The Dark Between The Stars

ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SIX
ZOE ALAKIS

Though Tom Rom was so sick he could barely move, he made his way to the quarantine-only airlock at ORS 12. All alone, he cycled through the airlock into the quarantine chamber, while Zoe rushed her handpicked team up to the orbiting laboratory.

The researchers arrived in full decontamination suits and crowded into the spherical station, twice as many scientists as on Dr. Hannig’s team. Zoe took no chances, wanting her most talented researchers there. All scientists who weren’t assigned to ORS 12 would work on the problem from their own labs. Nothing was a higher priority at Pergamus.

On the edge of consciousness, using his last strength, Tom Rom gave them a verbal summary of his current physical status. During the trip in the stolen courier ship from Vuoral, he had taken meticulous notes of his symptoms, temperature, blood pressure, and pulse in hopes the data would give them something to work with.

To buy time, the medical team placed him in an induced coma, used precision robotic arms to take samples, sealed his body into the quarantine module’s coldchamber, and dropped the temperature to bare survival levels. But still the disease progressed…

Trapped in her sterilized dome on the planetary surface, Zoe felt very alone. She watched the screens, read updates, and insisted that one or more cameras in the ORS be focused on Tom Rom at all times, so she could keep looking at his face.

He was gaunt, his mahogany skin discolored by hemorrhagic bruises, but since his eyes were closed she tried to believe that he looked peaceful. With every second that passed, she knew he was one step closer to dying.

She hated the disease. Hated all diseases. Wanted to destroy them. Pergamus was supposed to be her invincible fortress, her arsenal. Now, all the data and samples she had collected, all the sophisticated researchers were being put to the test.

She had never doubted the dedication of her researchers; she studied each person’s background before offering them employment at Pergamus. But Tom Rom’s illness made her so desperate that she needed to give them additional incentive. She wanted no excuses, only a cure.

At first, she considered infecting the researchers so they would all live, or all die. Incentive. The advantage would be that they could then discard their cumbersome decontamination suits, which would facilitate easier work. But the progress of the disease was swift, and they would quickly deteriorate. She needed them at their best.

Instead, she told them that if they failed to find a cure for Tom Rom, she would consider the disease too dangerous even for her most extreme precautions, and she would be forced to destroy ORS 12 with the entire team aboard. She ordered her well-armed sentry ships to stand guard in orbit just in case one of the scientists found a way to escape the lab sphere.

The researchers were not overly cheered by her ultimatum, but they continued to work, regardless. Zoe couldn’t tell if they worked with greater intensity once they knew how much was at stake, but she felt better knowing she had done everything possible to encourage them.

During the interminable wait, Zoe felt as if she herself were dying. Giving in to uncharacteristic nostalgia, she unlocked the old and secret recordings of her journals as a young woman at the watchtower station on Vaconda. She saw images of a younger, but somehow unchanged, Tom Rom working with the specimen-collection teams, helping to repair high windows that had cracked after a furious pelting storm, returning from offworld supply runs, repairing a weather satellite in orbit.

She found one image of Tom Rom deftly applying ointments and bandages to the numerous small bites she had received when the hummers broke into their tower station and swarmed into the chambers. Her father had been badly injured, but Tom Rom tenderly took care of her first.

“If it weren’t for you, Tom Rom, I would have died long ago,” she murmured to herself, then sighed. “Probably a hundred times over.”

There were images of Adam Alakis, too, and she smiled to see her father when he’d been healthy, his eyes alert, his conversation brisk. The pain of losing him to Heidegger’s Syndrome was long healed, the scars faded. Could she ever endure such pain again?

But Tom Rom was still alive—for now.

She checked hourly with the team aboard ORS 12, demanding to know what progress they had made. Then she made successive inquiries among the groundside domes where researchers worked on the problem independently, asking for their ideas, their insights. Teams scoured the entire Pergamus database, looking at every disease on record from any planet, trying to match the symptoms and possible effective drugs, but they could do only so much. This plague had originated in the Klikiss race, then mutated to kill Onthos, then humans; very little was comparable in the library of known diseases.

Even when they suggested long-shot drugs, the potential side effects were severe, and the various possibilities appeared to be fatally contradictory. If one treatment failed, they couldn’t try another. Tom Rom would be dead.

Zoe was unable to sleep and didn’t want to eat. She pestered the ORS 12 research team so mercilessly that finally the lead scientist scolded her, “You are distracting us, Ms. Alakis. We’re under enough pressure, thanks to your threat, and you could cause us to make mistakes. We will inform you the moment anything changes.” He switched off the comm.

Zoe felt so offended that she wanted to scream, then forced calm upon herself as she realized he was right. She sat sobbing by herself inside the sterile dome…

In the end, her scientists did not let her down.

Pulling the possible cures and treatments of every recorded malady, deconstructing the genome of the alien virus and following the pathways of infection, one of her independent teams working in a groundside dome made the proper connection by suggesting that a cure might be obtained from a distillate of the Klikiss royal jelly Tom Rom had harvested from Eljiid. Her researchers showed that something about Klikiss physiology rendered them immune to the virus. Therefore the royal Jelly might hold a key.

With racing pulse, Zoe listened to the research team’s reports, watched the glacial progress, felt the work as a frantic race against her friend’s degeneration, even as he lay in an enforced coma. The time it took to produce the royal-jelly distillate was maddening; after it was administered, the delay was more maddening still.

Zoe’s eyes were bloodshot and scratchy. She felt haggard, weak, and feverish, as if she had somehow become infected by her very obsession with the disease. It was eleven hours before the team on ORS 12 was able to report with confidence that the patient had turned a corner and his condition was ever-so-slightly improved.

Fortunately, on his acquisition trip to Eljiid, Tom Rom had collected enough of the royal jelly to produce effective vaccinations for every member of the research team in the orbiting sphere. As Tom Rom slept and slowly regained his strength, Zoe commanded the research team members to remove their decontamination outfits, expose themselves to the disease, and inoculate themselves.

“We have to be certain,” she said. “I want to see you stand by your own cure.”

Some of the scientists took offense at being treated as guinea pigs, but they eventually acceded. After being exposed and vaccinated, they monitored themselves for three days and finally concluded that the treatment worked and that they themselves were not infected by the plague.

Then they revived Tom Rom from his induced coma.

Zoe, who had wrestled with the decision throughout the ordeal, at last found the courage and strength—to change her life.

She gave herself the inoculation, then called a small one-person ship to dock against her sterile central dome. Drawing a deep breath, digging deep to find long-buried reservoirs of courage, she exited through five layers of protective decontamination zones, boarded the one-person ship, and flew up to ORS 12.

Tom Rom was awake and aware when she cycled through the airlock and entered the spherical lab. The researchers gaped at Zoe in amazement. None of them had ever seen her in person before—very few people had.

The smells of the processed air were strange to her, the proximity of other human beings was intimidating. Zoe fought back her nervousness, though, and came forward.

Tom Rom stared at her, as if trying to convince himself this was not a hallucination. “You can’t take this risk.”

“I can, and I did. You’re too weak to leave the lab yet. I could see you needed strength. Let me give it to you.”

At his bedside, she touched his skin, felt the warm reassurance there that was so foreign to her. It had been at least fifteen years since she had touched another human being—even Tom Rom.

But now she slid her fingers down his forearm, took his hand in hers, and squeezed. “I’m here,” she said.