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Authors: Susan Sizemore

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BOOK: Gates of Hell
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“Counter.”

“Aye, Captain. Computer access codes coming up now—if they haven’t been tampered with.”

“Assume not.”

A few delicate adjustments were made to communications equipment, then a powerful signal was sent toward the cutter.

“We’re open to the Triallen vessel.”

“Triallen vessel, this is the
USS Tigris
. You will cease fire immediately.”

The name alone was enough to frighten many ships off. Roxy wondered if the cutter’s captain had sense enough to turn tail and run. The
Tigris
had earned her fierce reputation.

“Shields completely down on the freighter.”

“Weapons’ hits to starboard and engines. It can’t take another hit.”

“Mr. Dawson, I want the
Tigris
between those two ships.”

“Aye, Captain,” the pilot replied.

“And put one suggestive laser shot across the Triallen bow.”

Roxy didn’t have time to look up as she searched for life signs amid all the confusing incoming data, but all around her she registered the exhilaration mixed with fear the crew felt as they reacted once more to a combat situation. She couldn’t help but feel the adrenaline rush herself. Damn, it felt
good
!

“Distress signal coming in from the freighter. They only have AEI on the bridge.”

“Too much interference to pick up bioscan readings,” Roxy added. “Want me to do it the old fashioned way?”

“Save your telepathy, Physician. Get a tractor net on the freighter, Bear.”

“Estimating fifteen minutes before the freighter blows, Captain,” Maura Weaver reported. “Energy overload in the drive has started a self-destruct sequence.”

“Triallen craft moving away.”

The sensors on all boards shifted across the color scale to silver, and blanked out. Roxy visually detected the faint shimmer against the rose background of the nebula just before the now-fleeing cutter disappeared completely from the main screen. Escaped. It was embarrassing. After thirty seconds, not a single trace reading had appeared on any sensor.

“Damn!” she snarled. “How did a planetary defense force get a Shireny cloak!” The cloak was so classified she’d probably broken a law by mentioning it, but being related and telepathically linked to one of the members of the top design team in the Systems tended to give her a lot of secret knowledge she didn’t particularly want.

The Captain’s pale eyebrows were looking like slightly off-kilter exclamation points when he glanced her way. He didn’t question her knowledge. “Untraceable.”

“By any of our equipment, yes, sir,” Bear spoke up.

“I’d speculate the Triallens are heading for home,” Weaver offered.

Eamon nodded. “Speculation noted. Can we have audio from the freighter?”

The communications officer clicked a few switches and a static-filled transmission began. “Two survivors… peaceful mission…
Do not
send rescue party. Repeat. Do not. Plague ship… Sag Fever on board… “

Looks were exchanged around the bridge; the emotional level soared. The reaction explained why a planetary security vessel might fire on an unarmed ship.

“Permission to lead the rescue party?” Roxy asked, coming to stand beside the captain’s chair. Worried jade eyes met hers as the voice from the wrecked ship continued to frantically warn them off.

“Very well, Physician,” Eamon agreed after a moment’s hesitation. “A minimum party. And be quick.”

“You’ll have thirteen minutes,” Maura cautioned.

Roxy hurried to her console, hastily signaling Bonita to prepare quarantine conditions in sickbay. When she headed for the lift, Grett and CeCe once more crowded in on her, both sets of eyes bright with excited pleading. “All right,” she told them firmly. “You’re minimum enough.” The bridge doors closed behind them and they were soon trotting toward the pod bay. “I want both of you in environmental belts at all times.”

“What about you?” Grett asked.

“They give me a rash.”

“Weapons?”

“Yes. Stunners. This is a rescue mission.”

“Yes, ma’am,” they agreed, meekly enough, but Roxy wasn’t completely convinced of their sincerity. The security men were aware of the
Tigris’s
crew’s reputation for violence, but too young to have been part of the good old days when there’d been a battle almost every day. They were eager to earn their stripes and become real members of the meanest crew in the Eighteen Fleets.
Damn fools
, she thought, but proudly. “Be careful,” she admonished as they grabbed equipment and weapons from techs standing by in the pod bay. “I mean it.”

———

“Pod attached.”

There followed a brief flurry of activity while three bodies jammed themselves through the freighter’s emergency hatch. Then they were standing in the ruins of the ship’s bridge. The two security men had pulled on dark coveralls and were surrounded by the faint blue glow of environmental shields. Roxy had taken a deep breath before squeezing through the tiny airlock. She let it out slowly only after the appropriate sensor jewels on the boys’ coveralls reported that, yes, Artificial Environmental Integrity was functioning. It was minimum, but functioning. The bridge was dark but for the illumination provided by Grett and CeCe’s blue glow and faint emergency lighting from the helm’s control board. Roxy really didn’t pay much attention to sensors when it came to life readings; she could feel where the two survivors were located.

“Stay here,” she ordered. The two young men, like proper grunts, cautiously spread out and followed her, grumbling colorfully about the darkness as they picked their way through the debris of crumpled machinery and dead bodies. She frowned, but admitted to herself that they were acting properly to watch her back. She was glad she’d remembered to put on a pair of boots as she moved cautiously across the littered deck.

There were two people slumped in the helm and navigation seats. Roxy ignored the one mumbling into the communications headset. She concentrated on the person slumped forward over the helm. One touch told her the woman was near death. “Oh, my.”

Roxy knelt beside the woman, vaguely aware of Grett and CeCe trying to assure the other crewman that he was going to be all right. The woman’s skin was parchment dry, far too hot for her type of humanoid. “Okay, hon, let’s see what we can do.” Roxy closed her eyes and put herself inside the sick woman.

It burned—very deep in the blood.
Tenacious little bastard
.

Somewhere in the distance she heard herself shriek, and registered the boys’ surprised reaction. Then she stopped paying attention to anything outside the fever.

Disease was a mindless hunger, a monster that fed on life. This one took the image of fire. With lots of teeth and thousands of burning claws. Roxy stood naked before the huge, burning creature that was feeding on the woman’s life. Roxy stepped between the fever and the dying woman. She held a flaked obsidian knife in her hand. She raised the weapon and called out, “Okay, big boy, show me what you’ve got.”

The monster snarled and reared back, huge and fierce, all fangs and claws and fire. Roxy laughed in its face. “Come and get me.”

It roared again and sprang for her.

———

“Holy fucking shit.”

The words, spoken in a barely audible rasp, were the first hint Roxy had that she existed. She heard them, realized they came from her, and accepted that they had a connection with something that had happened. But what? She didn’t open her eyes just yet, but let her other senses do some work on cleaning out the disorientation. A bit of consideration brought her the conclusion that she was horizontal on a comfortable surface. She traced her fingers slowly across a familiar texture while simultaneously sniffing and tasting the blandness of recycled air. There were sounds coming from her left. She listened, not quite up to paying attention to the words, but did recognize that the sounds were coming from her pet ensigns and Dee Nikophoris. So,
here
was the ship. And why shouldn’t it be the ship? Specific
here
was probably sickbay, as she couldn’t imagine being horizontal anywhere else but her quarters—and unless she’d gotten drunk and passed out at a party, it wasn’t likely those three would all be in her quarters. Eamon wouldn’t like that. Besides, she didn’t get drunk and pass out.

The last thing I remember is Grett complaining about a foul call. Oh, well, better get on with this waking up business.

She sat up, opened her eyes, and got stabbed by the brightness of sickbay lighting. “Shit! Ouch! God damn it!” She covered her eyes with her hands. “Bonnie, I’ll talk!” Roxy realized it wasn’t the lights, but her, and tried to adjust her body accordingly. She took her hands from her eyes, blinked, and saw Bonita Hernandez, Dee, and the ensigns looking at her. It was still too bright, but not actually painful. She smiled weakly at the four surprised stares. “Hi.”

“How you feeling?” Hernandez asked.

Roxy called up a holographic diagnostic display from the foot of the bed. As usual, the oscillating lights looked very pretty. And, as usual, the reading said that she was dead, insane, horny, and 97% fat free. “I need to go on a diet,” she muttered.

“The hell you do.” Hernandez grabbed her wrist, taking Roxy’s pulse the old-fashioned way. “Is this normal?”

“Close enough,” she replied. “I have a slight headache that does not want to be reasonable, and my pupils are not reacting to light properly. I do not want to know what sort of Bucon chemical I have ingested, but I promise never to do it again.” Hernandez dropped her hand and Roxy rubbed her eyes. “What happened? Why are you all glowing?”

Dee handed Roxy a datasheet. “I just analyzed a blood sample from you.” She grinned like a ghoul. “Do you know that you’re mostly caffeine?”

Roxy read the analysis. Only then did she realize that she must have done a healing. “Never had a reaction like that before. This looks like Sag Fever.”

“Used to be,” Dee corrected. “You fixed it. There’s a second patient waiting for you. And we’re all in isolation until you fix him, too. Can I get you a nice raw steak?”

“Sounds lovely.” Roxy put down the datasheet and lay back down. She closed her eyes and tried to remember. All she got was a large gray area where memory should have been. “I did a healing?”

“Yes,” four voices chorused.

Grett explained about a Terlert and rescue pods and two survivors and lugging three unconscious people off a self-destructing freighter and into the isolation room in sickbay.

“Oh,” she said when he was done. She took a sniff, and the aroma of approaching meat and coffee displaced any further curiosity. “Food,” she said, sitting up. “Eat, Now.” Hernandez swung a bed table in front of her, Dee set down a tray of food, and Roxy immediately dug into the meal.

“Better hurry it up, Sting,” Dee advised. “There’s one more survivor awaiting your magic touch.”

“Stable, but very weak,” Hernandez added.

Roxy swallowed quickly, then stuffed another piece of steak in and talked around it, meat juice dribbling down her chin. “Right now, Groupie?” She responded to Dee’s use of her Belter nickname by fondly using Dee’s.

“If you wouldn’t mind,” Dee answered. “Or do you want to be stuck in one little corner of sickbay forever? I knew I shouldn’t have volunteered when Hernandez wanted someone to run tests.”

Roxy stuffed down two more bites, then concentrated on lymphocyte production. This kind of rearranging of her insides produced a deep ache in the bone marrow, especially in her arms and legs. The pain, oddly enough, cleared some of the white noise out of her head. She finally recalled doing a healing. Circumstances? Fuzzy. There was a woman. And, yeah, there was another one. Better get to it. Sag Fever waits for no one.

She opened her eyes and pushed the table back, grabbing one last bite of meat as Dee whisked the tray away. She wiped her fingers on her shorts, then grabbed CeCe’s glowing fingers and let him help her up.

“Okay, witch doctor,” she said to Hernandez. “The faith healer’s back in business.”

———

“I’m going to faint now.” Roxy suited actions to words as she slid bonelessly toward the deck, holding the yellow bed cover in a death grip and taking it with her. She used it to bury her face in while she sobbed like a child. She didn’t know what she was crying about, or why she was being assaulted by a horrible feeling of melancholy. All she wanted to do was faint. Or take a shower. This stuff really made her sweat.

Hands lifted her onto a bed, and she felt a sting as an injector pumped concentrated protein into her system. It wasn’t quite so satisfying as a hunk of meat, but it did make her feel better almost immediately. She had to squint to look at anything. “Is he okay?”

“Of course he is, honey,” Hernandez answered as she scanned the readings on the patient’s diagnostic display.

“I don’t like this stuff. It fights dirty. Never met such a violent virus before.” Roxy shook sweat-damp hair out of her face. She looked around as her eyes got closer to normal and finally paid attention to the blue light surrounding everyone but her. There was even environmental shielding surrounding the beds of the two former plague victims. Bonita Hernandez was quite correctly taking no chances. “How long before you stop glowing?”

“We’re waiting for you to tell us, Physician,” Hernandez replied.

“We’re all better now,” Roxy assured the ship’s other doctor. She placed her hand over her heart. “Honest.”

“And I would appreciate being able to enter,” Eamon said from the doorway. Roxy looked toward him. The Captain’s long, slender form was obscured by yet another sterile field across the doorway.

Hernandez lifted a remote and pressed a button, killing all the fields at once. Roxy was glad to be rid of the extra lighting. Dee, Grett, and CeCe lost no time in making themselves scarce. Hernandez moved with less speed back to the main sickbay, passing Eamon as he stepped into the room and approached the patients.

Both of the freighter crewmembers were awake and staring in awe at Roxy. The man was big, ruggedly built, and bearded. Roxy recalled that the woman had been in her sixties, but she’d done a very thorough job of the healing. The woman was going to be very surprised when she looked in a mirror and discovered she was a red-haired beauty of eighteen again.

BOOK: Gates of Hell
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