“Any pain?” the doctor asked.
Kira shook her head, never taking her eyes off the knife.
The robot withdrew several millimeters and then brought the round tip of the scalpel down upon her forearm in a swift, plunging movement.
The blade snapped with a bell-like ping, and a piece of metal spun past her face.
Carr frowned. He turned to speak to someone (or someones) she couldn’t see, and then turned back to her. “Okay. Again, don’t move.”
She obeyed, and the S-PACs moved around her in a blur, jabbing every centimeter of skin covered by the xeno. At each spot, the organism hardened, forming a small patch of adamantine armor. Carr even had her lift her feet so the robots could stab at the soles. That made her flinch; she couldn’t help it.
So the xeno could defend itself. Great. Freeing her would be that much harder. On the plus side, she didn’t have to worry about being stabbed. Not that it had been a problem before.
The way the thing had emerged on Adra, spikes bristling, tendrils writhing … Why wasn’t it acting like that now? If anything might have been expected to provoke an aggressive response, it should have been this. Had the xeno lost the ability to move after bonding with her skin?
Kira didn’t know, and the suit wasn’t telling.
When the machines finished, the doctor stood, one cheek sucked in as he chewed on it.
“Well?” said Kira. “What did you find? Chemical composition? Cell structure? DNA? Anything.”
Carr smoothed his mustache. “That’s classified.”
“Oh come on.”
“Hands on your head.”
“Who am I going to tell, huh? I can help you. Talk to me!”
“Hands on your head.”
Biting back a curse, Kira obeyed.
5.
The next round of tests was far more strenuous, invasive even. Crush tests. Shear tests. Endurance tests. Tubes down her throat, injections, exposures to extremes of heat and cold (the parasite proved to be an excellent insulator). Carr seemed driven to the point of distraction; he yelled at her if she was slow to move, and several times, Kira saw him berating his assistant—a hapless ensign by the name of Kaminski—as well as throwing cups and papers at the rest of his staff. It was clear the experiments weren’t telling Carr what he wanted, and time was fast running out for the crew.
The first deadline came and went without incident. Twelve hours, and so far as Kira could tell, the xeno hadn’t emerged from anyone on the Extenuating Circumstances. Not that she trusted Carr to inform her if it had. But she could see a change in his demeanor: a renewed sense of focus and determination. The doctor had his second wind. They were working against the longer deadline now. Another thirty-six hours before the rest of the crew would have to enter cryo.
Ship-night came, and still they continued to work.
Uniformed crew brought the doctor mug after mug of what Kira assumed was coffee, and as the night wore on, she saw him toss back several pills. StimWare or some other form of sleep-replacement meds.
Kira was increasingly tired herself. “Mind giving me some?” she said, gesturing toward the doctor.
Carr shook his head. “It’ll mess with your brain chemistry.”
“So will sleep deprivation.”
That gave him a moment’s pause, but then the doctor just shook his head again and returned his attention to the instrument panels in front of him.
“Bastard,” Kira muttered.
Acids and bases had no effect on the xeno. Electrical charges passed harmlessly across the skin of the organism (it seemed to form a natural Faraday cage). When Carr raised the voltage, there was an actinic flash at the end of the S-PAC and the arm flew back as if it had been thrown. As the smell of ozone filled the air, Kira saw that the S-PAC’s manipulators had fused together and were glowing red hot.
The doctor paced about the observation bay, tugging at the corner of his mustache with what looked like painful force. His cheeks were red, and he seemed angry, dangerously so.
Then he stopped.
A moment later, there was a clatter as something dropped into the delivery box outside the cell. Curious, Kira opened it and found a pair of dark glasses: eye protection against lasers.
A worm of unease twisted inside her.
“Put them on,” said Carr. “Left arm out.”
Kira obeyed, but slowly. The glasses gave the cell a yellowish cast.
The manipulator mounted on the end of the undamaged S-PAC flowered open to reveal a small, glossy lens. Kira’s unease sharpened, but she held her position. If there was any chance of getting rid of the thing, she’d take it, no matter how much it hurt. Otherwise she knew she’d end up spending the rest of her life stuck in quarantine.
The S-PAC positioned itself above and just to the left of her forearm. With a snap, a purplish-blue beam shot from the lens to a point on the deck near her feet. Flecks of dust gleamed and glittered in the bar of collated light, and the grating below began to glow cherry red.
Moving sideways, the robot brought the beam into contact with her forearm.
Kira tensed.
There was a brief flash, and a wisp of smoke curled upward, and then … and then to her astonishment, the laser beam curved around her arm, like water flowing around a stone. Once past her arm, the laser regained its geometric precision and continued straight down to the deck, where it traced a ruddy line across the grating.
The robot never paused its sideways slide. At a certain point, the laser flipped sides and arced around the inside of her forearm.
Kira felt no heat; it was as if the laser didn’t exist.
What the xeno was doing wasn’t impossible. It was just very difficult. Plenty of materials could bend light. They were used in numerous applications. The invisibility cloak she and her friends had played with when they were kids was a perfect example. However, to detect the exact wavelength of the laser and then manufacture a coating that could redirect it, and all in a tiny fraction of a second, was no mean feat. Not even the League’s most advanced assemblers could pull that off.
Once again Kira revised upward her estimate of the xeno’s abilities.
The beam vanished. Carr scowled and scratched his mustache. A young man—an ensign, she thought—approached the doctor, said something. The doctor turned and seemed to shout at him; the ensign flinched and then saluted and gave a quick answer.
Kira started to lower her arm.
“Stay,” said the doctor.
She resumed her position.
The robot settled over a spot a few centimeters below her elbow.
A pop rang out, nearly as loud as a gunshot, and Kira yelped. It felt as if she’d been jabbed with a red-hot spike. She yanked her arm back and clapped a hand over the wound. Between her fingers, she saw a hole as big around as her pinkie.
The sight shocked her. Out of everything they’d tried, the laser blast was the first to actually hurt the suit.
Her astonishment was nearly enough to override the pain. She bent over, grimacing as she waited for the initial surge to wear off.
After a few seconds, she glanced back at her arm; the suit was flowing into the hole, the fibers reaching out and grasping each other, tentacle-like. They closed over the wound, and within moments, her arm looked and felt the same as before. So the organism could still move.
Kira let out her breath in a ragged flow. Had it been the suit’s pain she felt or her own?
“Again,” Carr said.