“I don’t know. I ran into him at the pier. He was covered in jellyfish stings and he was really far away from where he was supposed to be. I didn’t want him to get in trouble.”
“Thank you for bringing him back discreetly. He has been…troubled lately.”
“He was running on the beach. Guess he went into the water at some point. There were signs all over the beach today about the jellies, but knowing Max and Kovo, Velik wouldn’t have paid attention to them anyway.”
She chuckled. “No, he would not.”
“Anyway, we walked to my car. I used some tweezers to pull the rest of the tentacles off him.”
“And that’s why he was naked?”
Where was a hole and how fast could I sink into it? “Some of them were, umm, under his clothes. When I mentioned seeing one sticking out, he just stripped naked right there in the parking lot.”
“Of course.”
“He was fine. Talking and walking and…stuff. And then he just stopped. Like he passed out between one second and the next.” The memory of shaking him, trying to wake him up, made me shiver. “I had to make a sling with the beach towel to get him the rest of the way into my car. I got him in and drove here as fast as I could.”
As we’d talked, the warden had led me inside to some sort of viewing room. A large window separated us from what was going on in the next room as a doctor in green scanned and poked and prodded Velik, issuing instructions to two others in with him to move his unconscious body here or there. “Why isn’t he in a ReGen pod yet?””
“I don’t know.” Warden Egara walked up next to me. We stood silent, shoulder to shoulder, and watched the medical team work on him. The doctor seemed particularly interested in the streaks caused by the jellyfish tentacles. And no wonder, they covered almost half of Velik’s legs.
It felt like an eternity, but my trusty watch told me it had been no more than ten minutes since they’d pulled Velik out of the back of my car.
Self-conscious now that things weren’t in all out panic mode, I pulled my white shirt around me to cover up the best I could.
A few minutes later I held my breath as they lifted Velik into a ReGen pod and closed the lid. The doctor looked up at us then, his gaze locking with Warden Egara’s before he looked at me. When she nodded he walked out of the suite.
Less than a minute later he was standing in front of me.
“You brought him in?”
“Yes.”
“The red lesions beneath the skin on his legs, do you know what caused them?”
“They aren’t under his skin. They’re jellyfish stings.”
“How is one attacked by these creatures?”
I shrugged. “By swimming in the ocean. They’re everywhere. There was a notice on the beach today, warning people not to get in the water.”
“Hmmph. Are these creatures venomous?”
“I—yes—I guess. Not like a rattlesnake or anything. Most of the time we just put some spray on them and take a shower. Unless you get stung by a lot of them.”
The doctor pulled a computer tablet of some kind from his pocket. Within seconds I saw images of jellyfish moving across the small screen. “Fuck. There are more than two thousand sub-species?”
“I don’t know. I’m not a marine biologist.”
He looked at me like I was a bug under his shoe, like Velik’s condition—and the fact that the Earth had so many different kinds of jellyfish—was completely my fault. “I need a sample of the species that attacked him.”
“They don’t attack. They just sting you if you get in their way.”
“Either way, the poison is not one we have encountered before. It is having previously unseen effects on Velik’s nervous system.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“He’s dying. I need a raw sample of the creature’s venom. If I don’t get a raw sample, I can’t create an antidote.”
