A Handful of Stars (Star Svensdotter #2) Read online

  I resisted the impulse to gag her and activated my communit. “Caleb,” I said in a low voice, “go from standby to alert.”

  “Still no sign?”

  “No. I don’t like the feel of it. Stay sharp. Maile, run the bands again.”

  “Okay, Star, but we know they stand by on Channel 9.”

  “Do it anyway.”

  The red figures on the digital readout climbed rapidly, searching for traffic. When the speaker erupted into life we all jumped.

  “Hokuwa’a, Hokuwa’a!” an excited voice said. “Can you read me?”

  “This is the Hokuwa’a,” Maile said. “Who’s this?”

  “Name’s Strasser; have you got the serum?”

  Maile looked at me. I shook my head. “What serum?” she said.

  There was a long pause. The voice came back tense and angry. “Those bastards on Ceres told us you had a cure for it! That’s why they locked us out and told us to wait for you!”

  “A cure for what?”

  The voice said despairingly, “We don’t know! That’s the problem!”

  I tapped Maile on the shoulder and nodded at Charlie. She pulled herself within range. “Sir,” Charlie said, “this is Dr. Carlotta Quijance, medical officer of the Hokuwa’a. Do I understand you to say you have some kind of disease?”

  The voice came back, almost laughing, but the kind of laughter that sent a shiver down my spine. “Disease! We’ve got a goddamned epidemic on our hands, and those bastards on Ceres have locked us out of their medlab!”

  — 3 —

  Hitching Up

  Hitch your wagon to a star.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  “YOU’RE NOT GOING,” Simon said, but it was the fifth or sixth time he had said it and by now his words lacked force.

  Charlie stood over her bag with a frown of concentration on her face. “Yalowpacks, a hundred serum samplers.” She clicked her tongue. “We could use some more aseptiwands, Sister Catherine.”

  “I’ll tell Mother Mathilda, Doctor.”

  Simon turned to me. “Star!”

  I ignored him. He should have known better.

  Mother Mathilda poked her head into the ship’s dispensary. She was a dark, stocky woman with a serene expression and a gold crucifix on the collar of her silver-blue jumpsuit. “We’re ready when you are, Doctor,” she said.

  “All right, Mother. I’ll be there in a moment. Simon, stop it.” This when Simon caught her arm. “We can’t treat them on board ship, they’ll infect the crew.”

  “But you’re pregnant!”

  “You noticed!” Charlie closed and sealed her bag. “I won’t get out of my suit, Simon, but I have to be on the scene. I’m the only doctor here.”

  “But we don’t even know what it is!”

  Charlie turned and headed for the hatch, talking all the way. The rest of us pulled ourselves down the corridor behind her. “Star.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure you can run the Yalow?”

  “You checked me out on it yourself, Charlie. You know I can.”

  Charlie nodded curtly, looking far from satisfied. “The Sisters will do the blood sampling. They’ll feed you the data to begin the RIAs. I plugged the plague card into Blackwell so she’s ready to run symptom matches.” We entered the galley, crowded with Sisters of St. Anne already in their pressure suits. Charlie began stuffing herself into hers. Seven and a half months along and she looked like she was wearing a beltpak. I envied her. “Archy?”

  “Maile has a downlink dedicated to you and connected to Blackwell in the dispensary,” Archy said. “I’ll be standing by the link at all times.”

  “Very good.” Pausing, her helmet beneath her arm, my sister looked at me. “As chief medical officer of the Terranovan Belt Expedition, I formally direct that the Hokuwa’a be placed under quarantine until further notice. Nobody in unless I okay it and Archy has a positive match on their voiceprint identifying them as a member of our crew. Secure all hatches, with the main hatch set for ascep and bleed double bleed. Nobody gets on board, crew member or not, who hasn’t been through the bug spray. By the book, Star.”

  I nodded. I allowed myself one, and one only, bitter, self-condemnatory reprimand for the scoutship tucked safely away in the Voortrekker’s hold. If the scoutship had been loaded on board the Hokuwa’a Charlie would have had a ready-made mobile lab and I wouldn’t be sending her as good as naked into unknown territory and a dangerous and volatile situation. Strasser had sounded on the edge of hysteria. “Understood and acknowledged. Archy?”

  “Logged and dated, Star. All hatches sealed.”

  I looked around. “Whitney, get your people to double-check all hatches, and set up a schedule for a twenty-four-hour guard by each one.”

  Whitney Burkette straightened with a nearly audible snap, almost saluted, and hustled aft. He bumped into Simon in the companionway door, Simon half in and half out of his pressure suit. Charlie, when she saw him, looked as if she would liked to have stamped her foot, but in a p-suit on board a spaceship you don’t dare.

  Simon held up one gloved hand. “Don’t argue. I’m coming.”

  “Simon, I’m working!”

  He gave an abstracted nod, fiddling with a control on his helmet. “You have spent the last six months training me in medtech. I’m qualified to help. I’m coming.”

  “You’re staying,” I said. My back hurt. His head snapped up. “You’re second in command, Simon. I need you more than Charlie does. She’s got the Sisters with her. They’re all experienced physician’s assistants. You’re staying.” He opened his mouth to protest. “That’s an order, Simon.”

  There was a brief, sizzling silence. For a moment I thought I was going to have to add mutiny to the growing list of Things That Must Be Dealt With In The Next Five Minutes. Simon moved first. He stepped forward to kiss Charlie good-bye. Her set, unsmiling face disappeared beneath her helmet. Simon locked it down for her. Three by three they crowded into the lock. It hissed and cycled and delivered them into the arms of the jitney pilot waiting outside the hatch. Behind me I could feel Simon, tense with unvented spleen. I tugged myself back to the bridge with him close behind me. Crip sat at the controls, relaxed, alert, and wary. “Caleb. Report.”

  Caleb’s voice was deep and calm. “Nothing yet, Star. Every hatch into Piazzi City we’ve seen so far has been locked and sealed and a couple of them even look like they’ve been welded shut. We’re homing in on Strasser’s transmission beam now. He says they are in a geodome west of the city.”

  There was a long silence, productive chiefly of sweat.

  “Holy shit,” Denise blurted.

  “What now?” I said.

  “Traffic off the port bow and it’s big.”

  “Take a look.”

  The picture on the monitor changed. “Sweet Jesus H. Christ on a crutch,” Crip breathed.

  The Voortrekker hove into view. My back hurt worse than ever.

  “I don’t believe it,” Crip said blankly. “Austin, you bitch, what’d you do now?” And we all stared at the monitor with our mouths open, the medical emergency temporarily forgotten, as we looked at what Perry Austin, that bitch, had done now.

  “I really don’t believe this.”

  “Archy, back off a little on the image.”

  The Voortrekker’s pressure plate was dwarfed by the asteroid looming up in front of it. The ship trailed along behind at the end of a tripod of slender plasteel cables that looked entirely too flimsy for their load, like a grizzly bear on a dog’s leash.

  “I really and truly do not believe this,” Crip said one more time, his voice echoing hollowly down the transmitter.

  “You don’t have to,” said someone acerbically over the ship-to-ship frequency. “We matched orbit with it halfway here.”

  “Matched orbit? How the hell—”

  “An Apollo asteroid,” Sam Holbrook said. He crammed himself the rest of the way into the cockpit, his eyes fixed on the Voortrekker with
an expression halfway between incredulity and delight.

  “A what?”

  “An Apollo asteroid,” Sam repeated impatiently. “The astronomers figure there’s about two thousand of them with solar orbits that bring them relatively close to Terra. Like 1566Icarus. At perihelion it passes within the orbit of Mercury.”

  I said, “Perry, I don’t suppose that is Icarus?”

  Her voice came back at me. “Where do you think we’ve been, Star? Icarus is inclined twenty-one degrees out of our flight path. No, this is just a stray.”

  “How’d you get here so fast? You must be a week ahead of schedule.”

  “Five and half days is all. We hitched a ride,” Perry said, and even at that distance I could tell she felt more than a little smug. Well, she’d earned it, and her paycheck for the duration of the expedition if that asteroid was worth saving. “Crip. Tell Claire to run a snake, and to switch in the geiger.”

  Denise took a sight. Crip maneuvered the Hokuwa’a with the vernier thrusters so Claire could take pictures of Perry’s rock’s best profile.

  “How am I supposed to make maps of the Belt if people keep shifting the asteroids around?”

  I looked over my shoulder and saw Bob Shackleton, our supercargo disguised as an RGS cartographer.

  “Welcome to life in the Asteroid Belt, Bob,” Crip said. “I think Perry’s just demonstrated that the days of fixed orbits are long gone, at least for the duration of our expedition.”

  “It’s not going to be just us moving them, is it,” Bob said, and it wasn’t a question.

  “We probably perturbed some on our way here, just by virtue of our superior mass.”

  “How’d I get myself talked into this job?” the cartographer muttered, but he sounded less alarmed than resigned to his fate.

  Ten minutes later Claire shoved her way into the very crowded cockpit with what looked like a long, narrow picture of the Manhattan skyline.

  “So, Claire?” Perry said impatiently over the channel. “How’s it look?”

  “Black as a Yankee’s heart and dirty as his underwear,” Claire replied exultantly. “That boulder y’all got tied to your tail is twenty percent pitchblende or my momma’s no lady.”

  “That’s the way we read the albedoscope,” Perry said in a satisfied tone. “It was just too good to pass up.”

  “No argument here,” I said. “How big is it?”

  “Maybe a hundred meters in diameter. It’s flat on one side and kind of pointed on another and sort of scooped out on a third, so don’t go figuring volume just yet.”

  “I hate to interrupt this entrepreneurial business conference,” Charlie’s voice broke in, “but we’ve got this teensy little medical emergency going on at the moment. You think you can hold off breaking out the picks and shovels until we stop people dying?”

  Caleb’s voice made us jump when he said suddenly, “Stand by. We’ve found them.” There was another silence, during which the ache in my lower back continued to nag at me. Caleb’s voice said, “Switching to viewer.”

  “Archy?”

  “Got it, boss. Viewer on.”

  Everyone on the bridge looked at the screen.

  Caleb was in a cramped geodesic dome, the ceiling so low he had to stoop over. His chest camera played over the interior. I saw an AtPak presumably churning out oh-two and nitrogen. There was a screened latrine and a stove with a box of food packets set next to it. It looked like the standard Miner’s and Prospector’s Geodome Kit Series K from Eddie Bauer Outfitters, a guaranteed ninety days of food, fuel, water, and shelter for the independent miner, geologist, astrographer, astronomer, and scholar-gypsy clutching the inviolable shade. It looked a little like an igloo, including the tunnel entrance. It was built for a maximum of four occupancy, but there were ten—eleven including Caleb, twelve if you counted his p-suit—crowded into a tiny space that looked less than four meters square. They were sitting with their backs to the wall and their knees drawn up because there wasn’t enough room for all of them to stretch out.

  Caleb’s camera played over their faces, one by one. They all had a strange kind of skin rash made of large, dark uneven spots that looked like flat, sloppy moles. Two of them had limbs that seemed distended, the others looked emaciated to the point of starvation. None of them seemed able to summon up enough energy to move. No one except Strasser, one of the two swollen ones, was able to speak at all.

  Archy turned up the gain and we heard his thin, tired voice. “It’s some kind of sexually transmitted virus, we’ve figured out that much. Maggie’s was the first place to get hit and then her customers, but only the ones who got laid. It’s got a two-week incubation period. Then you break out. Thirty days later, you die.”

  Caleb, still with his helmet sealed, said, “And you’ve had no medical attention? What about the hospital in Piazzi City?”

  “What hospital?”

  “There’s no hospital in Piazzi City?”

  I heard what could have been a laugh.

  “Does that mean no hospital?” Caleb said patiently.

  “SOS and T-LM, they run the place. As soon as the plague broke out they sealed the city. We came here all the way from our claim on Eldorado and they wouldn’t let us in. They won’t let anybody in. They’ve got the only real doctor in the Belt. We’ve just been dying—” His voice broke.

  “Caleb,” I said. I had to stop and fight back a wave of fury before I could continue. “Caleb, those people need shelter. Get it for them.”

  “Break seal?”

  “Break seal, break heads, open up Piazzi like a tin can, I don’t care. Get them shelter.”

  There was grim pleasure in his reply. “Happy to oblige, Star.”

  “You getting all this, Charlie?”

  “Yes, Star.”

  “Trip Caleb’s locator beacon and follow him down.” I turned from the viewer and found Maile behind Simon. “Maile, get on the Ceres standby frequency, as many watts as it’ll take for them to hear the message in the fillings of their teeth. Tell them who we are. Tell them we’re coming in, the hard way if we have to, but we are coming in. Tell them we’re armed and we’ll burn down anyone who tries to stop us. Caleb, are we armed?”

  “We are.”

  “Good. Tell them, Maile, that I expect every doctor, P.A., nurse practitioner, and medtech they’ve got standing by to offer their services. Tell them that if I find out later that anyone shirked the duty, I will be very annoyed.” I rubbed my back. “Tell the miners what we’re doing and to head this way. Anybody who’s sick and who doesn’t have transportation, call in and we’ll find it for them. Crip, you hear?”

  “I hear. I take it I’m supposed to—ah—acquire said transportation on Ceres?”

  I managed a smile that was little more than bared teeth. Crip swarmed out of the bridge. I said to Maile, “Put both messages on tape and run a loop, broadcasting every fifteen minutes. Go.” Maile vanished up the companionway to the radio shack.

  “Hokuwa’a, Voortrekker, what’s going on?”

  I nodded to Denise, and she accessed the transmitter. “Voortrekker, they’ve got some kind of plague down on Ceres.”

  Perry was silent for a moment. “Son of a bitch,” she said finally. “What flavor?”

  “We don’t know yet. We’ve got security and medical people on the way now.”

  “Security?”

  “Piazzi City’s locked the Belters out.”

  There was another pause. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I’m not kidding. I suggest you secure all hatches and go to standard debug every time you cycle.”

  “Ah—”

  “What?” I snapped. “Those instructions too difficult for you to follow?”

  “No,” Perry said. “They’re late, is all.”

  “What!”

  “I got a couple passengers with your name on them. They’re in transit right now.”

  I looked at Denise. She pointed to the monitor. A dinghy with three p-suited figures strad
dling it grew larger as it moved toward the Hokuwa’a.

  “Helen and Frank,” I said grimly. “It just has to be.” I forgot my backache and pulled my best time ever bridge to galley. The lock was cycling as I entered the room. Three figures in pressure suits tumbled out, one the size of a midget. They needed more help than they should have in getting their suits off and that made me even madder. “Just what I need, zeegee rookies bumbling around the ship—”

  One of the two larger figures finally got her helmet detached and off and turned to help the midget. My jaw dropped and whatever curses I had been going to rain down all over the new arrivals backed up in my throat.

  It would have been hard for Gauguin to choose which, my mother or my sister, to use as his model. At seventy-three well-lived years of age Mother’s black hair was only winged with gray, her brown skin was clear and unlined, her almond-eyed gaze was steadfast in its customary calm, and her tiny frame was as lithe and graceful as ever. The last time I had seen her, downstairs on a public relations tour a year ago last December, she had looked drawn and much thinner. Today she looked healthy, almost glowing.

  “Mother!” I said. “Mother?”

  “Hello, dear,” she said warmly, as if I were eleven again and she had just returned home from a quick trip to the store. Instead of which she had just made a voyage of nearly two astronomical units via TAVliner, shuttle, and Express, and this was the woman who refused to get on a Cessna 180 for the twelve-minute ride between Seldovia and Homer. She kicked herself forward and enveloped me in a somewhat breathless embrace.

  “Mother!” I repeated stupidly. “What have you done to your hair?”

  Mother pirouetted, floating upward in the zero gravity. “Do you like it, dear?”

  “Well,” I said. “It’s short.”

  “Thank you, dear. And so much easier to care for in zero gravity.”

  “Natasha!” Simon said from the companionway entrance.

  “Simon, dear!”

  “Never mind that, Mother,” I said, “what’re you doing here?”

  Mother bestowed her special smile on the tech who took her helmet and he reeled away with a dazed expression on his face. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. “I’m late for work as it is, dear,” she said to me. “It took me longer than I’d hoped to settle my affairs on Terra.”