Origins (Valyien Far Future Space Opera Book 6) by James David Victor

Author:James David Victor [Victor, James David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fairfield Publishing
Published: 2018-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

8

What Lies Buried

The nights were long on Epsilon G3. Which must explain this constant, accursed cold, Eliard thought miserably, but it did help in a few respects having several hours in the crashed rear end of the Endurance.

It allowed Operative Anderson, Captain Eliard, and Section Manager Karis time to gather enough spare fuel cells, supplies, essential equipment, and medical kits to keep the crew alive on Epsilon G3 for a couple of months, if need be.

Stars help me if I’m here that long, Eliard thought. The stimulants had worn off and he had finally succumbed to sleep after hours of hauling crates and boxes and strange metal units to the main loading hold, with its wall of ice. He only had a couple hours of rest, but by the time he opened his eyes again, it was to see the welcome sight of cool and calming blue-white LEDs strung around the room.

“I guess they must have got the power back on.” He yawned.

“They? Me, you mean,” said a voice he instantly recognized. It was his engineer, Irie Hanson, still in her battered scrappers’ encounter suit but now with at least a clean, not-blued face and a grin. “Morning, Captain,” she said. “Sunrise was approximately forty-eight minutes ago, but I let you sleep in.”

“That’d be a first,” he admitted, sliding off the medical table to grab his engineer in a very rare but heartfelt hug, before breaking out of it just as quickly. Hadn’t her ribcage been crushed? he thought in alarm.

“No, I know. As good as new,” she said, tapping her chest. “Better, in fact.” She indicated where there was coffee already on one of the work tables, before picking up a selection of tablet-slate mini-computers that she had apparently been collecting for some reason. Eliard studied her. She didn’t have blue-scaled skin. She didn’t have tentacles, or claws, and she certainly didn’t have a stonking great nodule of a super weapon in the place of one forearm. In fact, she looked still very human.

But there was something wrong.

“What? What are you looking at me like that for?” Irie stopped and half-chuckled.

“You’re happy.” Eliard frowned. He found that fact more deeply upsetting than he did the idea that she could have some hidden tentacle somewhere. It was a mutagenic virus, right? His thoughts raced. Is that the most powerful mutation that the thing could do to my engineer? Make her happy?

“Well… I did almost get crushed by a sociopathic killer mecha,” Irie said with a shrug. “And now I feel great. Really great. I’ve run my bloodwork and yeah, there’s Q’Lot contamination in there for sure, but it doesn’t seem to have done anything other than heal my body!” she explained. “Even the healed fracture in my ankle, where I dropped one of Babe Ruth’s legs onto my leg. Completely healed.”

“So, the virus was like getting gene-therapy?” Eliard thought of all of the myriad ways there were now, in the thirty-first century, to have your body treated and recreated. Aging was no longer a worry, if you had the planetary fortune to pay for the genetic license.

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