Dirge (16 page)

“Woke up?” Vaan Leuderwolk blinked. “I thought you said he was comatose.”

“All right, maybe ‘woke up’ is an overstatement. He opened his eyes and he’s breathing on his own. Other than that, there’s nothing there. Severe trauma.” He spread his hands helplessly. “Not much I can do here. Sure, we’re trained and equipped to deal with a whole range of combat psychoses, but wherever this guy has retreated to, he’s gone deep. I could try to pull him out—”

“Why don’t you?” Lahtehoja prompted him.

“Like I said. Because if I make a mistake, I could drive him down deeper into the pit. Deep enough so that he might never come out. I’m not prepared to take that responsibility.”

“Suppose I change my mind and order you to try?”

The chief medical officer stiffened slightly. “Then I would respectfully relinquish my post and report to the brig. I assure you that in that event every one of my subordinates will follow me, one by one.”

“Take it easy, Ben,” she soothed him. “I had to ask. I have no intention of trying to countermand or supersede a medical decision. Damn! That means we’ll have to take him back to Earth for treatment without knowing his history. We’ll end up seeing his story on the tridee like everyone else.”

“If he ever recovers enough to tell his story,” the cautious physician reminded her.

“What about physical details?” vaan Leuderwolk prompted the other man. “Identification, clothing, indication of possible origin?”

“His garments were filthy.” Fastidious physician that he was, Holomusa’s expression wrinkled at the distasteful memory. “My inclination was to have them burned.” At the look of alarm that spread over the faces of the commander and the captain the physician hastened to reassure them. “Ai, don’t have a stroke in my presence! Rest assured that everything has been properly preserved for future examination. I can tell you that his garments disclosed nothing spectacular or specific, which was in itself telling. They were clothes such as anyone might wear around the house—or on a ship. Casual and domestic. No uniform. Nothing in his pockets or sealed secretively in the fabric of his clothing.

“He carried no identification. Nothing. I have been informed that the suit he was wearing when the Unop-Patha found him is a very old model. It was in bad shape, barely pressure-safe. Certainly would never have passed inspection on this ship, or on any private vessel that valued its certificate. It showed evidence of having been repaired, restored, and refitted more times than is legal. I spoke of burning our mystery man’s clothing. His space suit should have been burned before he stepped into it.”

“Yet it kept him alive,” vaan Leuderwolk pointed out. “On the inner moon.”

“In what circumstances?” Lahtehoja’s brain was running hot. “Did the colony have a scientific station there? Some kind of observation post, perhaps for weather watchers?”

“Sorry to disappoint you, Commander.” Vaan Leuderwolk knew what his superior was thinking. His thoughts had rushed down the same path of possibilities—until some basic research had shot them down. “According to every available record on Treetrunk there was not recently and never was any kind of colonial outpost or base of any kind on either of the planet’s two moons. They’re too small and their orbits are too irregular to make them of much use in that regard, and like most relatively new, rapidly expanding colonies, this one had no resources to spare on scientific frivolities. Their standard-issue communications satellites did the same kind of work more easily and cheaper.” He paused briefly.

“Of course, whatever annihilated the population took the time and care to destroy anything that might have been capable of recording what was taking place at the time. Including all communications and monitoring satellites.”

Lahtehoja grunted. “So we don’t even know where this poor bastard is from.”

Holomusa shook his head sadly. “Not based on his appearance, his suit, or his clothes, no. We can’t even say if he’s from Treetrunk or some passing ship that subsequently vanished. And that’s all we have to go on.”

“Not quite,” the always calculating commander countered. “There’s the vessel the Unop-Patha found him in.” Badly as she wanted to speak to the survivor, it could wait. Turning to the
Ronin
’s captain, she issued the order for a change of orbit.

Starting at opposite ends, two teams of investigators would examine the exterior of the unknown survivor’s ship while a third plumbed its interior. Should they encounter anything of significance, it would be removed to the cruiser’s labs for more detailed analysis. Following this preliminary survey and investigation the tiny ship itself would be brought aboard the warship, where further studies could continue in a controlled environment during the flight back to Earth.

Even if the Unop-Patha had not provided details of the vessel’s location, it would have been easy to find. The inner moon was not large. But anyone not making a deliberate search of its far side, she reflected, would never have picked up the incredibly feeble remnant of a signal that the diminutive craft was emitting. Identifying it proved surprisingly easy.

It was a lifeboat. A lifeboat from a KK-drive ship. What it was doing crewed by a single psychotic on the inner moon of Argus V no one could say. It was only when the
Ronin
was several days out from Treetrunk and deep in space-plus that a team of inspecting engineers brought the news.

Certain details had led them to one unlikely but inescapable conclusion. The lifeboat had not been launched from a ship. Leastwise, not in recent memory. Instead, it had been used to travel from a planetary surface to the satellite where it had been found. A one-way trip with no possibility of return or of traveling anywhere else. A suicide run—or one of ultimate desperation. Tests of microscopic particles clinging to its interior confirmed the obvious: that Treetrunk had been the origin of the battered vessel’s most recent and final flight.

What was an ancient, oft-repaired, and amateurishly refitted lifeboat doing on a colony world like Treetrunk in the first place? That was a question for which the most detailed examination of the boat failed to supply an answer. The craft’s on-board instruments had recorded only flight data, and there was no magic bottle full of answers hidden away in a cabinet or storage locker waiting to be opened. Only its presumed pilot, navigator, crew, and sole survivor could provide an explanation.

And he wasn’t talking.

The government intended to keep the matter as quiet as possible for as long as possible. Revelation that someone might have survived the Treetrunk massacre, much less have been a living witness to its destruction, would have sparked an outcry and concurrent media frenzy unprecedented in the history of interstellar colonization. Under the resultant pressure for information it might have proven well-nigh impossible for the physicians assigned to the case to perform their work properly. It was decided at the highest levels that the comatose survivor’s privacy would be protected at all costs, along with that of the specialists who were charged with doing their utmost to try to revive him.

The hospital was located in a quiet suburb of Kavieng, on the Pacific island of New Ireland. It was as isolated from the mainstream of world culture and tridee attention as it was possible for such a facility to be while remaining close to relevant government centers of operation on Bali and in Brisbane. Originally a center for research into and treatment of tropical diseases, over the years it had been expanded and modified to serve the needs of a wide area, including and beyond the Bismarck Sea. Workers on the regional tuna and lobster farms were among its regular clients.

Not everyone knew what the unconscious man in room fifty-four had been admitted for, nor the cause of his condition. An unusually large number of visiting doctors came and went from his bedside, prescribing, consulting, and conversing among themselves. Some were rumored to be specialists from as far away as Europe and North America, and several members of the staff recognized one especially famous neurosurgeon who was noted for never leaving his distinguished practice in Gangzhou.

It did not matter how many physicians visited room fifty-four, however. The condition and status of the patient it housed did not change.

The hospital’s regular staff attended to his conventional, daily needs. He was fed and hydrated intravenously. Fifth-floor nurses bathed and changed him, making sure the monopole braces that suspended him in a clinical magnetic field above his resting place did not fail and drop him to the bed or surge and fling him against the ceiling. Such lifters, which held a patient aloft in a strong magnetic field, were usually reserved for seriously injured patients such as critical burn victims, and its employment simply to ensure the comfort of one who could not express feelings of pain puzzled some of the staff. But orders were orders, and since the facility was notably free of critical cases at that time it did not become anything more serious than a topic of conversation.

That the patient was someone special was evident not only from the parade of specialists who visited his room but from the presence of the two plainclothes guards who were always present outside his door. These men and women were polite but uninformative, insisting to inquisitive staff that they had no more idea who the man in room fifty-four’s bed was than they did. They had been assigned to watch and protect. There was no need for them to know anything more, and frankly, they preferred it that way.

So the equatorial days slid into equatorial nights, with the tropical sun dropping systematically behind the distant high island of New Hanover, without more than a few people at the very top level of hospital administration knowing that the silent, unimpressive figure who lay motionless in corner room fifty-four was the most important patient on the entire planet.

Certainly Irene Tse was unaware of his prominence. Unlike some of her colleagues, she worked the graveyard shift because it allowed her to spend many of her daylight hours diving. Wearing their compact rebreathers, she and her friends would spend endless hours in the waters framing the dozens of small islands that speckled the ocean surrounding New Ireland and New Hanover, observing what was still the world’s most diverse and impressive aggregation of underwater life. Widowed at twenty-three when her husband had been crushed in a stampede of panicked three hundred kilo bluefin tuna, at thirty she had yet to remarry. A lively and spirited personality, she had been attracted to a number of men and several women, but attraction was not love, affection not passion.

As far as the motionless man in fifty-four was concerned, identified on his charts as a Mr. Jones, to her he was just another patient who needed to be cared for, an insensible lump of humanity who might or might not one day emerge to a greater or lesser degree from his present state of catalepsy. At two o’clock in the morning she greeted the guards, both of whom were engrossed in watching a live windsand race from central Asia. Even though they all knew each other by sight now, she was required to produce her ident as well as being physically recognized by both retinal and heartwave scanners.

Once passed into the room, she began by checking the monitors. It was not necessary for her to record their readings, as these were transmitted directly to the hospital’s central monitoring facility. Activating the levitator, she changed the bed and sponge-bathed the patient while he hung suspended in the field, the atoms of his body temporarily magnetized. When she shut down the field he was lowered gently in fresh hospital gown onto the newly changed bed.

She was preparing to move the osmotic fluid injector to a new area of his torso when she felt something touch her arm.

She might have stopped breathing for a second or two. She wasn’t sure. What she was certain of was that fingers had moved against her skin. Looking down, she saw that the patient’s left hand had brushed her wrist. Fallen against it, no doubt. As she was preparing to make a note of the phenomenon, two of the fingers, the middle and the index, rose. Trembling, they lightly grazed her for a second time before falling back, as if exhausted by their own nominal weight.

Looking up, she saw that the two fingers were not all that had moved. The patient’s head was inclined toward her—though that may simply have been where it fell, she reminded herself. The open eyes did not startle her—they opened every morning, to stare at nothing, and closed every night. It was the moisture at one corner that was unexpected. It could easily have been the result of a miss with the soft towel following the evening bath. There was a quick and easy way to tell.

Leaning forward and reaching over, she wiped at the bare trickle with a finger and brought it to her lips. Her tongue communicated the unmistakable taste of salt. The moisture was a tear.

Why she voiced her thoughts she never knew. It was not a conscious decision, simply part of an automatic response. “I’ll call the duty doctor,” she whispered tightly. As she started to turn to do so, all five of the fingers on the patient’s left hand suddenly uncurled and reached up to grab her wrist in a grip of iron.

Lips fluttered, lips that had been kept moist through the judicious application of treated cloths and expensive salve. For the first time in the month and a day since the patient had been brought into the hospital and placed in his bed, a sound emerged from the hitherto unused throat. She had to lean close to sculpt a word from the whisper.

“Don’t…”

Transfixed by the single word, by the man’s blank stare, and by the utterly unexpected firmness of his grasp on her wrist, Tse stood there, not moving, waiting to see what would happen next. She could break the hold if she tried, she felt, but what effect might that have on the patient, who obviously wanted her to remain? He had spoken—she was certain of that. Could he also now hear?

“I’ll stay,” she told him, “but let go of my arm. You’re hurting me.”

The fingers relaxed, released her, slumped away from her wrist. In minutes, she knew, someone at Hospital Central would have noted the surge in physiological activity within the room. The duty doctor and staff might already be on their way.