Gates of Hell (12 page)

When the answer came it was not at all what she expected.
Koltiri have vowed to blend our gifts with the younger seedlings. The Genesis Continues
.

The Genesis Continues
, Roxy responded automatically. Oh, great. She’d been expecting a lecture on nonviolence, and they’d thrown religion and reproductive policy at her instead. She crossed her arms, and glared at the women who weren’t there in the garden with her.
Your point
?

Where is your bondmate?

Onboard the
Tigris.

You have not sought the bondmate Racqel has Seen you with.

She didn’t understand this one. Racqel had claimed years ago that Roxy would bond with a great warrior, and she was married to the hero of the Trin War, just like the great Seeress predicted. Okay, they weren’t bonded, but she was determined to go back to the
Tigris
and work on her marriage as soon as the Sagouran Fever epidemic was under control. She did chafe at the unfairness of it; Reine didn’t exactly have a complete bond, either, but nobody yelled at her. Roxy rubbed a spot on her forehead that was beginning to ache. Koltiri shouldn’t get headaches, but it was a symptom of Sagouran Fever she couldn’t seem to shed.
I’m going back on duty now
, she told the koltiri matchmakers, and built up her shields to keep them out.
Odd girl
, the thought trailed after her anyway.

———

“Did you know I’m an odd girl?”

Alice Phere did not bother looking away from the diagnostic board as she replied, “No surprise to me.”

Roxy stepped out of the doorway of the Section Monitoring Room. She poured herself a cup of ‘caffeine beverage’ from the refreshment cart sitting in the center of the circular room, then took a seat at one of the other monitor stations. She was not surprised to see that Alice was the only doctor on duty. The staff, both native and offworld volunteers, was being spread ever thinner as the plague infected more and more of the population.

Roxy liked the SMR and ducked in when she wasn’t napping between healings. Each diagnostic station was set up to cover an entire wing of the giant hospital. It was as modern as anything she recalled from her stays on the hospital world Nightingale. Far more modern than what MedService personnel had to work with on low-tech worlds. The monitor boards with their arrays of bright flashing lights and multiple screens and readouts gave a reassuring feeling of medical personnel being in control of any situation. She ran her hand along a row of cool, sleek touchpads. Control was a lie, of course, where Sagouran Fever was concerned, but this stuff sure looked pretty.

Alice was in uniform, and Roxy took some comfort from the sight of the familiar mint-green and cream MedService clothing, even with the added faint blue glow given off by Alice’s environmental belt. She missed MedService, even though right now she was considering changing back into her black MilService uniform just to make a point about being a warrior among warriors with the other koltiri. Which they probably wouldn’t get, so why bother?

“What are you staring at?” Alice asked. “My ears on crooked?”

Alice wore her hair in shoulder-length dreadlocks. Roxy wasn’t sure if even biosensors could see through her heavy black hair. “I bet you don’t have ears. I was staring at your halo.”

Alice cackled. “A halo? Oh, God!”

Alice had been born on a Terran colony world settled by a Christian sect. She’d run away from home at fifteen, actually stowing away on a freighter to escape a life of rigid fundamentalism. Roxy knew Alice’s history, but she also knew that when Dr. Phere said ‘God’ she meant the God of her fathers. She practiced her faith quite sincerely, if not as strictly as she was brought up. So there would be no heart-to-heart talk with her old friend. What truly bothered Roxy about her mental run-in with the other koltiri was that she’d been reminded that she was duty-bound to help Spread the Genesis and go and have babies with someone from another planet. She and Alice could agree that evolution was a fact, but past that agreement there could be no discussion if religious wars in the United Systems were to be avoided.

“A tarnished halo,” Roxy assured her friend. Then she slumped back in the chair and asked, “It’s okay to be married to someone you love, right?”

“Nothing in the rule book against it,” Alice answered. She began running a medication check on an overflowing ward’s patients.

“We work by different books, darlin’,” Roxy muttered under her breath. She finished the poor excuse for a cup of coffee and moved to peer over Alice’s shoulder, automatically checking data screens herself. “Isolation wards.” The beds were occupied by patients with serious illnesses other than Sagouran Fever. The patients in each shielded ward were tended by a pair of meddroids.

“Probably the safest places on Bonadem at the moment.”

“Mmm.” Roxy rubbed a finger along her chin. “Wonder if we should ask the hospital administrators to put security guards on the . ward entrances just in case?”

Alice glanced up at her. “Just in case of what?”

Good question. Nobody came near the hospital if they could avoid it. And nobody inside wanted to get out. “I’m Military. We’re paranoid.”

Alice shot her an annoyed look. “I think the Military needs to stop fighting a war that’s over.”

“Over?” Roxy heard the sharp rise of her own voice, and fought down the indignant anger. Safer not to discuss the war with anyone who hadn’t seen action.

Roxy said nothing, and Alice went back to tracking the flowing patterns on a quartet of screens above the console.

After she’d taken readings, Alice said, “The research people up on Floor Twenty are threatening to jump out the windows. Or throw their equipment out.”

“They still haven’t a clue to stopping Sag?”

“Still nothing. Dr. Callen says he wants to talk to you. Physician,” Alice added for emphasis.

“I don’t have the time to go over his ever-mutating data.” She wasn’t quite sure she had the brains for it, either, not with what the healings were doing to her.

“Well, make some time, Physician,” Alice said sharply. “I thought the Trin were bad, but this epidemic could kill the Systems.”

“Yeah.” She wasn’t going to talk about how bad the Trin really were.

Alice tapped instructions on a keypad and adjusted a dial on the board, followed by quick calls to meddroids in other wards. Roxy found watching all this purposeful activity soothing; she could almost pretend that Alice was engaged in normal medical procedures. She felt recovered enough to get back to work, but waited a moment longer, listening in as Alice answered a call from Dr. Jeraldo. Patrisia Jeraldo was the head of Pediatrics. Roxy admired the way the petite woman and her medtech husband handled children. Kids seemed to naturally love and trust the couple. Their own three-year-old daughter had died of the fever when it first struck Bonadem, before the evac plan had been established. Rumor had it that it was the Jeraldos who came up with the plan to get the children of Bonadem safely offworld. The Jeraldos didn’t talk about their loss or take any credit, they simply worked harder than anybody else in the hospital to get as many children to safety as possible. In the time she’d been here, Roxy had never known either of them to take more than two hours of sedated rest. Seeing Patrisia Jeraldo’s haggard face on the view screen made her guilty for pausing for even a brief conversation.

Alice shook her head, making her dreadlocks swing gently. “We’re expanding the evac operation starting tomorrow.”

“More ships? More koltiri?”

“No. Neither ships nor healers are available. The Jeraldos have organized more medteams to go into the city to look for those too weak or sick or frightened to leave their homes.”

“Taking it to the streets, eh? Good idea.” She was rested enough. She had things to do. She drained her cup and tossed it in the recycler, and threw Alice a vague salute on the way out.

———

“Here, drink this.”

Roxy didn’t bother opening her eyes; she just gulped down the hot liquid from the cup held to her lips. To her delight, she tasted really good coffee instead of the nutrient supplement she expected.

Once it was all gone and she’d healed the slight burns in her mouth from drinking something too hot too fast, she opened her eyes to find Alice peering intently at her.

“You have green eyes,” she said, fascinated by this small discovery. “I’d forgotten your telling me that it was rare in Ter-Africans. Martin’s eyes are brown.”

She heard herself continue to ramble on as Alice took her by the arm and guided her out of the treatment room. Behind them, Roxy heard the child she’d just healed calling tearfully for his mommy. She would have liked to go back and cuddle him, but Alice’s grip was fierce as she led Roxy down the corridor.

“Have I done ten yet?” Roxy asked plaintively, worried that she hadn’t gotten in her ten-patients-an-hour quota. She was only allowed to perform ten healings at a time, then it was time for protein injections and some rest between sessions. Not the schedule the koltiri would have preferred, but some administrator had made the decision that this was the optimum way of utilizing an empathic healer’s abilities. “Optimum for who?” she complained as she was brought into an office. She was pushed gently into a chair in the center of the room. Alice stepped back, to lean tiredly against the closed, dark-purple door.

Roxy slumped just as tiredly in the chair, fighting fatigue and dizziness. After staring for a while, she eventually realized there was a desk directly across from her, set in front of a tall, narrow window. It was dark outside, the kind of gray-green darkness you get just before a thunderstorm. Silhouetted in the grim darkness of the window were two men, their environmental belts giving their forms an eerie glow. One man sat at the desk, the other man stood beside him. They were staring at her. After a while she recognized them as two members of the volunteer research team MedService had sent in.

The standing man was very tall; it made her even dizzier to look up at him. “I’m never going to play basketball again if this keeps up,” she complained as she recalled that his name was Dr. Rutherford.

The one in the desk chair was smallish and baldish. He had a doughy shape and pale eyes. His name was Callen. She could feel that he wanted her attention very much, so she tried hard to concentrate through the exhaustion. “Nu?”

“Physician Merkrates,” Callen said. “We need your ‘elp ‘ere.”

Roxy hit her palm against her ear, then she glanced at Alice. “My translator’s not connecting with my brain. What language is he speaking?”

“Standard, with a British accent. He said ‘help here’.”

Roxy smiled placidly. “Oh, good. I’m not crazy.” She knew she was slightly disconnected from reality, but unable to fight her way back through the residual effects of healing Sag Fever. The bounce back was getting longer every time.

Perhaps she was less lucid than she thought, as Alice snarled, “Jesus Christ!” and reached for her belt pouch. “Sorry, hon, I forgot you need some protein.”

An injection hissed into her arm, and some of the fog cleared within a few moments. She sat up straighter and made herself focus on the researchers. “What can I do for you, gentlemen?”

The men relaxed, visibly and empathically. Roxy found the hope they suddenly radiated bruising against her weakened mental shielding. She knew what they wanted from Physician Merkrates, but didn’t think it was in her power to give. Rutherford waited, letting Callen do the talking. “‘Ave you ‘ad a chance to look at any of the recent test data?”

“Uh—” Roxy searched her sieve of a memory. “—No.” Alice sighed loudly, practically in her ear. Roxy raised her gaze to the doctor’s pinch-lipped face. “I’m going to real soon now,” she promised. “How many days ago did you ask me?”

“Two.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“‘S all right,” Callen told her. “Might be irrelevant anyway. Not ‘avin’ any luck pinnin’ down the bugger. Every time we think we’ve got a possible treatment…” He snapped his fingers. “No joy with gettin’ a sample of the street cure, either. We’re not even sure it’s bein’ used ‘ere yet—if it exists at all. We’re tryin’ to get a sample in from Abidon. Rumor says there’s a large supply there—but no ship will go in.”

“And there’s an unofficial coalition of planetary defense ships patrolling infected systems’ borders,” Alice added. “They’re hunting and shooting down unauthorized traffic.”

“Nasty,” Roxy said. She didn’t mention the
Tigris’s
encounter with the Triallens. Or Dee’s less-than-legal forays into the city during her off-hours. In fact, she didn’t remember the last time she’d seen her Terran friend, but also knew it could have been days or hours or even minutes. She was living more and more inside the healings, and losing the capacity to deal with anything else for very long.
I have to get out of this
, she thought, and knew she couldn’t. Koltiri commitment came first, last, and always. Damn it. “So, what do you want me to do?” she prodded the researchers, wanting and hating to get back to work.

“We don’t really know how you perform a healing,” Callen stated.

“And I do?” she asked before he could go on.

“You don’t?” Alice questioned.

“Honey,” Roxy lied to her friend, “when I say I’m committing miracles, it’s no joke.” Alice stepped back, looking at her thoughtfully. Roxy addressed the researchers again, making a koltiri-like effort to figure out what they wanted without bothering with verbal conversation. It wasn’t easy for her, because she was in the habit of being ethical with the mind-silent beings she lived among, but she was too tired to get through the imprecise layering of verbal conversation right now. “You want me to try to analyze this thing while I’m healing it? Take the few seconds I’m infected and get to know and love the Sagouran virus like a bondmate?”

“If that’s possible,” Callen urged. “You’re the only one of the koltiri with a medical background. If you could combine your train-in’ with your talent…” His voice trailed off and he just sat there looking tired and hopeful. His colleague added his silent pleading, and all the emotion aimed at her was enough to make Roxy squirm in her seat. She focused her attention on Callen. The earnest little man was so tired, so close to despair. She wanted to hug him and make it all better.