Outlaw World, page 1
OUTLAW WORLD
MISSION 7
BLACK OCEAN: PASSAGE OF TIME
J.S. MORIN
Copyright © 2024 J.S. Morin
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J.S. Morin — First Edition
OUTLAW WORLD
MISSION 7
Dr. Harmony Richelieu lay flat on her own medical table, staring into the glare of the overhead lights. For noninvasive procedures, the level of illumination was excessive. However, in deference to her own physician, she kept from squinting or betraying her discomfort. A high-pitched hum both reassured and amused her, though she fought back equally against the grin that wanted to break out.
A tiny hand waved overhead, grasping a plastic wand. That hand stopped, shading her face.
“Mommy, your eyes are watering. Are you crying or is there an irritant?” Xrista asked, enunciating the last word so clearly and correctly that her mother couldn’t help a swell of pride.
“What’s your diagnosis?”
Xrista was quiet for a moment. “I think the lights are too bright.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well. For one, I don’t see why you’d be sad, so I don’t think you’re crying. For two, when I look up, my eyes get watery, too.”
“Excellent deduction!” Two reasons were sufficient for a four-year-old’s logical development. Limited exposure to children her own age had skewed Xrista’s socialization toward structured play and conversation out of bounds of the Martian Medical Society’s Childhood Development Schedule. She tended not to fiddle idly with blocks; she built things. She didn’t have tea parties with her dolls; they had backstories and acted out three-part plays in her toy room.
A thump of feet hitting the floor would have normally prompted Harmony to sit up and end the session, but she wanted to see what happened next. The stool used for her daughter to reach the patient atop the medical table dragged with a grating of metal on metal across the floor. Little feet climbed it again.
The lights dimmed.
Too much, frankly. Harmony could barely see anything but shadowy edges now.
“Is that better, Mommy?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
The stool scraped again, and Xrista climbed back up to resume her scanning in near-pitch-darkness.
A knock on the door startled them both.
“Got a min, Doc?” Junior asked from the doorway.
“Dr. Richelieu is busy presently,” Xrista stated firmly and with the same careful tiptoeing through long words that her speech coach had taught her.
“Sorry, cupcake. Mommy has to go back to work.”
“Aww.”
“Someone is really hurt this time. We can play later.”
“Makes you think I’m hurt?” Junior demanded playfully.
Harmony climbed down from the table, tugged the jacket of her teal uniform smooth, and reactivated normal illumination. Jaxon Schultz Jr. stood favoring one leg, leaning on the doorjamb for support. “The hint of strain in your voice. The posture I saw in silhouette in the doorway. The fact that you’re on my short list of crew who haven’t reported for their full physical exam yet.”
“To be fair about it, I haven’t let the wizard peek at my brain, either.”
Harmony pointed. “Bay 2. Get yourself situated, and I’ll be right with you. I’d offer you assistance walking, but I don’t expect you’d take it.”
Junior grunted an agreement on that count. He limped, using the wall as his crutch, and headed for Bay 2 as ordered. Subdividing Med Bay into multiple separate treatment rooms had been a priority once she’d gotten settled in. Two days as a construction supervisor, and she had a place where multiple patients could be treated in individual privacy. The haathee had no concept of modesty or embarrassment from what little she’d seen—unless Grosstet was atypical of his kind. The larger species could use the giant-sized facilities in Bay 1.
For now, Bay 4 needed decluttering. “Time to put everything away,” Harmony declared.
Xrista huffed but didn’t protest. She knew her pre-bedtime self-assessment of her behavior that day would determine whether dessert was forthcoming and influence the choice of stories. Good Xrista got to pick any story she liked; naughty Xrista got bedtime stories with moral lessons.
Secretly, the tales of adventure and whimsy had strong positive messages as well, but Xrista didn’t need to know that.
Once Bay 4 cleanup was well under way, Harmony headed over to Bay 2 to check in on her patient. Since this was a real visit, she shut the door behind her.
Sighing inwardly, she approached the table. “I don’t know what colonies you get treatment on typically, but why does half the crew think they need to be naked for a simple scan?”
“You weren’t too specific, Doc,” Junior countered. His uniform lay poorly folded atop his boots on a chair beside the door.
Harmony unclipped her basic med scanner from her belt and took a quick reading of heart and lung function. “If you’re all trying to impress me, this is a poor avenue.”
She caught the moment Junior tensed his pectoral muscles.
“Look, I got my knee jacked up in judo training. I don’t need a full scan.”
“Funny. According to my records, you do. Since you walked here under your own power, I’m going on the assumption that your injury is non-life-threatening, so the protocol is basic checks first, then diagnosis and treatment, then a full physical exam.”
“Aw, don’t even with that. Gonna take advantage of a bum knee to keep me here for a scan I don’t need?”
“If your heart rate were 155 or your blood pressure 60 over 30, I’d be remiss to wonder what ligamental trauma you may have suffered at the hands of your fellow crew.”
Junior grunted. “Wasn’t crew. It was the captain.”
Harmony tried to hide a smirk. While she was no marine, Jessie Ramsey had been subjected to advanced training and medical treatments that left her with bone and muscle density more than two standard deviations above the mean. And while Junior was undoubtedly stronger and plainly larger, the discrepancy wasn’t as wide as one might infer visually.
“You should have known better,” Harmony scolded.
“Call me an asshole, but I don’t like going full force against a woman. At least not when it’s not life or death.”
“Luckily for you, then, my services are gratis. Otherwise, I suspect you’d be spending a lot of money here, not just time.”
“OK. OK. Am I dying or can you look at my knee?”
Harmony took a few breaths to parse the readouts from her scanner. “Overall, you’re in excellent health. High cortisol levels, which is understandable given your stressful occupation. I’d recommend meditation.”
“Self-defense class was supposed to be relaxing.”
“Well, maybe pick a safer sparring partner,” Harmony advised as she swept the scanner over the swollen knee in front of her. “Oh my.”
“What? How’s it look?”
“You pulled off a trifecta. ACL, MCL, and PCL all torn. How’d you even walk here?”
“Slowly.”
“This doesn’t look like an accidental injury.”
“Never said it was an accident.”
That was never good to hear. Jessie had always been a firebrand, but that didn’t excuse intentionally injuring her subordinates. “Do I need to have a word with the captain?”
“Naw. We’re square. She’s not a kid anymore, and…”
“I see.” Jessie was younger than she had any right to be. Five years had passed her by. Most humans would have killed for a fountain of youth that could strip five years off their appearance, but not without getting to live those five years. “In any event, you’re in luck. I can get that knee fixed up in short order.”
Harmony ventured into one of the supply cabinets all along the wall. She came out with a tissue-grafting leg clamp.
“Overkill much?” Junior asked as the doctor set the device on the table beside his injured leg and opened it clamshell style.
“If I were the head of orthopedics at a Class 1 medical facility on Mars, I’d have these in a dozen sizes ready to choose the exact closest fit. Seeing as how I needed to pack a starship and lug everything across half the galaxy, I went for a one-size approach. Don’t try to help; just relax the muscles in your leg.”
Tiny force fields from Harmony’s bracelets provided a sterile barrier around her hands as she lifted her patient’s limp limb and set it into the grafter. When she closed it, Junior’s leg was enclosed from just below the cr
Magnets clacked, pinning the grafter securely to the table. Harmony pulled hoses from the wall and hooked them up to the ports on the grafter’s side. A medical datapad connected. She tapped in a treatment protocol. Servos whirred. Greenish gel pumped into the grafter, where it hardened around the joint—well, all of the leg, in this case. Then a series of stem injectors, force-field emitters, and bioelectric field modifiers went to work.
As the machinery went about its business, Harmony finished a full, thorough scan of Junior for the Arete’s records.
“For a man in your profession, you’re in marvelous physical condition,” Harmony concluded. “You have several mineral deficiencies common to spacers. I’ll forward you a list of settings for the food processor to help you offset those. Your cellular function is all normal. I purged a few benign pre-cancerous cells—something you should have done more often—and you should switch to a medicated toothsoap. I can see you’ve had your visual acuity tweaked at least four times; keep up with that on a biannual basis. Otherwise, once your knee ligaments are repaired, I’d say stick to light duty for a couple days, then resume normal activities.”
“How much longer on this thing?” Junior asked, slapping a palm on her tissue grafter.
Harmony checked her datapad. “Two hours, eighteen minutes.”
“What?”
“If you’d like quicker treatments, stay out of Med Bay while I figure out haathee nanotech. Otherwise, maybe try some of that meditation. I’ll be in shouting distance if you need anything.”
“What if I need to piss?”
Already poised at the door, Harmony marched around the far side of the examination table. There, she unhooked another hose from the wall. At the table, she used the fitting on the end to clip it to the metallic surface with a light magnetic force—just enough that it wouldn’t fall but easily pulled free. “The hose is liquid-sensitive and will activate a vacuum as needed. I assume you don’t need a demonstration.”
Junior shook his head.
The door shut behind Harmony as she headed from Bay 2 toward her laboratory.
Xrista was playing quietly in a corner, learning multiplication tables on her datapad in a game she adored.
On Harmony’s workbench, an array of depleted, misunderstood, and utterly alien devices awaited her. This was her real reason for being aboard the Arete. She’d teach the in-tik basic human medical care. She’d fill the role of ship’s doctor, complete with all the pro forma evaluations and examinations attendant to her position. And she would learn not only how to operate H-tech medical devices but replicate them.
However, in the meantime, no one on this ship was going to suffer so much as a head cold without her fixing them.
Jessie’s ready room was anything but. It needed a private washroom, a pull-out bed or something, and definitely some kind of snack bar. This place needed to be a professional office and an unprofessional spot to unwind, free from the prying eyes of her crew. Judges’ chambers, except military. This was where she ought to be able to confer with experts from her crew and confidantes she trusted with her innermost thoughts.
Her only upgrade since taking residence had been a decorative plant Drascz had made out of scrap metal. Nondescript, not exactly any particular flora, it had spray-tinted leaves and stood a meter and a half tall, just in frame behind her desk as she carried on a video comm.
Governor Horace Nikrat of Appalachia Colony had the look of a politician. From his overpolished smile to the carefully coiffed hair the color of fine dinnerware to the Nehru jacket that probably cost more than most of his citizens made in a month, he could only have been a colonial governor or the head of some middling borderlands corporation.
In this case, Governor Nikrat was both.
“Captain Ramsey, I hope you don’t find my line of questioning either accusatory or impertinent. But certain members of my government have expressed concern over the provenance of those remains.”
“Understandable,” Jessie replied evenly. There was no point getting worked up. This guy wasn’t a dictator or even a monarch. He had constituents and backers and rivals and allies to variously appease, confound, and keep promises to. Plus, he was newer at his job than Jessie was in hers. “But as I’ve stated, Evander Days is dead. Neither I nor any of my crew killed him—”
“That wouldn’t be a deal-breaker, Captain. Let me assure you!”
“Nevertheless, it’s the truth. The long and the short of it is that you want genetic proof that he’s dead, and I have his skull sitting on my desk right now. You have an independent trading planet with shipyard facilities; I have a ship that provides a degree of security to your little corner of the borderlands. I think there’s a deal to be had here.”
“Look. I have my detractors. You have yours. I know there are a dozen other worlds you could pick from with independent governments and the resupply options you need.” Jessie wasn’t sure the number was quite that high. “But I can’t make this deal unilaterally. If it were up to me, sure. I’d like to have a warship orbiting Appalachia that would make Mars and Earth think twice about occupying us. But to get the support I need for ratifying a treaty with the haathee, I’m going to need to win over some fence-sitters.”
Jessie hid her continued bemusement that the rest of formerly ARGO space was treating her as some kind of delegate of the haathee civilization. At best, she was running Grosstet’s ship because he realized he had more time for leisure with her captaining it. He’d given her a long leash, and since the odds of another haathee even hearing about the deal, let alone objecting, were practically nil, she was as good as an ambassador herself.
“What do you need from us? You wouldn’t be mentioning this unless you thought you couldn’t bring them around yourself.”
“Come to Appalachia Colony as my guests. Meet with some people I need to convince. Bring whoever you think might enjoy our hospitality, and prove to the naysayers that this alliance can work for both sides.”
Damn politicians. He made it sound so simple. But this wasn’t an A-to-B shift Nikrat was talking about. He was hinting at an A-to-Z with a whole alphabet worth of wheeling, dealing, and fine-print backstabbing along the way.
She needed a politician of her own. Whomever else she brought on this delegation, she’d need to include either Grosstet or her father. The choice between the two was clear. One had a long history of making friends and winning over enemies, while the other was a barely civilized animal with eating habits and mannerisms better suited to a zoo exhibit than a diplomatic conference.
“Thank you for the invitation, Governor. Have your people forward an itinerary. We’ll be there in eighteen hours.”
“We’ll look forward to showing you the highlights of Appalachia Colony.”
“And I’ll look forward to an alliance of mutual benefit. Ramsey out.”
She’d be spending a chunk of those hours finalizing a team and coming up with a plan for the negotiations.
Naturally, she’d be bringing Grosstet.
The star-drive chamber of the Arete was still a work in progress. With the relaxation of his timeline, Trebla had accepted help from Jomek and fabricated the parts they needed for the mechanical systems. Those parts now hung suspended in an exploded-diagram arrangement over an empty patch of floor nearby the site where it would be installed.
“And this looks right to you, somehow?” Hadrian asked. It was his magic holding the parts aloft. He stalked around the disassembled contraption as if glaring would force it to make sense.
“Muchly right; mostly connected. If you put the pieces the way they look now, it should work, yes,” Jomek informed the wizard.
“Assuming your magic hasn’t fouled anything,” Trebla clarified.
Hadrian turned that glare on Trebla. “I assured you once. I need not assure you again; this is not harming your precious technology.”
“Find the chill, young friend,” Jomek told the wizard. He took a puff of his atomizer and offered it with a lower hand.
The two laaku lounged in canvas camping chairs. Trebla had acquired an atomizer of his own from Figgy’s stash, generously shared, and nodded his assent. “The star that burns half as bright burns twice as long.” Something about the chemical mixture really helped the mind put life into its proper perspective.
