“You need fluids immediately.”
A moment later, a plastic straw pokes at her mouth. Noemi obediently takes a few sips, half opening her eyes to see Abel holding the pouch of… whatever this is. Something blue. It tastes sweet, too sweet, as if it were trying to trick you into drinking it.
When she lets her head fall back again, Abel says, “The medical scanners report a virus unknown to its databanks. The marks on your skin suggest, with a very high level of probability, that you’re suffering from Cobweb.”
People die of Cobweb. Harriet told Noemi that much. But it doesn’t have to be fatal, not necessarily. “I’ll get better,” she mumbles. “Just need to rest.”
“The bioscan readings are…” His voice trails off, but he seems to catch himself. “They aren’t good. And you’re unusually radioactive.”
That jolts her into a moment of clarity. “Radioactive?”
Abel touches her shoulder, which calms her. “All humans naturally emit a very low level of radiation. Yours is significantly higher than normal. Not enough to be dangerous to you or to anyone else on its own, but it’s a sign the Cobweb has drastically altered your physical condition. It’s a very strange symptom for a virus to have.”
Noemi tries to force her fever-maddened brain to think. “Maybe the radiation isn’t a symptom. Maybe it’s something we ran into on Cray.”
“If it were, then my level of radioactivity would have risen as well. It hasn’t. This disease is—it’s completely unfamiliar to me. Noemi, I don’t know how to help you, and we can’t assume you’ll recover on your own. We have to get you to a fully staffed medical facility.”
“Thought you—you had all the models’ knowledge. Tare medical models, too.”
“I do. But from thirty years ago, when I was stranded. Cobweb hadn’t yet appeared then. So I have no information on optimal treatment or likely prognosis.” Abel sounds like he’s mad at the whole galaxy for containing even one piece of information he lacks.
“Just try your best.”
He shakes his head. “That’s not good enough.”
Abel just admitted his best might not be good enough? Under any other circumstances, Noemi would’ve teased him like crazy for that: the arrogant Model One A of the Mansfield Cybernetics line admitting he has limits. Now, though, she has to keep him from doing something so logical it’s idiotic. “What else can we do? On Cray or Kismet—we’ll be found by the Queen and Charlie. And no one on Genesis can help me.” Nobody there will have treated Cobweb either, and she can’t bring some terrible plague back to her world.
“Exactly. So we’ll go back through the Cray system on our way to Stronghold.”
Stronghold? It’s the most populated world on the Loop save for Earth itself, a cold, forbidding world heavy with ores. Stronghold is as different from Genesis as it is possible for any world to be. Worse, it’s still tightly bound to Earth, still completely loyal… so far as she knows. But that’s far enough. “Abel, no. It’s going to take too long.”
“We still have eight days. That gives us time to get to Stronghold.”
“Barely. And we could get caught. It’s too dangerous.”
“I can disguise the ship, check in with Stronghold’s computer networks to see whether our images have been distributed there. If so, I can probably erase them in advance.”
“Probably isn’t good enough.”
He’s quiet for a few seconds, enough that she thinks the discussion is over. But just as she begins to drift in the fever again, he says, “You said you accepted me as your equal. I’m not under your authority any longer. So I get to vote, too, don’t I? And I vote for taking you to a doctor immediately.”
Then the vote’s a tie, and nobody wins. But as Noemi begins to say so, chills begin shivering their way up her body. Her bones ache as if she were being wrung out like a washcloth. She never, never wants to feel so cold again.
Noemi’s willing to die to save Genesis. But she never intended to throw her life away without meaning. If she dies out here, because of this, she dies for no reason.
She swallows hard and nods. “Stronghold.”
Noemi remembers their departure through the Blind Gate as hardly more than a blur of slowly spinning asteroids flecked across the brightly colored wisps of the nebula. When the light starts doing that strange bendy thing, she just closes her eyes.
She lies in sick bay, covered in silvery blankets. Before he left her to pilot the ship, Abel turned down the lights in the hopes Noemi could get some more sleep. She managed a catnap, but now she can only lie on the medical bed, gazing around the room in weary confusion. How can she possibly be so far from home? How is any of this actually happening? Maybe the virus is playing tricks on her, and in reality she’s back on Genesis, suffering from some totally normal illness.
But she can’t convince herself this is a dream, because her weak, aching body tells her this is all too real. And through the one oval sick bay window, she sees constellations of unfamiliar stars.
“Noemi?” Abel walks into the darkened sick bay, his face illuminated mostly by the glowing readings above her biobed. How long has it been since the leap through the Blind Gate? She drifted off for a while, but can’t tell whether she was out for a few minutes or a day. “We’ll be in Stronghold orbit within the hour.” Closer to the latter then, she realizes, because she’s missed another entire Gate leap.
“Okay.” Will she be able to walk off the ship herself, or will Abel have to carry her?
“Noemi?” Abel’s leaning over her, his thumb brushing her sweat-damp hair from her forehead. Did she drift off again? “I’ve given you drugs that ought to reduce fever. I’m not sure whether they’re contraindicated for Cobweb, but—something needed to be done.”
“It’s okay.” Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Noemi doesn’t particularly care at the moment. There’s no way the drug could make her feel worse than she already does. The rest is irrelevant.
“We’re landing on Stronghold now.”
Something seems very wrong with that. “But—why aren’t you flying the ship?”
“Stronghold brings in nearly all incoming ships via tractor beam, even during mass migration waves.”
“Mass migration?” The fever must be ebbing somewhat; Noemi can focus her mind better now. “What do you mean?”