Twenty-Five Pairs by T.S. Severe
Chapter Eighteen Challenger 2026 - 20??
It was hot and humid, and working in the field is a week of twenty hour days. It's easy to get tired and worn down. When you go to bed, in a tent with mosquito netting and maybe a generator to keep the lights on, or more than likely just a gas lantern. When you get to bed, you don't want sex, there's nothing romantic about it, you just want someone to hold you and tell you tomorrow is going to be better.
I woke up on the inflatable mattress we used for sleeping, it was our only luxury, and Cory was sitting upright and bent over with his forehead on his knees. It took me a few seconds to blink and clear my eyes and head, to understand that something was wrong. He was pale and shivering and then I heard him groan.
"What's wrong? Cory?" I moved to look at him, getting closer and touching his skin, hot and sticky. There was that cold rational voice in my head that said not to get near him. I couldn't hear it.
"I don't know." He winced, holding his stomach and beneath his arms I could see the dull bruise-like discoloration.
"Fuck." I breathed. "Lie down."
I scrambled through my clothes, bunched up in a pile, shaking them out and I found the cuff and then the bulb.
"I think I screwed up." He blinked at me, trying to breathe and I shook my head.
"Give me your arm." I didn't need to check his blood pressure to know what it was, but I needed time to think and I'd need the numbers anyway.
"When did it start?" I asked. "How did you get it? Did you stick yourself?"
"This morning." He breathed. "An hour...I dunno. I woke up and it hurt. I was careful."
"Eighty-five over sixty." I closed my eyes. "Your hemorrhaging inside, let me see."
I touched his stomach and then moved him gently. His kidneys, both of them, they were bleeding. I pressed against the left with my fingertips against his skin and Cory spasmed with pain. It was Lassa Fever, which had already murdered some twenty-eight people, Sudanese tribesman in this no-name village in the middle of nowhere. Cory was going to be twenty-nine if I didn't do something.
"Hey guys..." Simon was unzipping the tent. Dr. Simon Welling, a virologist from England.
"Don't come in!" I screamed. "Quarantine this tent! I need plasma, two liters right now. I want the T-Cells, give me some, uh...Fuck! Just bring that and water, ice...I need sample kits and..."
"Jen? What is it?" Simon asked, frozen now just outside the flap because he'd been doing this a long time too.
"Cory's infected." I said and that was all there was.
"You gotta...Ah..." Cory clenched his teeth, frowning at me. "...Get out of here, before you get it."
"I spent all night with you." I shook my head. "I either got it or I don't."
I moved him carefully, using my stethoscope and I listened to him while I waited.
"Your lungs are clear, your heart's good." I told Cory, but that didn't matter. Lassa goes for internal organs, mostly the liver this time around, but for whatever reason it had gone for Cory's kidneys and it was eating him alive.
"I'm coming in." Simon said some five or ten minutes later and I almost yelled at him for taking so long, but he'd had to dress out of course, and get everything together. He'd moved pretty fast considering.
"Give me the plasma, his BP is too low. He's gonna go into shock." I hung a bag from a nail on one of the poles and Simon was already opening his case, like a plastic toolbox. "Out of the way, I'll do it. I'm faster."
"Right." Simon wasn't going to argue because it was true. I didn't have to be careful, not anymore.
I started an IV, struggling for a decent vein in Cory's arm, and when I found it I was pouring blood into him, trying to keep the man alive. I started another one for the T-Cells, antibodies from patients who'd recovered, sending reinforcements to help Cory's body fight the virus. It wasn't going to work and he was trying so hard to be strong, laying there quietly and trying to hide the pain.
I took a sample of my own blood, handing the vial to Simon so he could put it under a scope and see if I was infected. I had to be. I'd shared Cory's glass the night before, shared Cory's plate, eating together. We'd slept together, kissed and said our goodnights. I had it, but I wasn't symptomatic yet. No fever, no pain. I felt wetness in my eyes as I bathed Cory gently, and for just a second I felt my heart freeze, before I touched my cheek and saw my finger wasn't bloody, merely wet. Some of the villagers had bled from the eyes, which seemed particularly terrible to me and I was afraid of it.
"It hurts a lot, Jen." Cory whispered and his beautiful green eyes were dull with pain. "Morphine?"
"You don't have enough blood." I swallowed hard. "You just have to hold on, okay? I'm gonna make you better."
"Hurts." He sighed.
"I'm so sorry." I stroked Cory's face, wondering how this could have happened. It was like that though, once in awhile, someone would get a virus and we'd never know why. Like God had just picked him to die.
"Jen, you have the antibodies." Simon was back half an hour later.
"Yeah." I nodded, that wasn't a surprise.
"No sign of the virus though." Simon told me. "Just B lymphocytes, but..."
"It's probably too early." I shrugged, leaving Cory so he wouldn't have to hear all the bad news.
"...The only antibody I found was IgM, there's nothing else there." Simon said through his suit. "It's just the primary and not even all of that."
"So, it's just started then." I said. "Six hours I'll give you more blood. What's going on outside?"
"Seven new cases, we had five deaths over the night, two more aren't going to make it until lunch." Simon spoke softly, putting his head close to mine. "We're looking at seventy...eighty percent maybe."
"That's too high." I frowned. "Too high for Lassa."
"Rosenthal wants to call it in as Lassa-B, a new strain." Simon said.
"I need to look at it first."
"That's what I told him." Simon agreed. "It's your call, but he says you're compromised, so..."
"Fuck." I looked up at the IV bags. "I need more blood, give me the real stuff, he's uh...A Positive. And more lymphocytes. Anybody survive last night?"
"Nobody new." Simon said. "We've got the four stable and eight presenting with antibodies and no symptoms. But the symptomatic chaps, they haven't improved that much. Not yet."
"Right." I nodded and it was about what I expected. "Four fucking days and we lose half a village. Okay, tell Rosenthal he's not calling in a new strain, not until I look at it. I don't want anyone else. He tries and I'll have his ass back in Montreal handing out condoms to college kids."
"Vancouver, I think." Simon snorted. "Either way, I'll get your blood. Anything else?"
"No." I looked at Cory and he was looking at me with those big green eyes full of fear.
=-=-=-=-=-={25}=-=-=-=-=-=
I woke up sweating, staring at the white ceiling above me. I'd been dreaming of Cory and my heart was pounding, my sheets damp and sticky, constricting me and I had to get up.
The cubicle was barely big enough for the bunk I slept in. It had some some lockers to hold my things. My few personal possessions. My bear and book. My snow globe. Everything else was business, books and binders, all my notes and equipment. I stood in the middle of that little room looking around, licking my lips and feeling caged. I wanted the sun and a blue sky and rain. God I wanted rain. It had been so dusty in Africa.
I coughed, getting dressed and leaving for the head, the toilet, and after that some coffee. I hadn't been sleeping well and so I'd been sleeping less. I'd need some pills soon, I thought. I couldn't keep going this way and I needed a clear head. I had to be stronger than this. Smarter.
"Hey, Jen." A woman's voice greeted me.
Welsh was on the command deck of the Challenger, but not for any real reason except that some binder someplace said she should be. The ship was on autopilot, all the way now. We couldn't stop or turn around, even if we wanted to. Chin's computers were driving, Welsh and the others in the command crew just made sure the lights kept blinking.
"Hi Diana. How are we doing?" I replied, coming up a ladder.
I smiled weakly and the physics guys had been wrong about one thing, hyperspace wasn't black at all. It was measly white, like looking at a snowstorm. An infinite number of snowflakes, not falling, but twinkling in and out of existence, making you wonder if your were really seeing it or not. I thought sometimes that we were in a snow globe of our very own.
"Still on schedule." She smiled, holding up a magazine. "Seen this one?"
The command deck was reasonably roomy, with a big curving flight control console beneath an equally curved window that covered a full 180 degree view, looking forward from side to side. The habitational section of the ship was a great sphere, over five hundred meters in diameter, and rotating to produce artificial gravity, but we couldn't tell, not without an external reference. We now weighed about seventy percent of normal, which was kind of nice, but bad for our bones and muscle, so we all had to work out.
"People magazine?" I laughed and shook my head. "No."
"You're in it, page..." She flipped through. "..Eighty-seven, best dressed for '26 issue. 'Astronaut Jennifer Pinchbeck puts a spin on Washington in a Joni Stur original' it says."
"Oh God." I sat down in one of the chairs.
"Nice picture too." Diana held the magazine open so I could see myself in that red dress I'd worn to the white house.
"They cut Josh off." I frowned.
"Yeah, they're bastards." She chuckled and narrowed her eyes at the photo. "What do you wear under a dress like that?"
"Nothing." I laughed.
"Yeah?" She raised her eyebrows. "I'd be scared shitless to meet the President with no underwear on."
Diana sighed and she was an attractive woman of a certain type, masculine and well, butch is a word that comes to mind, I suppose. Only her father had ever called her beautiful and Diana's dress that evening had been something much more practical than mine. I don't think she regretted it either.
"Well, it was a little weird." I nodded.
"I'm gonna keep this page, I think..." Diana said slowly, tearing my picture out and I blinked at her. "...Put it on the wall next to my pillow."
"Oh." I cleared my throat.
"It'll remind me that I'm not as brave as I pretend I am." She grinned at me.
"Ahhh..." I was blushing actually.
"Besides, it'll give me good dreams, thinking about you in that dress." Diana was getting up, touching my shoulder. "Time for me to wake up Allen. Come by later, if you want. I have a feeling I won't be able to fall asleep right away."
"Right." I licked my lips.
"We can talk..." She smiled at me. "...Or something."
I watched the woman leave, short and somewhat stocky, but in a good way. Her blonde hair was cut like a man's and Diana had those cobalt eyes. She'd be firm and hard all over, and soft in all the right places too. A serious fuck, the Colonel, who'd been promoted to full bird a month before lift-off. She'd do me right.
Diana...I sighed. Six days down and twenty-three more to go before we reached Pelham, and she'd finally hit on me. I closed my eyes and smiled, wondering why it had taken her so long. I'd been going out of my way to give her time alone with me, not a lot, but every now and then. I'd probably find her later, since there wasn't any real sense in playing hard to get. I wanted someone to wear me out, push those dreams out of my head for awhile and Allen was fun, but...
"There she is." Allen said softly, bending over and kissing my cheek from behind. "I've been missing you."
"Uh-huh." I smiled as he took the chair next to me, turning in it so we faced each other, rather than forward.
"I'm serious, Jen." He rubbed the short bristling hair on his head. "I think you've been avoiding me."
"The ship isn't big enough for that." I said. "I've just been busy, you know."
"Busy, yeah." He was unhappy with me. "Too busy to talk?"
"I know what you want..."
"I want you." He said. "Is that so wrong? I thought we had something going."
"Allen, it was never going to be serious." I sighed. "I'm engaged."
"He's not going to wait." Fuller said and this was what I hated.
"Don't." I warned him.
"I love you, Jen." He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "We're not like other people. We belong together. People like Josh...He'll never do anything."
"You don't know Josh. He built me a house." I smiled, resisting the urge to slap the man's face hard. "And if this is how you plan on making me fall in love with you, Allen...You're making a big mistake."
I stood up and he just watched me leave. Ever since he'd met Josh, some four months before, Allen had been jealous. It was an emotion that he was singularly ill-suited for, in my opinion, more than most men. It brought out the bully in him, the arrogance that he needed to do so many other things well. In love, it made Allen unattractive and abrasive. It made us both unhappy and now he'd driven me away with it completely.
=-=-=-=-=-={25}=-=-=-=-=-=
"Look at you." I smiled at Arthur Nielson, the surgeon, as he pushed some weights in the small gymnasium we had.
"Heh." He smiled at me, a little ruddy in the face, a little sweaty in his shorts and t-shirt. "I can bench two fifty now."
"What's that on Earth?" I asked, crossing my arms over my breasts, leaning against the bulkhead. "About one eighty?"
"Spoil sport." He grinned at me. "You been exercising?"
"It's in my log." I nodded. "Sixty minutes a day. About fourteen hundred I was thinking we could run some of the labs?"
"Sure." He nodded, sitting up on his bench. "Spectography?"
"Yeah, that looks like an easy one." I agreed. "We'll get David to help, he has some of his own to do anyway."
"Sounds good to me." Arthur looked at me a little closer. "How are you doing? How's your sleep pattern?"
"There's supposed to be a pattern?" I forced a little laugh. "I don't know, I have...A tough time sleeping."
"Taking your vitamins?" He asked and I nodded. "Any other problems?"
"No, everything else is fine." I said. "Slightly elevated blood sugar, but we expected that anyway."
"Yeah, I started Zach on insulin." Arthur nodded. "Glucose in his urine."
"I checked mine about eight hours ago, I'm fine." I said. "Just...Bad dreams."
This was part of Nielson's job, mine too, monitoring everyone and each other. We tended to ask a lot of questions, pay a lot of attention to what people said. We were the doctors. I wouldn't hide anything from him, because everything is a clue, but Nielson and I were the only ones we could trust that much. We had to assume that the others, being people like they were, would lie about their health. It reminded me why I was a lab rat.
"When did they start?" He asked.
"About three days ago?" I shrugged. "It's anxiety. Loneliness, I suppose. I'll give it a few more days and try changing my schedule a little.
"Quit the caffeine, that'll help." Nielson nodded.
"Yeah." I laughed. "I know, but..."
"We got decaf around here someplace, Jen." Arthur chuckled and I was a coffee fiend, which was a contributing factor, of course.
"I'm cutting down...Um, Arthur?" I cleared my throat and this was going to help too, but I was nervous.
"Yeah?"
"I...You asked me once about that Lassa outbreak, in the Sudan. Remember?"
"I remember." He nodded slowly and after a pause, "Is that what you're dreams are about?"
"Yeah." I closed my eyes for a second and then opened them, looking into his face. "I told you I didn't kill anyone. I lied."
"Jen, you don't have to explain to me." Arthur said gently, standing up.
"Yeah, I...I want to, see I was..." I frowned. "...There was a man with me, my assistant, my...Friend. Dr. Schiller, Cory, and uh, he was there because of me."
"Okay." Arthur sighed and he was standing close, touching my shoulders, ready to comfort me.
"He wanted to be a baby doctor." I smiled. "But he wanted to be with me and so he was there."
"What happened?"
"He got infected." I coughed lightly, looking down. "He got careless, or unlucky or...Something. We never found out why. And he died."
"Okay." Arthur hugged me, softly, pulling me off the bulkhead and I wasn't crying. This was two years old and I'd already mourned enough. "He was so...good. An angel, you know? And I killed him."
"You can't blame yourself for that." Arthur told me. "If he was there, it's because he wanted to be. We choose our own lives, Jen."
"I was infected." I sucked my lips, taking a deep breath and looking once more at Arthur. "I stayed with him. I watched him die and I had it in me, but...I didn't even get a fever, Arthur."
"Then you were lucky, that's all." He told me. "You don't have to feel guilty for surviving."
"I've never been sick a day in my life." I stared at him. "After Sudan, I, uh...Started running tests, on myself."
"What kind of tests?"
"I wanted to find out why." I nodded. "I...I tried different things, but I never got sick."
"You were...Exposing yourself?" Nielson looked at me, plainly shocked and with good reason.
"Eventually, yeah." I shrugged. "I gave myself tuberculosis, first. It lived in my body for, oh, twenty minutes before I killed it. Malaria lasted an hour. I gave myself Ebola-Zaire and I didn't even get a secondary immune response."
"That's not possible." Nielson blinked at me.
"I thought I could use my immune system to create a vaccine." I said. "I mean, I thought...Well, at first I thought if I'd given my blood to Cory, I could have saved him. You know? I was right there, I had the antibodies but we didn't understand it. I thought it was just...Too soon."
"You're saying, what?" Nielson searched my face. "You're the cure for cancer?"
"I tried to make a vaccine." I nodded. "Using my DNA. I didn't tell anyone where it came from. I made it and I used my work, my position with CDC and with WHO...That was Tempest. I was inoculating people with my immune system. Playing with it, looking for the key."
"Did it work?" He asked and the hope was in his eyes, the possibility of a miracle.
"No." I shook my head. "I tried a number of variations, but none of the vaccines were successful."
"So..."
"It's just me." I sighed. "I tried for two years. I tried everything, but I couldn't get it out of my body and into someone else."
"There must be a way, something you overlooked." Nielson rubbed his jaw. "You shouldn't be out here, it's too dangerous. You should be..."
"In a lab someplace?" I stared at him. "Locked up, stuck with needles and wires...Arthur, that's what they did to my brother. I'm not going there."
"No, I don't mean that, but...Jen, think of what it means!" He blinked at me as his mind caught up with what I'd said. "Brother?"
"You know what it means?" I ignored his questioning look. "I'm not human. I'm the alien we're looking for and I know what they'll do to me once they find out."
"Who are they? What will they do?" Nielson shook his head. "I don't understand."
"Be glad of that, Arthur." I kissed him on the cheek. "You're a good man."
=-=-=-=-=-={25}=-=-=-=-=-=
"Hmph." David Rogers was sitting at his science station. "Thick atmosphere, mostly carbon dioxide, trace nitrogen, methane, hydrogen...sulfuric acid."
"You sure that's not Venus?" Joan chuckled.
"Looks like it, doesn't it." Rogers sighed. "No little green men down there."
"What's atmospheric pressure?" Nielson asked.
"A lot. Reading 32 bars at the surface." David shrugged. "Sorry, no walks in the park today."
"A dead planet." I sighed.
We were looking at it through cameras because the windows were shuttered. The slow relentless spin of the habitation module made everyone sick now that there was something to see and we'd discussed turning roration off, but working in zero-G was a real pain.
"Yeah." Brittany shook her head. "That sucks, huh? Nobody to kill."
"Yeah." I frowned and maybe I deserved that after briefing the entire crew just the day before on the presence of PK1.00 in my lab and why it was there. It hadn't made me very popular at all.
"Knock it off, Chin." Nielson gave her a look and he'd taken a little beating as well, since he'd kept the secret faithfully.
"There could be microorganisms." I said. "Bacteria. We'll start prepping the collector tonight for a noon launch tomorrow."
"Works for me." Nielson agreed, and that was our department. "Up for that Zach?"
"Yeah, Doc." The systems specialist nodded and he was the driver of the probe, which would land on the surface, scoop up some rocks, and a bladder full of atmosphere, and then come back...Hopefully.
"No oxygen." Rogers was unhappy. "No water. No ice."
"It could be trapped in the rock." Joan shrugged.
"Maybe." Rogers shrugged and he looked over at Allen and Zach who were performing radar mapping of the surface, which was largely an automated process. Diana was leaning between their shoulders.
We all had a lot of stuff to do, which was nice for a change. We'd been conducting experiments in hyperspace as well, studying the effects of traveling through that other dimension at roughly 300 times the speed of light. We'd checked everything from ourselves, to fungus, green beans, and rats. After a month we were ready for something else, something a little more tangible than twinkling snow.
"We'll do a high resolution microwave survey and x-ray after your collector is finished." Rogers was checking the binder, because this really was all scheduled, so much as possible. "See what the place is really made of underneath all that pollution."
"I'm taking one of the sisters offline tonight for ten hours." Chin reminded us, meaning one of the two main computers.
They were Angie and Betsy, Alpha and Bravo, and at least they didn't talk. They were redundant, like everything else, one backing up the other, and Chin needed to run her maintenance to make sure we could get back home.
She'd also send a transmission to earth, all of the data collected so far and a status report. It would take twenty-three years to get there, of course, but if anything happened to us at least they'd have something. We tried not to think of it like that and we'd all made little messages, funny personal ones to our future selves in an effort to relieve boredom and a little stress.
I'd finished mine with, "I miss you, Jenny."
"Arthur, let's go take care of..." I cleared my throat and he knew what I meant, they all did.
"Yeah." He smiled agreeably. "Let's do that."
As I'd promised, we were destroying the PK virus I'd engineered. We incinerated it together, venting the gasses and what few ashes there might be after ten minutes at 3500 degrees Fahrenheit into the cold vacuum of space. It was gone forever and once more the organism existed nowhere but inside my head.
"Thank God that's over with." Arthur grinned at me and I nodded.
"Yeah." I breathed. "There's only one thing left."
"What's that?" He narrowed his eyes.
"Me." I sighed. "I can't go back."
"What?" He laughed nervously. "What do you mean?"
"The virus, it's part of me." I swallowed hard. "My DNA, a protein from Chromosome-25, that's what I used to make it work."
"So without you, there's no PK virus?" Nielson licked his lips. "But what you said before, you're immune to the virus right?"
"I don't know." I shook my head. "I tried to make a vaccine, when I engineered PK, and I didn't understand it yet. This was a long time before Tempest...Before Cory."
"Okay." Arthur cleared his throat.
"It didn't work. It doesn't matter, see? Even if I could unlock the secrets of my DNA and cure cancer, someone else would use it to create PK...It's the same material. We don't get one or the other and we can't live with both. The human race isn't ready for it."
"Science is always like that." Nielson argued gently. "Medicine, physics, chemistry...There's good and bad in everything. How we learn to deal with that is how we advance, more than the technology alone."
"Ethics?" I smiled sadly. "Always the teacher, Arthur? No, this was my mother's project and she forgot that nothing comes without a price. All of her predictions came true, but she never saw PK coming, and she was the smartest person I ever knew. If she wasn't ready for it, none of us are. Believe me."
"Jen..."
"We don't get the best things." I licked my lips, quoting my mom. "We're not supposed to. We get what we have and make the best out of it. If I have to choose between a world with cancer on the loose, or a world with PK in a bottle, I'll take cancer everytime. We can survive cancer, people do it everyday."
"Then it's gone. It's done with." He told me. "You're going to go home and be a hero and give speeches and open shopping malls like the rest of us."
"They'll make me do it again." I said. "They'll never let it go, now that they've seen it. Once they find out I'm immune...I can't keep that secret long, not from them. I've had two years already, my luck won't last forever."
"You're paranoid. You haven't been sleeping well, the dreams..." Nielson rubbed my shoulder. "...The stress. You're not being rational."
"I'm completely rational, Arthur." I reassured him. "Did you see that planet out there? It's dead. That's Earth if what I know, if what I am, ever gets loose."
"Jennifer, you're famous. You have a Nobel Prize, you've been to another planet." Nielson laughed. "What can anyone possibly do to you?"
"I could die in a car crash." I shrugged. "So far as anyone would ever know or prove. I could spend the rest of my life in a basement, in a hospital without a name."
"They don't do that..." Nielson shook his head. "...Whoever 'they' are, nobody does that sort of thing."
"You have no idea what they do." I sighed.
"And you do?" The man took a deep breath, not believing any of this.
"That's just it." I shook my head. "I don't want to find out. I'm tired of being Pandora and sitting on the box, trying to hold it closed after taking a peek. I'm so tired of it."
"You didn't come all this way to commit suicide." He squeezed me firmly, bringing my eyes to his. "I won't let you do that. I can keep a secret, Jen."
"I have a letter. I'm still writing, but when it's done..." I licked my lips. "...You bring it back for me, okay?"
"No."
"Arthur." I smiled. "It's why I'm here."
This was why I'd been sent, how Mr. Fox had made me untouchable. He'd known everything and all along and Mr. Fox was my father as much as he was anything else. He'd loved me too much, the way everyone does, and he'd put me on this mission knowing I'd understand, or perhaps only hoping, but no...Mr. Fox had never underestimated me. He'd sent me away so that I could make my own decision, free of everyone who could change my mind, or bind me to a dream I didn't share. It was in the book he'd given me, a scientific study of devils and witchcraft, and in the end we all die for another's fear.
Mr. Fox was giving me another reason, a choice that he trusted me to make. I wasn't Pandora, he'd known that and now I did too. I was just the box.
=-=-=-=-=-={25}=-=-=-=-=-=
And that is my story, so much as I care to recall and reveal. It will return without me. Doctor Nielson has promised me that much, although he doesn't know it.
There's nothing down there. Not even bacteria. Pelham Bravo is a planet without breathable atmosphere or water. It's a disappointment, but not a terrible one. The FTL Drive works and we've traveled safely to another star. That's a victory all its own and a triumph for our species. There are billions of planets and we'll keep looking and soon enough find life; it's inevitable and I'm greatly cheered by that. It gives me hope and I pray that the next would-be xenobiologist is stronger than I've been, and better able to resist the fears of lesser men.
I know I can't return to Earth. The things I've done and been willing to do, the terrible things of which I'm capable, makes me the enemy of our future. They would use me again, I know, as they have used me all along. I have a child now and a man who loves me. I have a house that I'll never see. I would die a thousand times before I'd ever surrender any of that to the abyss.
I love you, Josh.
Jen
End of Part 18
End of 25 Pairs
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