Zenn Scarlett (3 page)

She toggled the switch and the invisible energy barrier crackled off. Still trying to clear her head after what just happened, she was about to switch the fence back on as Otha came to help her out of the tank-pack. Strands of her hair lay like damp red cobwebs across her face. Her sodden coveralls, pant legs and sleeves rolled up to fit, clung to her like a clammy second skin. She didn’t want to imagine what sort of scrawny, drowned animal she must look like – a Tanduan skinkstork, according to Otha. And that’s when she wasn’t soaking wet.

She was tall for her age, but not tall enough in her own opinion, her body thin and wiry, her straight-as-string waist-length hair the color of Brother Hamish’s homemade strawberry wine. Years of clinic chores and fieldwork had left her lean, muscled and tan, with constellations of freckles spangled across arms and face. She didn’t mind the freckles especially, but she alternated between liking the look of her strong arms, and then wondering if they made her look boyish, and then wondering why she was wasting time thinking about this at all.

As she stood dripping before him, Otha gave her a hard look.

“Well, novice?”

Zenn winced at the sound of the word. Halfway through her novice year – and this is how she showed him what she could do. Wonderful. Nice job.

“I… lost my balance. I must have hit the nozzle keypad when I slipped,” she said, being careful to avoid his gaze so he couldn’t read the lie she was telling. “I should have locked in the setting.”

“That you should,” Otha said, inspecting the tank-pack nozzle to confirm her error. “And what should you have done when you slipped? That is, after you hoisted yourself back aboard the animal using his eyelid for a hand-hold?”

He’d seen. Of course he’d seen. He never misses my mistakes. And now he’s going to turn it into a “teaching moment”. Perfect.
 

“I should have checked the setting again,” she said, trying not to sound irritated with him, still not meeting his gaze.

“Right. But I’ll tell you what you did instead. You patted yourself on the back and took a little extra time for some daydreaming, eh? Enjoy the view?” Zenn inspected the ground at her feet. Otha was mad. With good reason. But his temper was shorter than usual lately. She assumed it was the cloister’s finances, or what was left of them. That and the towners. But to have Otha talk to her like this inflicted an almost physical pain on her.

“I slipped, Otha,” she repeated. “If I could try one more time…”

“You know how this works, Zenn,” Otha said, cutting her off. “Results for end of term proficiency tests are final. Period. I’m required to report scores to the Level Progress certification board. And even if I was allowed to show you any favoritism, I wouldn’t. That would do you no good at all in the long run. Now, you just had some bad luck on the first test. But no need to panic. Two tests left. And I’m sure you’ll make up the difference on those. Won’t you?”

She nodded, and briefly considered bringing up the fact that the tank pack spray nozzle seemed to have developed a sudden case of hair-trigger. But Otha, she could tell, was in no mood for excuses, valid or not.

“Checklists, novice,” he said. Apparently, the lecture wasn’t over yet. “We have them for a reason. What’s the first item on the list when treating mega-fauna?”

“Big animals are dangerous. Small mistakes are deadly,” she intoned, her face going even redder as she recited this, the most basic principle of all.

I know what went wrong, Otha.
 

Actually, that wasn’t entirely true either. She knew she should’ve verified the nozzle setting, of course. And checked the trigger sensitivity. But she had no idea what had just happened with… the other thing. She certainly couldn’t tell her uncle that, though. With his fiercely bearded face, graying braids and barrel-chest, facing Otha’s displeasure was more like confronting a medieval Earther warlord than the director-abbot of a Ciscan cloister training clinic. She kept quiet and wrung solution out of her hair.

“You’ve been a little… distracted lately, eh?” Otha’s sharp tone said this was the teacher speaking, not the uncle. “Maybe more than a little. Studies? End of term jitters? Or something else?”

Studies?
Well, yes, for starters!
she wanted to say. The heavy course load, the late-night cramming sessions, the merciless exam schedule, all on top of her usual chores and tending the clinic’s animals. Prepping for her all-important end of term tests was just more of the same, only with the added stress that the results would determine if she progressed to the next level of training or… well, the alternative was too horrific to consider. She
had
to accumulate a passing score on the tests. The first was the whalehound eye wash, and she was fairly sure she’d failed that about as miserably as was humanly possible. But Otha was right. Two more chances. And no reason to think she wouldn’t ace the next one: an in-soma pod insertion into a Tanduan swamp sloo. And while the mere thought of being confined in the body-hugging interior of the pod instantly provoked feelings of claustrophobia, Zenn felt quite confident about that particular test. She knew the in-soma procedures backward and forward. Despite her mother’s fatal in-soma run on the Indra, or maybe because of it, Zenn had always been drawn to the device and its remarkable capabilities. She was actually looking forward to finally going beyond the textbook diagrams and v-film animations, and taking a pod into a living animal for the first time. So, test number two was in the bag.

Test number three, however, was much more worrisome. Legendary among exovet novice trainees, the end of term Third Test was always a mystery – at least until the day it was sprung on the unsuspecting novice. The only requirement was that it had to be roughly within the parameters of something the novice should already know at that point in the program. As director-abbot of the Ciscan cloister school, Otha was allowed to pick the procedure and the animal for the Third Test, but was not allowed to so much as hint at what the challenge entailed. This, as any exovet novice in history would freely admit, was crazy-making.

And, of course, beyond her schoolwork, there was her father. But Warra Scarlett was a different kind of problem altogether. Worst of all of this was the hard fact she couldn’t bring any of it up with Otha. Being overworked and stressed was simple reality for any would-be exoveterinarian in their first year of training. And besides, none of this was the real issue. The real issue was what just took place between her and the whalehound, whatever that was.

Why now? Why is this happening to me now, of all times?
 

Maybe it was nothing, she told herself. Maybe it was her imagination. Maybe it would just go away. The problem was that she simply didn’t have enough information to form a working hypothesis. And without the building blocks of a basic premise about what was happening between her and the animals recently, she had no hope of getting to the truth. She had to wait, gather data… or in this case, let the data happen to her, and attempt to sort it out afterwards. The facts so far simply made no kind of sense, gave her nothing to work with. This was deeply frustrating. But Zenn had been raised in a house of science. And the clean, unambiguous answers science yielded had demonstrated the superiority of this approach time and time again.

Let the world speak for itself.
 

She heard this from Otha on a regular basis. This was the simple key, the scalpel-sharp tool of the scientific mind. Of her mind. She would wait for the data.

“…and if the course load is too much for you, if you need a break,” Otha was saying, his voice a little softer now, one large hand coming to rest on her shoulder, “you need to speak up. These animals don’t just deserve your full concentration. They demand it. You know that.”

“I’m fine, really,” she said quickly, a sharp flutter of fear passing through her. Zenn knew she would be – knew she
had
to be – an exoveterinarian from the moment she learned there was such a thing. She also knew novices had been dismissed from the cloister exovet school for less serious mistakes than the one she’d just made. She couldn’t tell Otha what she’d been feeling lately. She couldn’t risk being washed out of the program. And after what just happened, that unthinkable disaster suddenly edged a little closer to the realm of the possible.

“I’m just tired, that’s all,” she lied again. “I’ll do better.” To avoid Otha’s eyes she turned toward the sedated hound. He could have been hurt. So could she and Otha.

“Right,” her uncle said. “That would be wise. When we send the royal family’s hound back to them, we want to hand over a healthy animal, don’t we?”

Zenn nodded.

“Good. Lesson learned.” Otha waved his hand at the virt-screens still drifting around his head. But instead of turning off, the screens flickered fitfully and gave off a harsh whine. The main CPU needed new optic relays. That, however, would take spare parts, and spare parts of any kind had been in short supply on Mars for as long as Zenn could remember. The Rift with Earth made sure of that. Now stretching into its second decade, the Rift’s imposition by the ruling Authority on Earth had totally shut down Earther trade with Mars, or with any of the dozen alien-inhabited planets of the Local Systems Accord. The effect on the Martian colonies had been minimal at first. The true scope of the Rift only gradually revealed itself. Now, as old machinery and technology began to wear out, break down or become obsolete, there was no chance of replacement parts or software upgrades from the original Earther suppliers.

And the increasingly troublesome “Indra problem” was only making it even harder to get supplies from the other planets of the Accord – not to mention bring new clients to the clinic. Another starship had been reported missing just last week. During the past five years alone, almost two dozen Indra-powered ships and everyone on board them had vanished without so much as a neutrino trail. So far, the losses were limited to ships plying the far frontier areas – military scouts, survey missions. Some sort of on-board mechanical failure was suspected, but at this point, the sporadic reports that filtered through to Mars made it sound as if investigators had turned up nothing conclusive.

The fact was that the only place on Mars that would have anything as exotic as optic relays for their virt-screen was New Zubrin. And the only mag-lev train still running regularly from Arsia to Zubrin was being stopped and robbed by outlaw bands of scab-landers on a weekly basis. Pushed out into the most inhospitable and barren canyons known as scab-lands, these lawless, roving gangs were made up of the men and women who’d entirely given up on adhering to the rules governing what remained of civilized life in the towns. Scab-landers took what they wanted, whenever they wanted it.

Otha frowned at the malfunctioning screens circling him and waved his hand again, more emphatically. This time the screens obeyed, winking off with a series of quiet popping sounds.

“I want to try again,” Zenn said, attempting to sound more confident than she felt. She bent to rub at her aching leg, but then stopped when she thought Otha might see. She saw Otha frowning at her. “I know it won’t count in the test scoring. But he needs his eye taken care of.”

“We’ll take a break. Get you some dry clothes and pour a mug of hot cider down you. It’s best we let the animal settle a bit.” Otha gave her a steady look. “And you too.” The chill of fear raced through her again. She managed to give her uncle a half-hearted smile, but kept silent as they left the hound and headed for the refectory dining hall on the other side of the cloister grounds.

TWO

In the spacious kitchen adjoining the refectory hall, Zenn sat on a stool and blotted at her hair with a towel before gulping the last of the warm kipfruit juice. She now wore a dry pair of coveralls over her outfit of rough hempweave pants, low corvis-hide boots and the light blue, second-hand linen shirt Sister Hild had found for her at the Arsia City co-op.

“Right. I’m good now,” she said, hopping off the stool. A spasm of pain jolted up through her leg, making her suck in a quick breath.

“You sure?” Otha raised a questioning eyebrow at her.

“Yes, I’m sure.” She leaned with one hand on the stool, attempting a jaunty pose, while taking the weight off her leg. “I need to get back on the horse that threw me, don’t I?” she said, repeating one of her uncle’s favorite sayings. Of course, she’d never seen a horse in the flesh, let alone been thrown off one.

“You are your mother’s daughter, no doubt about it,” he said as they set off, Zenn walking gingerly, hanging back just slightly behind her uncle. They crossed into the refectory dining hall, past the long rows of empty tables and benches, their footsteps echoing. “You know, there was a time,” Otha said, “when your mother was at the same point you’re at now. I can see her plain as day, bright-eyed, all business, just starting her novitiate.”

This was promising, Zenn decided. Family talk. Casual talk. Anything to distract Otha from what had happened with the hound.

“Of course, Mai was older than you,” Otha said. This was a long-running issue between her and Otha. And between her and her father as well. They’d both insisted she was too young to begin her novitiate, and they’d both engaged her in several rounds of arguing over it. But Zenn knew she was ready. In the end, she wore them both down.

“Mai was nineteen during her first year, if I recall correctly,” Otha continued, giving her a quick glance but not bringing up Zenn’s own age again. That battle had been won, she told herself with some measure of satisfaction. For reasons Zenn never really understood, the colonists on Mars clung to a number of outdated Earther traditions – like how they measured the passage of time. With Mars’ orbit lasting roughly twice as long as Earth’s, a Martian year equaled about two Earth years. By that computation, in Mars years Zenn wasn’t seventeen, she was eight-and-a-half. It sounded comical.

“I remember this particular incident – one of Mai’s first patients was a Grosvenor’s thorn-throw,” her uncle said as they stepped out of the refectory and headed for the calefactory meeting hall.