The first bit to come down to the surface of Niflheim, just a few hours after we made orbit, was a lander piloted by Nasha containing a biological isolation chamber, a team from Medical, a team from Biology, and me.
We already knew by then that we were more or less boned when it came to both the climate and the atmospheric composition of our new home. Marshall had actually considered trying to push on to a secondary target when he realized that we wouldn’t be able to survive outside without rebreathers, but after a lot of discussion and a fair bit of yelling, Dugan and a few others from Bio convinced him that once we’d introduced some engineered algae into the ecosystem, we’d be able to get the partial pressure of oxygen in the atmosphere up to survivable levels within a reasonable time frame—reasonable in this case meaning not necessarily within the lifetimes of any of the adult members of the expedition, but possibly within the lifetimes of some of the embryos we were carrying in the hold.
As I think I mentioned, the odds of an expedition like ours ever reaching a secondary target are not-quite-but-almost zero, so in the end he decided to give Niflheim a go.
The first order of business for any new colony is determining whether there’s anything in the local microbiota that might pose a hazard to human health.
For the record, there is always something in the local microbiota that not only might, but in fact definitely will, pose a hazard to human health.
The way this is determined, naturally, is by exposing the expedition’s Expendable to anything and everything that can be isolated from the local environment, and then waiting to see what happens to him.
We’d been on the surface for less than a day when Nasha gave me a last kiss and a pat on the cheek, and then a tech from Medical named Arkady marched me into the isolation chamber. The last thing he did before he left me there was fit me with a scanning helmet for continuous upload. When I asked him what that was for, he said, “I guess they might want to ask you what you thought about this later.”
“Seriously?” I said. “You’re gonna give me super-herpes? Fine. That’s my job. Do I really have to remember it?”
He shrugged, backed out of the chamber, and closed the door.
* * *
THE ISOLATION CHAMBER was a cylinder just wide enough that I could almost touch both sides if I stretched out my arms, and just tall enough that I could stand up without hitting my head. It had a metal chair in the center that doubled as a toilet if you slid back a lid on the seat, a vent in the ceiling, and a drawer set into the wall opposite the door where they’d left me some snacks, in case I didn’t die right away. I’d just sat down when the vent began hissing.
“Take a few deep breaths,” Arkady said through the intercom. “Breathe through your mouth, if you don’t mind.”
I actually didn’t, because whatever was coming out of the vent smelled like dog farts.
It tasted like dog farts too.
After a minute or so of that, the vent closed with an audible click.
“Thanks,” Arkady said. “Make yourself comfortable. This may take a while.”
I had to bite back the urge to tell him that I hated to inconvenience him, and that I’d try to die as quickly as possible.
A few minutes after that, Nasha’s face appeared in the door’s tiny window.
“Hey,” she said. “How’s it going in there?”
I grimaced. “Great.” I gestured to the drawer behind me. “They gave me snacks.”
She smiled. “Lucky you. All we’ve got out here is cycler paste and water.”
I turned around and rooted through the drawer, found a protein bar, and peeled off the wrapper.
“Well,” I said, and took a bite. “Nothing but the best for the sacrificial pig, right?”
“Lamb,” she said.
“What?”
“Lamb, Mickey. You sacrifice a lamb. Pigs are gross. You don’t sacrifice them. You just eat them.”
I sighed. “Either way, they end up just as dead.”
* * *
NASHA TRIED. HONEST to God, she did. She’d probably known since we first kissed that someday she’d have to watch me die, but after eight years it was finally happening, and I don’t think she knew what to do. I don’t think she knew what to feel. So she stood outside that window for four hours, and she talked to me. She talked about what the planet looked like through the viewscreens. She talked about what a jackass Arkady was. She talked about some vid drama she’d been watching about a family of obscenely wealthy assholes on Midgard.
She talked about the stuff we could do together when this was over, when I came back out of the tank again.
I tried too, because she was trying, and I didn’t want her to feel any worse than she probably already did. After a couple of hours, though, I wasn’t feeling so well myself. At first I thought it must be psychosomatic. Who ever heard of a bug starting in on you that quickly, right? Before long, though, it was pretty clear that I was spiking a fever. Arkady came back to ask me a few questions about what I was feeling. I told him it felt like the early stages of the flu. He nodded and went away again. The coughing started at three hours. I first brought up blood at three and a half. Nasha had mostly stopped talking by then, but she was still there, watching me through the window, one hand pressed against the glass next to her face.
At the four-hour mark, I mustered up enough breath to tell her to go away. I didn’t want her watching what came next.
She didn’t go away. When it was clear what was happening, she arm-twisted Arkady into strapping her into a biohazard suit so that she could come into the chamber with me. I didn’t want her there at first. When things got really bad, though, when I started coughing so hard that I cracked a rib and brought up chunks of tissue, she held my hand and cradled my head against her belly and talked me through it. It was awful, what she did then, and it was beautiful, and if I live another thousand years I will never stop being grateful for it.
It was only another hour or so after that. Just for future reference: If you have any choice in the way you leave this life, try to stay away from pulmonary hemorrhage. I think I can speak from a position of authority on this topic. This is not the way you want to go.
* * *
I WOKE UP naked and covered in goo, laid out on the floor next to the portable tank they’d brought down in the lander.
“Really?” I said when I’d coughed the last of the fluid out of my no longer bleeding lungs. “I don’t even get a bunk?”
Burke, my friend from Medical, tossed me a towel. “You were covered in crap,” he said. “I didn’t want to wash the bedding.”
I scraped as much gunk off of myself as I could, then climbed into the one-piece gray coverall he handed me.
“Get something to eat,” he said. “You’ve got at least twenty-four hours before you go back in.”
* * *
“SO,” NASHA SAID. “That was rough.”
I looked at her across the common room table. She wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Yeah,” I said. “That was rough. Thanks for staying with me.”
She looked up at the ceiling, then down at her hands—anywhere but at me.
“Mickey…” she said.