Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 (31 page)

Deece raised his head. His dark brown eyes met hers as another victim stumbled through the thick tent flap. Lefevre herself. The brawny brigger looked worse than Jersey had. Half-drunk, fully stung, and gasping. Rios grabbed her by the arm and lowered her to a brown canvas stretcher. Questions would wait.

Rios jammed an epi pen home. "Stay there," she ordered Lefevre.

She ranked everyone in the garrison until the captain returned. Lefevre stayed put, though her hands began to jitter as the epi hit her.

When Rios turned back to the bench, Deece nodded once at Lefevre, then looked at the floor. Finally.

Rios knew Lefevre's record. She'd seen everyone's files. A dare sent Lefevre to E-17 as a brigger in the first place: five shots of illegal hooch, a naked joyride in a lieutenant's vehicle, and a shocked visiting member of the upper brass.

Rios had already voiced suspicions to Bilt, but she had "history" with Lefevre. Not the good kind. She needed hard evidence. A witness.

As the garrison's military correctional officer, Bilt's job was rehabilitating briggers and making sure the client was happy. He'd refused to send a half-baked court-martial up the pipe with only Rios's word against Lefevre. Not with the mission so close to finished. Not with the corporate brass who'd leased the briggers looking for any mistake from their military suppliers. That could void their final payment.

Now Rios had a witness.

What she didn't have was Captain Bilt, not for a few days more. He'd taken the corporate officers in the long-haul to ceremonially shut down the last mine on E-17. Two days' drive. He'd left the briggers in Rios's care, but she couldn't do anything about Lefevre on her own. Corporate wouldn't listen to a brigger med-tech, only to the captain. Hell, the briggers barely listened to Rios.

Fine with her, as long as they stayed out of her tent.

At first the briggers had followed Bilt's final orders and started packing up the garrison. Rios passed a few briggers staring at the amber horizon and the dark, hole-pocked landscape. Heard them dare each other to eat the newly planted grass beyond the garrison's wall. The edible grass and gene-tweaked saplings laid in for the incoming colonists had begun to sprout, tinting the ground a soft cream.

A day later, the mess filled with bored briggers. Boredom bred more betting: Russian roulette with sentinel wasps.

Good thing Rios had plenty of antihistamine. And a stash of epi.

Good thing there weren't any real weapons in the garrison. Might have cleared the place of stupid. Left just her and the wasps, probably. Nice. Except wasps were worse than briggers.

She treated the briggers on the bench for their stings and bites and told them off. Sent them back to barracks with extra ice packs, certain there were briggers who didn't want to visit her tent. She'd heard what they called it, and her: the freezer.

She turned to Deece. In the brig for petty theft. His welts raised trails on his skin, nothing like a wasp reaction. The new sting on his hand had barely begun to swell. Stung in the med tent, not earlier. Good evidence that Deece had stayed clear of the wasp bet, but it didn't explain the welts. Deece gritted his teeth as she scraped skin from his arm, then took a vial of blood for testing. Tough kid. She gave him a tube of ointment. Quietly had him fingerprint a statement about Lefevre and the wasp bet, then held back the tent flap and let him go.

He worked in the vespidary, same as Lefevre. Rios could find him when she needed him.

Rios gathered up epi pen caps, bagged her sweat-damp gloves and mask, and swept the mashed wasp outside. She secured Deece's statement in her pocket. Rolled up Kuo in a cold bag. Even dead briggers got to go home.

When the tent was under control again, she picked a spare cot and closed her eyes. Idiots. Only two more weeks and she'd be done with briggers for the rest of her career. No way she'd get in this kind of mess again.

Jersey snored on his cot, breaking the tent's quiet with a barking rattle that hinted at sinus swelling. Lefevre rested in a semi-fetal curl, her shaved scalp prickling with sweat. Kuo slowly cooled and stiffened on a shelf farther back in the tent. Rios listened to the wind howl around the garrison walls. The sound took some getting used to. They'd only doused the garrison's dome a week ago. She willed herself calm.

Serve as garrison med-tech for two years on an Earth-type, pre-colonial planet, her advocate had said. Wipe your record clean. Simple. Patch up other briggers who ran the mining equipment and the terraformers for the corporate client. Two years, three months, twenty days, and a wakeup on E-17. Thirty-five men and women, five brass. No murderers or rapists on this jaunt, he promised. Saltpeter and serotonin in the food. No weapons. Nearby, too—next system over. Practically a vacation from the hospital; barely a punishment.

The advocate didn't tell her about the wasps until after she'd signed everything.

Rios heard something buzz and sat up, ready to swat. Jersey, snoring, made more of the noise. Over Jersey's prone body, Lefevre's cot lay empty. She'd quietly left the tent. Rios lowered her arm, slowly.

The wasps were conscripts, just like the briggers. Corporate had shipped hives of the modified insects down with the first deployment, had briggers set up the vespidary to breed more. Shifts of briggers trained wasps to sense heavy metals deep beneath the landscape: ore that would be inaccessible once the colonists arrived expecting the pristine planet they'd purchased. Briggers taught more wasps to scent progress points in the terraforming process.

When the sentinel wasps picked up markers for a stable terraform, they bashed their chitin-hardened heads against their sensor tubes. The briggers struck the biosphere dome and felt E-17's winds sweep in for the first time since landing. Nearly free.

"Why not robot sensors?" she'd asked Lefevre early on, before Bilt put them on opposite shifts.

Lefevre had winked at Rios. "Wasps are light to ship. They don't break down, can smell like the dickens, and don't need much programming. Just breed some more, sugar." She'd said some other things, too, and Rios had turned her down.

Later, Rios found three wasps crawling in her bunk. She demanded to be billeted alone in the med tent.

Now she shuddered, unable to shake loose the thought of wasps loose in her tent. She found fresh gloves. Might as well run tests on Deece's samples if she couldn't sleep.

Corporate had equipped the tent, but only basics remained: epi and antihistamine in abundance; meds; suture kits; test panels that resembled her grandmother's bingo cards. Paint each square with a bit of sample, see what luminesced. Dispense the proper medicine. Dismiss the brigger. Usually, the cards lit up colds and STDs. This time, swipes of Deece's samples didn't luminesce anything. Rios grumbled. Her portable micro-spectroscope, one of the few machines on base outside the corporate tent, had broken six months ago. She couldn't use it to test the sample.

Dammit, she needed Deece, and the wasps.

When Rios knocked on the hardflap Deece unsealed the vespidary door. She held out a vial containing a swab. "Can you train some wasps to scent for this?"

Deece frowned. "What is it?" He wasn't used to Rios leaving the med-tent any more than she was used to being out.

"Your samples. Came up blank on my tests. No gear left to analyze for new infections."

Deece raised an eyebrow.

"Worst case scenario, you reacted to something local. The wasps might scent it." She eyed his bandaged arm. "The ointment helped?"

"Just stopped itching." He paused. "Two more briggers have welts. I gave them the ointment."

"Tell them to come see me," she said, knowing they might not listen. She waited while Deece looked at the vial.

"I can try." He pulled on gloves. "Want to watch?"

She'd managed to stay out of the vespidary, with its living walls and incessant hum, for most of the tour. Now she waited, arms tucked tight to her sides, keeping well away from the crawling wasp nests.

Deece pulled a panel from the wall and shook six wasps into sample tubes, careful not to smash their antennae. "Darn things pick up markers fainter than any spectrometer. Who would have thought?"

He mixed a packet of sugar with a vial of water, then held a drop of the fluid above a tube. Rios could see the wasp crawling inside, its heart-shaped head and oval eyes glistening. She looked closer; four smaller eyes atop the wasp's head glared back at her. Rios shuddered.

Deece lowered the dropper and the wasp raced to the tube's filter wall, butting its head against the filter hard enough to make a tiny sound: click. He brushed the sample swab against the filter and repeated the sugar drop. The tube clicked again as the wasp threw itself at the filter.

After half an hour, he said, "Next time the wasp catches the scent, it will do the same thing. You'll hear the clicking." He held out two tubes to her. She willed herself to reach for them.

She'd broken a wasp's nest as a curious child, with the expected result. She could still feel the prickling legs and the segmented bodies trespassing her clothes. She'd found one tangled in her hair. It stung her twice. Too late in the season for more to sting, she'd learned later. Mostly males survived till then, and they only bit. Still, her mother had run from their trailer with the fire extinguisher and doused the nest. Had pulled her own epi-pen from her pocket and treated her daughter once Rios's throat had begun to swell. "Why did God make wasps?" Rios asked through adrenaline-racked sobs. Her mother shook her head. "To teach us not to be so stupid," she'd answered.

Twenty years later, E-17 had a pressing need for a good med-tech, and Rios had a career-ending mistake she needed to erase. Now she wrapped her hands around the sensor tubes and took the wasps. Other briggers had welts. She went to the barracks to find them.

There, Lefevre rested in a bunk close to the door. The bed was festooned with ration chits. "Look who's gracing us with her presence," she murmured.

Rios ignored her. She scanned the tent, saw the men Deece had mentioned. Bunked in the back, scratching. Both mining briggers. One had welts on his cheeks that were beginning to pustulate. Rios lifted a sensor tube to his face. Click. The wasp beat itself against the tube. "You should have come to see me," she said. The men stared back. Career briggers. Went from penalty to penalty. Better miners than soldiers, now. "Couldn't take the time off," one said slowly.

"Not interested in getting dead," said the other.

"You're quarantined, now," she said. "Go to the med tent."

The men looked past her to Lefevre, who nodded. "Get your gnarly asses out of here."

"You know what they've been working?" asked Rios.

Lefevre shrugged. "Mine 22, same one that lost two men down that vent."

Rios waited for her to say more.

Finally Lefevre added, "Rest came back fine. Those two only started looking like that a couple of days ago."

Rios was about to ask another question, but Deece tore into the barracks, trailing dust. "Bring your kit. Captain's back."

Rios stepped from the cool dark of the barracks into the bright light. E-17's gravity tugged at her feet. The captain would take charge of these assholes before anything else went wrong.

When she reached the garrison's gate, Rios realized she was still in charge.

The captain hunched over the rover's charred steering wheel. Melted polymer dripped from the rover's blistered roof and over his blackened hands. Rios smelled rocket exhaust.

"What happened? Where are the others?" The four corporate officers who'd left with the captain were nowhere to be seen.

Bilt's eyes rolled back in his head. His face seeped and bulged from burns. Rios listened as he hissed a few words. "Gone," he said. "Home."

"Transport won't come for two weeks, Captain. They can't go home."

Bilt shook his head and whispered so that only Rios could hear. "Sent a signal. Dosed me with something. Corporate ship landed almost on top of me. They're gone."

Then he shuddered and moaned.

Her medkit wasn't up for this. Rios pushed Deece toward the tent. "Get a stretcher."

Deece moved.

A group of briggers milled around at the garrison's edge. Ration chits exchanged hands as they bet on Bilt. "Go pack something!" she shouted. They muttered and skulked, then disappeared.

Deece returned and helped her heave the captain onto the stretcher. By the time they got him inside the med tent, someone had won more rations: Bilt was dead.

Rios crossed the garrison, her cap twisted in her hands, shorn head bobbing in the sunlight. She headed for the corporate officers' tent. Lefevre and Jersey emerged from barracks, aiming for the same place.

On opposite shifts, Rios spoke with Lefevre only when she had to. She took her meals alone, used the exercise equipment when the others were in the mess. Kept her head down. Now she swerved at them, fists clenched. The two briggers veered toward the vespidary, pulling on their protective gloves, as if they'd been headed to work their shifts the whole time.

They'd be in the vespidary for at least twenty minutes, checking the hives. Rios hoped that would be enough time to break into the corporate officers' files.

She heard footsteps behind her. Deece. She waved him closer. She could use his help getting into the corporates' quarters.

The officers had locked the carbon fiber tent down hard when they'd left; black tent flap sealed, keypad armed. Rios pulled a scalpel from her pocket and dragged it over the fabric. The sharp blade couldn't pierce the tent. "Damn," she muttered.

Deece tapped the keypad awake. "Cabrese let me in once," he said, red faced. Yeah, Rios thought, Science Officer Cabrese had a reputation for doing that. She let a lot of briggers in, once. Sometimes twice. Double rations after.

Rios had turned her down too. Last time she'd taken up with a corporate, she'd wound up on E-17.

Deece had paid attention to Cabrese's moves. All of them. He hit the keypad combination on the first try.

"What are you really in the brig for?" Rios whispered as they slipped in and resealed the door.