Amaryllis and Other Stories by Carrie Vaughn

Author:Carrie Vaughn [Vaughn, Carrie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781933846620
Publisher: Fairwood Press
Published: 2016-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

A RIDDLE IN NINE SYLLABLES

After the attack, my team brought me straight to the med lab at base camp. They must have commed ahead, because as soon as the stretcher went through the door seals, Dr. Traynor was yelling orders.

“That table there! Bring her over. Ready, one, two, three, lift!” My view of the room shifted as I went from stretcher to examining table. “Get the scanner up! Where’s the entry point? Dr. Casey—Meg—can you hear me?”

I lay face down on the table. I lifted my head and tried to make an affirmative noise, but a hand pushed me back down.

“Casey, can you feel that?”

“Feel what?” I mumbled into the table’s padding.

“Dammit!” Traynor continued. “What am I looking at here?”

He was just muttering. He knew what he was looking at: a six-inch slash down the back of my environmental suit and the thing that got inside. It hit me from behind. I never saw it.

A whole crowd seemed to surround me: Traynor, his assistant Yons, my own assistant Harima. I didn’t know how many. I couldn’t see them, just hear their voices traveling around me, over me. I felt stupid lying there, unable to answer my colleague’s questions.

Traynor’s words were intent, pointed. I could trust him to solve a problem presented to him. “Has it broken skin?”

Harima stood to the side. I could picture her wringing her hands. “Yes. It burrowed.”

“Is burrowing,” Yons said in a hushed tone.

“By the Light!”

“What happened?” A new voice, harsh and demanding, entered the med lab. Captain Alvarez. Alvarez headed the Tiga 32-A survey mission of which I was Chief Xeno-ecologist. Every world was a new conquest to him, a recruit to be tamed and disciplined to the service of the greater galaxy.

He came to the head of the table and caught my eye while Traynor spouted.

“Dr. Casey was hit. Unknown lifeform. Possibly parasitic. Hand me those forceps!”

I remembered the attack. Something slammed into me like a cannonball. I fell forward to the ground and screamed as a burst of pain lit up my spine. Then I went completely numb. I was paralyzed and staring when my team members packed me up to bring me here.

“I know, never turn your back on the enemy,” I mumbled at Alvarez, giving him a wan smile. Good advice to be sure, but hard when the planet itself was the enemy and I was on the surface. Alvarez looked stern, his weathered face set in hard lines.

“We have to get this thing out of there,” Yons said. “It’s insinuating itself in the spinal column.”

“We can’t, not until we know the extent of its invasion into her system.”

“Did you say spinal column?” Alvarez said, his voice admirably calm.

Traynor ignored the Captain. “We’ll start slow. Yons, hypo. Five cc’s of halcyoncine.”

“For her or the thing?”

“I just want to try something…there…dammit!”

Everything went black.

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