Gates of Hell (5 page)

“Happy to save you the trouble, sir.”

“Though perhaps you would care to tell us what you consider more important than defending the United Systems from another possible invasion.”

Roxy was unabashed at being put on the spot. She also could tell by the warning look he gave that he already regretted giving her permission to bring up her concerns so early in the briefing. She sat up straight, every bit of amused diffidence leached from her demeanor. It was the Physician who answered the Captain’s question. “Sagouran Fever.”

“Which is?” Dee Nikophoris of Sciences urged. Dee already knew; she’d spent time in the lab with Roxy last night. Dee was a constant ally, but she also knew how to cover her tracks and her butt, since she and Captain Merkrates weren’t the best of friends.

Roxy glanced at the childhood friend who had ended up serving with her onboard the
Tigris
quite by accident. They made a good team. Dee was a chemist by trade, an anarchist by avocation. Her long dark hair was pinned up primly, her expression was bland, but her big, dark eyes held their usual wickedly amused gleam. They shared a brief nod. Roxy went into her portion of the briefing without having to refer to her datapad. “Sag Fever is weird. It is also fatal. One hundred percent fatal.”

“Is that possible?” the first officer asked.

Roxy didn’t answer Maura’s question yet, but went on. “It also jumps species faster than any other pandemic disease yet encountered in the Systems. Technically, of course, the disease does not jump species, but adapts with amazing speed to every Engendered humanoid variant it has yet encountered.”

Dense annoyance was aimed her way by several members of the command staff, ones who had cultural and religious objections to Neshama Wave Theory. She was koltiri of Koltir Prime, Engendered of the Second Wave Seeding. She knew what she knew and science backed up belief, though she wasn’t about to get into a creationist debate right now. This was the briefing room, not the mess hall, as she’d said once this morning already.

“The source for Sagouran Fever is not known, though the first humanoid fatality we know of is a trader named Antis Sagoura. About all that’s known about the man is that he dealt in salvaged space junk and was a member of some crazy religious cult.”

Of course, there were lots of those in the United Systems. Some would say that she was a member of the weirdest cult of all. The crew of the
Tigris
was not interested in the biography of a dead man. They probably wouldn’t even be interested in news of an epidemic. This was a combat ship. Eamon’s impatient frown told her to get this over with. Maura Weaver tapped her fingers on the tabletop. She tried to draw the senior officers’ interest as she went on.

“The pattern of infection seems to trace back to a salvage belt near Bucon space WDS.” She punched a button on her pad, and a spot on the holomap glowed green briefly to show the WDS location at a juncture of Bucon and Systems territory. “There’s garbage in that section that was hauled in long before the war. Mess has only gotten worse in the last four years.”

“They think this bug evolved on a space wreck?” Bear asked.

“MedService knows nothing. The Bucons are letting them send in an Outbreak Team, but the datawork is a little slow in coming.”

She’d been asked to head that team, but Captain Merkrates had already refused the request. His opinion was that this was just another plague in a galaxy full of them when humanoids from so many worlds mixed and mingled so freely. He didn’t think it was worth a full Physician’s time. That was one of the things they’d fought about last night. And that was not news the department chiefs needed to know.

“MedService must not have found the right Bucon official to bribe to let them in yet,” Dee explained.

“Bucons,” Bear growled derisively.

“The Bucon Empire is now a member of the United Systems,” Eamon reminded his officers. “Please show the greedy bastards some respect.”

Roxy was quite fond of the Bucons she had known back when she’d hung out among the gamers and black marketeers in the Belt, but saw no reason to go against crew solidarity on this point. She and Dee did exchange a secret smile, though.

“The Outbreak team is sure to come up with some answers once they finally go in,” Roxy went on, careful not to look at her husband because she didn’t want to let anyone see her glaring. “In the meantime, the Sagouran Fever has spread via space traffic to four known worlds within the Systems.”

“The populations of four worlds are dead?” Maura Weaver asked. The question was matter of fact; they’d all become inured to a lot during the Trin War.

Roxy held up a hand. “No, no. It’s not that bad. The spaceports where the disease appeared were quarantined fairly quickly. Several thousand people have died, which is certainly bad enough, but entire planetary populations haven’t been affected. Not yet,” she added grimly.

“Sounds like MedService has the situation in hand,” Eamon said pointedly. “Why bring this up in the briefing, Physician?”

He had that look on his face, the one that said she might be one of his crew, she might be the woman he loved, but she was too close to being a civilian and had no real concept of how the military functioned. Roxy loved the man, but hated the look.

“I am,” she told him, and the rest of the command staff, though it was Eamon Merkrates she talked to, “a
Physician
. You use the title, Captain, but sometimes I think you forget what it means. MedService has put
all
Physicians in the United Systems on Medical Alert.” She folded her hands on the tabletop, and quietly pulled rank. It was the most she could do right now. There was going to be hell to pay in private, but she had the itchy feeling this situation was important enough for her to cross her beloved warrior husband’s ego. Nobody else was supposed to know they were fighting, but she spoke into a tense, uncomfortable, and mostly unfriendly silence when she went on. “That means I am appropriating all of the
Tigris’s
science staff and resources for research into finding a cure for Sagouran Fever.”

She might have gone about it differently if he hadn’t had
that
look. She would have reported on the outbreak, and then arranged the use of labs and personnel with Dee and Maura Weaver. Instead, he’d been condescending and she’d reacted. She hated when she did that. He was a proud man who deserved her respect and compliance to his command.

It was Dee who spoke into the tense silence that sizzled in the room. “A full MedAlert? Isn’t that overreacting?”

“One hundred percent mortality rate,” Roxy reminded the Life Sciences officer who already knew the statistics. “Unknown vector, jumps species, spreading out from a minimum of four spaceports.” She rubbed the back of her neck, and thought once more of ashes. “That’s enough to make me a little nervous.”

“Could you cure it?” Bear asked.

Roxy shrugged. “I could probably heal it.”

“Koltiri can cure anything,” Bear said confidently, and his confidence was mirrored by a swell of emotion in the room as each of the command crew recalled battle wounds and diseases of theirs she’d healed. The war was long and nasty, but the survival rate on the
Tigris
was far higher than on any ship that had only a mere, mortal medical officer. Their recollections were vivid, and each one pricked at her shielding. They had no idea how hard gratitude and awe were for a sane being to swallow.

“Healing and curing aren’t the same thing,” she said, not for the first time.

No one paid attention to this. The Captain’s response was a stiff, “Proceed, then, Physician.” And then Eamon and Maura turned the briefing to the Borderer assignment. Roxy dutifully made notes on patrol schedules, her thoughts turning to coordinating the
Tigris’s
small research departments in ways that would blend a MedAlert with a possible combat mission.

———

“This thing is ugly,” Bonita Hernandez, the ship’s other doctor, said as she finished reading the last of the datascreens from the current download. Data gathered from every research team and Physician in the United Systems was posted once every ten hours. So far, none of the news was good. Death rates were rising, the infection was widening. “And getting uglier all the time. We still don’t know what it is.”

Roxy nodded. She, Dee Nikophoris, and Hernandez were seated around a table in the sickbay’s lab. The meddroid floated silently in the background, keeping watch on experiments the organic personnel had set up while the organics indulged in a coffee break and conversation. “It’s got me scared,” Roxy said. Five other planets had reported outbreaks of Sagouran Fever to MedService in the last twenty-four hours, making nine known affected star systems. Roxy had a tip of the iceberg sort of feeling about the situation, and an urge to get out there and do something about it. And if an empath couldn’t go on feelings… She sighed, and leaned back in her chair. “Wish we had a few more people to put to work on this.”

The
Tigris
was a long-range combat vessel with a crew of six hundred, so the sickbay was large and well-equipped. As far as personnel went, however, Roxy’s staff included only Bonita, two medtechs, a meddroid, and two nurses. Captain Merkrates had traded away the larger medical staff his ship rated for the privilege of counting a Physician among his crew. That the Physician was also a koltiri healer tended to make budget-minded MilService bureaucrats question the
Tigris’s
need for even the skeleton staff Roxy supervised. Roxy had to do a lot of snarling and threatening to return to MedService whenever there was talk of transferring her crew. She didn’t know how the legend that koltiri could do it all got started, but it was a real pain dealing with it here in reality. The reason she’d worked very hard to earn the rank of Physician was because the practice of medicine was so much more efficient than committing miracles. If you healed one person, they could go and get infected again; if you found a vaccine for the same illness, you’d taken care of a problem on a larger scale.

Right now she was fighting the urge to threaten the captain with her transferring back to MedService because he was using the excuse of the ship’s only having a skeleton medical staff when they might be heading into a combat situation on the Rose border to keep her onboard. From her point of view, even the possibility of being needed in battle paled before the threat of Sagouran Fever. She didn’t know quite when she’d stopped thinking like a combat soldier but, after months without any battles, she guessed the war with the Trin was starting to feel like it was finished. It seemed to Roxy that fighting disease on the front lines was where she needed to be these days. She truly, deeply wished that the
Tigris
didn’t seem too small for her when it had been such a haven not so long ago. And maybe Eamon was right when he argued that her blighted mental shielding still hadn’t recovered enough for her to venture away from the familiar shelter the ship offered.

“More people for
research
?” Dee cocked a cynical eyebrow at Roxy’s complaint. “Why would Command appropriate a proper staff when we have a goddess in our midst?”

“You are referring to yourself, I hope,” Roxy responded. Dee sneered. It was her way of showing affection.

Bonita looked from one to the other. “You two have a very bizarre relationship.”

“Works for us,” Dee and Roxy answered, and laughed. They’d known each other since they were teenagers on Terra, and frequently still acted like teenagers when they were together, much to the Captain’s annoyance.

The meddroid gave a polite, musical ‘ding’ to get their attention. Roxy took a sip of coffee out of a bright red mug while she glanced at the results the meddroid sent to their datapads. “So much for that.” She sighed again after reading down a list of negative test results. They’d been at this for two days now. Not really much linear time had passed, but it felt like weeks to her. “I feel too isolated from this,” she admitted to someone besides Eamon for the first time. “I need to get a taste of it.”

Bonita looked at her strangely. “That would require visiting one of the MedService onsites on a quarantined world. You haven’t been off the ship since the war started.”

“I’ll see if I can get a sample of Sagouran Fever to work with rather than simulations. Then again,” she added. “It doesn’t sound like something we’d want around. Containment would be a worry for the rest of the crew, even with isolation fields and safety protocols. Ships like the
Tigris
that rarely make port are the one place that’s absolutely safe.” She shook her head. “No. Can’t see Eamon letting me have a sample onboard.”

Dee gave a loud sigh. “For which we are all grateful. I don’t want to go near that stuff. Sims are fine with me.”

“Chickenshit.”

“You bet, Merkrates.”

“Ladies.” Hernandez got sarcastic looks from Roxy and Dee. She waved a hand at them. She’d been reading through data updates while they talked. She fiddled with a stack of datacubes as she said, “Says here that a group of koltiri have volunteered to go to the quarantined worlds.”

“I know,” Roxy answered. She tapped her forehead. “Got a call from Racqel—telepathic call,” she explained at both women’s puzzled look.

“From Racqel?” Dee sounded affronted.

“My feeling exactly. One of my sisters,” Roxy told Bonita. “The old one.”

“Doesn’t sound like you’re friendly, and I’m not going there,” Bonita wisely replied. “Your family life is already more complicated than I want to know about.”

“Besides, Eamon doesn’t want you hanging out with your family.”

Roxy gave Dee an annoyed look, but stuck to business. “I thanked koltiri Racqel for including me in the invitation, but told her that I was otherwise occupied.”

Roxy didn’t tell the other women that her annoyed sister—the one Roxy had never met until she went to Koltir Prime to finish her empathic healer training at the age of fifteen and hadn’t seen in the flesh since—had been less than enthusiastic about asking someone as “strange and violent” as Roxanne to join the other koltiri in their peaceful healing pursuits, but supposed it was all right since it was an emergency situation with uncounted lives at stake. Racqel was insufferably self-satisfied and superior, not to mention having a naive and innocent view of the universe from the vantage of her safe, cloistered existence where war hadn’t intruded.