David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

—Easy, easy. Okay, you Indonesians and Danes over there, you draw radially!—

Carl had not seen Jeffers so happy since the man had been unslotted. The man had hated work in the tunnels, preferring by far the hard glimmer of space and the oily tang of metal and machines.

Carl couldn’t really blame him, at that. Almost anything beat the doom and gloom down below. That was a major reason why he had pushed for the Newburn rescue attempt. He was convinced that the benefits to morale would do more for general health than all of Akio Matsudo’s traditional therapy and Saul Lintz’s laboratory concoctions.

He adjusted his visor to magnification 4 and looked toward Scorpio, where the comet’s fading dust tail was now barely a faint glow in the infrared. A few speckles told of grains big enough to reflect light still from the diminishing sun. One of the biggest of those speckles, he knew now for certain, was the slot tug Newburn .

If she had not existed, we would have had to invent her.

There came a cheer over the open-background comm as the storage unit met Halley’s surface with a soft puff of vapor. Jeffers wrung his hands over his head in nonchalant triumph. Carl had to smile.

This was his favorite of the three shifts working to refurbish and strip down the Edmund . Sure, he felt at home with Sergeov’s purely Percell team. But the mixed volunteers were the most cheerful lot.

Especially the Danes and Hawaiians. They didn’t seem to give a hoot if a man was an Ortho or a Percell… or a Denebian Glebhound… just as long as he wasn’t a purple or a goddamn Arcist.

Virginia is Hawaiian , he remembered. No wonder she was such an unrepentant Orthophile. Ortho-lover. Obviously, she didn’t see anything wrong with shacking up with one.

The thought lingered and made him feel a bit guilty as Lani Nguyen passed by, carrying a nickel-iron brace that would have crushed her anywhere with gravity, even on the moon.

—Hey, handsome—she sent. —You busy for the next three months?—

“What’ve you got in mind?” he said, leering back amiably. And she managed to put a little wag into her walk as she passed. Her unicorn tabard grinned back at him.

Oh, hell , Carl reminded himself, there are some good Orthos .

Lani had volunteered for the rescue mission in a flash. Good old Lani . She was so patient with him, never rebuking him at all for showing up at her cubicle every now and then, looking for company, then disappearing or keeping things strictly comradely for weeks at a stretch.

If only she were more what I’m looking for. More intellectual. More sensual. A Percell.

More like Virginia, in other words.

Only one Arcist was on duty right now. Each faction had a “watcher” to keep an eye on the others’ shifts… an unofficial designation, to be sure, but one more and more common at important functions such as slottings and unslottings.

Helga Steppins viewed the proceedings carefully, using a laser transit to double-check everything done by Jeffers’s crew. As Carl approached, she stepped to one side warily, as if he could infect her through two spacesuits and three meters of vacuum.

“You know, it’d be a lot easier to get at the Edmund’s science cluster if you’d let us remove the hydroponics modules first,” he told her. “It’d probably save two days.”

The taciturn, blond Austrian woman shook her head.

—Stupid trick, Osborn. We both know the launch date is set by when the fuel is ready. That’s at least next Tuesday.—

He balled his fists in disgust over this obstinacy. “Why, in the name of the Black, would I want to trick you? You people are the ones to insist on an insanely huge fuel reserve for a simple three-month rendezvous and return! We’ll have a stripped ship, and we don’t need more than six kilometers per second delta-V!”

The Arcist woman shrugged. —Safer if the tanks are topped off. Only au idiot sets sail without proper stores.—

“But…

—You don’t like it? Complain to that Percephile, Ould-Harrad.—

Carl snorted. Ould-Harrad? A Percell lover? Ha!

“Look, if we lower just the number-one hydroponics module now…”

—No!—She whirled on him, gripping the laser transit tightly. —The whole colony depends on that farm!—

“But the new dome is almost ready. All the fittings…”

Steppins swiveled back to face the Edmund again, as if afraid that Carl’s intent was only to distract her while Jeffers and the Hawaiians spirited the entire torch ship away.

—You Percells don’t fear the Halley diseases as much as we human beings do. We won’t go into why , since you keep denying all responsibility for the sicknesses. But it is sufficient to know that we will not let the hydro be polluted! Both the big and small hydroponics modules stay attached until the new dome is completely checked out…and by an Ortho specialist!—

Carl fumed. He knew what his alternatives were. He could give Jeffers the go-ahead anyway… and maybe spark a miniwar among the factions.

Or he could run below and complain to the spineless Mauritanian in command.

Or he could go down and lend a hand.

“Use a purple during your next erotic rest break,” he suggested, and kicked off toward the workers before she could reply.

“Hey, Lani!” he called. “Let me help you with that thing.”

“I’m getting so I don’t even care about the danger of dying anymore, Saul. It’s the itch I can’t stand. All day, all night, in spite of the topicals Akio Matsudo gives me. I swear, if this keeps up I’m going to ask ’Kio if I can borrow his great-grandfather’s seppuku knife and really scratch!”

Marguerite von Zoon lay facedown on the taut webbing, trying to keep still as the masked and gowned treatment-room techs picked away at her skin with tweezers and little glassine vials, sampling the fungoids that were turning her body into a battlefield.

A quarter of her skin was broken and cracked. Pink, half-open wounds and dark-domed blisters erupted in ugly patches. Here and there, the flesh had split open in nasty ulcerated sores, glistening with sickening dampness.

Saul worked his team as quickly as possible, knowing how hard this must be for her. Marguerite was an intensely private person—a true exile who had left Earth only in order to save her family from punishment for political crimes. Whatever it stated on some piece of paper, only a bureaucrat would try to say that she had “volunteered” to come out here to become food for gnawing alien cells.

And yet Marguerite’s cheerfulness was legendary. The discomfort had to be severe for her to be complaining at all.

Saul stepped up beside her as soon as the techs had finished. “Marguerite, I’m going to bring up the new beamer and try that experimental subdermal scrub now. Try not to move unnecessarily.”

She nodded curtly. Only a damp sheen on her forehead and her flexing palms betrayed her nervousness. Saul guided a wheeled hospital mech into position, canting the broad plate of a synthetic aperture microwave array over her prone form.

I’ve been privileged to know many fine human beings, Saulthought . But none braver than this good woman.

She had volunteered to be the first to try this untested treatment. When offered a chance to escape into the slots instead, she had rejected the idea outright. “I’ll not leave you and Akio as the only physicians awake during this crisis,” she had told him flatly.

Days had passed while the technicians built and rebuilt the new beamer to Saul’s specifications… always scratching for priorities against the hall crews and those overhauling the Edmund Halley . By now, there was little choice left. If this treatment didn’t work, Marguerite would have to go on ice.