Orphans - Kevin Killiany [38]
Lauoc was…He could not remember seeing Lauoc. He was somewhere, though. Of that Stevens was sure.
He had spent most of his time underground, going as deep as he could. They, the baron’s archeologists or scientists or whatever, were exploring tunnels that were clearly engineering decks. Decks designed for beings at least a meter taller than they were.
There had been great rooms of what looked like suspended animation capsules, or maybe coffins. Hundreds of them. The natives had hurried him through those to the corridors beyond.
The corridors seemed to lead somewhere. There were signage and panels and labels he could not read and which they clearly did not understand, either. They seemed to think he should. He thought he should, but though machines had to comply with the natural laws of physics, nothing he saw looked familiar.
Or everything looked familiar, but not familiar enough.
When a giant appeared, he started, then remembered he was in a hospital room. This giant, not the one who had spoken to him, had come in response to Soloman’s bell.
Soloman held his hands flat in the air, indicating various heights shorter than giants. Then he held his arms wide and pulled them in. Hugging the air? Gathering together. Right.
The giant left.
“I’ve asked that the others be brought here,” Soloman said. “I’ve tried that before to no avail, but perhaps they will believe this situation requires next of kin.”
Stevens laughed, coughing. “Tev is my next of kin?”
“Here, he is,” Soloman said. “As am I.”
“I knew that.”
Soloman dissolved into shadow as the walls and ceiling flowed together. Stevens sat quietly on the back porch of the Corsi farmhouse on Fahleena III until Pattie shook him awake.
“Fabe!” she shouted, sounding like Carol Abramowitz.
He laughed. That was funny.
“How’d you do that?” he asked.
But when he looked at Pattie closely, she flowed like water, turning into Carol. That wasn’t funny. Pattie was gone.
He cried.
“Stop it,” Abramowitz said, but not cruelly. “You’re wasting water.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Tev’s voice; his next of kin.
“Radiation poisoning, dehydration, starvation, electrolyte depletion,” Abramowitz answered. “And that’s just a guess, made without tricorder or medical degree.”
“Why is he so ill?” Soloman asked.
“The baron is apparently looking for the same sort of access we are,” Lauoc said. “He put us to work with teams exploring the tunnels. Stevens made a big show of being enthusiastic about going as deep as possible. He thought it offered the best chance at finding the control center. He said they’d found a region with warm walls. He was sure they were near the epicenter of whatever went wrong here.”
Stevens nodded.
Abramowitz took his belt pack.
“Hyronalin, vitamins, everything, gone,” she said. “He was keeping himself dosed to try and stay down there as long as possible.”
“Foolish.” That was Tev.
“Dangerous, yes, but not foolish.” And that was Abramowitz. “He was taking a calculated risk to follow up on the best lead we have.”
“Will my medications help?” Soloman asked. “I require far less protection from radiation.”
“No, you don’t,” Tev stated flatly.
“Thanks, Soloman,” Abramowitz answered. “I think under the circumstances if we each donated half a dose of hyronalin, we may have enough to stabilize him.”
“For how long?” Tev asked.
“If he doesn’t go back down those tunnels, days. Certainly as long as the rest of us. Relief should be here by then.”
“Relief should have been here two local days ago,” Tev countered.
But Stevens could hear him removing his medkit. Good ol’ next-of-kin Tev. He drifted into darkness.
When he awoke he had a sense that he had been unconscious for some time, but the others were all more or less where he had left them. Or their shadows were; his vision was not quite clear. He reshut his eyes and listened.
“One of the advantages of being in a hospital is that medicine relies heavily on diagrams,” Soloman was saying. “I think I have puzzled out what is happening to the infants.”
“Obviously an effect of the buildup of radioactive heavy metals in the