The Refugee (The Korvali Chronicles Book 1) (2 page)

“They’re dead.”

Catherine felt her blood run cold. “All of them? What happened?”
 

Tom shook his head. “I don’t know. That’s all I got. This has never happened before, so it’s anybody’s guess.”

“Wow,” Shanti said. “I only know one person who’s even seen a Korvali. Why didn’t the Captain make an announcement?”
 

“Don’t know that either,” Tom replied. “They’re probably still trying to figure out how to handle ten dead Korvali. Think about it: what are we going to do with them? Bring them all the way back to the Forbidden Planet, where they’ll wage war on us? Dump them into space like garbage? It puts the Alliance in a tough position.”

“I say dump the Mutants,” Middleton said. “They hate us anyway.”

“Don’t call them that, Mackey,” Shanti said, frowning. “It’s mean. And what do you know about them? You’ve never even met one.”

Middleton glanced at his cards. “I don’t have to meet one. I’ve heard the stories. When the Sunai entered their space, the Korvali killed them all with some kind of virus.”

“The Sunai didn’t
enter
their space, Mackey, they invaded it,” Shanti said. “After being warned to stay away. What would you do if a bunch of aliens stormed your house?”

Middleton shook his head. “It’s been ten years since we discovered them. They still refuse to join the Alliance and still look down their noses at us.” A few of the others nodded.
 

Catherine rolled her eyes, but said nothing. She’d heard it all before.
 

“Wait, I don’t get it,” young Zander said. “If it only takes three days to get from Korvalis to Suna, why were they stranded for so long?”

“They don’t have FTL drives, dumbass.” Middleton peered at his cards and tossed in his bet. “Their technology is last century. They could get FTL technology in exchange for their genetic technology if they joined the Alliance, but they refuse. How stupid can you be? Who gives a shit about genetics when you can travel to other worlds?”

Catherine looked up at Middleton. Before she could retort, Tom spoke.

“Watch your mouth, Middleton,” Tom warned. “Doc Finnegan here is a geneticist.”
 

All eyes were on Middleton.

“Sorry,” Middleton said to Catherine, fiddling with his chips. He paused, a confused look on his face as he glanced down, then back at Catherine. “I thought you were a soldier, like us.”

Tom started to laugh. Catherine elbowed him. “I’m a scientist,” she said.
 

Middleton and the other enlisted crew laughed nervously.

“The Korvali don’t want to travel to other worlds, Middleton,” Snow said. “They don’t like outsiders. Especially tatted-up losers like you,” he added, putting his fist up. Middleton, also heavily tattooed under his clothing, raised his fist and bumped it with Snow’s.

“You’re both dumbasses.” Shanti threw in her folded hand. “They’re a different species. Just because the Derovians are so friendly,” she motioned to the Derovian newbie, who produced a big smile, “and the Sunai are explorers, the Korvali have to be the same way? The Calyyt aren’t friendly, and I don’t hear you bitching about them.”

“The Calyyt are part of the Alliance,” Middleton argued. “And it’s hard to be friendly with them because nobody understands their stupid sign language.” A few others laughed at this.
 

“But the Korvali have never tried to harm us, Mackey. And think about it—why were they so far from home, adrift in space? For a vacation?”

Catherine nodded in agreement.
 

“I don’t know,” Middleton grumbled. “Who cares?”

“Alright,” Tom said. “You kids quiet down. Let’s play some poker, damn it!” He held up his beer cup. “To poker!”
 

Everyone followed suit and raised their cups. “To poker!”

At 0300, after numerous games and one too many beers, Catherine made her way back to her quarters. Tom had a tricky way of keeping your cup full without you realizing it. She undressed, climbed into bed, and fell right to sleep.
 

A loud beep woke her. Startled, she looked for the source of the offending noise—it was her contactor. She glanced at the time: 0610. Grabbing her contactor, she wondered who the hell would wake her up this early on a Saturday.

It was Dr. Vargas, Chief of Medicine.

“Yes, Doctor,” Catherine said, her voice thick with sleep.

“Lieutenant Finnegan, report to sick bay immediately,” a gruff voice barked at her.

“On my way, Sir.”

She stumbled a little as she got up, still feeling a little drunk. She quickly donned her uniform, threw her long hair back into a ponytail, and gulped a big cup of water. In her groggy state, Catherine wondered if she’d missed a sick bay duty shift, required of all officers once per month, regardless of rank or position. She hadn’t had hers in a while.
 

She walked swiftly to the stairwell and descended four decks, mentally preparing her apology. After only three months,
Cornelia
’s crew quickly learned that missing sick bay duty, or otherwise angering Dr. Vargas, was unwise. When one science officer missed his duty, Vargas yelled at him in front of the other medical staff and assigned him to work both of his off-duty days in sick bay.

Catherine arrived at sick bay, squinting from the bright lights. When she spotted Vargas near his office on the far side of the main chamber, he didn’t accost her, yell, or even appear angry. Instead, he impatiently gestured for her to join him.

As she crossed the chamber to where Vargas stood, she noticed a body on one of the medical beds, a tiny, almost transparent IV attached to its hand. She stopped and took a closer look.
 

He was an otherworlder. He was Korvali.

“I thought they were dead,” she said in wonder, staring at the Korvali.

He was fair-skinned with short, light brown hair. She noticed the webbing between his long fingers, the absence of fingernails, and his small, almost non-existent ears… all characteristic of the Korvali. His clothing, the traditional Korvali robe, was slightly dirty. Otherwise, he appeared peaceful and unharmed.

“They are dead,” Vargas replied, joining her at the bedside. “And I thought this one was too until my scanner picked up some very faint vital signs. He’s in some type of… stasis, and I can’t revive him. I’ve tried, believe me. His heart and respiratory rates are so slow they’re barely detectable. But he’s alive.” He turned to face Catherine. “When I scanned him, I found some irregularities in his DNA. They could explain why he’s in a coma, but I’m no geneticist. I need some answers.” Vargas, with his thick mustache and heavy build, looked at Catherine expectantly.

Catherine stood up straight, doing her best to absorb everything Vargas told her. “I’ll do what I can, Doctor,” she said, hoping she sounded more coherent than she felt. She glanced at his viewer. “I’ve never seen one of their genomes before.”

Dr. Vargas pulled the remote from the pocket of his white coat and scrolled to the scan results, which listed the four anomalies he’d found.

“I need to see his entire genome, at chromosomal resolution,” she said.

He handed her the remote. “The boy has twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, like we do.”

I knew it
, she thought with some excitement. “Some believe they’re the most similar to us, genetically speaking.” She instructed the computer to conduct a series of scans, each at increasing resolution. “How did the others die?”

“Dehydration. I’ve got them chilling like popsicles in the cold chamber until I know what the hell to do with them.”

She rolled her eyes, knowing he couldn’t see her. Catherine rarely got sick, but told herself if she ever did come down with something, it must wait until evening, when Vargas was typically off duty.
 

Once the scans finished, she took a look at the results. “Interesting. Those four irregularities you mentioned—on chromosomes six, seven, and eighteen—they’re anomalous because his DNA has been altered there…”

“Altered? As in, intentionally changed? How can you tell?”

She ordered the computer to project a three-dimensional image of the genome. “You can see the markers,” she said, pointing at them. While Vargas walked around the image, she connected to her own network, entered her password, and uploaded the file of the Korvali patient’s genetic material. She reran her scans and cross-referenced each alteration with her human genomic library. One by one, the viewer displayed the names and descriptions of the four altered loci. Two of the altered loci were in a region involved in visual processing. The other two, on different chromosomes, appeared to have some regulatory function.

She shook her head. “This couldn’t possibly explain his coma. Let me try something else.” Catherine conducted a different scan, again repeating her scans at increasing levels of resolution. It wasn’t until the third scan that she saw something strange. “What the hell?” she muttered to herself.
 

“What do you see?”

“I don’t know,” she said, staring at the viewer. “I’m picking up something, but the results don’t make sense. It almost looks as if the epigenome has been tampered with.”

“The epigenome?” Vargas said, confused.

“Yeah. It includes all the proteins and stuff the DNA is packaged in.”

“Why does that matter?”

“Because it controls the regulation of the DNA… which genes are turned on and off.”
 

“Nothing like that showed up when I scanned him…” Vargas said, skeptical.
 

Catherine shook her head. “A medical scanner wouldn’t detect something like this.” She continued to look, fascinated.
 

“How could this explain why he’s in a coma? Was he attacked by a bioweapon? Or did they experiment on him like some kind of lab rat?”

“I’m not sure.” Perplexed, she examined the remaining readout from her analyses. Suddenly, she sat back in her chair. “Holy shit.”

“What do you see?” Vargas said, not noticing her use of profanity.

She turned to look at him. “How long have the others been dead?”

“Two weeks or so.”

She nodded in excitement. “He hasn’t been attacked. They’ve engineered his epigenome. I think these alterations are the very thing that’s keeping him alive, like some sort of… epigenetic therapy!”

“Wait, slow down,” Vargas said, putting his hands up. “Epigenetic therapy?”

“Yeah… instead of altering the DNA, you alter how the genes are regulated. Think about some of those cancer therapies, and how they use those drugs to turn off the tumor genes. It’s like that… but far more sophisticated!”
 

Vargas gave her a look. “Sounds pretty farfetched, Lieutenant.”
 

“I know. But what else can explain this?” She gestured at the young man lying on the bed.

Vargas shook his head. “The kid’s been in a coma for two weeks, and hooked up for nearly two days. He’s probably brain dead by now.”

Catherine sighed, trying to hide her annoyance. Maybe Vargas was right. But she refused to believe it until she had a chance to investigate further, until there was no hope of his survival.

“If what you say is true,” Vargas said, “why didn’t the others survive?”

“Did you scan them?”

Vargas didn’t answer. He immediately walked away, returning minutes later with scanned samples from the nine deceased. “I picked up genetic irregularities for three of them.”
 

Catherine analyzed the samples. When finished, she shook her head. “That’s just a few DNA changes. I don’t see anything unusual in their epigenomes.”
 

She stood up and approached the Korvali, looking at him closely. Then she noticed something: a mark on his left hand, just peeking out from the edge of his long sleeve. She leaned down for a closer look, and then slowly nudged his sleeve up, careful not to touch him. The marking was a tattoo, a fan-shaped form with irregular edges, appearing almost like a leaf, with an intricate design. It consisted of one strange color that Catherine couldn’t easily describe… like dark magenta.

“Doctor,” she said, showing him.
 

“A tattoo?”
 

Catherine examined it for a moment. There was something familiar about it… then it hit her. “He’s Shereb.”
 

Vargas just looked at her.
 

“He’s a member of the Shereb clan, the clan that includes their monarchy.”

“How do you know that?”
 

“That’s the Shereb crest. I’ve seen it before, in graduate school.”
 

Vargas motioned for her to follow him as he walked to the rear chamber. He entered a code into a heavy, secure door, opened it, and walked in. Catherine did the same, hugging her arms to herself as the frigid air engulfed her.
The cold chamber
. Narrow metal shelf-like protrusions lined three of the four chamber walls. Nine shelves were occupied, each corpse covered in a dark shroud. Several of the corpses hung partially over the end of their respective shelves, due to their great height.
 

A hollow feeling came over her.
 

“Lieutenant.” Vargas’s voice woke her from her internal reverie. He gestured at her to come closer, and lifted a shroud to reveal a long, thin, webbed hand, so pale in color that it didn’t appear real. It had no tattoo.
 

“Left hand,” Catherine said. Vargas reached over and found the other hand.
 

And there it was. The tattoo differed from their patient’s—it had many dark gray vines, or perhaps branches, spreading out from a common origin. Six of the bodies shared this crest, while the remaining three displayed a third crest, circular in shape and simpler in design. It had the appearance of a biological thing, but Catherine couldn’t decipher it.

“This makes no sense,” she said, following Vargas back to the main chamber. “Why would a Shereb be on a ship with these other people who aren’t Shereb? Where were they going?”
 

Vargas didn’t answer. Instead, he contacted the Captain.