part0006

Sitting on the edge of an examination table, Tarkos opened up but growled in response. He’d been poked and prodded for an hour, made to pee and defecate in a talking toilet—“thank you for your sample”—run through fMRIs and a dozen other scanners, and finally had yielded up a pint of blood to a robot that stank of antiseptic and that looked like some medieval nightmare, all blades and needles.

This was not what he expected for his first hours after landing on Earth. He had imagined immediately going to a restaurant. Or walking in a park and seeing properly green vegetation from which came the songs of familiar feathered birds. Or going someplace where many young women were talking and he could just look at them and marvel and eavesdrop on their Earthly cares. Instead, this: Bria had received orders not to go to the headquarters of Earth’s Harmonizer Corp, housed in the Centre de Defense Terrestre, a silver tower on the outskirts of Paris, but rather to report to the Galactic Embassy, a tower recently built across the central plaza from the United Nations. Constructed in Neelee style, and shaped like a snail shell set up on its muscular foot, most of the the building’s materials were translucent. Tarkos found it disorienting, though he had grown accustomed to the Neelee style.

Inside, Tarkos shuffled from one desk to another under pale soft light, until some AI or functionary learned that Tarkos had not had a physical by a human doctor in more than three years. Orders promptly appeared in his personal network, and he reported to this Japanese-American doctor, who exuded a clinical enthusiasm as she inspected him, delighted about the prospect of possibly discovering some terrible alien ailment. Tarkos struggled with his indignation and impatience, on the one hand, and the rather disarming curiosity of the doctor, whose name was the unlikely confection of Suzanne Murakami.

“How’s your exposure to radiation been?” Dr. Murakami asked, balanced on the edge of a stool as she shined a painfully bright light into his eyes.

“Terminal,” he said, blinking. “Our armor is very good but on my last mission I received a terminal dose of gamma radiation. I need monthly gene restorative therapy or I’ll die. I can’t live more than a few weeks away from Galactic tech.”

“Hmmm,” she intoned, skeptically. “That explains it. But you shouldn’t be so sure that Galactic Tech is always better.” She turned off the light and picked up a computer tablet, shaking her head so that her queue of very thick black hair, streaked with gray, waved back and forth. She frowned at the data on her screen. “Those bacterial balance cocktails they give you are of course a disaster. I’ll have to rebalance your whole bacterial ecology. But what about exposure to toxic atmospheres?”

“Uh... atmospheres?” Tarkos hesitated. “Wait a minute, what did you mean before by, ‘That explains it’?”

“Yes,” the doctor said, thoughtful. “Have you been breathing alien atmospheres?”

Tarkos shrugged. “I guess on every planet where I saw trouble—which is most of them—I ended up with a lungful. Especially gas giants. I spent most of the last three years falling into gas giants. Or so it seems. Usually I got a few breaths leaked through some damage to my suit. Or a few breaths that got trapped in the airlock.”

The doctor nodded knowingly. For a moment her demeanor of dogged curiosity waned, and she put the edge of her tablet computer against her thighs, folded her arms neatly along the top edge, and leaned forward. “You’re a lucky man. I’d love to see all those different species.”

“Yeah?” Tarkos asked. “You’re in the Auxiliary Harmonizer Corp, right? They surely will let you do time out in the Galaxy.”

“What?” the doctor said. “I’d never go into space. Space is dangerous.” She waved one hand as if swatting away the notion. “Besides, I’m needed here.” That seemed to remind her of their task. She held up the tablet again and pointed one corner at him, as if to aim its data at him accusingly. “Do you cough often?”

“Yes,” Tarkos said. “I guess I do, now that you mention it. I mean, we keep the atmosphere on our cruiser a mix, a kind of middling compromise, between Sussurat and Earth. It’s mostly oxygen, and that’s really dry. I have a sore throat from the dry air, most of the time. It’s not ideal. I tend to cough. Or, anyway, I thought that was what made me cough.”

The doctor looked up at him, her dark eyes opening wide. For a moment, Tarkos thought she had realized some deep insight about his health. His heart began to beat faster in expectation of some terrible diagnosis. But, instead, she asked, “You mean your partner is a Sussurat?”

“Commander and partner, yes.”

“I’ve never examined a Sussurat. Do you think he—”

“Do you think she needs a physical?”

Tarkos laughed. “Sorry, doc, no way Bria is going to come in here and pee on command and then give you blood. She’s... very reserved. Very formal. Kind of prim and proper, in the usual Sussurat way. And, frankly, she might not trust a human doctor. Us being savages and all.”

The doctor’s wide-eyed expression of hope collapsed. “Oh. Hmm. Too bad. Still....”

“Listen, doc,” Tarkos said. “What’s all this about coughing and radiation and ‘that explains it’?”

“Oh,” she said. “You have lung cancer. Fairly advanced.”

Tarkos held his breath. The room seemed to swoon. He gripped the edge of the examining table, crinkling its paper cover.

Lung cancer. The most deadly cancer, as far as he was concerned. Lung cancer killed his father, when the otherwise strong man had been a mere fifty-four years old. It had been a terrible, slow death, and Tarkos had watched it all.

Seeing the blood drain from Tarkos’s face, Doctor Murakami held up a placating hand, this time waving it to brush away his worry.

“No, no! No worry! It’ll be fine. Really. I’ve a good sample of your DNA on record. We’ve sequenced you down to the base pairs. We know the mutations for typical lung cancers. I’ll check yours to ensure a match, and then program some nanobots to attack all and only the cells with those mutations. One injection of those, and in a few days the bots will have killed all the cancerous cells. Then, in a week, you’ll take another shot to program tissue regeneration, so that you don’t get scarring in your lungs as you grow back the proper tissue. Finally, as a backup, to prevent remission, we’ll also program your own immune system to attack the cancers.”

Tarkos felt his whole body relax. He almost collapsed back against the wall. “That’s it?”

She nodded. “You’ll be A-OK fine.”

“Thanks doc,” Tarkos said. He met her dark eyes and smiled. “Medicine has definitely improved while I’ve been away. My father died of lung cancer. If he had lasted a decade longer, he’d be cured.”

“I’m sorry to hear that your father died before we could help him.” The doctor furrowed her brow. “Medicine has progressed, but don’t get the wrong idea: we didn’t learn everything from the Galactics. It’s mostly us. I designed some of these nanobots myself.”

A brisk knock sounded at the door. The doctor had opaqued all the walls of the inspection room, making them glowing white. But it meant they could not tell who or what waited in the hall.

“Come!” the doctor said.

The door opened a crack. A voice with a strong Irish accent called through, “Tarkos?”

Tarkos jumped down to his feet and, though it seemed a bit ridiculous in the flimsy hospital robe, stood at attention.

“Vice Commander McDonough, sir,” he snapped.

Conor McDonough slipped into the room. “At ease,” the lean red-head said. He wore the gray uniform of a Harmonizer, but trimmed with the gold claw insignia of an officer. He looked around the room, as if inspecting the place. Then he said, “Good work on the space lift, Tarkos. You took some chances, and I’ll have to do a fair bit of explaining why you were there at all, but I reckon you just might have saved the elevator car, and our diplomats.”

“Thank you, sir.”

McDonough looked to the doctor. “Doctor Murakami?”

She slipped off the stool and set down the tablet and looked squarely at McDonough, crossing her arms. Tarkos was surprised that she adopted a slight tone of disapproval, if not scolding, with the vice commander. “He’s got some serious problems. I can fix them. But only because I’m good and he got in here in time. You need to bring all the human personnel through here, if we’re going to keep them alive. I’ve been telling you that, and this proves it. Space is not healthy.”

McDonough nodded. “Aye, space ain’t healthy. That’s the Lord’s truth. I’ll see what I can do about getting a full physical for all humans doing Alliance work. But in the meanwhile, can Amir go?”

“For now. He needs to come back in tomorrow, and then in a week.” She took a step toward the vice commander. “Sir, do you think that, well, perhaps I should also check out his partner? Perhaps you should order her to have a check up.”

Tarkos suppressed a smile. He had to admire the doctor’s persistence.

McDonough furrowed his brow. “Doctor, I don’t think she’d fit ’ere in your office. But tell you what. I’ll keep an eye on her. I see any signs she ails in any way, I’ll send her here.”

McDonough nodded at Tarkos. “Get dressed, Tarkos. Time for your briefing. That Sussurat of yours is ready to eat an intern out of impatience. She thinks it a grand insult that we wait on the likes of you. We’re going across the street, to the UN.”

Tarkos nodded. “I’ll hurry, sir.”

“Good.” Conor McDonough went to the door, but before he pulled it closed he looked back at Tarkos and smiled. He had recruited Tarkos into the Harmonizers, three years before, and had given Tarkos that same broad smile the day the young man had said ‘yes’ to the invitation to join the corp. “It’s good to see you again, Amir. I’ve enjoyed reading your reports. You’ve had a colorful few years.”

“That we have, sir. That we have.”

They met in a circular room without windows. Hidden lights cast a pale glow over the dark wood panels of the walls. Conor McDonough sat at the far end of an oval table, with a young woman at his side. She had blond hair, cut short, and wore a dark suit. The woman’s blue eyes went wide, when Bria padded into the room, shoulders brushing the frame of the wide door. It wasn’t fear, Tarkos could tell. Or, anyway, not only fear. Her expression mostly betrayed the same kind of curiosity that Dr. Murakami had shown. Aliens, he realized, were still a relatively rare sight on Earth.

Tarkos took a seat at the table. Bria pushed a chair aside and sat on her haunches, which still put her head far above the table top. The door slid closed behind them.

“I just sealed this room for maximum security,” McDonough said, speaking smoothly in Galactic. “You have been called to Earth for a sensitive mission.”

He turned to the woman to his right. “This is Dr. Karen Yeats. She’s a—what is it?—a bioinformaticist. She’s not a member of the Corp. She comes from US intelligence, but she has worked for the UN extensively. She has the highest UN security clearance, and the Alliance is clearing her for all information relevant to this mission. Dr. Yeats, this is Harmonizer Amir Tarkos and this is Commander Briaathursiasaliantiormethessess.”

Tarkos almost coughed. He’d never heard a human pronounce Bria’s name so well. Tarkos butchered it every time he tried, to his own shame and to Bria’s annoyance. Bria continually hoped that Tarkos would learn and then he could stop calling her simply “Bria.” Tarkos instead felt certain that the nickname had saved their lives a dozen times: they’d both be dead the first mission on which he had to yell, “Briaathursiasaliantiormethessess, duck!”

Yeats looked at Bria and then Tarkos. She tipped her head in greeting, but said nothing.

“They,” McDonough continued in explanation to Dr. Yeats, “are the two Harmonizers who stopped the attack that targeted Neelee-ornor. They destroyed the mysterious gravity weapon that was used against the planet.”

The woman’s blue eyes settled on Tarkos. She pulled back her lips in thought, giving them a thin appearance. She seemed to size Tarkos up, and find him wanting.

“Do you know about the biological weapons?” she asked, in English.

Tarkos looked to Bria in question, knowing that she would be running a translation program. When she did not answer, he said, “We knew that biological weapons had been dropped on Neelee-ornor during the gravity attack. It seems every kind of weapon was dropped: nuclear, anti-matter, and biological, all while the gravity weapon was deployed. But we don’t know details.”

Their enemy, the Ulltrians, had attacked the capital of Galactic civilization with a mysterious new weapon that had caused gravitational waves around the planet, shaking its continents. But biological weapons had always been the preferred tool of the Ulltrians. Called by the Ulltrians KunPaTels, these had been the superweapons of the great Accelerationist War, a war that had nearly destroyed Galactic civilization five thousand years before, when the Galactic Alliance first fought against the Ulltrians, and a thousand worlds were destroyed. Most everyone thought that no such weapon had existed since that horrible time. The weapon was essentially an ecoforming machine. Ecoforming machines primarily worked by distributing into an ecosystem organisms meant to change that ecosystem into a new stable form. What had been special about the KunPaTels was that the payloads had been a wide variety of organisms, some engineered to be super-virulent. The Ulltrians aimed not to ecoform into some stable form, but create ecological chaos, to spread warfare not just among their enemies but among all the organisms of the enemy’s biosphere. For the Ulltrians, warfare was waged not between species, but between clades, between whole life-trees. Once a KunPaTel was fully deployed, it could not effectively be fought. Millions of organisms, once distributed into a biosphere, were very difficult if not impossible to root out.

“Only one such weapon managed to land on the planet. The Neelee were able to quarantine the weapon,” Yeats explained. “They have shared with us their study of its contents.”

“Bria, Tarkos,” McDonough said, “Dr. Yeats has examined the Neelee data. She’s Earth’s best person for this kind of thing. And she has discovered something very disturbing. Part of the payload of the KunPaTel weapon was from Earth.”

McDonough let that hang in the air. Bria leaned forward. “Organisms already off Earth?” she asked in Galactic.

“No,” McDonough said. “Not legally. Not to the knowledge of Earth authorities or the Harmonizer Corp or the Galactic Life Registry.” He turned to Yeats. “Doctor?”

Yeats stood and walked to the wall, which lit up with an image of thin worms in a twisting mass. “The weapon’s payload included many nematodes. The majority of their genome is original. These are deep Earth ocean nematodes. Benthic. But this. This. Here.” Another representation popped up, colored lines arranged in aligned rectangles. Tarkos recognized it as a high-level abstract representation of gross genome features. She pointed at it. “This is the genome of one of the organisms in the weapon. It is more than ninety-nine percent identical to our record of the terrestrial organism. The actual organism in the weapon is terrestrial. Perhaps slightly modified, but terrestrial.”

“What is it?” Bria asked.

The scientist tilted her head forward. “In English, we call it a ‘water bear.’” She waved at some controls and a magnified image of a translucent, six-legged, bearlike creature appeared. “Subphylum, tardigrada. Microscopic. Very robust. Some people think it’s the toughest animal on Earth. Lives in nearly every terrestrial environment.”

“It looks like you,” Tarkos said, turning to Bria.

“Handsome organism,” she hissed.

“But where is this one from?” Tarkos asked, turning back to Dr. Yeats.

The scientist smiled without mirth. “That’s the good bit. We’re lucky. This one, it’s a rare subspecies. It exists only in one place. In the upper Amazon forest.”

“But that,” McDonough interrupted, leaning over the table, “is not the important part. Ready for the clincher? This organism is patented.”

“Patented?” Tarkos asked.

“Right. By a corporation right here in New York. Called Genmine. Recently bought by a private equity firm, and managed by the head of that firm.”

“But how can they patent it?” Tarkos asked. “Isn’t it a wild organism?”

McDonough raised an eyebrow. “Happens every day, Tarkos.”

Bria closed her top two eyes. Earth commerce disgusted her. Tarkos let it lie, though he wanted to ask more about it, because he didn’t want to give the Sussurat an even worse impression of Earth.

“Your mission,” McDonough said, “is to find out how this organism ended up as part of a biological weapon. If you locate any network exporting organisms off Earth illegally, you must eliminate that network. I’d recommend that you start by talking to the people at this corporation that’s patented the tardigrade. Dr. Yeats will be available to help you.”

McDonough leaned back. He frowned and glanced at Dr. Yeats. After a moment of hesitation, he said, “I don’t think I’ll betray any confidential facts when I tell you that our intelligence is frightening. On the edge of Rinneret space, Galactic ships are disappearing. The Galactic Executive thinks that we’re also in some kind of covert war with hidden allies of the Ulltrians. Our intelligence shows that the few species that remained sympathetic to the Ulltrians and the Accelerationist cause are organizing in secret. We fear there may be other KunPaTel weapons. The Galactic Alliance, and very likely Earth, are in imminent danger. This organism—” he pointed at the projection of the waterbear—“is one of our only leads that might help us find out something, anything, about the enemy’s plans.”

“One thing, Vice Commander,” Tarkos said. “What about this group that seized the elevator, the TLF—the Terran Liberation Front. Is that something we have to worry about? And could they be involved?”

McDonough shook his head. “We don’t think so. They’ve succeeded in perpetrating some very embarrassing terrorist acts against commercial interests, primarily Galactic ventures here on Earth, but I don’t think they have the resources to try to hinder the work of the Harmonizers. And, they would have no way to track you down or be aware of your activities. I think we can forget them, and let domestic forces take care of the TLF problem.”

“We understand,” Bria said, rising. “Lifecode violation. Will identify and punish violators. Start immediately.”

Tarkos smiled. “Again, no lunch.”

Bria lumbered out of the room. Dr. Yeats followed without another word. But as Tarkos rose, the Vice Commander caught his eye and made a small gesture, waving him over. Amir went to his side. Bria did not look back; she always expected Amir to follow close behind.

“You’ll need to take care of both of those two,” McDonough said to him softly.

“Dr. Yeats is important. One of Earth’s best people for whatever it is she does. But she’s not one of us. Her loyalties are to her nation and military. And well, she may even have other loyalties. Be vigilant.”

“And as for the Commander.” McDonough frowned. “Well, this is New York. All’s well here. But there’s a lot of resistance risin’ up against Earth pursuing Galactic Citizenship. Many humans are for it, but there are pockets of very aggressive resistance. Mostly outside the major cities. Some people are angry about joining a vast and ancient government where we’ll be nigh the lowest of the low. Some of those people think every alien is an invader. The referendum on whether to join the Alliance comes in just a few days now. Things are gettin’ hot.”