Dominant Species Volume Three -- Acquired Traits (46 page)

“I’ve heard
of her,” Yelton said.

“Yeah?”
Donna replied, “What have you heard?”

“Just
what everybody else has,” he said. “That you’re a damned good doctor.”

She
offered him a sideways grin. “Well, that part’s true, I guess. Anything else
you hear is a lie.”

“That
works for me,” Yelton said.

Donna had
Yelton sized up immediately. He would be one of those rare and truly easy-going
persons, relaxed and unflappable under even the most demanding conditions; the
kind who would sleep through a thunderstorm, she was sure, or one who would
keep his head to the very end, running coolly and efficiently through each
logical corrective action in step-wise fashion as his shuttle crashed
nose-first into the sea. She liked him. But that could change based on his next
answer.

“So what
brought you to Verde?” she asked him. “Your contract or your religion?”

“Contract,”
he said flatly. “Not much into religion. What about you?”

“Then we
have something in common,” she said. “I came here to run Health and Safety.
Turns out I still have the job. Not that Smith’s too pleased about it about
now.”

“Why’s
that?” Yelton asked.

“The
bastard tried to kill me,” Donna said. “And now he wants me dead more than
ever. But that ain’t gonna happen.”

“Well,
he’ll get what he deserves,” Yelton said easily. “Guys like him always do.”

Donna
nodded and forked up some vegetables. “You got that right, she said. She took a
bite and chewed. “Hot sonofabitch today,” she said past her food.

“Cooler
than yesterday,” Yelton added, taking a pull on his coffee.

22

D
onna’s
face had that “another really bad one” look on it and Rachel sighed and steeled
herself for the news she knew was coming.

“You’d
better come over here and look at this one,” Donna’s little face in the phone
said. “Bring your tools, too. You’re going to have to help me with this one.”

Rachel
picked up her kit, slung it over her shoulder and headed out the door. “Mind
the shop while I’m gone,” she said to Beverly Hobbs, her newly-acquired
assistant. “And stay away from those big ants I just dumped in that container.
They sting like fire and squirt acid out their asses.”

Beverly
eyeballed the big greenish ants in the plastic bottle with a frown. Ants had
never been one of her favorites. “Sure,” she said.

When
Rachel entered the clinic, she was greeted with a cloying and pungent odor that
clung to the back of her throat. She contorted her face at the smell. Donna was
standing next to a middle-aged male patient on an operating table under a bank
of lights. The patient had a respirator over his nose and mouth. His eyes were
closed. The white sheet that covered his body was stained with a wet yellow
material near his right side.
 
Donna was
already suited up, her hands gloved with a surgical mask on her face. More of
the yellow material stained the front of Donna’s gown and her gloved hands. In
one hand, was a gleaming surgical scalpel.

 
“What’s that smell?” Rachel asked her.

“It’s
coming off the juice from this damned thing,” Donna said and pulled the sheet
back from the man’s torso.

As if glued
to the man’s right flank, just above the hip, was a dark and shiny organism
about the size of a rat. Where the smooth seam of the organism met the man’s
flesh, a red and angry welt had raised. The life form reminded Rachel of an
ancient trilobite, the dorsal area striated with thick curved plates. The
thorax was thick, too, and ended abruptly at a blunt head. Small compound eyes
stared out from the sides of the head. Dark antennae lay flat against the
organism’s back.

“There’s
one we haven’t seen,” Rachel said frowning.

“I think
I have,” Donna said. “I think I saw one of these attached to the flank of an
ungulate one night in the green.”

“Have you
figured out what it’s doing to him?”

Donna
shook her head. “Not yet. But one of the scans seems to show tendrils around
his liver originating from the organism. He was agitated and in pain when he
got here. I put him under so I could work on him. Every time you touch the
damned thing it oozes this smelly shit.”
 
She showed Rachel her ooze-wet gloved hands. “It comes from glands or
something under the carapace. I’m betting it’s toxic, but I haven’t analyzed it
yet.”

“Hm. So
what do you want to do?”

“Take it
off him.”

“Lance it
off? What about the tendrils?”

“I’ll
deal with those later.”

“Hm.
Where did he pick up this thing?”

“The guy
who dropped him off said he saw him stumble out of the green a couple of
kilometers down the road. Looks like he stopped his truck and walked into the
jungle for some reason, maybe to relieve himself, and came out with his little
buddy here stuck to his side.”

“Who is
he?” Rachel asked.

“Tim
Collins. He’s a truck driver. And a Bondsman.”

“Hmm.”
 
Rachel pulled up a wheeled stool, leaned in
and took a closer look. “Lemme see your blade,” she said. Donna handed it to
her handle first.

“Don’t
get that shit on your skin,” Donna said. “Here, put this on,” she handed Rachel
a clear face shield. “And these gloves, too.”

Rachel
put on the gloves, slipped on the face shield, leaned in and touched the
organism with the tip of the scalpel. Immediately a thin stream of pale yellow
liquid appeared at the seam of parasite and human flesh and ran down in a
slow-moving rivulet. “God that stuff stinks!” she said and gagged almost
simultaneously. “I wonder what it does? Have you collected any of it yet?”

“Nope,”
Donna said. “Have a ball.”

Rachel
wiped a few swabs-full of the stuff off the table and stuck the swabs in a
glass vial. “It could be toxic, but I’ll bet its most toxic characteristic is
its stench. It’s probably designed to warn you off when you try to remove the
organism.
 
It’s noxious for sure. Toxic,
we don’t know yet. I wouldn’t want to eat any of it, though, or get it in a
cut.”
 
She picked around at the organism’s
hard surface with the tip of the scalpel. “Hm. These are interesting,” she
said. “These look like sockets for wings. I’ll bet this thing was airborne
until it landed on the victim. It probably shed its wings after attaching to
him. Ant and termite alates do the same thing when they land after swarming.
Once the wings have served their purpose, off they come. Hmm.”

“What?”

“So it’s
not just going to cop a meal from the guy and fly away. It looks to me like
it’s following an all-to-familiar pattern for this planet.”

“Using
the other species as a breeding substrate,” Donna said.

“No
surprise there, I suppose,” Rachel added.

“None at
all,” Donna agreed. “Let’s get that damned thing off him. Give me the scalpel.”

“Hang
on,” Rachel said. “I’ve got a better idea.”

“What?”

“Let’s try
to make it want to let go on its own,” Rachel said.

“Why?”

“To see
what it does,” Rachel said.

“This
poor bastard could die in the meantime. What do you want to do, just pester it
a little until it lets go?”

“Exactly.”

“No way.
That damned thing is coming off him right now.”

“We could
learn a lot more from it alive than dead,” Rachel said. “For all we know, this
thing could be in the middle of its lifecycle, not the end. Its lifecycle can
tell us more about how to avoid it than anything else.”

“Maybe,”
Donna said firmly. “But we’re not taking the chance. It’s coming off.”

Rachel
handed the scalpel back to Donna, rolled back from the table a couple of feet
and pulled up her face shield. “Okay. You’re the nurse,” she said. “It’s your
call.”

“That’s right.
You can play with whatever’s left of it,” Donna said. “I can’t wait to kill
this thing.”

Donna
moved around to the other side of the table and went right to work. She placed
the scalpel’s tip on the center of the organism’s head and pressed the tip firmly
in. With a slight snap, the blade pierced the parasite’s head. Instantly, a
gush of yellow fluid flowed out from around it, running onto the table and
forming a putrid pool under the man’s hip. Donna pulled the blade back across
the parasite’s midline with a jerking, sawing action, opening a deep slit in
it, head to end. Dark fluid leaked from the gaping cut framed by the sharp
edges of the opened carapace. She repositioned the blade in the cut where she
started and drew it down the thing’s length again, deepening the cut. This time
when she reached the juncture of head and thorax, the organism seemed to
shudder slightly, and the posterior end of it arched up and away from the man’s
body. “That must have hurt some,” Donna said to it.
 
“Too bad for you.”

She took
hold of the end of the organism with a pair of heavy hemostats and pried it up
even further.
 
She looked underneath it.
“Yep,” she said. “Got tendrils penetrating the skin here.
 
And it’s got no signs of letting them
go.”
 
She worked the blade in against the
tendrils and with mincing little cuts nipped away at the tough tissue. She had
soon sawed through the two penetrating tendrils. Trying not to tear the little
holes in the man’s skin left by the claspers any larger than they already were,
she loosened the organism. She wriggled free the rows of tiny clasping hooks
that ran around the parasite's perimeter; and in a minute, she had it loose.

She
dropped its ruined body in the sample tray held up by Rachel. “Well, at least
you left it in one piece,” Rachel said. “More or less.”

“You’re
lucky I didn’t stomp it flat after I got it off,” Donna replied

Donna
cleaned the area where the organism had attached to the man. When she was done
they could see a neat ring of little penetrating wounds in an elongated pattern
surrounding two severed tendrils sticking up a centimeter or two out of the
man’s side. The little wounds wept blood, and Donna blotted it away.

“Nasty,”
Rachel said.

“Nasty,”
Donna agreed. “I can’t believe how many organisms there are on this planet that
want to stick something dreadful in something else.”

“Now
what?” Rachel asked.

“Now I’m
going to try to pull out these tendrils and hope I don’t break them off. I
don’t want to go in after them.”

Rachel
spotted something. “Hang on,” she said. She reached in and squeezed the end of
one of the tendrils. When she did a pale, translucent object the size of a
pinhead squeezed out of the severed channel in the tendril. Rachel captured the
object on a glass slide in a drip of accompanying whitish liquid. “Gotcha,” she
said.

“Egg?”

“That’s
my bet,” Rachel said.

“Great,”
Donna said. “Let’s hope we killed it before any of them worked their way down
the tubes and into this poor sucker’s body.”

“Right,”
Rachel agreed. “If it is an egg, I might be able to incubate it and hatch
another one so we can see what the first-stage larva look like.”

“Oh, what
fun!” Donna said, testing one of the tendrils with a pinch of her gloved
fingers. “Just flush it down the toilet.”

Rachel
smiled at Donna behind her mask. She knew Donna knew better than to
deliberately destroy an opportunity to learn something significant about the
hazard. “Not a chance. When the baby’s born, I’ll name it after you.
  
How’s that?”

“Call it
Smith
instead,” Donna said.

That brought
a peal of girlish laughter from Rachel.

* * *