A vaginal door opened in the wall and Slog stuck his head through. I raised a hand to try sign language, but it shook so much I gave up.
"I'll get someone," Slog clattered, and disappeared.
My thoughts ran clear but I felt incredibly weak. Obviously I was aboard a Brumallian ship, and that ship was now in space. Had I hallucinated that voice talking about sprine? I thought not, but couldn't fathom what had happened. The vaginal door parted again and Rhodane entered, pulling herself along by struts jutting out from the wall to reach over beside my bed.
"You're alive," I said.
She pressed her hand to a bulky lump concealed under her clothing, just over her right hip. "The bullet lost much of its momentum, and broke apart as it passed through you. Some fragments penetrated, that is all."
I wondered what else might have penetrated her. Like many viruses of Earth the Spatterjay virus could not long survive outside its host. However, a bullet passing through me first and then entering her might serve to infect her with it, or with IF21, or both.
"She is not infected with either virus…probably," said a voice.
I recognised it as the same voice that recently talked to me of sprine, and now recognised it from before that. "Are you going to keep on hiding?" I asked in English.
Tigger materialised at the foot of my living bed. "Their own surgeon removed the pieces of the bullet. I used nanoscopic techniques to ensure the removal of any viral fragments, and then screened her blood and other bodily fluids."
I tried to hoist myself up again, but could not seem to find the strength even though I was not fighting gravity. Rhodane reached down and touched something beside the bed. The part behind my back folded up smoothly to bring me into a sitting position.
After a rush of dizziness I said, "Perhaps you'd better start with Vertical Vienna," switching to speak in Sudorian for Rhodane's benefit.
"It would seem that Fleet has obtained technology enabling it to detect me despite my chameleonware." Tigger now spoke Sudorian too. "Ironfist fired a missile at the city—one deliberately hardened so I could not interfere with it from a distance—and when I closed with it, someone aboard that ship pressed the detonation button."
"Yet you are here," I said.
"The smaller portion of me is here," Tigger replied. "As you will recollect, this form you see before you is not all of me."
"The sphere," I managed.
"Yes. By the time I was again able to move, a second missile had already been fired into Vertical Vienna. Through Brumal coms I was able to track you down and came here to this ship as they were bringing you aboard."
I glanced at Rhodane, who was staring at Tigger intently. "He revealed himself to you."
She turned towards me. "You were dying. We sealed your wounds as best we could and made the most of the medical technologies aboard, but to no avail. Tigger then appeared, told us what he was, and took over."
"What did you do, Tigger? I heard something…about sprine."
"As you have known for some time, any injuries done to you enable IF21 to gain headway within your body. Your gunshot wound caused something like open warfare between IF21 and the Spatterjay virus, both of them using up your physical resources in the process. Had I left matters as they were, nothing would have remained of you but the two virus forms, and perhaps a few bones. One of them had to go. I could do nothing about IF21, but sprine effectively kills the Spatterjay virus. I showed the Brumallians how to synthesise that organic chemical, then we fed it to you in very small doses, killing off the Spatterjay virus and enabling IF21 to win the war."
I tried to absorb that news, but felt so very tired. "But sprine kills…"
"It kills the virus. When given in large quantities, the breakdown is so sudden and catastrophic that the body supported by the virus dies as well. However, the small quantities I gave you killed the virus at a rate your body could support. As it died, IF21 then took over the Spatterjay virus's role in your body, displacing it."
"So…I am no different now…just another form of the same virus?"
"I cannot even speculate on that. IF21 was based on the Spatterjay virus, but it is unaffected by sprine and in fact produces it. The changes Iffildus introduced to enable it to do that were substantial. In fact, less than ten per cent of it remains the same as the original virus."
"So I could die?"
"I just do not know."
"A risky strategy."
"It was either that or death. You chose not to die."
I closed my eyes. Iffildus's aim in making IF21 had overtly been to create something that killed the Spatterjay virus, but had he intended anything beyond that? The Spatterjay virus could cause some horrible transformations; so had that aspect of IF21 been changed? Even if not, IF21 might just die within me, poisoning my body in the process. But at the moment there was nothing I could really do about that; I just had to live with the possibilities. I drifted mentally, only half aware of the bed levelling out again. Then I slept.
Yishna
Sudoria now lay within view as the transport decelerated. Gazing through the polished quartz windows, Yishna could just see the thousands of gleaming satellites that made up Orbital Combine, and though glad the journey was over, she felt some trepidation about arriving at her final destination.
For the Vergillan, a transport for short insystem flights, the run from Brumal to Sudoria had been a long one. As the journey progressed, Yishna began to notice a change in attitude amongst its small crew of twenty Fleet personnel. First polite but distant, they now tended to either avoid her, or were unhelpful bordering on insolent. She suspected that without the Chairman aboard their treatment of her would have been even worse. She recollected a recent conversation with Duras on this subject.
"Just smile and bide your time, Yishna," said Duras. "Had Pilot Officer Clanot received other instructions concerning you, I believe he would have carried them out by now."
"That he has not received any other instructions I put down to your presence," Yishna replied.
"Undoubtedly."
"But that may change when we reach Sudoria, since Franorl, aboard Desert Wind, awaits there at Corisanthe Main and, judging by what happened to the Combine observers, he is not averse to taking very direct action."
Duras gave an empty smile. "But his actions were in response to attempted sabotage by those same observers."
"Do you really believe that?"
"I have yet to decide what I believe," said Duras, "but you may put your mind at rest about Franorl. Desert Wind is presently on a course that takes him wide of us, heading out from Sudoria."
"You learnt this from Clanot?"
"I did. Apparently Fleet is grouping at Carmel."
"Oh no." Yishna felt her legs grow weak. She abruptly sat down in one of Duras's chairs and tried to figure her way through this latest news. Obviously Harald must be securing his position in Fleet, but that he chose Carmel—the factory station that had supplied much of the munitions during the last few years of the war—was ominous.
"What are you thinking?" Duras asked.
"I am thinking we are on the verge of something regrettable," Yishna replied.
"That has been implicit since the moment the Consul Assessor's ship was struck, and subsequent events only confirm it. I can only say that at present Fleet and Combine still seem to heed the will of Parliament."
"What do you intend to do when you reach Sudoria?"
"I will continue pushing for an extensive investigation, and in undertaking that try to keep Fleet and Combine from each other's throats. I will play the political game in the hope that both sides will hold off because of the chance of getting what they want without resorting to bloodshed. I will feed and nurture that possibility for as long as I am able."