Nexus by Robert Boyczuk (best large ebook reader txt) 📕

“Just keep a firm pressure on the wound while I’m gone.”

Liis nodded.

Sav turned and lumbered towards the door. Liis followed his progress until he disappeared into the dark well of the corridor, listening to his fading footfalls. Then she dropped her head so her light lay across Josua’s chest. Lifting a corner of the compress she looked at the wound; it seemed small, insignificant, a thin red line where the flesh puckered slightly. But when Josua inhaled, it gaped open like a tiny mouth and bright, frothy lines of blood coursed over its edges. She put the compress back down.

Why, Josua? she thought. Why did you do this to yourself?

But she knew the answer as soon as the question had formed in her mind: for love. It could only have been for love.

“We’ve can’t wait any longer!” Liis picked her way through the debris of the corridor, pacing back and forth in the narrow space, stepping carefully around Josua.

“We have to wait for Hebuiza,” Sav said flatly.

They’d brought Josua out here into the hallway and bundled him in a silvered, thermal blanket. Liis had put two sloppy stitches in the wound on his chest, the best she could do with the awkward fingers of her suit, and wrapped the other cuts with gauze. On his right cheek was another ragged line of fresh stitches. She paused to stare at the pink edges of the wound beneath the dark zigzag of surgical thread, remembering how Sav knelt on Josua’s cheek while she had to twist the pliers with all her strength to extract the thumb-sized fragment. Now Sav sat on an overturned crate at Josua’s feet, shoulders slumped, elbows resting on his knees, hands curled one within the other. His head hung so low Liis couldn’t see his visor; his helmet light made a small, brilliant pool on the floor beyond the toes of his boots. He hadn’t moved for the last hour.

Liis resumed her pacing.

The beam from her lamp swung in annoying rhythm to her steps, bobbing up and down the corridor, illuminating first the dropshaft where they waited for the Facilitator, then, when she swung around to walk in the other direction, lighting up the corridor that ran off into the darkness. She checked the suit’s display, did a mental calculation. Almost two and a half hours. Nearly an hour to treat Josua’s wounds. Then another hour and a half waiting for Hebuiza to make an appearance, while Josua lay exposed to the cold. The Facilitator had not followed them down to this floor; and he hadn’t been at the interface when Sav had gone back. For the last hour and a half they’d tried to raise him, but with no luck. If he was in range, he’d shut off his transceiver.

“We need to get Josua back to the ship,” Liis said.

Sav remained silent.

Liis’ frustration reached boiling point. What the hell was wrong with Sav? Hebuiza had abandoned them. Good riddance, as far as she was concerned. But waiting here wasn’t going to help Josua a damn bit. Yet Sav only sat there staring at the floor. Liis whirled away, cursed Sav, then Hebuiza. The thought of the Facilitator made her angry, made the muscles in her chest tighten even more.

“Damn him!” She kicked savagely at a broken crate, but either the material of her suit damped the force of her blow or the crate contained something heavy, because it moved only slightly, leaving a small, hopeless track in the dust. She cursed again.

“He’ll be back,” Sav said wearily.

Liis turned. Sav was sitting up now and she cold see through his faceplate. He looked exhausted.

“He’s got nowhere else to go.”

“We’ve got to get Josua back to the ship,” Liis said, stepping up to him.

Sav looked at Josua, then at dropshaft, but said nothing.

“We don’t need Hebuiza. We can do it ourselves. It’ll be tough, but we can manage.”

Her suggestion drew a blank stare.

“Sav-” she began, stopping at the click of a bootsole on the metal rungs of the ladder. She spun around as the Facilitator’s lanky black form, supported by his long arms, clambered down into view. He swung himself off the ladder and into the corridor in an abrupt, off-balance motion, a movement, Liis realised, that would have been graceful in a person of normal proportions. Hebuiza swayed, regained his balance. He enabled his comm link.

Liis stepped in front of him. “Where the hell have you been?”

Hebuiza blinked inside his oddly-shaped helmet. His eyes were small and dark; the angles of his face were exaggerated in the shadows thrown by Liis’s light, making him look even more skeletal. “I have been downloading data,” he said. He licked his lips in a distracted manner.

“Sav already downloaded the only available log.”

“Yes,” Hebuiza said, “At that interface. However, I found another. And I have means of extracting information that is unavailable to you.”

Sav straightened up. “What do you mean?”

Hebuiza touched the box on his chest with the tips of his fingers. “I am a Facilitator.”

Liis could imagine him socketed to an interface, two cables trailing from the port to his skull jacks, one input for each of his surgically divided cortexes. “I don’t care what you are,” Liis said sharply. “You should have told us where you were going!”

Hebuiza’s face coloured; he scowled at her. “I do not answer to you,” he said, his head beginning to swing from side to side in short, abrupt, motions. He tried to step past her.

Liis grabbed his left arm, felt bones and tendons through the thick material of his suit. “Just what the hell do you mean by that?”

With surprising strength, Hebuiza pulled his arm free and shoved her so that she staggered backwards against the wall. Regaining her balance, Liis took a step towards him, but Sav was suddenly there, between them, blocking her path. “Stop it,” he said, placing his hand on her chest lightly, but firmly. “None of this is helping Josua.”

Liis hesitated. Then she blew out a breath, took a step back and tried to will her muscles to relax.

For the first time Hebuiza glanced past her at Josua, but didn’t look in the least surprised to see him lying there, out of his EVA suit, the awkward stitching running across his cheek. But then, Liis thought, he’d probably listened to everything over his suit radio.

Sav turned to him. “Liis is right. You should have told us before you wandered off. And I’m the ranking officer, so you do answer to me.”

Hebuiza eyes glittered in Sav’s light. “We are no longer on the Ea. That is as far as your authority extends over me. And down here, Josua is in charge. Given that he is incapacitated, the role naturally falls to me….”

“Maybe,” Sav said. “But we won’t be down here forever, will we? Unless, of course, you choose not to go back to the Ea.”

The Facilitator’s thin lips twitched. “I see your point,” he said dryly. “I have reconsidered. I concede your right to command.” But the lines of his face were still hard and unrepentant. “In future, I shall consult with our esteemed commander before taking any initiative. At least until the mission “

Sav nodded, ignoring the Facilitator’s sarcasm; Liis could hardly believe the restraint he was showing. “You said you downloaded new information.”

“Yes. About the plague.” The Facilitator seemed to be appraising Josua. “Did he breach any of the cells?”

“No,” Sav said. “Now what about the plague?”

The Facilitator’s eyes flickered and he stared off into the middle distance, as if he saw another world. “It begins with a light fever, that passes in a day. After a brief remission, a second, more debilitating fever occurs some forty-eight hours later, as the virus spreads to the liver and spleen, enlarging them and accelerating the filtering and phagocytic activities into a hyperactive state. Red blood cells are destroyed indiscriminately. Jaundice appears. Then the victim experiences intense abdominal pain, nausea, diarrhoea and vomiting. Within twenty hours lesions form on the skin, and abscesses develop inside the lungs, kidney, heart and brain. Lassitude, confusion and prostration result. Within forty hours irreversible cerebral and renal damage has occurred. Then multi organ failure. Death follows quickly from toxic shock, hypovolemia-or any one of dozens of other complications.”

Silence.

“No survivors,” Hebuiza added flatly, his eyes focused on Josua again. “At least none here.” If he felt any emotion at all, Liis couldn’t detect it in his voice. “The morbidity and mortality rates of the contagion appear to be one hundred percent.”

“Appear to be?” Sav’s voice sounded unnaturally calm to Liis.

“There was severe system degradation,” Hebuiza answered. “I found only sketchy information directly related to the plague. News reports, a few medical bulletins, things of that sort.” Once again he looked past them at something only he could see, his head bobbing slightly. “The epidemiology was highly unusual.” He spoke in a distant voice, pausing between phrases, as if he were merely repeating words he heard in his head. “The disease didn’t follow the usual patterns, spreading from a single source over time. It appeared in geographically disparate regions-including the colonies and off-world research facilities-at roughly the same time.” His eyes snapped back into focus.

Sav frowned. “Then it is not an infectious disease?”

“Yes and no. It appeared everywhere more or less simultaneously. It did not spread from city to city the way a natural disease would infect the population. But once the plague manifested, it became an aggressively infectious disease.”

“You said a natural disease doesn’t spread that way. What the hell do you mean by that? That it wasn’t natural?”

“The records contain some speculation along those lines, yes.”

There was silence; Liis was aware of her heartbeat, of her breath. She asked, “Who would do such a thing?”

“Nexus could easily engineer such a plague.”

“Why?” Sav sounded incredulous. “Why would they want to destroy Bh’Haret?”

“Perhaps because of our reluctance to join their Ascension Program.”

“It’s insane. Why destroy a world that you want to bring into your organization?”

Hebuiza raised the shoulders of his suit in a shrug that conveyed the pointlessness of the question. “All I said was that they had the technical expertise to engineer such a plague. I did not say that they did. As to their motives-”

“Are we safe?”

Sav’s question caught Liis off guard.

Hebuiza blinked. “Impossible to say. But I do know we’re wasting our time here.” As he spoke, he moved closer to Josua, stopping about a meter away from him. The Facilitator’s head began its movement again, swinging first one way, then the other, inside his helmet. “We need to go to a major centre, as I suggested earlier.” He glanced at Liis, raising his eyebrows in a dismissive gesture. “The local net-or what’s left of it-is as good as dead. It is routing power to the stasis cells on a priority basis; it’s part of the microcode, so we have no chance of reprogramming. Which means we cannot power up anything without first repairing the array. Even if it is possible, it would take months.” Hebuiza flicked on a handheld light, bent at the waist, and shone it fully on Josua’s waxen face; then he swung it down to where Josua’s left arm lay across his chest, a vital sign monitor strapped to wrist; a steady stream of figures scrolled across its miniature screen. “The individual nodes are mostly disabled or dysfunctional,” Hebuiza continued. “From what I could gather, there were accusations and counter accusations between the city states after the advent of the disease. Some skirmishes broke out. Bombs were dropped and computer viruses were released. The continental net crashed just before most