And yes, I know she’s innocent of any personal scheming. Just as obviously, though, she’s a tool in some complicated Devices and Personnel power play. This is bad news for her, God knows, and might be trouble for you too, given the interest you’ve taken in her. Please don’t be naive! The Trust uses people like Zoe Fisher the way you and I use toilet paper. The only thing that protects us here is distance, and even that might not protect us much longer. Isis isn’t a republic; it’s a Trust property. Never forget that.
This Avrion Theophilus is suddenly on a cargo manifest from Earth. Part of a plan—or worse, a plan gone wrong. Watch out for him, Tam. Trust Families don’t send a fancy cousin like that on such a dangerous journey unless the stakes are very, very high. Maybe he only wants to make sure Zoe succeeds—that the excursion gear functions as promised—but even if that’s so, it means there must be equally powerful people who want her to fail.
But here is the truly troublesome news: I think Zoe’s bloodware has been tampered with.
Last night I found her in the cargo hold, about an hour after midnight. She thought she was alone, and she was crying. Quiet, helpless baby tears—you know the kind I mean. When I asked her what was wrong, she blushed and mumbled something about a nightmare. What struck me was the way she said it, trying to sound casual, obviously attempting to brush me off, but weirdly sincere, too, as if a nightmare was a completely novel experience, something she had only read about in books. Which it might well be, given her D P background.
Ask yourself, Tam: Why should a highly regulated bottle baby like Zoe Fisher suddenly suffer from nightmares? (Or fall in love, come to that!)
After I calmed down Zoe and chased her back to bed, I woke up Shel Kyne. Shel is a competent physician but he’s irredeemably Terrestrial. He didn’t even wonder why I was asking all these questions about Zoe’s bloodware—-just trotted out her charts, miffed at the hour but happy to be consulted. (I don’t know about you Red Thorns, but among Rider Clan the unwarranted sharing of medical information is grounds for summary disenfranchisement. Earthlings!)
I asked, first, whether emotional instability might be a sign of a failing thymostat.
Yes, Shel tells me, that’s certainly possible, though thymostatic disequilibrium can be subtle at the beginning; emotional volubility doesn’t usually show up until some weeks or even months after the thymostat switches off.
So I asked him. Is there anything wrong with Zoe’s regulator?
He smiled and said he didn’t know.
Apparently Zoe is loaded with novel bloodware, most of it in germed gland sacs clustered around the abdominal aorta. These devices are so newfangled that Shel’s instruments won’t read them, and D P didn’t send blueprints. The most Shel can do is monitor her metabolites for the major neurotransmitters and regulatory chemistry. Zoe’s serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, and Substance P do look a little odd, apparently, and she’s negative for most of the common reuptake inhibitors. But her regulatory bloodware is so unusual that Shel can’t decide if this is appropriate functioning or a major malfunction.
Shel suggested we ask Avrion Theophilus about it when he arrives. (I lied and said I would; I also advised Shel to keep quiet about it until I spoke to him again. You might want to edit his reports to the IOS in the next little while.)
So what does this mean?
It means, I suspect, that Zoe is off her thymostat, maybe for the first time in her life. In Kuiper terms, she’s practically a newborn. A whole battery of new and difficult emotions to cope with, and she doesn’t understand any of it. The Zoe Fisher you’re so obviously falling in love with, Tam, is a brand-new Zoe Fisher. Fragile. Probably scared. And trying very hard to do the job she’s been trained for.
I can’t tell you what to do about any of this. I don’t know.
My only useful advice: Keep your eyes open. Watch your back.
I’ll do the same. I’m saving this into my personal memory, because I don’t want it drifting through Yambuku cyberspace. If all goes well, we can talk in person as soon as I’m back.
P.S. Of course she likes you, you idiot! Many of us do. Myself included. Were you too dense to notice, or too polite to let on?
Idle curiosity.
Hayes read the message.
Then he read it again, enclosed in the silence of what had once been Flam’s cabin, as night rolled over the long valleys and the canopied hills.
FOURTEEN
When the red-light summons from the shuttle’s quarantine module appeared on his scroll, Corbus Nefford was mildly scandalized. There had never been a medical crisis aboard the IOS during his health-management watch, and he fully intended that there never would be.
Admittedly, this didn’t look good—an unexplained summons of the highest priority posted by Ken Kinsolving, day-watch quarantine medic, from the shuttle-bay lockdown. Dire as that sounded, however, it was probably only Kinsolving panicked by some crewman’s gastritis attack or tension headache. The alternative was unthinkable.
But he found a guard stationed at the shuttle module’s bulkhead door, and inside—
Inside, there was chaos.
Two nursing assistants sat plugged into remensor hoods, talking through their microphones in low, urgent tones. Kinsolving, gaunt in his drapery of medical whites, waved Nefford toward an empty control bay. “Rios and Soto are dead,” he said flatly. “Raman is comatose and Mavrovik is intermittently lucid. We need help with palliative care and tissue samples—if you would, Manager.”
Kinsolving was a junior medic and not entitled to speak to Corbus Nefford quite so brusquely, but this was an emergency, after all. Nefford squirmed into the remensor chair. He had put on some weight since the last time he operated one of these rigs.
But one did what one must. What one was trained for, and thank God for his training; it supplanted the instinct to panic. He imagined his thymostat registering the sudden torrents of epinephrine, working to calm him without dulling his heightened alertness. Pathogens, he found himself thinking, Isian pathogens aboard the IOS: it was the nightmare he had hoped never to face…
The remensor hood activated and he was suddenly inside the quarantine room with the victims. His arms had become the arms of a medical tractible and his eyes were its enhanced sensors. He oriented himself quickly. The quarantine chamber was claustrophobically small, never meant to be used as a hospital ward. Tractibles and remensors battled for floor space; Kinsolving’s remensor rolled up next to him.
He identified the shuttle crewmen on their cots. Mavrovik, Soto, Raman, and Rios. Two male, two female. They had been the sole survivors of the oceanic disaster, a pilot and three crewmen who had shuttled up from the outpost shortly before its final collapse.
And they had brought something with them, apparently, although they had been in quarantine with no observable ill effects for, what was it, most of a month now? And didn’t Isian pathogens attack almost instandy? An Isian infectious agent with a long incubation period was unheard of—a threat almost too terrifying to contemplate.
He followed Kinsolving’s medical remensor to the bedside of the shuttle pilot, Mavrovik. Kinsolving had plugged fluids and hemostats into Mavrovik’s exposed arm. Nefford added a pulmonary tap to drain blood and fluid from the pilot’s lungs. Mavrovik had been disrobed and strapped to the cot. Beads of sweat, putrid and faintly yellow, trickled down his shaved skull to his pillow.