Ship of Ruin by Lindsay Buroker

Author:Lindsay Buroker [Buroker, Lindsay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-05-22T16:00:00+00:00

11

As Rache led the way from the shuttle to the wreck, Kim paused and looked up at the stars visible through the narrow slit of their canyon. She had queued a long letter to Casmir to go out whenever there was enough of a signal—she suspected that wouldn’t be until Rache gave up on this place and flew the shuttle back up to orbit.

Her letter included wishes for her remains, messages to her family, what she’d learned—or hadn’t learned—about the strange energy attacking their bodies, and that she’d found her mother’s broken droid remains. It was possible Casmir or another engineer could repair her and get the droid powered back up again, but she wasn’t working now. Kim had no idea if that was permanent or not. There had been damage to the head, aside from it being ripped from the body, which may have broken chips and circuits. All that her mother was might now be irretrievably lost.

Even though they had never been close, that filled her with a sense of bleakness and regret. She wished she’d had a chance to say goodbye, to have known her better before having to say goodbye.

“Scholar Sato?” Rache said from the hole in the side of the wreck that his team used as a door. “Are you coming?”

“Yes.”

Kim forced her heavy legs to work. She could feel the affliction progressing and her weariness increasing. Dr. Peshlakai was sleeping again, and several of Rache’s men had gone into the shuttle, peeled off their helmets, and collapsed on the seats or the deck. Only Rache remained unaffected.

She added that as a postscript to her letter to Casmir. That neither Rache nor his ancestors had received the Great Plague treatment and that he wasn’t being affected by this cellular destruction, that maybe someone with more time could run experiments with mitochondria. If she’d had bacteria or viruses to work with, something she could have isolated, it would have been a simple matter to place them in solutions with both types of mitochondria and see if they preferred one over the other. But she had no way to capture whatever this was, not yet. Nor did it make sense to her that something akin to radiation would care one whit about a person’s mitochondria.

She wished she had some of her radiation-eating bacteria with her to see if they might make a difference. It was possible they would be able to detect what human instruments couldn’t. And if it was compatible, maybe they could even consume it.

But she didn’t have them. She’d never planned to leave Odin, so she hadn’t inoculated herself with them.

She wondered if Dr. Sikou had been inoculated with them. She’d mentioned the Osprey being in Phase II testing. If she had been, it might be possible to extract and isolate some of the bacteria from her body.

Kim had no idea if they would be useful against this threat, but it would be worth trying. She composed a quick message to Sikou, not surprised when all it did was sit in the queue with Casmir’s, unable to go out until she had network access.

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