“I want to stay here with Mama.” Xe didn’t usually pay much attention to the long, red light wave lengths that were part of his normal spectral vision, but the child’s body glowed yellow and green while her face appeared orange and red.
“She’s just going to keep sleeping; she doesn’t know you’re here, Zalara.”
“I know I’m here.”
Quixote had never seen Rianya as flushed and hot in the five years he’d known her. Mills had her on a warming table but only covered with a sheet to keep her fever from escalating to a dangerous level. Nothing in the humans’ sick bay worked on her non-human body to reduce the fever, and Mills decided he had to let her own immune system work with the antibiotics to kill the Yersinia pestis.
“She wouldn’t want you to worry and sit here all the time. She’d want you to go play with Honey. I’ll stay here in case she wakes up, if you like.”
“No.” The little half human folded her arms and didn’t look at Quixote.
“You’re not to touch her, Zalara. Your father would not approve.”
“I know.” She didn’t look at Quixote but instead at her mother. “Mr. Mills say I need to let his medicine make her get better.”
“He’s right.”
“The bad is all right here,” she said, putting a hand on her own chest. “I can feel inside,” she said. She finally looked at Quixote with her curious eyes, the jade crystals of her father and frilly-edged pupils of her mother. “I can do it. I don’t care what Mr. Mills say, I not let her die.”
“Yes, I know. But let the medicine try first.”
“I not letted Papa die. Papa had lectricee in his head. Mama haves ocean in her chest.” Quixote assumed that meant the hyper-hydro pneumonia.
“Your mama said you are not to fix her.”
“I don’t care.”
“Oh, look here, thank you Bailey,” xe said when the chef arrived carrying a tray.
“I’m going to put this on the table,” Bailey told them, drawing the two of them out of the single bay into the treatment room. “It would be better to eat here,” she said with a nod to Quixote. Xe took Zalara’s tiny hand in his heavy claw and led her out despite her reluctance.
Mr. Mills and Bailey joined them at the table. Quixote detected a chill in the room that he could literally see. Xe cared for Zalara and Rianya as much as anyone else, but in a slightly different way that he could never quite define. Of course he and Rianya were the only aliens on the human ship, and Zalara, well, xe’d known her since the day she’d been born. More than the captain’s family, xe’d known Thomas Jackson for almost 20 years and admired the human for at least a dozen reasons. His choice to bond with an alien, Rianya, and his forthright affection for Zalara only confirmed the captain was a human worthy of respect.
If Rianya perished, Zalara would go on, but he wasn’t certain if the captain would. Jackson seemed born to push boundaries, to explore, to take risks, but a facet of him put the safety of these two females as his priority, tempering yet enhancing his skills as their ship’s leader. Jackson had explained to xe years ago that being a captain in the air service meant you could fly an air vehicle. Being a captain in the naval service meant you commanded a ship and crew.
“Zalara,” Mr. Mills began gently, “You need to go down to the gym and meet up with Honey. She’s been missing you.”
“I have to stay with Mama.”
“We’re here to take care of her, Sweetie. I’m not going to let anything happen to her.”
“Zalara, I could really use your help in the galley; Honey too. We’re a little shorthanded lately.” The girl looked from one adult to another then at Quixote. Her hand grasped a glass filled with fruit juice, her mouth a straight line, her eyes focused on the drink.
“Okay,” she said. Tension dropped palpably by several magnitudes. The vigil was broken, but most likely not over. She drank the glass of juice and took a handful of puff cookies as Bailey took her by the other hand and led her out of sick bay.
“I need to give her another treatment,” Mills said, vaulting from the table, his chair rolling away on the slick floor. Quixote took his celery beverage and drank it in one long slug, clanked the glass down on the tray and followed Mr. Mills into Rianya’s isolated chamber.
Mills promptly turned on several monitors and placed some sensors on his patient’s head. Her mane was bound and contained in a puffy blue cap that barely held all her thick tresses. Her eyes had sunken in her skull, her long lashes motionless on her cheekbones. Patchy grey areas of her pink skin revealed that the depth of the infection was no longer solely in her lungs.
Numbers blinked on the monitors over her head, a few in green, most of them in orange, one in red. Xe knew enough that red numbers in any department, engineering or the sick bay, were bad numbers.
Mills placed a mask over her nose and mouth which was attached to a strange hose, one with a second, smaller hose inside. The red number 89 turned an orange 92.
“Her lungs can’t oxygenate her blood,” Mills muttered. “I wish she’d just come out of it already, but overall her stats are stable,” Mills said. “Adams warned me this could happen so it’s not like I’ve been blindsided, but I would sure love to have his or Dr. Ferris’ help. Henderson’s the only one who can help.”
“I volunteer as help, if there’s anything I can do.”
“Keep Zalara out of here. I can’t watch her and Rianya at the same time.” Mills placed a ampule of medicine in a micro injector and pressed it against her neck. They watched the numbers begin to change, a few flipping from orange to yellow, a few from orange to green. Mills’ attention focused on the numbers while they changed. “I take it you haven’t talked to the captain yet.”
“I’m afraid not. Mr. Lee has orders to find him, but no one has seen him for several hours.”
“Hours?”
“Seems apparently the entire Cinconian population stops whatever they’re doing and travel to enormous stadiums to watch the politicians physically battle for office. The captain was invited to attend. We suspect he’s indisposed or unable to respond.”
Rianya still lay unconscious but her skin had cooled a degree already.
“Why is her condition so grave when the rest of the crew is not sick at all?”
“She’s not human, Quixote. Remember, her DNA spins in the opposite direction of earthlings. I think we forget that since she’s so much like us. I look at you and I know you aren’t human.”
“If that was supposed to insult me it did not,” Quixote quipped. “She is human enough to the captain.”
“He is unlike any other human I’ve known over the years.”
“He’d give the bacteria hell if he could. The strain that survived in that mummy must have been titans to survive as they did and infect her to this degree.”
“Titans in a Trojan Horse,” Quixote said with hindsight. Mr. Mills stared at him askew. “Have you not read Homer, Mr. Mills?”
“Quixote, I’m a man of medicine, not literature. Her immune system is what’s suffering now. The systemic Yersinia is responding to the ciprofloxacin but it’s damaging her internal fauna. Her poor body doesn’t know what to do with the dead Yersinia. This is why we don’t want to treat with broad spectrum medications, they don’t target specifically enough.
“You need to have someone find the captain and get him up here in preparation for the worst-case scenario,” Mills continued. “I can’t guarantee Rianya will pull through this. She could fall into a coma. We all need the captain and doctor to come back to Maria Mitchell.”
“I agree, Mr. Mills. I’ll see if there’s anything else I can do from the bridge.”
The planet Cinco occupied the bow windows, and but for a few chirps, beeps and whistles, the bridge was eerily silent, quiet, and still. Ensign Rougeau turned briefly and nodded. Zoe Stone, the quartermaster, stood near the navigator’s station and also tipped her head at Quixote.
“Mr. Rougeau, have you knowledge of Mr. Watson’s whereabouts?”
“He is on the overnight watch; I would guess he’s in his quarters.”
“I haven’t seen him,” Zoe added. “I’m manning his station for now, sir.”
“We must contact Captain Jackson even if it means breaking radio silence. Code a priority one signal and ping his personal com until he answers it. No words, just the signal. Let me know as soon as you hear from him.”
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