I have a very powerful medicine here. If I give it to you, I have to be careful. It’s a hundred times more powerful than Sensblok.”

“Please.” Her shattered fingers dug into my arm. “Please, may I have some?”

“All right. As soon as I infuse it, you’re going to feel very tired. Then you’ll sleep and you won’t wake up for a long, long time.” I brushed her hair back from her face. “Ready?”

She nodded, and I injected her. Squilyp came over to observe, and went still as my medicine began to work.

“I feel it,” Gerala said, her ruined voice in awe.

“It makes the pain go away very fast, doesn’t it?” I watched as her eyelids drooped and she yawned. ‘There you go. Don’t fight it, just let the medicine work. That’s my girl. Go to sleep now. “I pulled the linens up over her, motioned to Squilyp, and returned to the research unit.

He shut the doors and secured them. “You infused that child with saline solution.”

“I know.” I went to the storage cabinet and began sorting through it. “There are some other syrinpresses in here. They’re old, but I think we can make them work.”

“Cherijo!” Squilyp jerked me around. “You injected that child with salt water!”

“I
said
I
know
.” I pushed a syrinpress in his membrane. “You’re going to help me do the same thing to all of them.”

“This is sheer insanity.”

“No, it’s a placebo. Look.” I took out my scanner and switched it to display Gerala’s brain imaging. “Watch her chemoreceptors-they reacted immediately to the infusion. The salt makes it sting, like a real drug would. As long as the patient believes what I’m giving them will stop the pain, the brain reacts accordingly.”

“But not in all cases. Placebos have only be shown to be effective in less than seventy percent of most humanoids.”

“That’s better than nothing.”

Squilyp listened as I coached him on how to “talk” the patients into accepting the lie, then we went back out to start treating the patients. An hour later, we had nearly everyone in the ward sleeping.

“Better than ninety percent,” I said as we went to recharge the synrinpresses. “And all it takes is ten cc’s of saline.”

“Doc.” Dhreen appeared. “I’ve got a line on where they’re holding Duncan and Xonea. How did you do that?” He waved back at the silent ward.

Squilyp answered for me. “It is a highly technical procedure that will take too long to explain. We must retrieve the others and return to the ship as soon as possible.”

“But you have to stay, and help the others,” Dhreen said. “I’ll find a way to get Duncan and Xonea back to the
Sunlace
.”

“We cannot help them without an analysis of our scans, and the equipment here no longer functions. Will the Bartermen allow us access to the medical database?”

“Not without turning us over to slavers.” Dhreen made a face. “They want their credits pretty bad.”

“Then either return us to the ship”-the Omorr hopped over to Dhreen, and smacked him in the chest with a scanner-“or figure out what to do yourself.”

I silently applauded my boss. “We’d better take a couple of specimen containers along with us, too. We’ll need the tissue samples.” I gathered up the dusty, ancient charts left behind by the Oenrallian doctors. “And no heads, please.”

After we retrieved what we required, and moved Qonja on a litter to the back of Mtulla’s vehicle, Dhreen drove us beyond the city to what appeared to be a secondary, abandoned Transport site. No Oenrallians rushed toward us as we climbed out, but my skin prickled.

Someone was watching us.

“Where are Duncan and Xonea?” I said as we carried the resident’s litter toward a small pile of junk parts left beside the stripped-down hull of an archaic League starshuttle.

“We’re going to get them now.” Dhreen reached into the salvage heap and pulled. The parts began rolling away, revealing a small, battered launch beneath. “Get in.”

“That?” I stepped back. “No. I don’t think so.”

“It’s all I could steal on short notice.” A sound made Dhreen whirl around. “Get in, or we’re not making it out of here.”

I glanced at what had grabbed his attention and groaned. A cluster of glidecars were headed for the launch area at full speed. “Will I ever leave a planet without being chased down by the locals?” I said as I helped Squilyp carry Qonja up the docking ramp.

“Probably not,” the Omorr replied.

Dhreen got in behind the helm controls while Squilyp and I strapped our patient down and climbed into the crude harnesses hanging from the interior wall panels. There were no seats, and from the look of the rewired components powering the launch, we’d be lucky not to fry in a flash fire before the Oenrallian got us off the ground.

Shots smashed into the outer hull, making me throw a protective arm over Qonja. “Dhreen!”

“Hang on!”

The launch shuddered violently, then lifted off. Shots fired from below still smashed into the deck under our feet, and Squilyp closed his eyes.

“Going to hover over the auction pens,” Dhreen said as he flew back over Valsegas. “When we’re in position, dump the lower cargo container.”

“What’s in it?” I said as I untangled myself from the harness.

“Something to distract the crowd.”

I went back to the cargo hold controls and manned them. Squilyp went up to the helm and took over from Dhreen, who came back and strapped on some weapons. “If everyone on this planet is immortal, those won’t work,” I said.

“The slavers aren’t Oenrallian.” He activated a pulse rifle, then slung it over his shoulder before facing me. “Don’t worry, Doc, I won’t kill anyone. I’ll stun whoever gets in my way.” He checked the viewport, then called to Squilyp, “We’re here. Assume hover position ten meters above the central complex.”