Starbleached (6 page)

“Occasional murder?”

“Surgery. The same thing that takes life can give it, under
the right circumstances. I can move shattered fragments of bone back into
place. Remove a tumor. Put the pieces of a severed artery back together. And
unlike most of your doctors here, I can do it cleanly.”

“You can compare to a real doctor?” The contempt in her
voice could have been deep fried with butter.

“The people here have no medicines. No antibiotics. Their
doctor is an old woman who was not taught how to work without modern equipment.
Perhaps I cannot compete with you, but I am better than their alternative.”

Adry couldn’t argue with that, if it were true. Without an
irradiating field generator to clear out bacterial colonies, even bandages
would carry death on white folds. Most doctors weren’t taught about boiling to
sterilize because there were so many other, surer options. You got that
training with triage work, or under an experienced doctor who knew what they
were doing. Not on your own in an otherworldly swamp. And if her only other
choice were dirty knives and sepsis, she might choose an Overseer’s hand. The
result would be kinder either way.

Which didn’t make her feel more charitable towards the
monster.

“This does not allay your fears.”

Okay, that was three times. Now she felt violated. “You can
read minds,” she said, dully.

“Not human minds.” It shifted, slowly. “Other…true minds.
Minds of my kind…” Another, longer silence. It looked confused again. “But I
can perceive emotional reactions of…other species. The color of the mind. Yours
is frightened and repulsed by me.”

“You eat people. There can be no other reaction.”

It did not respond, simply turned back to its work. Only it
wasn’t throwing the enzyme into its machines, this time, but items from her med
kit. “Those are antibiotics.” Green-brown Amenoperithol, packaged in tiny
aerosol “poppers”. It had a bad effect on the digestive system. Poppers were
the safest way to administer it. “What are you doing?”

“The village is experiencing an illness. I cannot fight it.
Providing the water purification system slowed its spread, but half the people
in the village are dying regardless.”

“Probably due to their lowered immune systems. Having your
life sucked out of you tends to do that. Well. At least you care about your
cattle.”

It made a low, awful hissing sound, and its broad shoulders
sagged. “We cannot help what we are.” Its voice was a dry whisper. “I can
choose what I do. Feed, or hunger. Take what I need, or provide things in
trade. I cannot prevent the spread of this disease. I do not understand how it
works. But they are still dying.” It paused, ugly fingers on the medicines,
then faced her. “Perhaps a smaller trade in kind. If you can identify the
organism causing the illness, help the village stop its spread, you may stay
there, rather than here.”

She closed her eyes.
Stockholm syndrome. I don’t want to
be manipulated into caring for a monster.
She shouldn’t give in. But… if
this were a plague, she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t help to stop
its spread. And being allowed anywhere other than this awful place…She turned
back to the blank mask. “Can I at least change clothing in privacy?”

It left the room without providing an answer.

*****

Then:

“How long has Mich been gone?” General Shawn Miller asked
Bryan.

“I have no idea. He assaulted Adry and then took off.” They
marched down the hallway bisecting the living quarters. It lead to the
labyrinthine service tunnels, and then to the military zone. Here, things were
no longer smooth and polished. Angles and olive drab abounded. Lockers and
weapons and fighting ships like shark’s teeth. Neither Bryan nor Adry fit in
here at all. Shawn, however, was in his element. He fixed Bryan with a sharp
gaze, and the scientist said, uncomfortably, “Look, I did try to talk him
down.”

“The story I heard had you doing a little assaulting of your
own.” General Miller said.

“He had her pinned to the wall, Shawn.”

“You’re preaching to the choir. Adrienne, you want to tell
me your half of the story?” He looked down at her. Overseers topped off at
nearly seven feet. Rumor had it Miller could look one of them in the eye.

“Mich pinned me to the wall of the gazebo. And he…” she
dropped her eyes, rubbed her throat and shivered.

General Miller turned back to Bryan. “I read your report.
You gonna be able to sleep, knowing your brother is out there, that screwed up?
He’s gone AWOL with one of our fighters. You got that on your conscience too.”
Bryan started to speak and Shawn shook his head. “No. You should have done this
four years ago and you and I both know it.”

“I wanted to protect my brother. After what I put him
through—”

“You saved his ass from a psychopath.”

“Yeah, but maybe not soon enough to keep him from turning
into one. I shot my stepfather in the leg, in front of my brother.”

“After he’d beaten you both down into a pulp. Hell, I wish
I’d
had a shot at the son of a bitch. But there’s nothing we can do about how
Mich turned out. I’m telling my people to be on the lookout. They’re going to
bring him in and court martial him for taking the fighter. He’s out. There’s
nothing I can do about that. You need to start getting your targets lined up
and see if you can salvage something. But he has to take the fallout from
this.” Shawn looked at both of them, his eyes deeply sorrowful. “I’m sorry.” He
marched back into the military zone.

Bryan ran his hands through his long, thick hair. Fingers
clenched, he hit the wall so hard the skin on his knuckles split. A few drops
of red hit the decking. “He’s right.” Bryan said, to the wall. “I’m just like
that son of a bitch.”

“Your stepfather?” Adry said.

He was silent for a very long time while her hands gently
ran over his back. “He molested both of us. When he was angry, he’d…we had
broken ribs. Fingers. Broke my leg, once. I used to get his attention on
purpose, so that he’d hurt me instead of Mich. It worked for a while, but when
I got a scholarship for an early college program I knew I wouldn’t be able to
protect Mich anymore.” He took a deep breath, still speaking to the wall. “I
got Dad’s shotgun. I told him to get out, and never come back, or else I’d kill
him. He came at me with a…god, it must have been a club or something. So I
pulled the trigger, and I hit him in the thigh.”

“How old were you?” She took his hand, held it tightly.

He turned, eyes still closed, and slid down against the
wall. She sat with him, touching his shoulder. “Fourteen. Mich was twelve,”
Bryan sighed. People walked by, soldiers with steel spines, engineers with
touchpads and tools. This hallway was the only one that lead from the bright
greenery of the civilian zone to the dark angles of war. It allowed for easy personnel
movements, and could be defended with minimal effort. Not that Holton would
ever be attacked. Military minds just liked things that way.

“What happened to your stepfather in the end?”

“He was supported by child allotment from Mich and me.
Without us, he had nothing. So he signed up with one of the mission teams back
when Foster was being invaded. The Overseers fed on him. One of the few times
we had a body to identify. Mich blamed me.” Silence, while Bryan leaned his
head against the wall. “How am I different from them? The only solution I
reached for was violence. The sword. Not the scalpel.”

“I don’t know. A scalpel must look pretty nasty to a tumor.”

Bryan closed his eyes. “I just hope Mich is smart enough not
to get himself killed.”

“They’ll find him. Everything will be fine.” Adrienne said,
then smiled. “Or as fine as things can be, when they involve Mich.”

Bryan caressed her face, then kissed her. A gentle,
lingering thing that promised heat in the future, whole volcanic eruptions.
“You’re an optimist. I didn’t even know we made them like you anymore.”

“I have you.” She touched his face, then kissed him back.
“As long as that’s true, everything’s roses.”

*****

Now:

It didn’t tie her hands again. After she changed clothes, it
lead her back to its village. There was a path, one part beaten dirt, one part
O-tech, and one part human construction. That last part had left her a bit off
balance. The bridges and path supports she found were solid. The kind of work
you’d be proud of. Not the kind of thing you’d build for your scary alien
master, to make its preying on you easier.

“It isn’t far.” The Overseer said.

She hefted her pack. It held everything she thought she
might need. Food.
Clean
water, because if these unseen villagers were
willing to trade their lives for a water purification system the stuff in the
local water must be pretty awful. And speaking of that…she stepped over a
fallen log. “How much did the purification system help?”

The Overseer was having a much easier time of it. Its
not-leather clothes were barely dirty. “Infections decreased, but did not
stop.”

Well, it was probably in the water, then. With the
Overseer’s filtration system in place, she’d expect a decrease. But if the
villagers had gone without a purifier for a while they weren’t going to use the
clean stuff for washing and bathing. “How about symptoms?”

A shrug of black garbed shoulders. “High fever. Vomiting and
other digestive issues. A rash. Near the end, the rash bleeds.”

Huh. For an inhuman monster, that information was actually
helpful. “Is the rash onset symptom, or—” a tree branch tangled with her boots
and she went down. Grabbing for the nearest support, she found herself tangled
in the Overseer’s arms. Nematocyst teeth prickled against her skin. Trembling,
she looked into its dreadful face..

A solid wall of disgust rolled through her. Goddamn this
thing for taking her. Goddamn it for making her see it as something more than a
thing. And thrice-damn it for hurting people, good, innocent people, just
because it hungered.

Its lips twisted as if in pain. Her disgust must burn
against its mind. Good. She was getting some of her own back. “Give me the
formula corrections, and I will let you go.” It held her almost gently. The
prickling sensation withdrew.

Get out of my head.
“Why do you want it?” she
whispered.

“So I can live.”

“You have a pulse. How many other people don’t because of
you?” She waited for an answer, past when it was obvious one would not come.
Slowly, it helped her stand on her own.

“As long as you haven’t shared your formula, I do not dare
harm you.”

She glared up at its terrible face. “Then let’s get this
over with.”

*****

Then:

“They found him.” Paige’s head stuck through the door to
Bryan’s office. The look on her face was a bit less than joyous. “He showed up
at Gaga in the fighter. According to Shawn’s man on the ground he looked like
he hadn’t slept in two days.”

Bryan sighed. “That fighter had subspace only. No jump
drive. He didn’t have enough time to go anywhere else. Thank God. What are they
going to do with him?”

Paige shook her head. “Probably confine him to barracks
until they have enough for the court martial. No point in arresting him yet.
Where would he go?” Bryan shrugged his answer, and the shrink left. On her way
to some other patient, some other great problem needing her attention.

Worried, Adry eased her chair a bit nearer to Bryan’s. Ever
since Mich took off, he’d been tired. The steel she’d come to love had, it
seemed, rusted. “You okay?”

“I just want to know what he’s thinking. It took all his
time and fuel just to go in a straight line to Gaga. He put his ass in a sling
for absolutely nothing. And that…” Bryan sat up. “That’s not like Mich. He
doesn’t waste gestures like that. Not after Abrams, anyway.” He turned back to
his work.

“You know, I still don’t know the whole story behind that.”

“You never asked.” He had a sad little smile.

“I figured you’d tell me eventually. Or Mich. Or somebody
else. But no one has.”

Bryan sighed and leaned back in his chair, fiddling with a
pen as he gathered his thoughts. He shook his head, as if he were flicking the
weight of the world off his shoulders. Then he said, “Major David Abrams and my
brother went on a mission to Foster. We’d identified a former commander in a
slave pit. Abrams thought they could get him back. He volunteered to go, and
that meant Mich went too. You couldn’t keep them apart. They went into the pit,
found the commander and two Overseers. We didn’t have shock rounds at the time
to lock their nervous system, so Mich put bullets in the cranium of one, and it
went down. The other picked this device off the table. We think they planned on
using it on the commander, but the Overseer slammed it into Abrams instead. It
punctured his cranium and wound into his nervous system almost immediately.
Abrams didn’t even realize he’d been injured. They got the commander out. He’s
back on Earth, in a nursing home. I got word yesterday, he remembered his own
name.”

He stopped, taking a deep gulp of air. She sat near, taking
his hands in hers, and waited for him to start talking again. It took a long
time, and first he let go of her hand.

“By the time we got Abrams into med bay the device had
extruded a secondary spinal cord and invaded his torso. We spent every minute
trying to stop it, and he hung with us every step of the way. The…skeletal
changes were the worst. He spent four days screaming. Then the pain began to
die off, and he thought I’d saved him. He went to sleep, and when he woke up,
there were mouths in his hands and David Abrams was gone. We had a very big,
very strong alien who thought we’d spent the last several days torturing him.”
Bryan shook his head.