On Distant Worlds: The Prologues & Colibri. Brian Gonzalez
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well as helping edit the Emissary’s daily orders.
And best of all I’ll still get to fly. Perhaps an occasional Jump filling in for the regulars if I’m lucky, but more often, if all goes according to plan and we find the Colonies, getting the Surface Teams down to planetary surfaces safely. I’ll be flying the planetside shuttle. I’ll be the one who physically sets us down on distant worlds.
Davvit Tan
c. 3015 C.E.
To get the medical treatments which kept him alive, Davvit had to leave the Lobe once a month.
The pain generally came back about a week before the treatment was due. It started with a dull headache and stuffy nose. Overnight the headache would become severe and the abdominal pain would set in; these symptoms were manageable with tabs given him by his physician, Dr. Saito, and Davvit could still attend school. The last two or three cycles of that week would be lost to the pain, however. Davvit spent those days in bed; by the end of the week he was usually moaning in pain, even with nerve blockers. The abdominal pain was the worst, an unrelenting soreness throughout the trunk of his body which left him desperate to move to seek relief from the grinding ache. But if he did move, random parts of his torso would flare into full-on agony. Dr. Saito kept him well tabbed up during those times, including STM blockers so at least Davvit didn’t have to remember all the pain. To add insult to injury, by the time he returned from his treatment, he would be behind on schoolwork and would have to do double academic duty for a week when he ought to have gotten extra time off to recuperate. But school was strict that way; if you were of sound mind, you were expected to keep up. Life on the Ice-ship was tough, so school wanted you tough.
If Davvit was lucky, he got two weeks between treatments to be free of both pain and extra work.
Even as such, his life might have been tolerable but for his classmates. They hassled him constantly, not just because Davvit’s illness left him smaller and weaker than the other boys but also because he was an orphan who lost his parents in the big accident some time back. “What are you going to do,” a classmate might ask while twisting Davvit’s arm painfully behind his back, “Run home and tell your mother?”
“Your parents killed themselves to get away from you!” was another class favorite.
That was the point at which Davvit usually hit them in the nose. His punches were not meaty enough to seriously hurt anyone – a couple of the burlier boys would actually laugh at his effort -- but he suspected it kept some of his milder classmates from teasing him as often as they might have otherwise. Nor could anyone fight him back in any serious sort of way; beating up a person who had a serious illness was a sure way to land in the brig for a month or so. Davvit had more than once previously attempted to draw out a scuffle in the hopes of getting a particularly nasty classmate, Herk, arrested. But the bullies were too canny to be drawn into his trap. They struck like rumors, hitting him in dark and empty places and disappearing before raised voices or the sounds of a scuffle could attract attention.
Davvit’s long-term strategy to deal with his life was a simple one: wait for age seventeen. By age seventeen, the doctor assured him, he would outgrow his illness. Furthermore, as they graduated school the students would disperse. Some, as Davvit intended to do, would go on to college for advanced studies. Most would take ordinary jobs or join the Authority Peacekeepers. A few would struggle to find their place and end up addicted, arrested, or killed. Davvit hoped Herk would end up in this category. One way or another, after graduation it would be rare for Davvit to encounter his former classmates and that was a time he looked forward to with great anticipation.
But today he was still in ninth grade and it was time for his treatment. That meant a two-hour journey to the Medical Center in Authority Lobe 1, at the front of the Ice-ship. The first time he’d made that trip, back when he was eight, it had been new and exciting. It was rare for kids to see other parts of the Ice-Ship; even adults, unless they were Peacekeepers or involved in the running of the Ship itself, spent most of their lives in just one Lobe. Davvit had looked forward to that first visit despite his pain and in fact when the word got around some of his classmates showed actual jealousy, a situation wholly unknown and rather pleasing to an ill and undersized orphan. For a week his fellow students had pestered him about it, some asking questions about his illness and treatment, questions Davvit didn’t answer because, after all, it was none of their damn business if he had IDCS (Interstellar Disrupted Cell Syndrome). It wasn’t contagious.
The majority of his classmates saw Davvit’s condition as just an additional way to torture him. They made up stories to terrify him. Mary told him the treatment would make his testicles shrivel and drop off. Micah claimed secret knowledge that no one ever came back from the Authority Lobe after medical treatment. Sissa, whom Davvit secretly liked, claimed the path to the other Lobe was full of monsters; chupes, the escaped genetic experiments that would hunt you down and suck your blood, ice ghouls, which scream in the night before they haul you off to eat you, and shamblies, the walking dead. Herk, already well down the road to sociopathy at such a tender age, had told him the Authority was just going to put a bullet in the back of his head.
Intellectually, Davvit knew that none of those things could be true. Certainly they weren’t going to execute him; he hadn’t done anything wrong and if they were planning for no discernible reason to kill Davvit, why were they bothering to educate him? And – in the daytime, at least – he didn’t believe in chupes or ice ghouls or shamblies. Those were little-kid stories. Yet he couldn’t help feeling chilled as that first visit neared, especially in the night-time. He even asked Dr. Saito why the medical treatment couldn’t be performed in the Lobe hospital instead of travelling to the Authority Lobe.
“Controlled technology,” the doctor told him. “The tiny robots they’ll be using to help you aren’t allowed in the civilian Lobes. So we have to take you where the robots are.”
They’re nanites, not robots. But Davvit didn’t bother saying it. Dr. Saito was a good guy; he couldn’t help it if he didn’t have children of his own and was unsure which words kids would understand.
After the fearful anticipation, after the horror stories and the dread and the hope; the journey was utterly ordinary. They rode the Medical elevators up to the top level of the Module, where they waited for what seemed a very, very long time for a quarter-to-the-hour to arrive. Davvit was in a lot of pain at this point; he hunkered down in a chair and tried not to cry as the minutes passed by with literally agonizing slowness. Finally, as it did every forty-five minutes, the entire level then disengaged from the rest of the Module by retracting its accessways and the massive titanium-alloy pins which normally secured it to the rest of the Module. The magnetic induction plates which spun the Module then reversed on the top floor only, gradually slowing and then stopping the spin of the discrete level. Davvit and the doctor and nurse, along with the other waiting passengers, floated in the sudden microgravity through narrow access tunnels which slid them neatly into the waiting vehicles.
They rode the same ancient, creaky and graffiti-covered rail sleds one rode to go anywhere. The rail sleds had only one forward window which was inevitably pitted and starred and slightly hazy, so it was difficult to look through them at the walls of the transport tunnel. The tunnels ran through the interior of the infrastructure struts and building braces but there were occasional places where there were windows in the tunnels; there you could look out and see the sights of the Lobe interior: the lit buildings spinning on their braces, the distant cool glow of the ice-farms, perhaps even a work crew flitting by in a compressed air-powered work pod. Like all children Davvit loved looking out the windows at his homeland, but between the pain and the dismal condition of the window there was little joy to be had from sight-seeing on that trip.
In the increased security of the Authority Lobe, there were no tunnel windows. There was also the question of dealing with sudden and unfortunate nausea. Between the pain and the meds, Davvit found himself retching as they passed through the various gravity gradients on their way to the Authority Lobe; as they transited the central core of the Ice-Ship where gravity was essentially non-existent, he actually threw up. Gravity sickness like a little