Twenty-Five
Twenty-Five
J essyn hurt. They had started permitting Jessyn to hurt.
That was a very good thing. Her memory was a lacework of drug-induced sleep and half-dreams, forgetfulness and distress.
Sometimes she’d forgotten everything and floated on clouds of weirdly vivid visions.
Sometimes she’d remembered the cylinder she’d hidden in the grove and her desperate need to have it.
Her sense of the passage of time was broken—hours that went on for eternity and days that passed almost before they began.
The worst was when she could only recall that there was something important, and that it was her responsibility, and that she didn’t remember what it was.
So pain, as long as it came with clarity, was a blessing in this, as in all things.
She shifted in the bed. It was her own cell in the ship, so that was good.
She knew where she was. When she tried to sit up, the pain took her breath away.
She rolled onto her other side and tried again with better results.
The bandage below her ribs was a pale clinging foam that moved with her like a false skin.
She remembered probing it with her fingertips somewhere in the haze of her recovery and finding it sticky, but it was dry and waxy now.
Hopefully it was some advanced Carryx medical technology and not just an industrial sealant they’d slapped over her to keep the blood inside.
Standing up was better than she’d expected it to be, but only a little.
“Stupid,” she said to the room. To herself. “Fucking astoundingly stupid.”
She made her way to the little farm that produced her medication.
Everything between the sheets of glass had gone black and oily.
The little organisms that she counted on had all starved to death while she was out.
She had failed them, they had failed her.
It was all right, though. Recoverable. Right now, the only symptom of withdrawal was a gnawing headache behind her eyes.
She’d clean and sterilize the device, set up one of the two remaining starter packs that Tonner had made for her, and by tomorrow or the next day, she’d be back in the saddle. Good as new.
Laughing hurt too, even just a chuckle. She’d have to try not to do that.
She picked up the glass panes and walked to the common room.
It took her half an hour to scrape out the residue and boil the device in heavily salted water.
If she’d had a good autoclave, that would have been more effective for killing off any contaminants.
But it would also have been a bigger risk for the equipment.
She had two doses of starter. Only one farm to put them in. Risks had to be balanced.
While she was waiting for the glass to cool, voices came from the front of the ship.
The geologist and botanist, talking over each other like they were each so eager to be heard they couldn’t bother listening.
Then the artificial calm of the half-mind.
Something else was with them. She steeled herself.
Third Gardener came into the common room first. It might have been her imagination, but the Sinen seemed to hesitate when it saw her. Holom Coombs, the geologist, was right behind it, and Jessyn had the flashbulb memory of the man working over her wounded body as she’d tried to die.
“Oh!” he said, and then grinned. He had a mouthful of crooked, coffee-stained teeth that somehow managed to look kind of charming on him. “You’re up and about!”
“Vaguely,” Jessyn said, and smiled. The botanist came in last. She was a thin, sharp-faced woman with black hair cut so close to her scalp it looked like stubble on a chin.
Manni. That was her name. Jessyn tried a smile, but the woman only looked grim as she came over, squeezed Jessyn’s hand, and then walked away.
Coombs’s smile had taken on a tightness like he’d made some social misstep by being pleased to see her.
Jessyn almost joked Who died? before she remembered that, as far as they knew, Garral P?r had died and she’d watched him do it.
She looked down, trying to think what she’d been like when she’d been shocked and grief-sick in the past.
“I, ah,” Coombs said, then patted her shoulder awkwardly. “I hope that you’re… Yes. Well.”
He turned back, heading for the corridor to the outside and leaving her alone with Third Gardener.
It made its way to her more slowly. She wondered what it would do if she walked away.
If that would seem more suspicious or less.
Instead, she touched the glass farm. It was almost cool enough to load with the new batch.
Third Gardener made soft, wet sounds and its pseudotentacles twitched. “You are feeling well enough to work,” the half-mind translated.
“I won’t be at full capacity for a few days,” she said, and took the glass farm in her hands. “But I’m on the mend, yes.”
“You will report more fully. Explain what happened to you and the Garral P?r.”
Jessyn took the farm to the sink, measuring out water for the substrate.
It gave her an excuse to talk more slowly, to take time with her words.
She didn’t remember exactly what she’d said in her pain haze, or who she’d said it to.
“We were exploring a set of caves in the limestone cliffs past the orchard. We were attacked by something. It killed Garral. I ran. I got away, but I was injured.”
She poured the white powder of the substrate into the farm, and then the water.
“Your attacker was found, and it was killed. Take comfort in this if necessary.”
Jessyn put the farm down on the table with a click.
Corvall was dead, then. Well, that had been the plan.
Strange that the fact still shocked her a little.
It was as if until she knew that, the clock hadn’t really started.
The plan was only a plan, except Corvall was dead.
So he’d sent the signal. So it was happening.
It was all happening, whether she was ready for it or not.
“Thank you for telling me,” she said. “Do you know what it was?”
“An enemy. The location you were exploring was outside of the evacuation perimeter. Explain why you chose that site.”
“Because it was outside the evacuation perimeter.”
“Explain.”
“I picked it because we were unlikely to run into other researchers there. I was hoping to spend some time with Garral privately. I understand now that was a mistake.”
“You wished to spend time in seclusion.”
“I was hoping to fuck him,” Jessyn said, but the sharpness of her answer was lost on the Sinen.
“Explain what happened to your equipment and supplies.”
“Most of it’s still at my primary research site. The orchard. I left the rest behind when the thing started shooting at us,” she said, then held up the glass farm. “Did you find my notebook?”
“We have not attempted to recover it. Leaving the evacuation perimeter is dangerous,” the Sinen said. “Further explain your interaction with the enemy presence.”
“Look,” Jessyn snapped at it. “I understand you want to have a clear idea of what happened, but I have to get this set up, get back to my work, and I’m going to need more rest than usual.
Would you like me to use my energy answering questions about what’s already happened, or getting the survey work done?
Because I can manage one of those right now. ”
“You will return to your survey,” Third Gardener said.
It shifted, took something from its satchel.
A new notebook. When she didn’t take it, Third Gardener put it down on the table beside her.
“We will discuss the loss of Garral P?r again. You will provide greater detail when doing so doesn’t interfere with your work. ”
“All right.”
The Sinen didn’t leave. It stood, looking up at her with its unnerving goatlike eyes. “Surviving this encounter with the enemy and such serious injuries was unlikely.”
For a long moment, she didn’t know how to reply. She settled on, “I’m grateful for the care I’ve been given.”
Third Gardener trundled away. Jessyn went back to her cell, fed the fresh starter into the substrate and then a half dose of sugar to help it get going.
She expected the wound in her side to hurt, but her whole body from toes to temples was aching.
More than anything, she wanted to find some painkillers, curl up in her bed, and lose consciousness.
To be someplace else for a while, even if the someplace else was just a random firing of neurons in her sleeping brain.
When she was done, she went back to the kitchen, scooped up her new notebook, and headed out.
The gravity of the planet had clearly ratcheted up since she’d come to.
Her flesh felt heavier than it should have, and the makeshift plaza between the Carryx ships felt a dozen times wider than it had.
Three huge, lumbering Carryx stood between the ships, hunkered down on their fighting arms and gesturing with the thinner feeding pair at their chests.
A pair of the stone-skinned, six-legged aliens were leaning against each other as they walked east, wire baskets filled with flowers on their collective back.
The sunlight felt like early afternoon. At the base of one of the other ships, Third Gardener was talking to a Rak-hund.
As she walked down the ramp, they both turned toward her, but they didn’t approach. She returned the favor.