Redwood: Servant of the State (9 page)

Chapter Nine

The next day, Dee Dee was all better. She walked around, met everybody, thanked them for their help and concern. The only sign she’d been in trouble was a bandage on her shoulder. I decided if her wounds were like mine on my neck years ago, they’d heal up soon. She probably wouldn’t have any scars, either.

The station remained a beehive of activity. Besides the excitement over Dee Dee, and our team’s misadventure, for the first time the researchers had a monkey cadaver to examine. Everybody seemed giddy as kids on Christmas morning.

I didn’t bother to go look at the cadaver. I’d seen enough monkeys for a while.

Ranger Jenkins and his wife Ella led a group to retrieve the equipment we’d left behind. I volunteered to go with them. The triplets did, too. We were rebuffed. The Jenkins took another Ranger husband-wife team with them instead, the Jones. All four went heavily armed, and returned with all our stuff. They saw no sign of Fred.

The days rolled by. Jeremy refused any kind of treatment for his black eye. He wore it proudly, like a medal. His skin was never broken, and the Physician confirmed he was not hematophageous, much to his parents’ relief. He retold the story of how Fred jumped us over and over again, usually with himself as the main focus. Every night for a week before going to bed he wanted to talk about it. Each night, Jacob, Jason and I finally had to tell him to shut up and go to sleep.

Over time, with each retelling, he shifted the focus ever so slightly, and his role in the incident became more and more prominent. After hearing it for the umpteenth time on the porch one night, I clasped him on the shoulder and gazed seriously into his eyes.

“Thank goodness you were there, Jeremy. You saved us all!”

Jacob and Jason burst out laughing. Jeremy’s ears reddened, then he joined in the laughter. He stopped recounting the tale so often, though.

The Patel girls, Aneeta and Anusha, fawned over Jeremy’s injury. They were younger than us, 15 and 13, but old enough to notice boys. Since their parents comprised the medical team at the station, they had a natural interest in medicine and injuries, too. Aneeta in particular turned into something of a teenaged Florence Nightingale.

Aneeta gushed over Jeremy and his injury so much, Jason and Jacob grew quite jealous. They decided to bop each other in the eye so they too could have shiners, until I reminded them it wouldn’t be the same since Fred wasn’t involved. Reluctantly they agreed that was true. They decided instead to wait until Jeremy fully healed, then they gave him another black eye.

I resumed working for Mrs. Ng, and kept waiting to catch her smile. It seemed I would have to wait forever. She was the most expressionless person I’d ever met. She did seem happy at the end of the work day, though. Especially when I’d done all she’d asked of me. Sometimes I’d do more, if I had time for it. Really there wasn’t a lot else to do, and I’d been laboring like this all my life anyway. Most of what she had me doing was food prep. Shelling peas, skinning potatoes, and so on.

I considered Mrs. Ng my boss, and deferred to her on schedules when others asked for me, for research purposes or otherwise. She never acknowledged it, but I think she appreciated it. Often I found myself working beside her in silence for hours, nothing but a grunt or a couple spoken words passing between us. The days went faster while I worked, and were never boring.

As the days slid by, I got a chance to know Mr. Ng, too. David and Susan Ng were originally from New Indonesia, but made their way to New Texas A&M shortly after marriage. David was a Scientist specializing in arboriculture, so after Janus 28 opened and the giant trees of Redwood were discovered, he and Mrs. Ng were on one of the first spaceships over.

They never left. The University fabricated departure documents for them, and they continued researching the trees with the rest of the team on Ranger Station Alpha. They had one daughter back on New Texas, who was of age and stayed behind when they came to Redwood. They hadn’t seen her in all those years.

Unlike his wife, Mr. Ng was quite jovial. He almost had a bubbly personality. He’d often stop by to visit us around lunch time. He was short but stout, and had a dark complexion and dark hair like hers.

“Hey, Marcus! How are ya?”

As far as personality, he was loud, boisterous, and perpetually happy. In other words, the exact opposite of Mrs. Ng.

She usually ignored his entrances, so he’d walk up to her and give her a big bear hug from behind.

“How’s my beautiful bride, huh? How’s my sweetie?”

“Get off me. Go away. Let me go, I have work to do.”

But I noticed despite all her protestations to the contrary, Mrs. Ng always seemed a little happier after his visits.

-+-

Dee Dee and I spent more time together while the Physician and the Professor examined us daily. New volunteers donated blood to drink since Dee Dee’s was no good for me anymore. I wasn’t really hungry for it yet, though.

Connie took all the changes the worst. She no longer spoke to her sister. Evidently she had trouble living under the same roof. She spent her days as far away from both of us as possible. She avoided the triplets, too, and looked at Jeremy’s shiner with horror and disgust. I don’t think he noticed.

Everybody waited anxiously for Dee Dee’s cravings to start up. Mine started about two weeks after being bit, so we expected the same for her. On the fifteenth day after her bite, Dee Dee developed her first symptoms. Just like I had: sweating, shaking, stomach cramps.

The Professor and the Physician watched the instruments hooked to her with interest. They discussed at length whether they should offer her blood immediately or wait a few days and observe the cravings increase in intensity. After much back and forth they decided to let Dee Dee decide.

“I can handle this, Daddy. For now. We can go a few days.”

So they continued monitoring her.

On the eighteenth day after the bite, her symptoms grew considerably worse. The expression in her eyes changed, too, and she began looking at people differently. With hunger. When the two men hooked her up to the instruments that morning, she licked her lips every time they came close. They decided it was time to give her some blood.

“Remarkable. The symptoms cleared up immediately.”

“Yes, Jiven. For the first time, we’ve been able to follow the process from the time of infection to first feeding. Sweetheart, I’m sorry you had to go through this, but the contributions to our understanding have been extraordinary.”

“It’s okay, Daddy. Anything for science.”

She said it flippantly, and we all laughed. But there was a strained undertone that no one vocalized. She was different now. Officially, she was an “Enemy of the State,” and faced eradication if anybody found out her secret.

Just like me.

-+-

One addition to the daily routines since our encounter with Fred: target practice. Ranger Jenkins unlocked the storage center with the base’s rifles and made sure everyone knew how to use them. I went with the triplets, Dee Dee, Connie, and the Patel girls for our turn at training.

“Standard issue nine millimeter, semi-automatic. Load a magazine like this.”

He demonstrated, pushing ammo down into the magazine.

“Make sure the bullets are pointed that end down the rifle.”

We all laughed at that, except Aneeta and Anusha who took everything very seriously.

“Insert the magazine here. Give it a slap on the bottom to make sure it’s seated. Pull back the bolt. Now a round is loaded. When you pull the trigger it will go bang. Never ever point it at something you don’t want to shoot. Never play with it. It’s not a toy. Always treat it like it’s loaded, even when it’s not.

“Okay, everybody get their earmuffs on.”

He aimed at a target set up at the base’s shooting range. It was open air, but had a backstop forty yards out with some kind of spongy material that prevented ricochets and absorbed the bullets.

“Hold your breath. The more movement you make while holding the gun, the more you affect where the bullet hits. Line up the sights. Squeeze the trigger, don’t jerk it.”

Bang!

He pressed a button and the target came back on a pulley. Now it had a fresh bullet hole in the middle of the bullseye.

“We’ll do a point system. Friendly competition. Ten shots. Ten points each for hitting the center circle.”

That excited the triplets, who scrambled to see who could shoot the best.

Jenkins took Aneeta and Anusha off to one side and spent more time one on one with them so they could better familiarize themselves with the firearms. Dee Dee, Connie, and I shot with the triplets.

Connie never said a word to any of us. She fired off her practice rounds and left. The rest of us stayed and chatted for a while.

“I’m the best shot in the O’Donnell clan,” Jason said, proudly holding up his target.

“I got the three of y’all beat,” I said, holding up mine.

“Oh, boys …” Dee Dee sang out. She held up her target, where so many holes had been shot through the center circle, it wasn’t there anymore. The middle of the target had one ragged hole, with no stray shots anywhere.

“Don’t worry,” she teased. “I’m sure you’ll all get better with practice.”

-+-

One night Jacob produced a box of Kalinowski’s cigars. I decided not to ask where he got them. His procurement skills were extraordinary. Best I didn’t know.

We sat around on the porch of the triplets’ tree house, having one of our late night bull sessions.

“What I want to know,” Jeremy said, “Is who came up with the naming conventions for planets? I mean, we start okay. Europa, Asiana, Bharata, Africana, Australiana, Americana. All named after continents on Old Earth.”

“Bharata is a subcontinent,” Jacob pointed out.

“Whatever. Then they discover Oceana. Okay, I get it. It’s a planet with one gigantic ocean and a few habitable islands. Then they start naming planets after place names and countries. Brittania, Hispaniola … everything goes along fine until Janus 23 or so.”

“You’re forgetting Pacifica,” Jacob said. “The one after Mesopotamia and before Caledonia.”

“Another water planet. They already had Oceana, so they named it after the largest body of water on Old Earth.”

“Specifically, the Pacific,” said Jason with a grin.

Jeremy frowned at the interruption. “Anyway, then you got your ‘new’ planets. New Scotland. New France. New Moravia. I guess they ran out of places to call ‘new’ because then they started naming entire planets after old cities. Brasilia … Alexandria …”

“How about New Hong Kong? It’s a ‘new’ planet named after a city, am I right?”

“Shut up, Jason. Then they get here and it’s like, they look around and say, ‘Wow, look at these big trees! This reminds us of Redwood trees back on Old Earth. Let’s just abandon our whole naming convention thing, and call the place Redwood.’ And on the next planet they’re like, ‘Gee, look at all these citrus trees! Let’s call the place Orange!’ I mean, what happened to centuries of tradition? Now we have to name planets after the trees that grow on them?”

I chuckled at his sarcasm and said, “I bet what happened, they had a name picked out to honor some region or city back on Old Earth, then discovered people exposed to primate bites here were going off world and attacking others for their blood. They decided some generic name that adequately described the planet would do, rather than tainting a good name, with all the bad publicity hematophagia would bring. Same with Orange. What place back on the home planet would want to be associated with a penal colony?”

They nodded as they mulled it over and seemed to agree with my reasoning. At least, no one argued with me.

“Another thing I want to know,” Jeremy said, pausing to puff on his cigar. “Is why we don’t have better technology out here on the frontier planets.”

“It’s gotta be reliable,” Jacob pointed out. “If it breaks, how you gonna fix it? It’d take a couple years or more to send it to Asiana, or wherever, then a couple more to get it back.”

“It doesn’t have to be fragile to be high tech. Look at the Januses.”

“That’s true,” I chimed in. “Supposedly the Januses have maintenance crews, but I don’t think they have to do much.”

“Okay, fine. On Redwood and Orange it’s got to be super reliable. I’ll buy that. But what about New Texas, Athena, and Alexandria? They’re still relatively low tech. From what I understand, you have to travel back at least to Bharata before you start to see really cutting edge stuff.”

Jacob was about to object, and possibly start another long argument, when Dee Dee’s head appeared at the top of the rope ladder.

“Hi guys! I saw your lights on and thought I’d climb up. Hey, can I have one of those?”

“Rough night?” Jacob said.

She nodded. “Connie and I had a bad argument. I had to get out of the house for a while. She’s unbearable when she’s like this.”

Jason said, “If she ever really ticks you off, just sneak into her room one night while she’s sleeping and start licking her neck or something. That would freak her out!”

Dee Dee giggled and said, “Daddy would probably kick me out of the house.”