Sanctuary (Jezebel's Ladder Book 3) (18 page)

When the Zeiss family left Toby alone in Olympus, he was
furious. He’d been demoted from essential team member to lackey. What was he
going to do up here in this tin can for several extra days? Toby kicked the
rucksack in his room so hard that it bounced through the zero-g region and
caromed into the shower tube.

By the time he retrieved his bag,
he’d calmed. Regrettably, the impact had broken his mother’s picture frame. The
LCD liquid leaked out, and he could no longer see the images of Earth his
family had sent with him on this trip.

As he popped the ruined picture display
into the recycler, he glanced over at the stasis tube. Lou wouldn’t want a
one-armed woman like Yuki. If Toby could save her, she might be grateful. This
might be his only chance to meet someone while he still had a sex drive. Over
the link, he said, “Mercy, how do I open the stasis chamber to look over Yuki’s
damage?”

“Toby, you’re so sweet. Put your
headset on speaker mode and hold it out.”

“Okay. Done.”

“Snowflake, grant Toby voice access
to the emergency stasis chamber. Open stasis door but leave the field on.”

A warning bloop sounded before the
curved metal cover slid away, revealing sleeping beauty in her glass coffin.
“Don’t fall in. Mercy out.”

Toby turned the comm set to mute
and hung it around his neck. As the last god guarding Olympus, he could do
anything to this woman and no one would know. He grew excited by the
possibilities.

Despite Mercy’s warning, he reached
for the hand of Yuki’s damaged arm. When he touched the invisible field, he was
forced to jerk it away because of the pain that lanced through his right middle
finger. Asleep: the circulation had stopped. After a few moments, he was able
to massage the finger awake.
Interesting
.

He lowered a sticky strap onto the
woman’s wrist until it made contact. With great effort, Toby moved the arm a
fraction of an inch. It might damage her stone-like ligaments, but this could
work. If he could pull the arm outside the field, he might be able to
reconstruct it with no blood flow, and reanimate her when it was fixed—Prince
Charming ready for the kiss.

Toby moved a large portion of the
medical lab down to the stasis chamber for the procedure, including the
microscope. He also rigged a block-and-tackle to haul out the resistant limb.
After winching the arm free of the field, he untied Mercy’s lab-coat tourniquet.
Taking repeated samples, he tagged the necrotic tissue with a borrowed black
marker. Over 75 percent of the flesh around the detonation site was useless,
and the damage increased every minute without oxygen. Sweating, he winched the
arm up further until he found good skin. It would leave Yuki with little more
than a stump, but she’d be alive. The team might even be able to rig a prosthetic
for her.

Floating back to the medical bay,
he grabbed a few specialized tools, including a cutting laser and a cauterizing
iron. Then, he scraped some of her cells from the tourniquet area to grow the
skin graft that would cover the stump and loaded the samples into the device
that would slowly grow a circle of flesh. Next, he began the excision by
swabbing the area with iodine, which was probably an unnecessary precaution in disease-free
Olympus. The entire operation took nine hours, but he performed what he
considered the cleanest amputation in history. Exhausted, he pushed her body
deep into the cushion to preserve his hard work from further degradation. He
didn’t tell the others over the radio yet. At a loss for what he should do with
the severed arm, he placed it in the frozen tomb beside her and climbed into the
cocoon bed in his room.

****

Lou’s voice on the radio woke Toby
the next morning. “Hey, Bad-jizz! We hammered out the new rotation and posted
it. Yvette is matron of honor for Nadia, so it looks like you’re working that
shift.”

“I’ll bet you’re probably scoping
out all the bridesmaids already. What did you bring for your weight
allowance—condoms or jelly?”

“You know it. Too bad all you’ll be
getting is leftovers . . . from the wedding cake.”

The pilot’s cocky attitude made
Toby want to kick something, but he didn’t want to break anything else. He
tossed his pillow across the room instead, swearing in three languages.
Unsatisfied, he floated down to the surgery site and inspected the tissue
culture.

“Bollix.” The patch had two
separate cell donors, either from Toby himself, or someone who’d carried the
woman downstairs. The result was white splotches in the field of caramel skin—a
chimera graft. Yuki would cringe every time she saw it.

Lou would never touch her spotted
hide again.

There was even a chance it was Toby’s
skin covering the lithe body. “Leftovers, huh? Screw you. See how you like
them, Lou.” The resources he’d used were scarce and may be needed to save a
life. Nothing could be spared for cosmetic work.

He pulled up the shoulder to place
the defective patch. It wasn’t harmful, not really. As he worked, he plotted
how he would wake Yuki. He could tell her everyone was dead—some empathic
accident at camp, or winter freezing them all. Toby could play last-man-on-Earth.
Then she’d warm up to him.

Moments after he finished and
turned off his headset’s busy/mute feature, Mercy called him on the headset.
“Toby, I want you to know that because you’re trying to help Yuki, I
volunteered for the shift after yours. I’ll be leaving the wedding early to
bring you anything you like. Name it!”

“From my inspection, Yuki’s arm is
pretty damaged. I’m not sure we can save it.”

“I’m sure you’ll think of
something. Everyone here is a genius, I’m told.”

Changing the subject, Toby said, “I
heard there’s cake.”

“Yes. Johnny makes wicked frosting.
We’ve all been sampling. I’ll bring you some of the vegetarian lasagna, too, if
you want it. Because it’s Pratibha’s wedding, everything is vegetarian. Yuck.
Since you’re working for all of us, I could talk the chef into making you
pheasant under glass.”

Toby smiled despite his foul mood.
Maybe this girl liked him. “I don’t know. What kind of cheap date would I be if
you could buy me for a little chicken?”

“I’ll also sign up to help you map
out the micro-biomes when you get back to camp.”

“Do you have any experience in field
biology?”

“No, I figured I’d just carry the
samples and do what you tell me. Zeiss has ordered that no one can travel
anywhere alone until we find the predators.”

“Right. You’ll be there to protect
me.”

“Yes. I’m learning how to use a
spear.”

“Are you just going to talk about
sports the whole time, like the others?”

“I could bring my reader along—it
could recite Tennyson or Keats as we walk.”

“I look forward to the
Idylls of
the King
. Olympus out.”

He picked up her lab coat and
inhaled. Maybe young Mercy would do instead.

Regardless, he needed to consult
with Auckland about the painkillers and dosage before waking the patient. “Back
to the freezer, Yuki. Snowflake, close the stasis cover.” Toby hid the evidence
of the amputation—to give Mercy hope. He could still arrange something with
Yuki later if Mercy didn’t work out.

Toby spent the rest of his sentence
learning about the windows in the control room. The others weren’t aware of
this, but they could be instructed to zoom in on any person or location. The window
could follow that person if commanded. Experimenting for days, he even found a
setting to enhance the image, much like a military starlight scope. He told no
one about this new ability, but kept it for himself. After a week of practice
with the ability, he felt omniscient. This could come in very handy.

The first week of darkness passed slowly for Mercy: decorating
the dorm, studying dry medical texts, picking olives on the mountain, transplanting
mushrooms, processing bamboo, tying together greenhouse covers for the gardens,
weeding Johnny’s herb garden, and drying fish. She also drew more than her
share of kitchen duty—scrubbing, not cooking. Her arms were aching. Mercy didn’t
complain because Yvette worked just as hard picking root vegetables for storage
in the root cellar since they didn’t have jars to can the excess yet.

Her least favorite task was wading
out into the lakes to measure the water levels so the planners could determine
how much water each jump consumed. The flood sticks she installed would help
the next team read the results with binoculars. Eventually she decided to build
a raft to rig more permanent measurement devices. An expert at boats, Lou helped
her with the undertaking. He showed her everything she needed to know about
knots, but when it was her turn to demonstrate, she became so flustered under
his intense gaze that she dropped her scissors in the lake.

Each day the air in the sphere grew
half a degree colder.

Zeiss, Sojiro, and Red spent all
their time in the cave the astronauts dubbed ‘the model train room’—with projections
and maps covering the floor, ceiling, and every wall. They were replanning the
next few legs of the trip with their new data. The next leap would take them to
a nice, warm sun. They’d bask there to recharge the ecosystem. Since
Sanctuary
only had enough fuel for ten to twelve more jumps, each immersion into subspace
needed to take them as far as possible; however, travelling too far or into a
dark region would mean another winter. Nothing was ever easy. They decided to
plot the course to Midway, the point of no return, and vote whether to continue
or not once they arrived.

On the fourth night, Lou drew
kitchen duty for some minor infraction. He would sit for hours regaling the men
of camp with action stories and off-color jokes. This kept the men away from
legitimate work as well as their respective womenfolk—neither of which broke
the charter. However, when he slipped and said something religiously
intolerant, the women could give him “sensitivity chores” to rehabilitate him.

Since his latest gaff gave Mercy
the night off, she used the free time to have Auckland teach her how to draw
and type someone’s blood. Proudly, she told her dorm mate, “I’m O positive,
Oleander—universal donor. That means if anyone gets hurt, I can save them.”

Preparing for the ‘night’ shift, Oleander
laughed. “A noble sentiment. Sometimes, no matter what we do, bad things
happen.”

It was the first night groundside she
didn’t collapse—the night the nightmares began.

In Mercy’s dream, the aliens told
her she could save the Brazil spaceport and everyone in it if she were clever
enough. She tried to solve the problem, but her arms were slowed by high-g goo.
Nonetheless, she shouted commands to Snowflake and typed on her helmet
interface as fast as she could.

When she failed, the spaceport
burst into flames again. After which, the few smoking shards of her childhood
home were leveled by a wall of water. She screamed until Oleander slapped her
awake.

Red ran into the dorm room. “Mercy,
what the blazes were you doing?”

“They were all counting on me. I
wasn’t good enough.”

Her childhood friend leaned next to
her and put an arm around her. “You’re shivering, girl. I’ll tell Risa to bring
a heater in here.”

After Mercy calmed, she asked, “Red,
what brought you into the dorm?”

“Since you went to sleep with your
headset on, you’d created a new project for Snowflake and were stealing our
computer resources. If we’d let you continue, who knows what you might have
built.”

“I might have saved Brazil.” The dream still clung to her, more logical and real than the tragedy.

“It’s okay. Now we know. At bedtime,
we all need to take off our comm sets and mute them.”

Oleander had to go back on duty, so
Red held Mercy till she fell asleep.

The next morning, Risa moved the
incubators into the women’s dorm room.

“What’s this?” asked Mercy,
awakened by the sound of an electric screwdriver.

“All the heat I can spare—thirty-five
degrees Celsius,” the Latina said. “Toby said the lamps might help the
depression if you were suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder. The jerk
doesn’t realize you lost more than anyone else at the spaceport. Nobody cared
enough about him to show up for his launch. Dr. Baatjies also wanted you to
have more hands-on experience with the life sciences, so he recommended you be
in charge of the chicken ark.”

“The what?”

“Some of them may be turkeys or
pheasants. We collected ten fertilized eggs of each fowl type we encountered,
assuming eight would hatch. We’ve filled the greenhouses with all the plants we
could sample.”

“Like Noah’s Ark.”

“Exactly. If winter lasts too long,
we’ll be able to repopulate . . . and have omelets. Toby was in charge, but since
you’re low woman on the bioscience totem pole, the job now falls to you.”

****

Mercy had nightmares the next
night, too, but there were no disastrous side effects. Yvette just put a hand
on her forehead to check for fever. At least she wasn’t shivering now.

At the end of the first week at the
outskirts of the solar system, Yvette, Park, and Nadia travelled lensward to
take the next shift. Toby went straight to the men’s dormitory. That night, the
chicks began to stir in their shells. Mercy watched till morning as they pecked
their way free. Toby found her there watching the chicks dry off and then wander
around the box.

Mercy was glowing when she said,
“They kept knocking over the water bowl, so I made a big tray.”

“Yeah. They’ll poop in that and
spread diseases, but this is good enough for today. You’ll want pine shavings
for the floor, and eventually roosting poles. My mother has chickens.”

“How do I tell the boys from the
girls?”

“There’s a bump, but even a pro
misreads that one out of every ten times. I can never tell the cocks apart until
about five weeks when they either crow or develop a comb.”

“They don’t eat the bugs yet, but
Strut will eat the coarse-ground grain out of my hand.”

“Tell me you’re not naming them!
They’re
food
. For the boys, all but three must be, or they fight. You
can only have one cock of the walk for each coop.”

She opened her pocket to show him
the chick huddled inside. “But she loves to snuggle!”

Even Toby didn’t have the heart to
discourage her. Instead, he reached into his bag. “Dr. Auckland said you’ve
been taking his blood samples for the hemoglobin check, and you have a gentle
touch. I suppose that will come in handy if we ever need to give children shots.
You’ve earned this.” He handed back her cleaned lab coat.

Her eyes opened wide, and she threw
herself into a broad hug. Toby left his arms at his sides but closed his eyes
to enjoy the thanks.

“How is Yuki?” she asked, assuming
the best.

“Easy there. I had to remove your
tourniquet to examine the injury more closely. Whatever we decide, it will
probably take all three of the medical professionals in Olympus a good nine to
twelve hours to achieve. I doubt we’re going to be able to accomplish that
before we reach our mission goal.”

“I could take Yvette’s place as
nurse. You could train me.”

He looked her over as she slipped
back into her familiar lab-coat armor. “You show promise. Perhaps.”

By the end of the second week
beyond Sedna’s dark orbit, Mercy had nearly all of the birds named. Strut came
to her whenever she held out her hand. The other chicks knew her by the sight
of her white lab coat and would waddle behind her as if she were the mother hen.

Coming back from guard shift,
Oleander groaned. “They won’t stop peeping! How am I going to sleep?”

“I’ll cover their pen while you’re
in bed. They’ll quiet down.”

“How can you stand it all day?”

“They keep the nightmares away.”

The hardened spacer couldn’t argue
with the results. “Fine. The next twenty-four days will be subspace travel—a
long jump. Watch them for any strange symptoms. I could use your help on my
shift to watch for the predators.”

“Okay. I won’t let anything in to
eat my babies.”

****

Toby, Red, and Zeiss oversaw the
long jump personally.

After the first full shift of their
being submerged, Oleander reported evidence of a new winged creature—bats. She
relayed this information as she woke Mercy for her shift with Herk.

“They must eat the insects at
night,” Mercy reasoned.

“Why didn’t I notice them before
now?” asked the security team member.

“Maybe they change their pattern in
subspace.”

“Perhaps it messes with their
sonar, too.”

“Did you track them back to their
cave?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“The guano will be good fertilizer.
Ask Rachael.”

Oleander sighed. “We’ll send out
search parties.”

“I just had a thought. Did Park
have a headache after the first immersion?”

“No. Why?”

“I think gravity talents might be
immune to the effect. That would be me, Park, and Z.”

Taking off her boots, Oleander
asked, “Are you suggesting we experiment on our commanding officer?”

“I’m saying that I don’t think the
designers of the ship would let us open the shutters if it could harm us. More
than that, I don’t think they planted all this vegetation so it could die.”

“There’s a definite negative effect
every time we jump. Everybody else feels it.”

“Maybe it’s just a boundary
effect,” Mercy suggested. “I want to see what happens when we open just one of
the giant shutters—”

“That’s crazy.”

Mercy continued, “At the
translucent
setting.”

“They have a third setting?”

“Every other window in this place
does. To be safe, they could opaque all the windows in Olympus.”

“That . . . could work.”

“Would you carry the message to Olympus? For me?”

The security specialist said, “If
Red is on duty, she’ll try it. If Z is on, he won’t.” She glanced at her wrist
to check the time. “I’ll try in five minutes.”

After preparing for bed, Oleander
lay on her mattress. Entering the proper mental state, consciousness left her
body. A few moments later, she reopened her ice-blue eyes. “Make sure everyone’s
inside. We have fifteen minutes till the test commences.”

Excited, Mercy asked, “You mean
everyone but me?”

“
Everyone
. She won’t risk a
single person on this. We want a lot of rock between us and any subspace
radiation. Red’s going to set up their camera and some Geiger counters on the
domino patio, open a shutter for ten seconds, and close it again.”

The campers congregated in the mess
hall, waiting for the results. After the experiment, Nadia checked the
readings. “Nothing worse than the exposure we faced at the Antarctic station or
the UN moon base.” Once she announced it was safe, everyone huddled around her
to watch. When she activated the camera’s playback, the tiny screen flared with
coruscating light. In her Russian accent she commented, “Is like Saint Elmo’s fire
in different colors. The lighting effect looks like what happens when you put a
florescent bulb in the microwave.”

Nobody in the group other than
Nadia had ever done this, so she explained, “The radiation excites some gas in
the windows and gives us dim light.”

“Enough to photosynthesize?” asked
Mercy.

“For the evergreens and shade
plants, probably. The fruit trees will probably lose their leaves, but the
daytime animals will think is it just another cloudy day.”

“We’ll still need the grow lights
in the main greenhouse,” Rachael said.

Oleander asked, “What next?”

Rachael replied, “We’ll put some
pheasants out in the yard for a few hours and see if they survive the exposure.
After that, Herk can go out in his EVA suit. When that works, we try someone in
a normal spacesuit.” Turning to Mercy, she asked, “How did you know?”

Mercy self-consciously bound her
hair, blocking the stares with her elbows. “It’s kind of like my dad’s BMW.
Whenever I wanted to do something new, like change the tire, I asked myself, ‘How
would I design it?’ Then I’d look in that place and find the tools, hook, or
mount point.”

Laughing, Nadia said, “Is good
thing
Sanctuary
is not Russian car. Then, only heater would work.”