21
“Dad? What’s wrong?”
His breathing was forced. “Don’t know, punkin.” He steadied himself against one of the cattle pens before falling to his knees, clutching his chest.
“Lie down, Dad.”
He did, in a filthy pile of straw on the barn floor. Stubborn as ever, he began fumbling for the cell phone in the pocket of his worn jeans. “Call . . .”
I snatched the phone from his hand. “I’ve got it, Dad. Just hang on.” I stabbed at the keypad. It was an eternity before someone finally answered.
“911, what is your emergency?”
I frantically explained what I thought was happening. The dispatcher on the other end was infuriatingly calm, asking for name, age, et cetera. Didn’t she know how critical this was? When she asked for the address, I drew a blank. What? I’d lived my whole life here! Couldn’t they see my location? The words eventually fell out of my mouth.
“Do you know CPR?” the voice asked me.
“I . . . I do.” Why the hell hadn’t I thought of that myself?
I laid the phone on the ground beside him and began compressions to the beat of “Staying Alive” in my head.
I woke up screaming. Happens every time.
I came to hate that song, no matter how many times I’d use it for the exact same thing in the future, maybe because of how often I’d have to use it.
I’d worked summers as a lifeguard and they’d taught us to use that ditty in our first aid class. Had it again in EMS school. No matter how hard I tried to unlearn it and find another song with the same beat, it was still there, the memories stabbing at me like an ice pick every time I had to do chest compressions on a patient. No matter how hard I tried to suppress those memories, they always found a way back. Assholes.
The data crystal on my nightstand was blinking and chirping, growing brighter and louder with each pulse. It was time to get up. I pushed the covers aside and sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing my eyes with my palms. My head pounded, smothering the lingering memories with a killer hangover. Despite doing my best to pace myself last night, Thuban tequila packed a wallop. On the bright side, I’d made a bunch of new friends and that was worth the headache. Being small even by human standards, it felt like victory to be accepted by a group of reptilian warriors almost twice my size.
After going through my morning bathroom routine—and yes, they’d provided human-compatible plumbing fixtures—I pulled on a fresh set of coveralls and turned on the food synth. “Coffee, black. Toast, plain. Electrolyte juice.” When the little door slid open, I had a fresh cup of hot coffee, perfectly done toast, and a glass of something that looked like liquified algae.
I picked up the glass and studied it with a healthy dose of skepticism. “Is this stuff compatible with humans?” I asked the machine. It was the first time I’d tried talking to it.
A pleasant voice answered. “Affirmative. It is calibrated for your individual physiology, augmented with known human athletic beverages.”
“Can you at least change the coloring? Because this looks gross.”
“Affirmative. Please replace your glass and select your preference.”
I did as the machine said. “Orange juice, please.” The little door slid shut and reopened to reveal what looked and tasted like a fresh-squeezed glass of OJ. I gulped it down, and by the time it was finished I was already feeling better. If there was a way to reproduce this extraterrestrial miracle hangover cure on Earth, it’d be worth a fortune. It also made the coffee much more enjoyable. With electrolytes in balance and a clear head, I left for work.
***
The hangar swarmed with activity, more so than usual for a shift change. I was assigned to bay five again with Xeelix, and the warning beacons were already flashing. Our ship sat atop maintenance lifts as a team of Grays and insectoids scurried underneath, mounting a long cylinder to the hull as Needa watched. She seemed particularly interested in the attachment points. Elastic webbing hung from one of the outrigger pods.
Xeelix came over to meet me with Bjorn in tow. “You are early. Excellent. We have been assigned to what could be a challenging run.”
I hiked my bag up my shoulder. “I’m always up for a challenge.” That’s always easy to say when you have no idea what you’re about to get into. I looked up at Bjorn. “You’re coming with us?”
“This will be a “big job,” as you might say. Dr. Xeelix wanted an extra medic aboard.”
That got my attention. Bring it on. “Cool. Where are we going?”
They eyed each other. “A planet called Aegir, in the Ran system,” Bjorn explained. “Your astronomers named it Epsilon Eridani.”
“Okay . . .” I said warily, not sure why this was such a big deal. “What makes it so challenging?
Being our instructor, Xeelix stepped in. “Recall our review of Union civilizations. Aegir is a gas giant, the only planet in the system. The upper strata of its atmosphere is compatible with organic life. Its lower regions become exponentially denser, with a high concentration of sulfuric acid. The Aegirans will be unlike any species, sapient or animal, that you have encountered. They are quite large, and quite light.”
Aegirans were “floaters,” massive gas bags that lived in the upper reaches of their planet’s atmosphere. They looked like jellyfish the size of hot air balloons and moved about on essentially the same principles, living off of microorganisms in the upper atmosphere. Like whales back home, Aegirans were one of those intelligent species which were physically incapable of manipulating their environment, and so were entirely dependent on Union technology for anything beyond scooping up food in the air. “I remember. They’re new to the Union, right?”
“Quite so,” Bjorn said. “A pair of Emissaries made first contact with them only twelve annums ago, and they have been Union members for less than two. Construction of an outpost at their world is still underway. Currently there are no medical services available.”
I remembered that from class too. The Aegirans were so massive that we couldn’t keep species-specific gear in the outriggers; they had to be attached externally. We turned at the sound of a pneumatic hiss as our ambulance was lowered back to the deck, loaded up with the custom gear we’d need.
Needa signaled to Xeelix, who motioned us to get aboard. “I will brief you on the patient’s situation once we are underway. Come, we must hurry.”
As I stowed my gear, Bjorn hung an extra set of exposure suits in the aft lockers. He closed them up and sat in the seat beside mine. “There is one more thing which you must know.” He met my eyes apologetically, and I wondered where he was going with this. “We are the closest treatment facility, though Aegir is still quite distant.” He looked ahead at Needa’s pilot station. “It will require us to hasten our travel.”
“So?”
Bjorn seemed chastened, as if he realized he’d been hiding something. “I do not believe we have adequately prepared you for the effects of time dilation.”
The low-frequency hum of the gravity drive began to spool up around us, and I felt our ship begin to lift off. Outside, warning beacons pulsed as our bay emptied itself to the vacuum, jetting us out into space. The drive’s hum increased to an intensity I hadn’t experienced before. My innards could feel it moving us along.
Ahead, the star field had once again warped into concentric rings of blurry starlight. It was different this time; everything outside had taken on a distinct bluish hue. Remember my rock-in-a-pond analogy from that first time leaving Earth? This looked more like a boulder had been thrown ahead of us.
I was passingly familiar with the concept of relative time, if only through the dumbed-down explanations from Discovery Channel programs. It was the kind of thing I’d watch at three in the morning to decompress after a late shift. “I don’t understand. I thought we couldn’t go faster than light?”
“We cannot, though the effect becomes more pronounced as relative velocity increases.” He looked to Xeelix. “Our vessel will be traveling at its maximum rated dilation factor, correct?”
Xeelix nodded silently, and Bjorn continued. “Our relative velocity will be fifty percent of light speed, which equates to a time dilation factor of roughly fifteen percent. For each hour that passes in our time reference, close to an hour and ten minutes will pass back at the station.”
He’d helpfully put it in human time reference, but I got the point. Add in the Union’s longer hour, and it would feel even more pronounced. I’m ashamed to admit this impressed me in purely selfish terms—every hour we spent in transit would be an extra ten minutes back at the barn, which meant our shifts would be over sooner. Cool. Maybe another trip to Wayside with Chonk after work? My stomach was growling already, needing something more substantial than a hangover breakfast.
Xeelix had been listening patiently until now, and snapped me out of my contemplations of relativity and stone bug curry. “If you are comfortable with Byyruumn’s explanation of relative time, I will brief you on our dispatch order.” He tapped on a nearby panel and files appeared on the sidewall screens. “Our patient is an adolescent Aegiran, approximately twenty annums old. Her parents report that she is having difficulty breathing and cannot maintain directional control. The symptoms began after she strayed too deeply into their lower atmosphere.” He prompted me for an initial assessment.
“Poor gas exchange and impaired directional tendrils . . . sulfur poisoning?”
He seemed satisfied. “I suspect so as well. Please continue.”
I didn’t want to mess this up, and so pulled up the files on Aegiran physiology on my crystal. Living in an environment just above the clouds of sulfuric acid that dominated its lower atmosphere, mature Aegirans were supposed to be resistant to its effects. Her rhopalium, the sensory organs that dangled from the lip of her outer hood, could have been damaged as well. That would also explain the loss of directional control. “They say anything about chemical burns?”
“Unknown, but I suspect we will find some damage to her hood and subumbrella at the very least. Twenty annums is a young adolescent. She likely has not had enough exposure to trace amounts of acid for her epidermis to develop the protective callus of an adult.”
“If she’s having trouble exchanging gas, it sounds like she ingested a lot of it.”
“Agreed. What would you consider to be a proper course of treatment?”
“She’ll need a broad-spectrum counteragent.” I thought back to my own training from poison control back home. The mantra they’d taught us was the key to pollution is dilution. “They’re oxygen-breathers. We’ll need to administer O2.” I tried to imagine what that would look like with an airborne jellyfish that could be bigger than our ship. “We don’t pack that kind of gear.”
“We do not,” Xeelix confirmed. “Recall your training. We have other methods which you may find unconventional.”
I thought of the big metallic cylinder mounted beneath our ship. I pointed at the deck. “That’s another anal probe down there, isn’t it?” The Grays sure did like their shiny suppositories.
“For an Aegiran, the distinction is moot. Recall their central orifices perform both intake and elimination functions.”
I suppose it helped that Aegirans didn’t have taste buds, but . . . yuck. “The probe’s full of nanobots, right? They’ll disperse and distribute the counteragent.”
“Correct. In this case, the probe also contains catalysts to dissociate its component compounds. The patient’s initial reaction will be . . . unpleasant. We will have to keep her immobilized in the restraining net Needa rigged between our outboard pods while the reaction proceeds. It will become messy, as you say.”
“She’ll end up expelling the hydrogen and sulfur.” Thank goodness for those exposure suits. It was going to get smelly. Explosively so, if we weren’t careful. “Those compounds could ignite, too.”
Xeelix fixed me with his black almond eyes. He was prodding me to think through it more, but it was especially unnerving coming from a nonhuman.
“This is going to be traumatic for her,” I continued. “We’ll need to monitor for signs of shock.”
“All correct.” Xeelix pointed a long, delicate finger at the dispatch briefing on our sidewall screen. “The entanglement receiver only transmitted the patient’s condition and location. We must deduce the rest from what we know of them. Are there other factors we should consider?”
He was talking about cultural differences now, which I’d overlooked on yesterday’s run. “Aegirans are herd creatures. The scene could be crowded. Her parents will be on us like stink on a stick.”
Xeelix looked momentarily caught short. His translator must have skipped at that last one. “The parents will indeed be watching closely and will no doubt be upset by their child’s reaction to the catalyst treatment. Considering their size, that could present an additional hazard. Is there anything else?”
I searched my memory for what we’d learned of the Aegirans. “We won’t be able to communicate with the patient. They don’t take translator implants until adulthood.”
He seemed satisfied now. “Very good. Melanie, this will be an excellent opportunity for you to apply your veterinary training.” He looked to Bjorn. “I would prefer you to be our interlocutor with the parents while we perform the procedure. Will this be acceptable to you?”
Bjorn nodded. “Of course, Doctor.”
We entered orbit around a massive planet completely shrouded in clouds which stretched around its circumference in bright bands of yellow and white. I reminded myself that it was almost all clouds. Hovering high above one side of the planet was a semicircular smear curving across space.
I must have been gaping. Bjorn leaned in close and pointed at the half-ring. “That used to be one of Aegir’s moons. It was torn apart by tidal forces several hundred annums ago. In time it will become a ring system, like your planet Saturn’s.”
It might be spectacular in the future but right now it looked threatening, like a crescent poised to slice the planet in two.
Up front at the pilot’s station, Needa tapped at her console and a swooping curve of light illuminated our path. “I have located the herd and plotted an entry path to their position,” she announced. “Please remain in your acceleration couches.”
I watched Bjorn tuck his arms and legs into their rests and followed his lead. “The upper level winds reach several hundred kilometers per hour,” he said. “Wind shear will be considerable.” Apparently there was a limit to what the inertial dampeners could absorb. I didn’t have to know much about meteorology to understand that rivers of near-supersonic air changing direction as we passed through them could make the ride down hair-raising.
To be honest it wasn’t much worse than airliners back home. There were a few jolts and sudden dips, which must have been more unsettling to my companions being used to the dampeners shielding them from such unpleasantness. I chuckled to myself that maybe all this technology had made them soft.
Pillars of sulfur-yellow clouds swept past as Needa piloted us deeper into the atmosphere. Ahead we could see a swarm of white specks moving in a gentle circle. She began to slow down. “I have the herd in sight,” she said.
Xeelix stood to lean over her. “Have you identified the family?”
She swept at her holographic display and isolated a trio of the white specks at the center of the swarm. We’d slowed down to the point where we were now hovering at a distance. “There. It appears the herd has moved to protect them.”
Xeelix made an almost-human tsk sound. He was perturbed. “That is . . . not optimal. Can you maneuver clear of them?”
“It will be difficult.”
Damn. I’d seen this before back home. Crowds of hysterical concerned onlookers getting in the way of the cops and rescue squads; happened way too often. Especially if there were kids involved. One more trait that seemed universal, I thought. “Xeelix, can you communicate with them at this distance—telepathically, I mean?”
His eyes were closed, and he held up a hand to quiet me. “I am attempting that now. Please wait.”
Chastened, I turned to Bjorn and jerked my head at the exposure suits. “While he’s doing that, we’d best get prepped.”
We pulled on skintight temperature-regulating garments before slipping on the environment suits. Other than the hood and respirator pack, this gear wasn’t like our sleek vacuum suits; these were meant for keeping nastiness out, not for holding air in. Loose-fitting and in an attention-grabbing shade of orange, they were still better than the “bunny suits” I’d worn for hazmat accidents back on Earth. Once the coveralls were on and the helmets pressurized, Bjorn and I checked each other for tight seals. He gave me a quick thumbs-up which almost made me feel like I was on a run back on Earth.
Almost.
Xeelix must have been able to warn the floating rubberneckers away, because he was hurrying back to join us and get into his own suit as Needa cautiously brought us down through the top of the circling herd. Outside it looked like a hot-air balloon festival, that is if the balloons were giant undulating jellyfish.
Once Xeelix was suited up, he led us to the main doors and watched as we each secured ourselves to restraints in the ceiling. There was a warning tone and the side doors slid open to a howling wind that buffeted the inside of our ship.
I held to my safety tether and peeked over the sill, spotting our patient for the first time. We were maybe a hundred meters above her now, and she was almost as big as our ship. Her parents hovered nearby. Even more massive, their undulating opalescent hoods streaked with pink. They were taking turns nudging her up higher to keep her from falling deeper into the atmosphere. I’d never seen Aegirans before, but I’d sure seen my share of exhausted parents. Mom and Dad were running out of steam, and their girl was running out of time. Her color was badly off, a sickly gray pallor. The younger Aegirans were supposed to be a healthy pinkish white; my “book learning” was backed up by the young ones I saw circulating amongst the herd, now at a safe distance. Out of curiosity I looked beyond our patient, down to the planet’s surface.
Yeah, that was a mistake. There was no surface, just pillars of clouds that stretched down into a depthless dark. Lightning flashed miles below, like flashbulbs buried beneath cotton. Farther down, somewhere there was a “surface” of solidified gases, but first you’d have to get through the clouds of sulfuric acid. Which was why we’d had to come in the first place.
I froze. My hold on the tether had turned into a death grip, to the point I could feel it digging into my hand through my suit’s gloves.
Xeelix reached out to slap his hand against the side of our ship and a pair of railings folded out from its skin. Oblivious to the danger my own nervous system was screaming about, he grabbed hold and swung himself onto the outrigger pod.
I tried to follow his lead, fighting the urge to look down. The wind buffeted me as I hooked an arm through the railing, desperate to stay attached to our ship. Xeelix showed no such concern, holding on with one hand as he watched Needa maneuver us closer to the ailing Aegiran. He fully trusted his harness, and I wished I could’ve been so confident. Did I mention I’m terrified of heights?
I heard Needa’s voice in my helmet. “Stand by. Deploying collection net.” I stole a look down—ignore the depths, watch the gear—and the elastic mesh ballooned out beneath our ship. “Are you ready?”
There was an edge to Xeelix’s voice as he looked at me. “Ready.”
Needa moved us in slowly. The poor kid was clearly struggling, her outer skin quivering erratically compared to her parent’s graceful, measured pulsations through the air. As we moved over top of her, the poor kid collapsed into the net and settled into its mesh. Resting on her side, our patient expelled a torrent of yellow fumes. Her body was already trying to reject the toxins, but it wasn’t working fast enough.
Xeelix lowered himself into the restraining net. I followed cautiously, fighting to keep my handhold and footing against the howling wind. I had to close my eyes and let go. It was only a short drop, not even a second in time, but my stomach heaved as if I’d jumped off a building.
The mesh held and I heaved a sigh of relief. Our footing was surprisingly firm, where I’d expected to feel like we were trying to work on a trampoline.
I took a deep breath to collect myself. We were here, we weren’t falling into an acidic abyss, and we had a patient who needed us to be on our game right freaking now. EMS work meant that sometimes you had to wade into some scary shit to get to your patients. This was no different, even if it was next-level terrifying. Time to get to work.
I began setting the transducer discs in place. Soon a full picture of her inner workings appeared in my visor. The graph of vitals looked dangerously low—not that I had Aegiran vitals memorized, but the traces had a helpful reference baseline hovering above them. The wheezing and low O2 saturation only confirmed what we could tell by her gray pallor and fluttering hood.
Xeelix moved around to her rear, tenderly probing and prodding. He lifted a flap of tissue-thin skin to look beneath her outer hood. “It is as suspected. Her vital signs and gas exchange are consistent with respiratory acidosis.” He moved to her opposite side and began unlocking the probe. “Come. We must work quickly.”
Bjorn’s voice cut in. “The parents wish to know what you intend to do.”
Xeelix answered for us. “Please tell them we are administering the nanobot counteragent. It will work quickly.”
I left the transducers in place and followed Xeelix’s movements, snapping open the probe’s remaining restraints. The silvery, meter-long probe fell into our hands, light as a feather. Together we carried it around behind the wheezing Aegiran. This was the touchy part, as inserting rectal probes tends to be. Her single orifice winked open and shut with each labored breath.
Xeelix eyed her rhythm and patted the air with one hand, cautioning me. “We don’t want to force this. Stay in time with her.” We waited through at least half a dozen cycles before he tightened his grip around the probe. “Next inhalation. Ready . . . now.”
Her orifice opened, expelling air, and we swiftly guided the probe in as she inhaled. She convulsed reflexively, fighting to expel it. Xeelix didn’t flinch, coaxing it along while I held it steady. “Hold it in place. Good. Good.”
In my visor, the probe’s business end was already getting to work. I could see it dissolve inside her, billions of nanobots dispersing themselves throughout her body and getting to work separating the ingested sulfur and hydrogen. As she gasped for air, we shoved it the rest of the way in.
Her body was wracked with spasms, her hood rippling with convulsions as the probe did its work. Xeelix motioned me to move away as he did the same. “She will feel like she is drowning at first. The probe is momentarily blocking her airway while it disintegrates.”
I watched as the car-sized gasbag between us shuddered. “Pulling all that hydrogen and sulfur out of her system isn’t going to feel any better.”
“It will not. But once the catalyzing reaction is complete, she will expel the toxins quickly.”
Kids had a way of finding creative new ways to try and kill themselves, and this was no different. I don’t know how many times I’d had to administer Ipecac or help pump some poor kid’s stomach after getting into something they shouldn’t have. Sometimes the parents didn’t have any business raising kids, but more often than not the little rugrats had found a way around Mom and Dad’s best efforts. I turned to see this one’s parents hovering on either side of us, their blimp-sized bodies casting a shadow over us. They were the ultimate “helicopter parents.”
My visor lit up with activating nanobots, like a swarm of fireflies had infested the Aegiran’s body. “Get ready,” Xeelix said. In a single wrenching, convulsive burst, our patient soon expelled a stream of lemon yellow gas in the loudest, longest fart I’d ever heard in my life. The hassle of wearing an environment suit felt like a pretty good tradeoff because I could only imagine what all that sulfur smelled like.
Her paper-thin skin began to regain its color within minutes, the gray pallor fading into a healthy pinkish white. This was mirrored by her vitals creeping back into normal range. I sighed with relief. “I think she’s going to be okay.”
“Her gas exchange is greatly improved,” Xeelix said. “But the tendrils of her rhopalium did sustain chemical burns, as I feared.”
On instinct, I gently stroked our still-quivering patient to try and calm her. “Anything we can do for that?”
“Not here. If the Union outpost was complete, we could call for a medium-lift transport and place her in rehabilitative care.” He looked across at me. “But do you believe that to be necessary for this patient?”
I wasn’t used to having to make that sort of call as a medic. It was another sign that GU work would be a lot different, closer to being a vet in the field. If we were out on a long run like this, far removed from Med Corps facilities, triage would be part of the package. Here I was, standing in a net suspended miles above a churning stew of toxic clouds, and my mentor was asking me to decide if our patient needed neurological rehab.
This time I had to consult the implant files. The answer came surprisingly quickly. “It shouldn’t be necessary, in fact. Adolescent rhopalia can regenerate, but she needs to stay away from clouds of toxic vapor.” Which seemed easy enough, but I was learning it was a universal constant that kids were wildly unpredictable.
Bjorn interjected. “Would you like me to communicate this to the parents?”
“Please do,” Xeelix said. “Tell them the catalyst treatment has expunged the toxins. Her visual and tactile senses will be impaired for a time due to chemical burns, but they will return to normal as her tendrils regenerate. Also, please have them tell her we are waiting for her system to expel the nanobots. When that process is complete, we will free her from the restraining net.”
I spent our remaining time at Aegir watching the swirl of straw-colored clouds that surrounded us, spiraling into a bottomless well of condensates hundreds of miles below. The herd had gathered closer, circling us and the parents in a protective swarm. I rested my head against the netting and drew my knees up, studying how they moved.
They floated about us in silence, hundreds of them gliding past in wide circles above, around and below. Their hoods would contract and expand, inhaling and expelling the microbe-rich gas in an act of both feeding and breathing. Bjorn had explained that at this altitude, oxygen became a lifting gas like hydrogen or helium was on Earth. And while the Aegirans were enormous creatures, their low mass density kept them afloat exactly like the hot-air balloons they resembled when expelling gas.
It was hard to see them as intelligent beings at first but as we waited with our patient, my translator implant began to interpret more of their language. After a time I could begin to hear multiple conversations, most of them marveling at our ship and the odd-looking beings tending to one of their wayward youth. Apparently diving into the depths of Aegir’s atmosphere was a constant game the younger ones played. The parents didn’t exactly encourage it, but I learned from listening to them that it was also something of a rite of passage. As the herd circled us, I realized their natural buoyancy meant that it would take some effort to dive down into the denser layers.
I suppose it paid to understand your environment, but this seemed like playing with fire.
A chime sounded in my helmet, drawing me out of my reverie. “The last of the nanobots are expelled,” I said, and stood up to make one last check of our patient. “Vital signs are stable. Cardiac and pulmonary rhythms are holding in normal range. I think she’s ready to go.”
“Agreed,” Xeelix said. He began stepping around to join me, pulling his safety tether behind him. “Patient is stable and ready to release,” he reported.
“Understood,” Bjorn answered from above. “Advising the parents now.”
It was hard to hear outside, thanks to my helmet, but I could pick out a series of low snorts and puffs. The young Aegiran responded with a jolt, ready to get out of here. “Steady, girl,” I said, placing a calming hand on her. “You’ll be on your way soon.” I knew she didn’t have an implant, but it felt like the thing to do. I was rewarded by a thin tentacle wriggling out from beneath her hood to tickle my leg. I won’t lie, it was a little freaky, but it felt like she was saying “thanks.”
Xeelix climbed back onto the outrigger and waved for me to follow. I patted her tentacle before hopping back onto our ship. “Now go, and behave yourself.”
We grabbed the handholds and watched as Needa released the net. It gave way and retracted into the opposite outrigger, and the young Aegiran quickly righted herself. Her hood expanded to its full diameter, easily as big as our ship. She sank, then with one smooth contraction, she expelled air and shot away to join her parents who closed ranks around her before they all jetted off to join the herd. Without being told, the mass of floaters dispersed so we could make our way clear.
Xeelix gestured for me to climb back aboard, then followed me in. He pressed the handrails and they retracted into the hull. “Safe aboard. Restraints secure.” I felt the caress of the gravity drive spinning up, and we were soon rising above the cloud tops.