Earthrise (Her Instruments Book 1) (8 page)

“You can talk to him?” Hirianthial asked.

“Can’t you?”

The Eldritch shrugged, that hitch of one shoulder that was so easy to miss. “I’m an esper. They say it’s supposed to be easier for us to talk to them.”

“Do they?” Reese warred between agitation and curiosity. “I’ve read about them but there’s not much available in the u-banks. The usual stuff... some biological information about how they eat and reproduce, and historical information about how we ran into them. But nothing more than that.”

“Probably because there’s not much more than that to be said.” In the Eldritch’s arms, Allacazam turned an amused goldenrod yellow. “We had some additional information in medical school but not much more. I never saw a Flitzbe anywhere I worked. If they get sick, they’ve never done it where someone could record evidence of it.”

“Never?” Reese asked.

“Not that we know of,” Hirianthial replied. “Even seeing one is fairly unusual. You’re a lucky woman.”

Reese said nothing to that, only watched the colors on Allacazam as they changed. All happy colors. “He likes you.”

“You sound surprised,” Hirianthial said and laughed. “I suppose you can’t imagine anyone liking me right now.”

“I’ll thank you to stop reading my mind,” Reese said, bristling.

“I’ll thank you to stop assuming I’m some sort of magician,” Hirianthial replied. He leaned down and set the Flitzbe on the floor. “The only thing I can sense from you is your emotional state, and trust me, any number of factors can cause a single emotion. Guessing at which of the many things in your life is currently causing you distress isn’t as easy as you would presume. I am making an educated guess from your tone of voice and the things you’ve said, lady. Not plucking my wisdom out of your frontal lobes.”

“Are all Eldritch this infuriating?” Reese finally said, unable to help herself.

“No,” Hirianthial replied. Then, glancing at the ceiling. “Most of them are worse.”

Allacazam bumped up against Reese’s toe. She pulled him into her arms and was surprised at how quickly he soothed her. She sighed over his round body, feeling the thrum of the engines in the deck and wondering how soon they’d be able to escape this particular nightmare. Allacazam slipped a tendril of curiosity into her mind, like a shoot of green trying to push up through soil. She imagined packing it back into the earth. She wasn’t ready to deal with the alternatives to their venture if they failed.

The ship chose that moment to shudder hard and jink to one side. Reese clutched Allacazam with one arm and the bench with the the other. The moment it passed she was on the intercom. “What in Freedom’s name are you people doing up there?”

“Sorry,” came Kis’eh’t’s terse reply. “We got dinged by a small rock. We’re not going to get out of this without dents, Reese.”

“I’m coming up there,” Reese said, and cut off Irine’s protest.

“Lady,” Hirianthial said.

“Not now.” Reese set Allacazam down and headed for the door.

“I would sit down—”

Her stomach felt like a burst fuel-line. Even her throat was burning. She kept going.

“Captain Eddings,” Hirianthial said, standing, and that almost made her stop but Irine and Kis’eh’t were going to get her ship completely bent out of shape and she was the only one who could possibly stop it—

An ominous taste in her mouth gave her pause. Was she queasy? She hated being queasy. The corridor suddenly seemed a lot longer.

“Maybe you should come back in here and sit.” His baritone was so soft she almost couldn’t disobey. But no doctor, no
Eldritch
doctor was going to tell her what to do. She kept walking.

Her stomach lurched. The burning in her mouth intensified. Reese licked her lips and swayed beneath a wave of hot unease. She reached out and braced herself against the wall, no longer caring if he saw her. What was he going to do... come out here and pick her up? Not likely!

“Since kind suggestion doesn’t work on you,” Hirianthial said with what sounded like a hint of asperity, “I’ll simply be blunt. If you don’t walk back in here under your own power and let me treat you for the ulcer you’ve been nursing for what looks like several years, you’re going to fall and vomit up what remains of your last meal, which I am wagering was a pack of antacids. Then you’ll be forced to accept the help you’re currently refusing, which will only make you angrier. So save us both your future frustration and come in here now.”

Reese stared at the lift at the end of the hall as waves of sickness flooded her, each one making her hunch just a little more. Every word made her clench her teeth harder. When he finished his speech she felt crushed between her body’s impending crisis and her obstinacy.

“Treat me out here, because I’m not moving,” she said, and fell forward onto her knees.

Hirianthial swept forward but not in time to catch her. The moment her palms hit the floor plates, Reese gagged. He didn’t even pause to steel himself before pulling her up by an arm, and when she didn’t support herself on her wobbling legs he caught those up and heaved her into his arms for the short trip from the corridor to the bench in Kis’eh’t’s lab. He didn’t have time to organize the impressions he got through their brief contact but all of them hurt. The moment he laid her down, she groaned and said, “I’m going to throw up.”

“I know,” he said, and found a waste container in time. He held her steady as she retched bile and blood.

“Oogh,” she said, hanging onto the edge of the pail.

“Done?” Hirianthial asked, but gentler. He hadn’t expected to be able to see such a radical change in her skin, but the brown had lost most of its warmth in the short minutes between the collapse in the corridor and her transport to the bench. Seeing her so wrung out made him realize just how small she was. It wasn’t a thing one noticed while she was biting someone’s nose off with her words.

“I... I don’t know,” Reese said.

“That usually means ‘no,’” Hirianthial said, keeping his grip.

She rolled a dull blue eye back at his hand. “Doesn’t that hurt?”

“Not as much as—” he stopped as she dropped her head back into the container and paid attention to her aura this time, feeling his way over the spikes and static hiss. When she lifted her head, he said, “Now you’re done,” and helped her lie back on the bench.

The ship shook under them again and Reese tried to rise. He pressed her down with fingertips on her collarbone. “No.”

“Got to drive,” she said.

“No,” Hirianthial said again. “Where’s your first aid kit?”

“Don’t need—”

“Captain Eddings,” he said, using his sternest tone. “Every ship is supposed to have one. Where’s yours?”

She sighed. “Above the blue thing.”

The “blue thing” must refer to the chemical analysis machine, though the only blue on it was a stripe down the side. Hirianthial looked in the cabinet above it and found the kit along with a couple of blankets. He took them both down, covering her with one and folding the other into a makeshift pillow. “Now, how about the nearest source of water?”

“Water?” Reese asked weakly.

“Water,” Hirianthial agreed.

“Bathroom. Further down the hall. Turn left.”

“Right,” Hirianthial said. He lifted Allacazam from the floor and tucked him in next to Reese’s arm. “Neither of you move.”

In the cramped bathroom, Hirianthial washed his hands and avoided looking at himself in the tiny mirror. He hadn’t questioned his desire to become a doctor on fleeing his homeworld; whatever his original motive one could hardly find fault with the healing professions, and once he’d begun he’d found he loved the work. But moments like this, where he realized that taking care of someone provided a useful distraction from the wider view, he wondered just how noble it was to be a doctor. So much easier to think of the patient than wonder whether they’d be slaves in a few hours. So much more satisfying to treat someone’s sickness than to serve as their executioner. So much better to run to a good cause than to admit why one started running.

He chanced a look at himself and saw only a bland mask learned among the Eldritch and refined by the school of medicine. He could hide in it for the rest of his life and no one would ever guess. Not even irascible young human women with riding crop tongues.

Hirianthial returned to the clinic to find both patient and palliative alien where he’d left them. He sat next to Reese and slid his hand through her braids. He knew from sight they would be wiry and light, but somehow he still expected them to slide as smoothly as satin and as heavily as rope. The memories were still raw.

“I can lift my head without your help,” she said, dispelling the ghost.

“Hush and drink.”

She slurped at the cup, swished out her mouth and spat into the waste container three times before actually swallowing.

“That’s enough. You’re not ready for much more.”

She eyed him rebelliously, but he pressed her back onto the bench.

“Are you going to force me to keep pushing you down or will I have to tie you there?” he asked.

“If you keep touching me, will you eventually faint?” Reese asked.

“That would make me fairly useless as a doctor, don’t you think?” Hirianthial asked. Some of the notions Alliance citizens had cobbled together about his people would have been amusing had he not had to work past them so often in the past. He knew the reasons for the Veil of Secrecy decreed Jerisa, the first Eldritch queen, but even he chafed at them sometimes and he considered himself a private man.

Hirianthial turned his back on Reese and opened the kit. Standard kits were packed with supplies sufficient to solve typical problems—bone breaks, bites, cuts, scrapes, basic infections—but didn’t contain any of the things he’d need for a solution to her problem. With his own kit in a Sendaine storage locker, he’d have to pray the quick fixes he had access to would tide her over until they reached Starbase Kappa. If they reached Starbase Kappa. Hirianthial prepared an ampoule of mellifleurin and said, “This will see you to the starbase if you follow my instructions about what you eat and when. Will you do that?”

“What’s the alternative?” Reese asked, watching him with a gloss of gray skepticism as he pressed the AAP to her side. She eyed the paper tab he offered her, but let him swab her tongue with it anyway.

“You vomit more and more often until I have to operate on you with—” he checked the kit, “—medical tape, paper cut-grade antiseptic and my boot knife.”

Her eyes lost their anger, though her gaze remained as intent. “You’re kidding, right?”

He ran a hand over her aura, feeling the tight wad of wrongness around the middle of her esophagus. “No.” He left his hand there, feeling the extent of the pressure on her chest as he slid the tab into the analysis unit. He was not surprised to find a large concentration of keliobacteria. Humanity’s determined march into space had inspired several thousand new variations on old microbiological foes, most of them more virulent than their Terran ancestors. He’d sewn up a few esophaguses as an intern, but never without surgeon’s tools... and while he couldn’t tell exactly when Reese’s esophagus would rupture the pressure under his hand suggested it would be soon.

If it did before they reached the starbase, she would die.

“Don’t make me do this with a knife,” he said. “I’d rather knock you unconscious and keep you that way until we get to Starbase Kappa than have to cut you open with something I use to trim my meat at supper.”

Reese blanched. “You’re serious.”

“Yes.”

The ship shivered beneath them again. Reese rolled her full lower lip between her teeth, then said, “At least find out what’s going on. I promise not to go anywhere, but if I don’t know what’s happening I’ll gnaw a hole through my arm.”

“That I can do, as long as you promise not to get up,” Hirianthial said. He leaned over and rested a hand on the comm but didn’t activate it. Her belligerence returned, flaring orange.

“You’re actually going to make me promise?”

“I have the feeling you keep your promises,” Hirianthial said.

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t tell me you actually believe in personal honor and all that.”

Hirianthial said nothing. Personal honor had driven him to unpleasant ends, and discussing it wasn’t one of his favorite pass-times.

“Fine, fine, I promise. Now call!”

He depressed the button. “Clinic to the bridge.”

“Nice try, doc, but this is lowerdeck,” Sascha said. “What can I do for you?”

“The captain wants to know what’s going on.”

“And she’s not asking? Did someone tie her down?”

Hirianthial eyed Reese, who looked about to vault to her feet. “In a manner of speaking. She can hear you, though, so I wouldn’t indulge in too much flippant language.”

Sascha’s laugh sounded tinny, as if he’d moved away from the pick-up. “Right. You don’t know anything about how things work here yet, I see. You’ll learn fast enough. Repairs on the inside are doing okay. What the rocks are doing to the hull is outside our purview. Ask the bridge about that.”

Another shudder ran through the floor, the walls. Reese said, “What, are they
aiming
for the things?”