That night Eight Antidote had crept back into his room in Palace-Earth and gone to bed straightaway, even though it was still hours before midnight. He wished he hadn’t. Less sleep would have meant less time to dream.
As she approached the medbay, every protocol subroutine in Weight for the Wheel’s ship AI shouted alerts into Nine Hibiscus’s cloudhook: STOP—DO NOT ENTER—DANGER—BIOLOGICAL HAZARD on endless and unrhyming repeat. It was far more jarring than a normal safety message. Those had prosody. This was … this was for being shocked and disturbed and terrified, and for being warned away, shaken out of normalcy by monosyllables. Nevertheless she approached the vacuum-sealed medbay doors. Sixteen Moonrise was following her, as avid as a vulture, and she felt full up with the weight of knowing that the alien enemy did have a home she could reach and attack, if she was willing to risk the ships and the loss of life.
Afterimage, too fast to do more than kick her heart rate up another few notches: that Shard-death by fire, the hideous relief she had thought she’d felt from the pilot—but that had to have been her own projection—emotion didn’t travel through Shard-sight. Or at least it never had before.
She peered through the heavy glass window set in the center of the medbay doors. It was her only view into whatever the fuck was happening to Swarm.
He’d shut himself off, closed down everything like the medbay was experiencing an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever. She assumed an alien fungal bloom that had killed at least one of her soldiers was an approximate equivalent to a hemorrhagic fever. If it spread like one, Twenty Cicada was already dead, even if he hadn’t finished dying yet.
Aloud, not caring if Sixteen Moonrise heard her, she called up her messaging system again and sent him a quick inquiry: “We’re here. What’s going on inside?”
“Well,” said Twenty Cicada, using the medbay’s intercom service—he must not be dying very hard yet, if he’d turned on the two-way communication inside that was meant for just this sort of emergency, infectious disease on the inside of those doors and a healthy ship on the outside—“currently I feel fine, and there is no one in here but one dead alien and one dead medical cadet—Six Rainfall, I think. He’s got fungi growing out of a wound on his hand.”
“You’ve turned on the purifiers, and none of the air in there is getting recycled back into the ship, right?”
“Yaotlek. Mallow, my dear, you know me. Of course the purifiers are on outgas cycle. We’ll make up the oxygen in about three days from the hydroponics decks.”
My dear was worse than Mallow, as a sign of how concerned Twenty Cicada was about his own life expectancy. Fuck, but she didn’t want to lose him. And she really didn’t want to lose him where Sixteen Moonrise could see her grieve. “I never doubted,” she told him, wishing she could see him. “Tell me about the cadet.”
“… Well, he found the fungus before it killed him, and he had time to send all of medical a message about it with microscopic analysis holos. That’s how I knew to come—I’m on that message list. So it’s slow, whatever it is that killed him. From what I can tell—and trust me, I am not doing what this poor child did and sticking my hand in the alien’s mouth—the original locus of fungus is growing out of its brain. The alien, I mean. Not Six Rainfall.”
Sixteen Moonrise said, “… Like a fungal herniation through the ethmoid bone? Into the oral cavity?”
“Quite exactly, Fleet Captain,” said Twenty Cicada, faintly sepulchral through the intercom. “Are you, perhaps, a biologist by training?”
“I never have had the pleasure of serving in medical,” said Sixteen Moonrise, which was not no, and also Nine Hibiscus despised her entirely for being useful as well as herself. “But if the fungus was living in its brain, that is how it might emerge to spore. A pressure downward, first through the ethmoid bone and then through the soft palate. The alien did have a soft palate, I recall.”
Nine Hibiscus interrupted her. “How did the cadet die?”
“He cut himself,” Twenty Cicada said. “And got the fungus in the wound. But I think it was anaphylaxis that killed him. Not the fungus itself. It’s—not very widespread. And he is cyanotic.”
One more question. The one she really didn’t want to ask. “And you?”
“No cuts, no anaphylaxis,” said Twenty Cicada, brisk and brief. “In a moment or two I’ll have a better readout on whether these things are aerosolizing or not—the ship is running me a particle diagnostic, it’s crude but it’ll tell me something—and the fungus isn’t very happy.”
“Happy,” Sixteen Moonrise said, flat.
“It’s been robbed of its host,” Twenty Cicada told her, “and it doesn’t much like living in Six Rainfall. Or at least in Six Rainfall’s bloodstream. It is wilting as I watch.”
“Perhaps it’d like his brain better.”
Nine Hibiscus turned on Sixteen Moonrise and took a step into her personal space. Used all of her weight and size to loom, to make a point of her authority. “We are not cutting open the skull of one of our dead,” she said, “to do experiments. Alien fungi or not.”
“I was hardly suggesting such a thing, yaotlek,” Sixteen Moonrise said, and managed to sound affronted.
“What were you suggesting, then?”
“That this fungus likes neural tissue, and is stable there. That our enemies might have sent this one as a trap. A bomb. A sacrifice. That you should check your spook and your spook’s pet for anaphylaxis—or fungal infiltrates in the brain. And your adjutant, as well. Yaotlek, I am not attempting to challenge you on your ship—I am frightened of what this might mean. Take it seriously, for the Empire’s sake if not your own.”
She could sound so very sincere. Cold, and sincere, and far too likely to be right to be dismissed—either from Weight for the Wheel or from this conversation.
“My own adjutant, as you’ve noticed, is inside the contaminant field,” Nine Hibiscus said. “I cannot take it more seriously than I am doing right now.”
Sixteen Moonrise nodded—and pushed onward. “And the Information officer? And the escort team you sent down with her? They could already have died. And already be spreading the fungus outside the contaminant field.” Nine Hibiscus thought she must be the sort of Fleet Captain whose command was always laced through with the intimation of threat. The Parabolic Compression would be an exquisitely tuned ship—tightened to snapping.
Through the intercom, Twenty Cicada said, “I doubt it, Fleet Captain. I have the results of the particle assay, and it isn’t aerosolizing at detectable levels. Whatever it does, that’s not how it spreads best. Be reassured.”
Nine Hibiscus couldn’t have sounded that calm or that comforting. Not from the other side of the medbay door. “Swarm,” she said. “Confirm that you mean you are unlikely to die of fungal infection?”
His laughter was sudden, strange. “Unlikely to, yes. But I’m not coming out of here until six hours have passed and I am sure. Besides, the Fleet Captain’s right, my dear—the asekreta should know about this development.”
“If she doesn’t already,” Sixteen Moonrise said, darkly, and Nine Hibiscus could imagine, quite clearly: the bodies of asekreta Three Seagrass and her barbarian xenolinguist ambassador, filmed over with mold, hours dead in the quarters she had assigned them—and worse, the bodies of her soldiers, haphazardly placed throughout Weight for the Wheel, each a locus of infection. If it did spread. But it hadn’t spread to Twenty Cicada—yet—