Escape (69 page)

Chapter 47

B
ack in the medbay Jilly prepared to take blood samples from each of them. Ferrel watched her laying out the vials and syringes with great interest. Attaching a vial to a syringe, Jilly turned to them. “Who's first?”

Ferrel pointed to Kieran. “He is.”

Kieran shrugged and rolled up his sleeve. “Let's get it over with.”

Jilly nodded to the stool on the other side of the counter from her, and Kieran took a seat, resting his arm on the surface and turning his head to look the other way. What he saw when he did so was most curious.

Ferrel had taken one of the syringes from the counter top, and with his back turned to them, appeared to be taking his own blood sample. Intent upon her task, Jilly didn't notice. She rubbed his skin with a disinfectant and was just about to plunge the needle in when Kieran raised said, “Uh, Ferrel, what are you doing?”

He turned to them with a grin, the vial at the end of the syringe already full of blood, his other hand putting pressure on the spot. “I prefer to inject myself.”

Jilly looked up with a frown. “You should let a trained professional do that. What if you get an infection?”

Ferrel's grin faded, and he looked away. “Let's just say I've had some practice injecting things.”

“Oh. Well, you still should have waited for me to do it.”

Ferrel shrugged and placed the syringe with a soft clink of glass on the counter beside the other empty one.

Jilly turned back to Kieran to take his sample. He felt a quick pinprick and then a sharp burning sensation, and it was over. She set the sample on the counter, far from Ferrel's, and picked up the empty syringe to take her own sample. When she was done, Kieran watched her mark each vial to show whose was whose, and then she gathered all three and made her way over to the holographic microscope on the other side of the room.

Standing before the microscope, Jilly disconnected the vials from the syringes and placed each of them in the microscope's sample slots. It accepted each vial with a gentle tug of automated rollers which drew the samples inside the microscope for analysis. Finally, Jilly took a seat in the chair before the microscope's control panel and flicked the power switch. Kieran watched her bring up the recording of his sample from the last time, then toggled the microscope to display all 4 holograms side by each.

The new samples showed remarkably similar progress to the old ones: the nanites, perfectly symmetrical spheres with spindly arms were motionless, and they could see the globular white blood cells attacking them from all sides. The virus had been disabled, and now it was being eliminated from their bloodstreams.

Jilly swiveled her chair away from the microscope and looked up at Kieran with a broad grin. “Looks like we can finally get out of here.”

Kieran nodded. “Looks like.”

“Spectral!” Ferrel said. “I'll go fire up the engines.”

Jilly held up a hand to stop him. “Wait. Let's get the EMP inside first.”

Ferrel's eyebrows beetled. “What for? We're clean. Let's just get out of here.”

Kieran shook his head. “You said it yourself. By now the whole galaxy could be infected. We might get reinfected and need to use the EMP again.”

Ferrel looked uncertain, but at length he nodded. “I'll go get it.”

Jilly stood up from her chair. “I'll go with you.”

“Looks like I'm going to fire up the engines, then,” Kieran added.

* * *

Jilly spent the whole way to the EMP silently trying to read Ferrel's mind, but no matter how hard she concentrated, she couldn't catch even one stray thought. By the time they reached the EMP, she'd grown tired of wondering about it privately.

“Why can't I read your mind Ferrel?”

There was a pause as he disconnected the power supply from the EMP generator. “You can't? That's odd. I can read yours.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, I was infected before you were, so maybe that's the reason.”

“Maybe.”

Another pause. Ferrel passed the EMP generator to her, a power conduit trailing from one end and the barrel from the other.

Jilly idly examined the device, her eyes taking in the broad focusing dish at the end of the barrel. There was a broad cleft in it which she hadn't noticed before, and one half of the dish seemed bent. She frowned, wondering how well it could focus the charge from the capacitors when it was so asymmetrical. But it had worked all the same. Their test results showed that the virus was disabled
—
the nanites in their bloodstreams were being eliminated by their immune systems.

She looked up from studying the device and her thoughts returned to her conversation with Ferrel. “You're not doing something to shield your thoughts?”

“If I am, I'm not aware of it.”

“Well, hopefully we'll learn to develop the same resistance. Being able to read each other's thoughts all the time is more than a little disturbing.”

“Yeah. Well, we're done here,” Ferrel said, lifting the power supply in one hand and bank of capacitors in the other. Together they must have weighed almost as much as he did, but Ferrel didn't seem to notice. They hurried across the rooftop toward the ship, with Jilly periodically throwing nervous glances over her shoulder to the rooftop exit. Each time she looked, she expected to see a mass of wrinkled gray monsters boiling out onto the roof.

But each time there was no one, and the door remained shut.

Jilly looked away from the door for the last time before leaping up onto the topside of the cruiser. She landed with a heavy
thump
beside Ferrel and said, “I'm going to be glad to put this planet behind us.”

“Yeah,” Ferrel nodded. “But what planet are we going to go to next?”

Jilly frowned, considering the question. It had been gnawing at the back of her mind, too. Where could they go that would be safe? And how could they be sure that the virus hadn't reached there, too? Maybe some worlds had successfully imposed quarantines before the virus could spread to them.

But if that were the case, those worlds would blast them to atoms before breaking quarantine to let them land
 
.
 
.
 
.
and who could blame them?

* * *

On the bridge deck Kieran was busy negotiating a truce with Javax, the AI. Without a proper crew, he had to rely on Javax to run the various stations, which meant a great deal of interaction with the arrogant little shakra. The terms of the truce were simple: Kieran wouldn't step on Javax's enormous ego, so long as Javax only spoke when spoken to and in as few words as possible.

Kieran sat contemplating the holo map hovering before the command chair where he was seated. The farthest colony would take them several weeks to reach, and there were no TLS lanes to get there, meaning they'd burn up a lot of fuel on the voyage, opening and reopening wormholes to trilinear space. According to Javax's nav computations, the journey would eat up more than half of their fuel supply, since they would need to leave and reenter trilinear space over a dozen times to navigate around interstellar obstacles along the way
—
such as the Whirlpool, a dense asteroid belt within a rainbow-swirled nebula, which was circling a massive blackhole. That obstacle alone would take four separate jumps to negotiate.

Kieran sighed meaningfully, inciting an unwelcome comment from Javax: “You can't get there faster any other way. Either you waste time but save fuel by taking a longer route with fewer redirections, or you waste fuel but save time by taking this one.”

“What did I say about interrupting my brain functions?”

“That your processor requires long, uninterrupted periods of silence to function optimally.”

“Exactly.”

Javax went curiously quiet then, and Kieran smiled. It was all about knowing how to speak their language. AI's could be reasonable.

Kieran heard the bridge doors
swish
open behind him and swiveled the command chair to see who it was. He saw Jilly and Ferrel striding accross the deck toward him. “All ready to go?” he asked.

Jilly nodded as she stopped in front of him. She gestured to the holo map. “Where are we going?”

He half swiveled toward the holo map and studied the set of glowing green lines connected by open circles which overlaid the constellations. “I think our best chance to find a place where the virus hasn't hit yet it, is to go to the colony farthest from the frontier, since that's where the virus supposedly originated. Kieran pointed to the blinking star where the green lines terminated. “Acasia.”

Ferrel nodded. “Sounds good.”

But Jilly was shaking her head. “Kieran, that's half a galaxy from here. It would take us
 
.
 
.
 
.
”

Kieran swiveled his chair to meet her troubled gaze. “Weeks.”

“And what if we're wrong? We'll have used up a lot of fuel for nothing.”

“Well, I was arguing with Javax about it earlier, but if we take the slowest route we'll only use a quarter of our fuel to get there.”

“And if we take this one?”

“We won't have enough fuel to get back. It'll be a one way trip.”

Chapter 48

“I
say we go for it,” Ferrel said. “It's our best chance to find a world that the virus hasn't had a chance to reach yet.”

Kieran nodded, but looked askance at Jilly.

She pursed her lips and frowned. “I guess we have to try. But maybe we should take the longer route, so we can still get back if we're wrong.”

“How much longer
is
the longer route?” Ferrel asked.

“About two weeks,” Kieran replied.

“Then we'd better take the fast one. The ships that were spreading the virus already have a headstart, and I doubt
they'll
be trying to save fuel.”

“But then we'll be stranded there!”

Ferrel nodded. “For better or worse. It's a gamble.”

“Actually,” Javax interrupted them. “You could always take the longer route back. You'll easily have enough fuel for that.”

Kieran nodded. “True. Thank you for pointing that out, Javax.”

“Not at all. I only regret that the limitations of your single-threaded processor prevented me from interrupting sooner.”

Jilly arched an eyebrow and sent Kieran a curious look. “Single-threaded processor?”

“Long story,” he said, shaking his head. “So we've decided then? We're going with all possible speed for Acasia?” Ferrel nodded, but Jilly looked hesitant. “Somewhere else you'd like to go?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No, but I'd like to send a message first.”

“A message?”

“I know it's a long shot, but
 
.
 
.
 
.
I'd like to try to contact my parents on Sylica before we go. It's also pretty far from the frontier, so there's a chance that the virus hasn't reached them yet.”

Kieran saw the sullen hope shimmering in Jilly's eyes, and knew he had to let her try. He nodded slowly, then turned to Ferrel. “Anyone you want to try to contact?”

“No.”

Kieran wasn't surprised. Ferrel didn't look more than 16 standard years old, and yet he'd been running his own shop aboard the Corollary when Kieran had found him. He was likely an orphan, or a runaway. Either way he wouldn't have any family ties to worry about.

“Well, let's get this ship into space first,” Kieran said. “It'll be easier to send a message without all the interference down here.”

* * *

Kieran fired the vertical thrusters and angled the cruiser's nose up. The surrounding buildings made it hard to find a clear trajectory, but at about 35 degrees the nose of the ship was finally pointed above the jagged horizon of buildings. He checked the intertial dampeners, making sure they were at 100%, then threw the switch from vertical to rear thrusters and they rocketed up and forward. There was no sensation of being suddenly pinned in place by the acceleration, only a disconcertingly fluid journey into the now blue and lavender sky. Ordinarily, he preferred to keep the inertial dampeners dialed back a few percentage points, but because he was piloting such a big ship, and had no way of knowing how well secured things were in all its myriad comparments and rooms, it was safer to eliminate shipboard inertia completely.

The cruiser crested the highest building anywhere in sight, and Kieran leveled out, not wanting to get too close to the city's artificial skyline. As the bow of the ship came parallel to the ground, they were granted a spectacular view of a sprawling metropolis that didn't quite go on forever, but ended sharply in a radius around them, fetching up against the edges of the dome. For a moment, Kieran had a sensation like being trapped inside a fishbowl, but then he slewed the ship a dozen degrees to port, and the lavender sky appeared to shatter in a hundred jagged lines.