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MIDNIGHT IN THE HEART

OF MIDLOTHIAN

* * *

FRANK O’CONNOR

ONE

___________

“It’s just cancer.”

“What do you mean, it’s just cancer?”

“I mean, it’s just cancer. A very simple cancer that hasn’t spread or metastasized and is eminently operable.”

“I don’t mean to sound rude, Doctor—”

“I’m not a doctor, I’m a medical technician—”

“Whatever. What I’m saying is that I don’t know what cancer is.”

“Oh. I got you. Cancer’s a kind of um . . . slow-burn, localized infection, kind of. But we haven’t really seen a lot of it since . . . hmm, twenty-second century, according to this. Anyway, it’s easy to treat, but you’re going to have to have surgery.”

“What for? I thought you said it’s an infection. Can’t you just irradiate or drug it?”

“Yes, and we’re going to do both of those. But to be sure we get all of it, and don’t have you back here next month, we may have to remove some tissue.”

“What kind of tissue?”

“Nothing you need for a date. Don’t sweat it.”

What a bastard arse of a morning, he thought to himself. I wake up with a stomachache and end up in the medical bay with an archaic disease that was wiped out by simple gene therapy four hundred years ago. At least, according to Shipnet. There were more than fourteen terabytes of data on “Cancer,” which was apparently damn-near ubiquitous in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

His morning was about to get much worse.

The ship he was in was heading into a grim unknown. The planet Algolis had been attacked by a small but potent Covenant force. Details were thin, since the only witnesses were civilians. Civilians who’d barely made it off that world. Civilians who’d been kept deliberately in the dark about the Prototype weapons systems on that planet and had escaped by the skin of their teeth, and by the sacrifice of a brave few Marines from the Corps of Engineers.

It was a mess. And they were hurtling into it through the quantum foam and spatial uncertainty of a rushed slipspace jump. The plan was to stop short of the system itself and come in under the cover of a gas giant and a faked asteroidal trajectory—an old strategy, but one that worked well enough. Find out what had happened on Algolis and make sure the weapons prototypes were completely eradicated. Then loop back on a complex and slow Cole Protocol return trip.

The last mission had been complicated by a Marine sergeant going MIA. Guy the other Corps of Engineers salts called “Ghost.” He supposed they were all ghosts now. Or ONI was hiding something.

A mess.

“Mo Ye, how come I have cancer?”

Mo Ye, the shipboard AI of the UNSC Destroyer The Heart of Midlothian, thought for a picosecond before answering through the medbay’s directional audio feed. “Nothing in your civilian, Marine, or ODST record to suggests any particular genetic preponderance. But it happens from time to time. Perhaps you’re just a throwback, Baird. It would explain that Cro-Magnon brow of yours.”

Mo Ye’s avatar, a small, angry, and elderly looking Chinese lady in peasant’s garb, flashed a rare smile as she said it and cackled through a crackling (and perfectly synthesized) smoker’s cough to punctuate her joke. Her eyes sparkled with the wicked humor of the viciously old and crotchety. The projector plinth on which she stood pulsed a pleasant pink hue.

Orbital Drop Shock Trooper Sergeant Mike Baird snorted back a laugh. Mo Ye was well known for her bone-dry sense of humor, but he smiled as he thought of his high school nickname: Captain Caveman.

He really did have a heavy brow; a thick ridge that capped an otherwise unremarkable, if sturdy face. A prominent rounded jawline and sharply defined cheeks helped elevate him lightly into the realm of Homo sapiens, but a low-slung, muscular build, a close-cropped dusting of silver-black hair, and cloudy, amber eyes did little to dispel the visual notion of a rock-banging troglodyte.

“Don’t worry about the surgery, Baird. It really is trivial. The autosurgeon will be done in less than an hour. But you’ll be under for significantly longer than that. It