The Dark Between The Stars

FIFTY-SEVEN
ZOE ALAKIS

Even with Tom Rom off hunting down interesting diseases, Pergamus remained a bustling place. Zoe’s teams added more and more knowledge until she felt that her databases would burst.

She refused to give up the battle. Each new discovery expanded her arsenal in the never-ending war against enemy microorganisms. Zoe could never be victorious against so many mutable strains of viruses, disease, and bacteria, but she would put up the best possible fight. No one had better resources than she did.

From inside her sterile dome, Zoe reviewed progress reports and pored over study proposals. She ate a bland but nutritious meal, took her high-dosage supplements, then completed the day’s body measurements—pulse, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, temperature, body composition index—and logged the data in her extensive file. No single human body had ever been so thoroughly and consistently documented.

Finished, Zoe sat back at her desk with a weary sigh. Two more interim reports had come in, and one of her freelance operatives arrived from Earth, broadcasting appropriate priority clearances, so that her security teams allowed him through the picket line.

After the unsettling arrival of James Duggan, Zoe had dressed down every member of her security team, and they were now far more alert. What if, instead of a distraught husband, the intruder had been part of an active military operation against Pergamus? Or some terrorist intent on stealing her vast collection of deadly biological organisms?

Fortunately, few outsiders knew exactly what Zoe Alakis did here or how she funded her work. In the worst-case scenario, she had her fail-safe systems, automated self-destructs that would vaporize everything. At all costs, she would keep the deadly samples and records out of any hands but her own.

She preferred to rely on less extreme preventive measures first, however.

The operative from Earth expected to be well paid. Dr. Benjamin Paolus appeared on her main screen, cool and humorless, a consummate professional. “Ms. Alakis, I have an interesting delivery for you.”

She sat back to listen. “You haven’t previously let me down, Doctor.”

“This one is unlike any other disease in your library—an extremely rare microfungus DNA-adherer, originating from Theroc. I have samples and a complete medical workup—quite an unorthodox spread and progression.”

“Can you cure it?”

“Doubtful.”

Paolus transmitted his files, and she glanced at her desk screen. He would deliver the physical specimens in triply sealed quarantine containers to one of the Orbiting Research Spheres, where the organism could be properly assessed. “Is it fatal?”

“In this particular case, almost certainly fatal,” Paolus said, then paused. “One other detail adds special interest—the victim is Prince Reynald of Theroc.”

Her eyes widened. “The Prince is dying? How could I not have heard of this?”

“He is careful to protect his privacy. I am committing a severe ethical breach by delivering the sample and records here.”

Paolus didn’t seem to be angling for an increased payment; he was simply stating a fact. She said, “You will not find anyone with more discretion than I have, Doctor.”

“That’s why I do business with you, Ms. Alakis. I know your penchant for protecting and withholding your data. If your research teams were to find a treatment, however, the King and Queen would be immeasurably grateful. And if Reynald did survive to become the next King, you would forever have a solid ally in the government.”

Zoe’s voice was as brittle as breaking ice. “Thank you for the suggestion, Dr. Paolus, but I think not. Allies have a tendency to demand more than they give. If I make an exception for one pathetically ill patient, even if he is a Prince, then where do I stop making exceptions?”

Dr. Paolus fumbled with something out of the range of the screen, then nodded. “As you wish, Ms. Alakis.”

“You will be compensated well, as before. I am always here if you should encounter anything else of note.”

She signed off before he could reply. Her security team met his ship and received the sealed medical samples, which they delivered to an assigned ORS. Dr. Paolus departed, his business finished.

On screen, Zoe skimmed his report, looked over the results and the body scans, glanced at young Prince Reyn’s face before dismissing that part of the file as irrelevant. She would add the disease to her collection with all the others, one more piece in the grand puzzle.

Her father died on Vaconda, although he had been functionally dead for a month before his last flickering breath. Tom Rom and Zoe were beside him, hovering near his bed and the monitoring instruments. His life signs were already so faint that they didn’t realize he had slipped away until several minutes later.

Zoe had just turned twenty. Though Adam Alakis had suffered five years of slow decline, she was startled to realize that she had made no plans for his funeral—an intentional blind spot, but now she made the quick and obvious decision. “I want him buried out in the jungle next to my mother’s grave.”

Tom Rom nodded. “Then that’s what we will do.” If she had said she wanted Adam Alakis to be placed aboard a flammable basket and sent off in a hot air balloon, Tom Rom would likely have reacted the same way.

But her mother had died twelve years ago, and when Zoe went out to search for the grave, she found that the lichentree jungle and fungus vines had grown so thick and dense that she could not locate the right spot—not that it mattered in a real sense, but it mattered to her.

That was when the grief finally hit her with a crushing weight, and she broke down, lost. She remembered her mother, but the missing grave marker seemed to have erased Evelyn Alakis’s entire existence.

There at the bottom of the forest, Tom Rom wrapped his arms around her, held her in silence as he took her back to the watchstation above the treetops. He left her in the empty deck and returned to the forest floor. In the watchstation, she was surprised to see that Tom Rom had quietly cleaned up the death room and put away all the monitoring and medical equipment that had kept her father alive for so long. He had made the bed, and now the research tower appeared to be a normal and comfortable home again.

Zoe wouldn’t have had the strength to do it herself, hadn’t even thought that far ahead. The lonely station was not a place where she wanted to stay, however. She had no idea what she was going to do now.

In less than an hour, Tom Rom led her back down to the overgrown forest floor. He had rediscovered Evelyn’s grave and cleared away the underbrush to expose her name marker. He had also made a marker for Adam, which he placed next to Evelyn’s. The new grave marker was perfect, created with great care. Zoe couldn’t imagine how he had done it so quickly—until she realized that Tom Rom must have prepared the marker some time ago without telling her.

They buried her father out there, knowing that the jungle would creep in swiftly. Standing by the fresh grave, young Zoe looked around her at the scabrous lichens, the feathery pollens blowing through the air, the insects crawling in the undergrowth, the slime molds oozing up the sides of trees. Vaconda was a turgid place where Adam and Evelyn had come to hunt for pharmaceutical possibilities, but Zoe saw it as a place of rot and death.

She looked up at Tom Rom, cold and businesslike. “The homestead is mine now. Everything automatically transfers into my name upon my father’s passing.”

Tom Rom nodded. “Yes. I helped him prepare the documents myself.”

“And you are my guardian.”

“I am your guardian in actual fact, regardless of the legalities. You are an adult, but I will stay with you if you wish.”

She looked at him as if he had become a fool. “Of course I wish it.”

He gave another nod. “I don’t need a document to tell me who I am. I am your guardian regardless, and forever.”

Zoe knew she was being impetuous, but she made up her mind. “I don’t want this homestead. I don’t want to stay on Vaconda. I don’t want anything to do with this place. I want to leave.”

Tom Rom said, “I will take you wherever you wish. But what do we do with the homestead?”

Zoe heard the simmering sounds of the lichentree forest, watched a purple beetle making its way too close to the questing probe-tendril of a sluggish mold, which snapped it up and retracted the pseudopod into its own main spongy mass. Seeing all the festering life, the churning biological cauldron all around her, she turned to one side, vomited, and sank to her knees. “I hate this place. I wish we could just burn it.”

“I can burn it,” Tom Rom said, “if that is what you want.”

At first, she was unwilling to consider it a genuine possibility. “But it’s all I have. How will we live?”

“We know how to survive. I’ll make sure you survive.”

Zoe looked at him for a long moment, then told him to do it.

Back at the watchstation above the lichentree forest, they packed their few belongings aboard Tom Rom’s ship and retreated to a safe distance to watch.

He triggered the fire bombs he had scattered throughout the jungle for kilometers around. Explosions erupted in orange feathers of fire that flattened a large swath and ignited the surrounding lichentrees. As the wildfire spread, it cleared a giant section of the dense forest, leaving only a smoking smear of ash.

As Zoe watched the fires, she felt a kind of satisfaction, of freedom. Even though there was nothing left, she still owned it. The fire bombing had erased all the years of her life there, all the marks her parents had made, everything Vaconda had done to them. The jungle would reclaim its own soon enough, she knew, but Zoe planned to be long gone by then.

In an irony even greater than the reward, after the smoke cleared and the ashes settled, they discovered that the wildfire had exposed an extensive vein-inclusion of prisdiamonds long buried under the jungle growth.

And those prisdiamonds were enough to make Zoe Alakis one of the wealthiest women in the Spiral Arm.