Home: Interstellar: Merchant Princess (8 page)

“You can see the improvement in just two months,” the doctor continued. “With access to the final product and replicator templates, we will be able to…ah…thank you, Phillip,” he said and led them out of earshot.

“Treatment can begin next week if we reach a final understanding,” the doctor said, and John nodded. Meriel frowned at the idea that he might delay treatments for the burn victim because of financial arrangements, but she said nothing.

Dr. Wo led them to a small exercise area where two athletic women played a version of racquetball. One woman had red cuffs around her left knee and ankle and a bright pink scar that ran between them on the outside of her leg. Four monitors adjacent to the viewing area showed side and top views of the knee and ankle joints as they moved. It was clear that the red cuffs were instrumentation displaying real-time telemetry.

“See,” the doctor said while pointing to a graph below the display on the monitors of the knee joint, “the joint stress exceeds the nominal range for her age. She needs to worry that the
ISA
will rule this as a disqualifying enhancement.”

“Is she a professional athlete?” Meriel asked, not recognizing her on the sports networks.

“No. At least, not yet. A talented amateur. Her joints were crushed last year in an accident. They told her to forfeit the leg and hip for prosthetics. Your company offered her an alternative. She learned the sport as part of her physical therapy. Now she’s considering a professional career.”

Meriel wondered if John had some business deal that would require continuing treatment for people like Phillip and this girl.

“What about the radiation patient?” John asked and looked at his link. “Mr. Thompson?”

The doctor smiled again. “Released last week.” He looked at Meriel. “An impossible case, you know. Mining accident. Just remarkable. Stage IV melanoma spread to his lungs—incurable. He came here to die, to waste away where his family could not see him degenerate.”

“Bone-marrow regen,” John said.

“That’s right, Mr. Brown,” the doctor said. “Genetic replication for hematopoietic regeneration. Your company also provided the cancer-cell tagging. The regenerated T-cells wiped out the melanoma completely.” He looked back at Meriel, clearly moved. “Death comes easy for some who have nothing to live for. This man recovered remarkably fast and returned to children who loved him.” The doctor walked ahead, and Meriel and John followed a few paces behind.

Meriel could remain quiet no longer and whispered, “John, it’s cruel to withhold treatment for business reasons.”

“Yes, I agree it is immoral and unethical to withhold it,” John said, “but treatment is also extremely expensive.” Meriel opened her mouth, but John raised his hand to stop her. “That’s why their treatments are free.”

Meriel raised her eyebrows. “Then what’s this ‘final understanding’?”

“In a moment,” John said. The doctor stopped by the door to a small office, and John turned to Meriel. “If you will excuse us please, I’ll be out shortly.”

Meriel waited for a few minutes and then went back to watch the women playing racquetball. She looked at the screens with interior views of the ankle and watched it flex and extend. The graphs spiked with stress each time she planted her foot or cut in a new direction.

The young woman’s faint scar caught Meriel’s attention again, and she recalled Phillip’s scar-free wrists. She rubbed her shoulder above her left breast.
Maybe his people can heal me
, she thought.

John came up beside her. “Well, what do you think?”

“Well, it’s not stim. Can…” Her voice trailed off, and she blushed, not wanting to expose her disfigurement to another round of “poor girl” or “oh my God.”

“Does the scarring treatment work on…old scars?” she asked.

“As far as I know, yes,” he said. “Why?”

“Oh, nothing. So what’s this ‘final understanding’?”

“It’s a trade for marketing,” John said. “Each treatment is custom to the patient and still very expensive until we can get equipment and replicators near the point of treatment.”

“Their treatments are free?”

John nodded. “And no one else could help them.”

Meriel thought she had misjudged him more than once today and looked at John with newfound respect. She pointed to the women playing racquetball. “Which was your product? The joints or the instrumentation?”

“Yes,” John said with a smile and led her back to the entrance of the clinic.

“Uh, which?”

“Both. When we first introduced joint regen, the doctors could not distinguish the performance between the original and the regenerated joint without better instrumentation, so we had to invent that, too. All of our competitors had joint replacements, but no one could heal the bones, nerves, and muscles at the same time. We can. The standard postop goal is mobility. We’re changing the goal to performance functionality.”

“Why so much secrecy?”

John looked around them and smiled. “Not here,” he said and led her outside the clinic and flagged a personal shuttle heading back to the docks in blue-zone.

***

Blue-zone included the docks and had its own shops and bars that were functional, sterile, and resilient because spacers from different ships tended to mix it up. Stationers thought spacers brought vermin with them and were hard on their fragile decor, so they mostly forced spacers back to the facilities near the docks. Station police harassed the blue-zone bar owners with sanitation orders that kept most of them alternating between repair and fumigation.

Meriel and John joined the
Tiger
crew at the TarnGirl in the middle of a raucous party and pulled chairs over to the table. Cookie flirted with a buxom blonde at the next table, which annoyed a large bald man sitting beside her. Their shoulder patches identified them as crew on another ship in their league, the JSS
Rowley
. Both crews had already reached stage 5—loud and bawdy—of Meriel’s
ten stages of a spacer’s party
with Alf Martin, Socket’s alternate, acting surly and heavily invested in a severe hangover. Socket was there as well, enhancing her legend with two muscular escorts.

John scrolled through the list of premium scotches. “What do you think, Alf, a single malt or blended?”

Alf Martin blinked with his mouth open, and Meriel looked away and bit her lip. She let her breath out slowly when John ordered a scotch-flavored alcohol replica.

“So why the secrecy?” Meriel asked John.

“Our competitors hunger for information about our products and customers. I can travel under the noses of our competition when I work crew.”

“Competitive products?”

“Not really,” John said, “but they control the product buzz and the media. Our tactic is for loyal customers to post testimonials on the net and spread the word before BioLuna and others can suck the air out of our message.”

“Who’s the ‘we’ in your story?”

“LGen Inc. You heard of them?”

“No,” Meriel said.

“Good. That’s the idea.”

“What are you selling?”

“Information,” John said. “It’s too expensive to ship finished goods, so we sell replicator data sets so partners can mass produce locally.”

“Everybody does that,” Meriel said.

“Yes, but ours mimic an individual’s genetic markers—implants are guaranteed nonrejection; drugs are guaranteed compatible; drug blends without contraindications. We just need to have our nanoscale replicators on site to execute the data sets.”

“Why haven’t I heard of LGen before?”

“The big corporations have a media blackout to keep LGen out of retail,” he said, “so we need to sell through channels. Even BioLuna sells our stuff. Actually, the anonymity gives us lots of flexibility.”

“How does a small group like yours compete with BioLuna and the other conglomerates?”

“They need us. We’re still a big part of their R and D,” John said. “Most of the technology, the research threads, started on L5. You know about L5?”

Meriel raised her eyebrows, remembering that was where John came from. “Not much,” she said with a skeptical tone.

“What’s the matter? Why the look?”

“You look too normal, too healthy, to come from L5,” Meriel said.

John stood up and grabbed a pool cue from the wall and then hit his leg with a loud whack without flinching. “Nobody’s perfect.”

“Prosthetic?” Meriel asked.

“That’s us—prosthetics, genomics, pharma. They built L5 for research and development of products that could be mass-produced back on Earth. Well, L5 got old and worn, and the residents, including my parents, took a chance and left for a habitat called Haven. Our station is called LeHavre.”

“Haven’t heard of it,” she said.
Sheesh, refugees from a condemned habitat moving up to a low-grav hellhole like Ceres
.
Meriel shook her head. “Rumor has it that L5ers were sterile from radiation and went extinct.”

John smiled and shook his head. “Nope. We’re doing fine.” He reached for his link and pulled up a vid of two girls, perhaps nine and eleven, and a woman kneeling between them. The older girl had a patch over her left eye. “See? I got two of the sweetest and healthiest little girls in the galaxy there. Becky and Sandy.”

Meriel raised her eyebrows and smiled.
Good thing he didn’t surprise me about that
, she thought. “They’re beautiful. Is that their mom in the middle?” Meriel asked.

“Yeah. She died some years ago.”

“Sorry,” she said and paused. “People out here don’t know anything about LeHavre either.”

“Only LGen ships fly in and out. The catalog coordinates are wrong, and BioLuna keeps them wrong.”

“How come?”

“BioLuna thinks they still own us. They want to control immigration and don’t want squatters,” he said. “It’s just as well. The ecosystem can’t handle a large influx of immigrants.”

Meriel nodded, only half listening. She was thinking about Haven and how impossible it sounded that a viable station and habitable body she’d not heard of could even exist. Before she could ask John about Haven’s location and livability, he interrupted her train of thought.

“Back there,” John said, “what did you mean when you said you’d lose the kids?”

“The kids from my ship when I was a kid.”

“The
Princess?
” John asked, but Meriel remained silent. “Sorry. Word gets around. I didn’t mean to pry.”

Meriel did not hear a note of pity in his voice and gave him a friendly smile. “You’re not…yet. I try not to talk about them. What did you hear about the
Princess?
”

“Only the announcement. The story disappeared pretty quick.”

“Yeah, instantly.”

“You’re the kid who survived?”

“One of them,” she said. “I’m trying to get our ship and the kids back together. There are lots of lawyers involved, and I need to act like I’m a good influence—or at least not a bad one.” Meriel finished her second drink and felt it. She wondered if any of the station lawyers might be taking vids of her here.

“Where are the others now?”

I should not be talking openly like this
. “I really don’t know.” She lied. “Sometimes, I want to go AWOL to see them, especially my sister and little Harry.” She knew she had said too much. The drinks had affected her mood.
Time to change the subject
. “Say, Cookie told me you could help with some questions about coordinating in space.”

“OK, shoot.”

“How could one ship ambush another between stations?” she asked. “Cookie says they teach marines that it’s impossible.”

“Not impossible, just improbable, and that’s the issue—probability.”

“They don’t teach two-ship coordination.”

“That’s because they don’t do it anymore. Let me get Cookie.”

John turned around, and Meriel stole a look at his profile.
A nice face,
she thought,
and honest eyes. He’s the most straight-arrow guy I’ve met in my life
.
But he’s not some station hookup. I still need to work with this guy tomorrow.

When John turned back to her, she felt the blush returning to her face. Cookie had a similar blush, and she suspected that the nearby blonde still held his attention. It appeared that the table next to theirs had already achieved stage 6 on Meriel’s party scale, and at the current rate of alcohol consumption, they would soon enter stage 7.

“You’re nav two, right?” John asked, and Meriel nodded. “OK, so I’ll just take it for granted you know about jumping and the sphere,” he said. Meriel nodded again. “Before they built all the stations, spacers tried to transfer cargo at jump points but gave up. Bottom line is that merchants could not make their margins trying to transfer cargo at jump points, and thieves gave up looking for them.”

“How so?”

Cookie turned to join their conversation. “’Cause you need to know exactly where something’s gonna be.” He swayed in his chair and grinned, oblivious to the balled up napkins that the blonde bounced off his head and the growing annoyance of the muscle beside her. Meriel wondered if they had reached stage 7 already.