Death in Winter - Michael Jan Friedman [71]
Beverly remembered how awful it had been to watch them yield to the bloodfire. One by one, moaning and wheezing, crying out for help the colonists couldn’t provide. She recalled the look in their eyes, the sorrow and the dread, but most of all the surprise-because they had truly believed the Federation could do for them what the Romulans would not.
Doctor Baroja had been wrong about the medical supplies-as it turned out, they were more than sufficient to take care of the Kevrata. But that was because the last of them died so quickly, medicines or no medicines-more than a dozen of them in the space of one wild and hideous night.
Normally, Beverly would have been asleep by then. But she was too busy running from bed to bed, delivering hyposprays or trying to comfort the Kevrata as they battled the monster eating them from within. The last of the aliens went under a couple of hours after dawn, claimed by the disease he had brought with him from his homeworld.
Jojael had been among the earliest to succumb. However, her travail had been less painful than most. Beverly was grateful for that.
Zippor, the botanist who served as administrator of the colony, looked at the bodies of the Kevrata with tired, red-rimmed eyes and muttered something about the Federation medical vessel assigned to the crisis. With the aliens no longer in need of the team’s services, Zippor intended to contact the ship and tell their captain to turn back.
But he didn’t-because Doctor Baroja was wrong about something else, besides the sufficiency of the medical supplies. Before noon of the same day, Bobby Goldsmith’s father found a collection of tiny bumps on the back of his hand-bumps that weren’t there before the arrival of the Kevrata. And to the horror of everyone in the medical dome, they were a lot like the bumps the crash victims had displayed before they died.
A tricorder scan confirmed it: Bobby’s father had contracted the disease. And if one human could catch it, they all could. And theoretically, so could the nonhumans in the colony.
Doctor Baroja, who seemed to turn to stone at the news, whispered that the virus must have mutated-that what had seemed so common and relatively harmless to his species had overnight become something potentially deadly.
So it was no longer advisable for Zippor to tell the medical ship to turn back. The only question at that point was whether the colonists would survive to see it-because the medicines they had used to treat the Kevrata were now indeed in short supply, much too short to keep an entire colony alive.
Doctor Baroja had already begun to discuss the allocation of those medications-and whether they should go to the youngest and strongest or the worst afflicted, because they couldn’t go to everyone-when Beverly’s grandmother guided her out of the medical dome into the thick, oppressive heat of morning.
At first, Beverly thought it was because the talk inside the dome was getting too grim. But that didn’t make much sense. She had already seen things far grimmer the night before, things none of the other kids in the colony had seen.
Then Beverly realized that her grandmother had something else in mind, because she didn’t stop when they got outside the dome. They kept going in the direction of their house.
Beverly asked why her grandmother was taking her home, and Felisa Howard said it would become apparent in a moment. When they reached their domicile, the older woman didn’t go to the front door. She skirted the structure and went out back, where her garden was glistening in the glare of their star.
“A long time ago,” said Felisa Howard, in words Beverly would never forget, “long before synthetic drugs and hyposprays, our ancestors treated their problems with tubers and leaves. That’s what we’re going to do.”
Beverly had never known such a thing was possible. As it turned out, she wasn’t alone in that