David Weber - The Apocalypse Troll

"I guess we'll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it," he said slowly. He became aware that her hand was still on his forearm and tried to disengage himself unobtrusively. But she tightened her grip, and he stopped and looked up to meet her eyes.

It was a mistake. Those eyes were not, he thought after a moment, what he would have expected from such a young woman. Their incredibly clear, darkly blue depths understood. There was a soft almost-twinkle in them, a sort of gentle teasing he almost grasped laid over a bittersweetness he couldn't begin to fathom. They held neither the embarrassment nor the unintentional cruelty of surprise he might have expected from one so young. And, perhaps most surprising of all, they showed no rejection, not even the gentle nonresponse of someone trying to avoid hurting him for his ridiculous interest.

He was caught. He couldn't recall ever seeing anything quite like her understanding expression, and it was hard to remember hers was the face of a woman who'd killed-killed repeatedly-in the performance of her duty. He had killed, sometimes at a range so close he had smelled his victim's sweat before he struck, and he knew it had marked him inside. He hoped it hadn't made him callous or cold, but he knew it hadn't left him untouched, and he'd often suspected it must show. Even if it didn't, he'd never thought of himself as a ladies' man-certainly no one had ever accused him of being handsome, and age and more than his fair share of scars hadn't improved things. But those young-old eyes seemed to look past externals, totally free of rejection or condemnation.

"Milla," he said finally, "I think-" he gripped her wrist gently and removed her hand from his forearm "-that I should be ashamed of myself."

"Why? I've seen how hard you're working at being a gentleman, but you shouldn't strain yourself. I'm flattered that you enjoy looking at me-why does it bother you?" She asked the question simply, and his face reddened.

"Because of what I'm thinking when I do it." He straightened his shoulders. "You're a stranger here. You've lost everything you ever knew-your friends, your world... . And I'm fifty-nine years old, Milla. You don't need an oversexed geriatric lech trying to-"

He broke off in astonishment at her totally unexpected reaction. It was laughter. Not cutting, dismissive laughter, but soft, genuine amusement ... touched, he realized, with more than just an edge of world-weary sorrow that sat strangely on her fresh, young face.

"I'm sorry, Dick," she said, and her lovely voice was soft. She touched his cheek before he could draw back, and those surprisingly strong fingers were gentle. "I'm not laughing at you-it's just that I keep forgetting how little you know about me." His expression showed his confusion, and her smile faded just a bit. "How old do you think I am, Dick?"

"What?" He looked at her for a moment, then frowned. "I don't know," he said slowly. "When I first saw you, I'd've said eighteen or nineteen. But with all you've seen and done, you have to be older than that, don't you?" He shook his head. She couldn't be much older than that. "Twenty-five?" he hazarded uncertainly, and she laughed again, almost sadly.

"Chronologically," she said, and something in her tone told him she was approaching the point with care, "and bearing in mind the time dilation effect of all the time I've spent at relativistic velocities, I am-or was when this started-a bit over a hundred and thirty." He swallowed, his eyes wide, and she gave him a wry smile. "Biologically, of course, I'm younger than that. Only eighty-three."

He stared at her. Eighty-three? Impossible! She was a child! He started to speak, then stopped, remembering the way she'd healed.

"Eighty-three?" he asked finally, amazed by how calm he sounded, and she nodded. "Just what is the average life span where you come from, Milla?"

"About a hundred and twenty," she said steadily, and he shook his head.

"You folks do all your aging in a hurry at the end or something?" he asked slowly.

"No. We age at the same proportional rate we always did. Or most of us do." She smiled, but for the first time, it did not touch her eyes. "You see, there was a reason I reacted so strongly when you suggested I might not be human, Dick. My grandfather survived the bio attack on Midgard, and I've heard a lot of that kind of thing because in a sense I'm not ... not really."

"What-" He paused and licked his lips, even more shaken by the carefully hidden pain in her expression than by what she had just said. He reached out and touched her wrist. "What exactly does that mean?" he asked, forcing his voice to sound level.

"It's a bit complicated," she said, and her eyes thanked him for controlling his surprise. "You see, the Kangas were short on time, so instead of whipping up a new bug from scratch, they modified a nasty little parasite from Delta Pavonis. It wasn't so much a biological weapon as an organic one-and a nasty one, at that. Essentially, it was transmitted as an airborne bacteria and matured into a multicellular parasite rather like a Terran slime mold that invaded the respiratory and alimentary systems and used the circulatory system to get around its host's body. The parasite itself didn't look like much-just a double handful of protoplasmic ooze that scavenged its hosts for its own needs until they died of starvation or respiratory failure. If that didn't kill them, something very like cancer set in ... and if anyone actually managed to survive that, the parasite simply went on growing until it clogged the arteries.

"The beauty of it, from the Kangas' viewpoint, wasn't just that it was lethal in so many different ways, but that they'd already been playing around with it for a couple of decades. They had its life cycle down pat and they'd been working on ways to aim it at specific DNA/RNA groups. That was what made it perfect for Midgard, because only one species on the planet used DNA at all: man. Actually, the biochemistry on Midgard isn't all that much different from Terra's, bearing in mind that we're talking two entirely different biospheres, but it uses a different complex of amino acids.

"So they revamped their parasite, accelerated its growth cycle, and dusted Midgard with it. Before we realized what they'd done, everyone on the planet was infected."

She looked out to sea, her face drawn, and Aston surrendered to a sudden impulse. He slid closer to her and reached one arm around her. Not really in an embrace, far less a caress, but simply to let her know he was there. She looked back at him and smiled, her eyes suspiciously bright.

"Anyway," she said in a voice which was just too calm, "it performed to specs. According to the records, it was incredibly painful, too, so perhaps it was merciful that it killed so quickly in most cases. The actual death rate was something like 99.8%. Out of just over two million people, there were exactly 5,757 survivors.

"But-" her eyes flashed suddenly, and he saw the she-tiger in her smile once more "-they'd expected a hundred-percent kill. They should've gotten one, too. The best theory is that their little horror was unstable and they got an unexpected mutation. Whatever, one tiny batch didn't kill everyone it infected. Most of them, yes, but not all. And in the case of those it didn't kill, it became not a parasite, but a symbiote. Not only that, it piggy-backed itself onto their chromosomes."

"Symbiote? Piggy-backed? I'm afraid I'm not with you yet, Milla," he said gently.

"It's simple, really." She turned to face him fully. "I mass about sixty-six kilos, but I tip the scales at just under sixty-eight. The other two kilos is my symbiote."

"That ... 'protoplasmic ooze' you mentioned?" he asked levelly.

"That's right. Only it's not as greedy as the original version." She smiled mirthlessly. "You might say it's a case of mutual advantage; it lives off my respiratory and digestive systems, and, in return, it protects its environment: me."