The Dark Between The Stars

ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY
ZOE ALAKIS

Zoe waited inside her sterile dome on Pergamus—and waited, and waited—hoping for word from Tom Rom. She checked with her system perimeter sentries, the picket-line ships. Nothing. She began to grow very concerned.

She had good reason to worry about him, especially after his recent encounter with the Roamer pirates on Vaconda. Though he was more competent than any other person she knew, Tom Rom put himself in dangerous situations—to do as Zoe asked—and she dreaded the day when he would not come back.

Finally, though, a small, unrecognized courier ship arrived at Pergamus, burning the last of its fuel in a red-line deceleration. Her picket security ships went on alert, racing out to defend the medical research station, but she could see that this tiny courier vessel posed no conceivable threat. One or two blasts could vaporize the ship before it even entered orbit.

Then Tom Rom transmitted a security code, and his voice came through, rich and familiar. “Zoe, prepare an available ORS, full lockdown and quarantine setup. I’ve… brought you the alien plague for your library.”

She found herself grinning like a teenage girl. Just hearing his voice made everything all right, but she found it odd that he hadn’t transmitted his image. She wanted to see him. Zoe responded quickly, using a priority override to break through the usual signals of the security ships and the receiving crews. She had a wealth of questions.

“I don’t recognize that vessel—what happened to your own ship? Why didn’t you send a message? You’re five days late, and I was worried…” She let out a nervous laugh. “Go through the full decon routines and meet me here in the main dome. We’ll have time for the whole story. It must have been quite an adventure.”

Tom Rom maintained an audio-only transmission. “Zoe, use secure channel five.” Then he switched off.

She frowned. That meant he had a private message for her that he didn’t want even her most dedicated personnel to overhear. Something that could not wait. She tapped the controls on her desktop and opened a new window, piped in through several layers of security access.

When Tom Rom’s face appeared on the screen, she gasped in dismay. His face looked ravaged and discolored, as if thugs had held him down and beaten him… but Zoe could see the blotches were not mere bruises.

“I brought you the alien microorganism, Zoe, as promised. It’s inside me. I’ll take samples of my own blood, seal them in sterile packages, and arrange to transfer them to a designated Orbital Research Sphere. I don’t want this to go into any surface dome, no matter how many precautions you take. This may be the deadliest disease we have ever studied. I have only a few days left.”

Zoe shook her head, trying to deny what she saw. “I’ll put you in one of the ORS labs. I’ll use all of our facilities and researchers—everything Pergamus has. We’ll find a way to treat you.”

Tom Rom had never denied her before, but now he shook his head. “This is incurable, Zoe: one hundred percent mortality. You can’t risk it. Every person aboard the alien space city died.”

Zoe refused to listen. “Those other victims didn’t have my resources, my experts, my database. I’ll take care of you—I promise.”

“You will get the disease sample for your library, but anything else is too dangerous. I can’t let this disease get near you, Zoe. Once the specimens have been placed in a safe orbital station, I will need to be neutralized.”

Growing angry, she leaned closer to the screen. “That’s not going to happen, and you know it.”

“I insist,” he said.

“Insist all you like. I’m going to ignore it. You’ve always listened to me, done as I asked. You swore—and now I’m going to hold you to your word.”

“Then I’ll destroy this ship myself, just to be sure.”

Zoe snorted. “No, you won’t, because you haven’t given me the sample yet.”

She called up records on screens across her table surface. “Take your ship directly to ORS Twelve. It’s empty—recently sterilized and decontaminated. Our best team just finished refitting it for research.”

“Dr. Hannig’s lab?”

“Yes. Hannig made a mistake, and I cleaned it up. We can take care of you there.”

Tom Rom looked deeply disturbed, but she had found a loophole and she knew it. “You have to do this for me,” she said. “Let us put the Pergamus facilities to good use. You know I’ll take the proper precautions. I will assign a team of doctors, every one of them in a sterilization suit. The ORS is completely isolated.”

“Too risky.”

Now she hardened her expression because Tom Rom needed to see her resolve. “You know me. If anything goes wrong, if there’s even the slightest chance of a release, I’ll vaporize it all rather than risk contamination.”

He seemed amused by that. “Even with me aboard?”

“Yes, dammit! Even with you aboard. You know I will.”

He let out a rattling sigh. “Yes. I know you will.” She could see Tom Rom was too weak and too ill to argue, and he accepted defeat with as much grace as he could manage. “If nothing else, you’ll learn quite a bit by monitoring and testing me as the disease progresses. I’ll allow myself to become your specimen.”

He guided his stolen courier vessel toward the necklace of research spheres that orbited above the planet. Security escort ships followed him in, unaware of what was happening. They simply believed Tom Rom carried an extremely valuable and dangerous specimen—which he did, but they didn’t need any more information.

Her pulse racing, Zoe called up the records of her research teams, scanned their areas of expertise. She knew little about the alien disease, so she would put her best scientists on it. All of them. Other work on Pergamus would grind to a halt, and she didn’t care.

Tom Rom continued to talk to her in his ragged voice. He transmitted a summary that he had compiled on his journey, but many of the sentences were aimless or incomplete. He had trouble focusing his thoughts, which chilled Zoe to her core. She had never known Tom Rom’s mind to be anything but sharp and organized.

She couldn’t lose him!

This exotic and deadly plague was a Klikiss-borne disease that had infected another, previously unknown alien race, then also spread to humans as well. It might have opportunistically shifted its genetic structure to adapt. A disease that could cross species lines was amazing and terrifying—Zoe needed to study it. In her war against the unseen world of germs and diseases, this was like a super weapon.

She understood Tom Rom’s determination to get the specimen here, but she couldn’t imagine how he had been so careless as to become infected. He simply did not make mistakes.

Though she struggled to remain calm, panic rose within her. Seeing him, knowing he was dying, made her feel helpless again—just as when her father was in the last stages of Heidegger’s Syndrome. Adam Alakis had died because no medical research teams had bothered to devote resources to curing an obscure disease, and Zoe refused to let that happen to Tom Rom. To save him, she would devote the full resources of Pergamus: people, equipment, finances, and knowledge.

She handpicked her top doctors for the ORS 12 research team and powered up the sphere’s life-support systems.

She wanted to keep talking to Tom Rom, because she didn’t dare lose a second of what remained of his life. He looked as if he’d grown sicker in just the few minutes while she’d been busy making arrangements.

She said, “Do not underestimate me.”

His smile was weak but genuine. “Zoe, I never underestimate you.”