4
Surfing the internet after knocking back a few drinks is rarely a good move, especially if it involves shopping after some half-assed Great Idea has taken hold in your head. I’ve had a lot of useless crap show up on my doorstep over the years, most of it cookware that never left the box. My kitchen back home had an espresso machine, rice cooker, sous vide, two sets of chef’s knives, and three varieties of air fryers. Don’t ask how often I used them, because the answer would be embarrassing. My intentions were noble.
The property management company Bjorn and his colleague Sven had set up for me was still drawing from my account, so I assumed all of that stuff was still collecting dust in the pantry. I’d vowed to finally use all of it whenever I returned.
Despite Clara’s motherly objections, I’d fallen into my usual routine of checking up on the latest news from Earth, though the remote surveys didn’t offer much of the kinds of things I’d have considered “news.” This was especially so for politics, which I admit was a nice break. The Union deemed that sort of thing to be a transient aberration in the development of our civilization. Background noise. The exception was when the halfwits in expensive suits did something head-poundingly destructive.
The big surprise today came from the news that humans had finally landed on Mars, and you’d better believe the Survey Ministry had taken notice. I began poring over the intercepted broadcasts from home, desperate for details. It wasn’t hard, as TV and radio signals are constantly streaming out into space and someone is always listening. There it was, a grainy video of two people in sleek white spacesuits planting the American flag on Mars. In the background, a silvery rocket that could’ve come from a 50’s sci-fi movie towered against a salmon-colored sky.
I was elated. Pride swelled inside me and I found myself wiping away tears. We’d done it! Humans for the win, bitches!
Going to Mars had always been talked about, but it wasn’t something I’d followed before. Giant rockets blew up every now and then, so I’d assumed it would forever remain a long way off. But in the five years I’d been away, it had all come together.
Then I saw the time stamp on the video: eighteen years for them. So my math had been right, another reminder of how much I’d missed.
Yes, that was a little deflating. If I ever did manage to return home, how much more actual time would have passed?
Returning, of course, remained my current dilemma. I was sitting cross-legged on my bed, searching through the Union network. My bedroom was filled with holographic projections of anything that might get me near my goal.
The goal was Earth, and I still wasn’t finding anything that went close to it. I shouldn’t have expected any better, since we weren’t in the Union yet. The Survey Ministry was still keeping an eye on the place with a quartet of observatories safely hidden in the asteroid belt, but they were autonomous and not regularly serviced. There was the occasional pass by a Thuban picket ship, but those never got any closer than our heliopause. Chonk had once mentioned something about military vessels staying within recognized interstellar boundaries.
Other than the run to Tau Ceti, the closest transport route I’d found was to Rigel Station. The latter was where I’d first entered the Union, and they still ran a semi-regular shuttle from the Capital. Tau Ceti was closer, but there wasn’t much of a Union presence there. I had a better chance of finding a ride to Earth from Rigel than just about anywhere else, and that was still rolling the dice. I’d have to find someone to take me the rest of the way, someone with time on their hands (or claws, tentacles, whatever) and a willingness to expend precious fuel for a long side trip. An unsanctioned side trip, which would surely cost extra.
I stared at the projections hovering above my bed and thought through the logistics. The prices were, well, astronomical. I had just enough Union kuulas in my account to pay for a slow boat to Rigel; the kind favored by invertebrate species like the Eridanis. Hextapods didn’t tolerate long periods of acceleration well, even with inertial dampening. Still, I looked up the particulars.
Relative cruise velocity of 0.8 c. I groaned. Even at eighty percent light speed, that still made for almost a twelve-year journey when you factored in the warp distance. No big deal to a hextapod; they’d just naturally go dormant and sleep most of the way. That’d leave me stuck on a transport with most of the other passengers asleep in their seawater tanks. I could pay extra to be put in hibernation, but I’d still have to find a ride home at the end after twelve years of no income.
Maybe the transport was looking for extra hands? All of the big long-haulers had medical staff, surely I could find some kind of arrangement to work for my berthing. That way I’d keep my savings intact, maybe even earn enough to buy a ride home from Rigel.
In twelve years. Actually, it’s worse than that.
Mind you, that time is only by the ship’s reference. I mentioned that relativity really starts to kick your ass once you’re past seventy percent light speed, when time dilation begins to multiply exponentially. At 0.8 c, twelve years from the ship’s perspective would be closer to twenty on Earth.
Damn you, Einstein.
Okay, not really his fault, but I needed someone to be pissed at.
I made an angry swipe at the holograms, sending them back into the bowels of my crystal. Even this tenuous, half-assed plan had turned around to bite me. The very problem I was trying to run away from kept rearing its head, and the faster I tried to run, the worse it became. The closer I got to home, the farther away it was. In twenty more years everyone I’d known would be well into old age, if not dead. And who knew what Earth would be like? Hell, who knew if it would even be there if we ran sideways into one of those “threshold events” Bjorn had once warned me about? By then we might’ve baked the planet in greenhouse gases or gene-edited our way to extinction.
It was enough to make a girl wonder what the point was of going back in the first place.
I flopped back onto my bed with a groan.
Suffice it to say I was more than a little distracted at work the next day, and even more torn. Thoughts of the life left behind tugged at me, while the new one I’d embraced demanded my attention. Waiting around the hangar bay for a call didn’t do anything to resolve the conflict between the two, if anything that down time only sharpened the division.
I sat in the back of our squad, idly perusing the same transport schedules that had frustrated me the night before. It was classic doom-scrolling, digging ever deeper into the muck of disappointing information while hoping for that tiny nugget of gold to reveal itself.
Of course there was no nugget that would make my harebrained plan work, only more muck. Did I mention interstellar travel was prohibitively expensive?
I shoved the crystal back into my hip pocket and blew out a sigh. I stole a glance at Karrak, who seemed indifferent to my inner turmoil. That of course was a convenient fiction, as his telepathic nature left me no doubt that he sensed what was on my mind. He’d come to know me well enough by now to also understand it was best to leave me alone until I was ready to talk.
I thought of Bjorn and Sven. I could never hope to achieve their near-telepathic levels of empathy, but one vital lesson they’d taught me was the value of detachment, of looking at matters objectively. The more complicated the problem, the more helpful it was to remove myself from it. That is, to set emotions aside.
I’d been weighing the pros and cons in my head. What was there for me to miss so much, anyway? My life had been nothing to get excited about when they’d plucked me from obscurity. They’d given me an opportunity, and I’d jumped at it. So why was I feeling so disconnected?
The pros of living in the Union were considerable. All my needs were met, and I’d made more reliable friends here than on Earth. The work was almost always rewarding. It scratched both my veterinary and EMS itches, and there was always more to learn.
The learning hadn’t stopped with the dozen or so different alien anatomies, either. I’d been to other worlds, seen galactic phenomena up close that would’ve knocked human astronomers on their asses. Just the other day I’d been within spitting distance of a black hole. The images recorded in Clara’s memory would’ve been priceless back home.
Back home. Why did I keep thinking of Earth that way, when I’d felt more at home here than at just about any time since Mom and Dad had passed? I supposed the roots had grown deeper than I’d realized, the kinds of bonds you take for granted until you’ve severed them. No matter how welcoming my companions had been, there was no escaping the fact that I was not among my own kind. I was one of only two humans within a few hundred light years, and I wasn’t going to be on Gideon’s social calendar any time soon. Not that I wanted to be.
That thought led me back to the single “con” of life in the Union. Here, I was the alien.
The alert klaxon blared, and a shimmering curtain of golden light appeared outside. The vacuum force fields had activated, along with a warning broadcast: “Alert bay sixteen, alert bay sixteen. Prepare for immediate departure.”
Time to stuff the intrusive thoughts away and get to work. I leaped out of my seat and stood next to Karrak, who was studying our dispatch notice. We were being sent to a Mintakan transport out of Auriga. One of its crew was suffering from “acute photon exposure.” A sunburn.
That might sound like a waste of our resources, but Mintakans were extremely sensitive to natural light. They’d evolved on an overcast planet beneath dense jungle and their translucent skin offered very little protection from UV rays, so direct sunlight could easily damage their internal organs.
Needa closed up the hatch while we strapped in. The deck hummed as the gravity drive came to life, and we shot out of the bay into space.
An hour later we pulled up alongside the transport, which itself wasn’t much to speak of. The Mintakans liked to keep things simple, and their ship reflected this aesthetic. Other than the faint red light from its open landing bay, the ship was a featureless cylinder nearly half a mile long.
We stepped out into the dimly lit bay and were greeted by a translucent ovoid blob a little more than a meter across. The only way to tell it was facing us was by its eyes, which weren’t much more than a patchwork of slate-gray photosensitive receptors embedded in its skin. I flipped down my visor, which compensated for the low light. Now I could see the Mintakan in full, down to being able to identify its internal organs and circulatory system. Its skin vibrated as it began to speak, which at first came as a discordant, low-frequency warbling. I hadn’t had many interactions with this species, so it took a second for my translation implants to pick it up.
“. . severe burn, terrible accident. Hmm, yes. Please follow me.”
Karrak lifted the species-specific trauma kit from one of our outrigger pods and loaded it onto the levitating gurney. The Mintakan turned, its gelatinous body supported by hundreds of spaghetti-like feelers which moved in a rhythmic cadence to propel him across the bay. He was almost too fast to keep up with.
The landing bay was sized to accommodate various classes of Union shuttles, but the rest of the ship was designed with Mintakans in mind. The corridors and compartments were barely high enough to for me to stand up in, while all the hatchways weren’t much more than a meter square. Big enough for one of them, but I had to get down on my knees to crawl through.
Our patient had been isolated in a darkened room adjacent to the landing bay. I pulled out a pair of scanner discs to take vital signs and began to gently move them across his body. This was a little touchy, both for the patient’s sake and my own gut reaction. They look like disembodied brains suspended in goo beneath a tissue-thin, translucent membrane. I had to remind myself that Mintakans were the most intelligent race in the Union. Their massive brains and complex network of nerve receptors can perceive things the rest of us can’t, including (I’m told) other dimensions. Their minds function on an entirely different plane. Ever encounter someone so smart that they can’t relate to normal people? Mintakans are like that.
I put this out of my mind and focused on taking vitals and assessing his condition like any other patient. His delicate skin made it easy to identify the burns. A large patch of blistered epidermis covered most of one hemisphere, including a good portion of his ocelli, the photoreceptors that passed for eyes on this species. Honestly it was a little repulsive, but they weren’t the first Union species to trigger my horror-movie reflex.
I’ve found the best way to quiet my primitive monkey brain is to just start talking to the patient. I dropped to my knees beside him. “I’m Melanie. This is Karrak. We’re from the Medical Corps. Can you tell us your name?”
His skin vibrated in short, staccato patterns, a sharp contrast to the Mintakan who’d led us here. Even through the translator, his speech was weak and halting. “Hmm. Raxx . . . Udan . . . Woxx . . . of Mintaka.”
I stifled a grin. He didn’t have to tell me he was from Mintaka. I kept making idle chat while gently probing his skin. “Hello, Raxx. Looks like you have some pretty nasty flash burns. Can you tell me how this happened?” This mattered, because there was a big difference between a bad sunburn and exposure to ionizing radiation. Superficially they presented the same way, but the latter could turn nasty in a hurry.
“Shield . . . reactor . . . anomaly.”
I shot a glance over my shoulder at Karrak. He knew the technical stuff much better than I, but hearing “anomaly” associated with an antimatter reactor made the hair on my neck stand up. He turned to the other Mintakan with a questioning look.
“Hmm, yes. Raxx-Udan is our chief engineer. He was conducting a routine inspection of the reactor plant. There was a . . . how should I describe? . . . stutter in the protective field.”
“But not the containment field?” Karrak pressed.
Raxx answered for himself. “Not containment. Protective.”
I finished my scan, careful to not touch his affected skin. “He’s not throwing off any radiation. Doesn’t appear contaminated.”
Karrak relaxed. “The protective field is unique to the Mintakans for their sensitivity to visible light. It’s in essence a filter.”
That was a relief. The shades had glitched momentarily, and our patient had been unfortunate enough to be there. The discs didn’t show any signs of radiation exposure other than a concentrated dose of plain old photons, so we were probably dealing with a simple sunburn. Of course, “simple” is relative for a species so exquisitely sensitive to light. “Okay, Raxx. Can you tell me how you feel? Any nausea or dizziness?”
“Hmm, no and no. I do not feel unsteadiness, though I do not know ‘nausea.’ That is not a condition we experience.”
I’d kind of expected that, but still had to ask. Mintakans absorbed all their nutrients directly through their outer membrane, which was icky but effective. It filtered out anything they couldn’t tolerate before it entered their digestive system, but radiation poisoning could alter that chemistry.
I held a light in front of his photoreceptors. The healthy ones changed color from light gray to black, a normal response for his species. The burned ones didn’t respond. Raxx shuddered.
“I’m sorry. Was that uncomfortable?”
“Yes and yes. Very bright.”
“I apologize. We had to check your optic reflexes.” I sat back on my heels and started unrolling a patch. “This will protect your photoreceptors. I’m going to apply a corticosteroid spray over the rest of your burns and cover them with a cooling wrap.” I nodded to Karrak, who was lifting a small infusion pump from his trauma bag. “My partner here is going to start you on a saline infusion. You’re dehydrated from the burns, and this will help. We’ll inject a mild sedative into the mix for the pain. Sound okay?”
“Yes and yes.”
With this species, we couldn’t just find a vein to start an IV even though the circulatory system was visible beneath Raxx’s skin. Karrak unrolled an infusion mat designed for Mintakans. One side was covered with feeding tubes, the other with microscopic pins. Once the mat was in place on our patient, the pins would begin gently pushing fluids which would be absorbed through his membrane’s natural capillary action. It was a slow process, but with thousands of entry points over a large area our guy soon started to feel better.
He still needed a lot more than we could provide on our own. The affected area was large enough to qualify as third degree, which meant we’d need to transport him to the Med Corps complex back at the Capital.
When I broached this subject, the Mintakan’s reaction was sharp. The patient didn’t voice any objections, but he began quivering nervously. I sensed he wasn’t happy with the idea, and our escort was more insistent.
“No and no. Raxx-Udan cannot leave. That would be sub-optimal.”
Sub-optimal? Compared to half of this guy’s body being covered with flash burns? I was ready to blow a gasket when Karrak stepped in. “I know he is a vital member of your crew, but his injuries are quite extensive. Without proper care, they could become life-threatening.”
The escort paused. His body pulsated as he considered my argument. Raxx pulsated in response. They were having a whispered conversation which my translator couldn’t pick up.
“We can care for him here,” the escort said. “Your services will not be necessary.”
I smelled bullshit. If they could take care of him here, then why’d they call us in the first place? I glanced at Karrak, who knelt in front of our patient. “That is, of course, up to you,” he said, “but we must inform you of—”
Raxx began convulsing, with violent ripples coursing back and forth across his body. Warnings began flashing in my visor as his vital signs began bottoming out. “He’s crashing! Spin up the defib!”
Karrak rushed back to the trauma kit to pull out the crash box and began synching it to the transducer discs. They’d act as defibrillator paddles, pumping current through the patient while also taking vitals. It was one of many pieces of gear I’d have loved to have on Earth. Heart monitor, ECG, and defibrillator all in one handy unit about the size of a deck of cards.
“Full charge.”
I set the transducers in place and stepped back. “Clear!”
The machine itself was not nearly as dramatic as a defib kit on Earth. No electronic whine of current building up, just a pulsing white light and a barely audible click when it discharged. Our patient convulsed from the shock. I gave it a second to watch his sinus rhythm. Nothing, just a quick jump in the trace lines. “Again.”
“Stand by . . . full charge.”
“Clear!”
Another click, another convulsion. The trace jumped, then went flat again. “Still not responding.” I looked up to see Karrak searching my face. We knew what had to come next.
In a humanoid we’d start CPR. The problem here was that even with an automated chest compressor, it only worked on species where direct pressure could be applied. With a gelatinous Mintakan, things got a little more complicated.
“Massage wands?”
I nodded, and Karrak pulled out a pair of thin, meter-long hollow rods which were in essence large-gauge needles. He handed one to me and we took up positions on either side of the Mintakan. “Ever done this before?”
“No.” Grays rarely showed emotion under pressure, but the veins bulging along Karrak’s slender neck were a dead giveaway that he was apprehensive.
“Me either. Just in the holo sim. We do this together.” I placed the sharp tip of my rod against our patient’s skin, holding it steady with one hand while keeping the other on a control pad fixed to its end. I could just barely see the heart, which my visor highlighted. “Like playing a video game,” I said, which probably meant nothing to Karrak. “You ready?”
“I am.”
“On three. One . . . two . . .”
On three we pushed in simultaneously, driving the rods through Raxx’s membrane. We each stopped just short of the heart, and the control pad suctioned itself into place on the Mintakan’s skin. “I’m in position.”
“As am I. Controls are synchronized.”
“Got it. I’ll initiate.”
“Please do.”
Yep, Karrak was nervous as hell. I smiled to myself, as there weren’t many things I could outdo these guys in. I pressed against the control pad. “Starting heart massage.”
Small elastic cups extruded from the hollow tubes and molded themselves around either side of the heart. Soon they began working in unison, squeezing and releasing. The trace lines in my visor jumped back to life, matching what we needed to see for a Mintakan. I rocked back against my knees and blew out a sigh. “There we go. Sinus rhythm. Good job, Karrak.”
He stood and brushed off his green coveralls, watching the feed through his own visor. “I agree. Patient is stable.”
I turned to our escort. “He needs to be hospitalized.” His eye patches contracted, a sign of confusion. His translation implants were tripping over my human English. It happened sometimes. “A treatment facility. Long-term care. These burns are extensive and they’re overtaxing his body. He’s shutting down. The massage wands are to keep him stable for transport. If we don’t get him somewhere for proper treatment, I promise you he won’t last.”
Our escort’s skin tensed up, as if he were making a hard decision. “Hmm, yes. Very well.”
I activated the anti-grav gurney and directed it back to our ship. I thought of Needa, and the tickle in the back of my mind told me she was listening. “We’re ready for transport. Capital complex.”