ZOE ALAKIS
It was an unreasonable fear, Zoe knew, but she couldn’t bear the thought of losing Tom Rom. While he went out on his missions, she remained safe inside her private, sterile fortress on Pergamus, just waiting for him to return.
The air in the isolation dome was filtered, processed, and disinfected until she considered it safe to breathe, and her personal chambers sat behind twelve layers of decontamination. The Pergamus medical researchers, plague teams, and specimen organizers worked in separate domes scattered across the planet’s harsh landscape, sealed against the poisonous atmosphere. The most dangerous biological investigations were conducted in Orbital Research Spheres.
Her existence was as safe as she could make it.
All of the teams reported directly to her, so that Zoe could hoard their discoveries. Her Pergamus library was the most complete collection of pathogens, disease organisms, viruses, and genetic mutations ever gathered in human history. Zoe was proud of her accomplishments, and she didn’t share them with anyone—at least not while she remained alive. People had refused to help her, time and again, during her greatest need, but she and Tom Rom had survived and succeeded regardless.
Zoe often wondered if the human race was even worth saving, but even though she possessed enough viral specimens to wipe out every living person in the Spiral Arm several times over, she had no interest in causing humanity’s extinction. She just wanted nothing to do with anyone else. She had cut herself off from the Confederation and called no attention to her facility or her work. She didn’t need any outside help, and she liked it that way.
Zoe had assigned her best research teams to study the Onthos space plague that had nearly killed Tom Rom. She was obsessed with this particular disease, afraid of it because of what it had done to him. The plague made her feel weak and ignorant, despite all her precautions. And Zoe Alakis did not like to feel weak or ignorant.…
When Tom Rom’s ship finally returned from Serenity’s Reach and entered orbit over Pergamus, she felt a wash of relief. As her mercenary security ships escorted him in, Tom Rom contacted Zoe on a direct channel. “I got what you asked for—and I am safe.”
Her voice hitched. “Any complications?”
“A perfectly smooth mission. I have what may be the last existing specimens of the nematodes that wiped out the Dhougal colony.”
Zoe studied his face, his mahogany skin tight against high cheekbones, his deeply set eyes, and a reticent smile that he only occasionally let her see. “Last specimens? Did the colonists find a way to cure it?”
“By incinerating the island. I escaped with only a few minutes to spare.”
Her expression hardened. “I told you not to cut it so close. You can’t risk yourself!”
“My job entails risk. If you won’t let me take risks, then you won’t let me do my job, and that would destroy who I am as much as any disease would.”
She didn’t want to argue with him. “Bring the samples to me directly. I want to look at them in person. Inside my dome.”
He shook his head. “That I will not do, Zoe. I’ll deliver them to one of the teams, and they can start work.”
“If you can take risks, then so can I.”
“My risks are necessary. Yours are not. Don’t be petulant.”
“I still want to see you in person. I’ll set all the decontamination procedures in motion so you can come inside my dome.”
“That will take some time. Do you have another mission for me?”
“I do—and I’ll tell you when you get here.” They stared at each other on the comm screen for a long moment; then she lowered her voice. “I just want to see you.” She was still shaken after his close call with the plague.
“All right, then you will see me.” He ended the transmission.
Remotely on a dozen different sensors, Zoe watched Tom Rom as he transferred the specimens of the Dhougal brain parasite to exosuited researchers, who took the samples to one of the quarantine domes for cataloguing and study.
She knew that Tom Rom was correct in refusing to bring the sample in here. Zoe had been testing him, pushing him, but he would never let her come to harm. She wished she could make the same promise to him.
She watched via a succession of monitor screens as he entered the main Pergamus complex and began his long journey through the multiple decontamination locks, like a penitent following the Stations of the Cross. He stripped down and showered in antibacterial foam, then let his body be irradiated with brief high-intensity flashes of UV light. Suited doctors ran medical checks, took blood tests, scanned his perspiration, analyzed his breath—then declared him fit to move through to the next level of protection. The entire process took six hours, and Zoe waited, ever more anxious to see him.
His naked body was lean and muscular, as if carved from weathered wood. Tom Rom was not her lover, but she loved him all the same. He was old enough to be her father, and had protected her since she was just a child on the jungle planet of Vaconda, where both of her adoptive parents had died.
Zoe had never taken a lover; the very idea disgusted her, with so much chance for infection in the exchange of fluids. She eschewed physical contact entirely. She had seen micrographs of the menagerie of creatures that lived on human skin, in human hair, in saliva. She had not left her protective dome in years until recently, when she insisted on being beside Tom Rom’s treatment bed in the Orbital Research Sphere. After he was cured, though, she had returned to the shelter of her isolation dome, and Tom Rom insisted on going on scout missions, as if nothing had changed. But Zoe felt that her life could never return to exactly the way it had been.
When he finally emerged through the last of the airlocks and stood before her in a fresh jumpsuit, Zoe rose to her feet from behind her desk. Though he remained several meters away, this was as close as Zoe came to personal contact. With anyone. She basked in his proximity.
Tom Rom smiled at her and finally said, “I have high-resolution scans of the parasite samples I acquired. You’ll find them interesting.”
On her main desk screen, she called up enlarged images of the cysts he had extracted from the victim’s cerebral tissue. Coiled whiplike worms devoured the remnants of the brain cells, but they seemed sluggish, dying.
“These killed everyone at the Dhougal colony?”
“They would have. The incineration blast took care of anyone else who was still alive.”
“I’m glad I have this for my collection,” she said. “Thank you.”
He gave a crisp nod. “What new assignment do you have for me?”
“Nothing important enough to send you away.”
“I thought you’d found another mission.”
“We’ll always find another mission. Are you so anxious to leave me? You took six hours just to get through decontamination. Stay for lunch.”
“I would be honored to have lunch with you.” His expression softened. “Just like when you were a little girl on Vaconda.”
She remembered the days they had spent together in the lichentree forests, high up in the watchtower where her father had conducted his research. After the death of Adam Alakis, she and Tom Rom had survived, moving from place to place, forming a strong bond. “You kept me alive back then.”
“Always. And I helped you build this facility and all that it contains.”
The dispenser delivered a sterilized grain mash with added nutrients, a bland but safe fare that Zoe ate every day so she could monitor her vital signs and her blood chemistry.
He ate the grain mash without complaining, then leaned closer, so close, in fact, that she could have reached out to touch him. She could have … if she dared. “You must not worry about me, Zoe. I’ve confronted my own mortality, and I understand it—and learned from it. What we do is important. Who you are is important … and I take risks so that you don’t have to.”