Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

Nobody had any answers for why the tortoise had stabbed Lortisse. By the time they got him back to the habitat he was already in profound shock; Lante spent four hours working their medical lab to its limits just to stop his body shutting down, mostly by taking over failing parts of his nervous system and practically running them by hand until they found their feet again. After that, “stable” was not the word for his condition, but the constant attentions of the medical systems sufficed to keep his brain, heart and body all within the tolerances they required to ensure that he lived, and that what lived would still be Lortisse.

The unexpected answer Lante did have was just what the alien had injected him with.

She met with Baltiel once Lortisse’s condition no longer required her constant intervention. By then she had managed to extract a small sample of the material from his bloodstream and cross-reference it to the database.

“You remember the tortoise graveyard.” She was hauling up files almost carelessly, dumping them in the common virtual area for Baltiel to pick over: dissection recordings, her spoken logs, half-complete entries on alien life that were an exercise in speculation.

Baltiel revised the facts quickly: a collection of a dozen tortoises apparently dead or in some deep torpid state; Lortisse had hauled them all back for study because it looked like some other odd behaviour that might perhaps have led to more. Except it hadn’t. They had been inactive, and the very low level biological activity Lante had detected might count as “dead” on Nod. The boundary wasn’t quite that clear-cut even in Earth biology. What Lante had gone on to investigate—what had seemed quite the rabbit hole at the time—was that three of the twelve contained a thick opaque fluid in their central sac, which was normally filled simply with a fluid close enough to the brackish water of the marsh. Her interest, as Baltiel saw, had been a flight of fancy that she’d found some differentiation of sexes in Nodan life, but that had gone nowhere. All the studied species appeared to practice sexual reproduction without genders, just exchanging identical gametes equably (cue Lante writing about “the parasitic gender of the male” in Earth evolution and various other hobby horses). She hadn’t been able to show that the liquid had anything to do with reproduction, but it had been very dense compared to most Nodan cellular material, the interior of its cell walls maze-like with complex molecular structures. This was Nodan genetics, as far as Lante could tell, but if so, the stuff had either a very complex or a profoundly inefficient genome.

That was what the tortoise had shot into Lortisse, more of the same. Baltiel had a headachy moment when he thought Lante was going to talk about mating rituals and imply the damned thing had been after the equivalent of humping the man’s leg, but Lante had gone on to grimmer areas of speculation.

“I think they were diseased, the tortoises,” she explained flatly. “I think this stuff is an infection, some sort of fungal or bacterial equivalent found in the tortoise population. And maybe it spreads by having them stab one another. Its injection went through Lortisse’s suit like it was tissue paper, but that’s not surprising if it was expecting to have to get into a shell. Having gone over my data, I’m thinking maybe even something like a slime mould—a collection of cells that can act in unison. Clots of it seem to be holding together within Lortisse’s body, at least.”

“So what’s it doing to him?” Baltiel asked her. “It’s… infecting him?”

“It can’t,” Lante insisted. “It can’t possibly. Because there’s nothing in Lortisse’s body that it can have evolved to use. His proteins, his structures and organs, it’s as alien to this stuff as Nod is to us. But what it can do is trigger a massive reaction across his whole system, because his immune system is in overdrive. I’m not able to do anything about the stuff in him. I’ve just spent hours stopping Lortisse killing himself through self-induced anaphylactic shock, basically, and the fight’s not over. This stuff is travelling around his system, and not just where his circulation takes it, either. I think it’s trying to do whatever it normally does in a new host, and obviously it can’t get that done, but it spreads and moves about and… and changes its external structures I think, so that Lortisse keeps reacting to it again. It is taking everything we have just to keep his body temperature from cooking him, his tissues from swelling until they burst and—oh God, his pulmonary tract—I’ve rebuilt that from scratch twice now, because he’s swelling up like…” And Lante broke off and just stared at Baltiel for a moment, a great weight of weariness skating by her, doubtless greased on its way by the same drugs he knew Senkovi was even then playing with. “Anyway, I’ll record a full report, but it’s there, all we have.”

“Prognosis?”

“Fuck knows,” Lante said frankly. “I think the invasive material is suffering attrition from Lortisse’s immune reaction, so at least he’s not only killing himself. Best result: he whittles it down, he calms down, he comes back to us. Cerebral records suggest no brain damage yet at least. That may change.” She kept that level, haggard stare on him. “This changes everything, Yusuf.”

“It’s a setback.”

“This planet has attacked us,” she pointed out. “And yes, I’m not imbuing this act with some malign intent, but it’s happened. We’ve taken this place for granted—its primitive-looking creatures, its simple-seeming ecosystems. And we didn’t know half of what we needed to.”

“Perhaps we would if you’d followed up on researching this stuff when you first found it,” Baltiel told her before he could stop himself.

Lante blinked, taking that in remarkably placidly, though perhaps that was just the comedown from the drugs. “I am going to sleep now. Rani is in medical and she can hold the fort if things kick off before you can get me back up. I will then record a full report.” She stood, swaying slightly. “And if that is where your vaunted leadership takes you in times of stress, Yusuf, then you had better think about what the point of you is.”

In her absence, after she had left, Yusuf considered that she was right, but found no acceptable way to take the words back. At around that point Senkovi finally responded to one of his many messages, so at least he had someone to be justifiably angry at other than himself.