I understood why now. I’d bled on their wounds from my own cut hand, which had been the last thing to get cleaned and bandaged. Digging for a bullet. Unsteady stitches. Blood-soaked bindings over a stump that had made me want to vomit.I’dbeen their antibiotic.
I turned back to our botanist—who was capable with a lot more than just plants. Unsurprisingly, plantgeneticshad been her specialty, although the force of things had set her on the path to biological warfare. Somehow, I couldn’t feel sorry for those goons who’d breathed in her poisoned spores. Incinerate a planet, and you got what you deserved.
“It can’t be ingested, right? The kids would need to have shots?” I asked.
“Shots, yes,” Fiona confirmed. “But a small dose should be enough. I can keep preparing the injections while we get ready to take off. I’ve already done a whole batch, and I remember seeing a few big cases of needles and syringes in the lab attachment. Can you get them for me along with more bags of blood?”
I smiled, but it felt weak. Triumph never came without sacrifice. “How many?” I asked.
There was no real surprise for me in her immediate question back. “How many do we have?”
I hesitated. “Four.” I hated the answer I had to give her, but Shade would be done soon, and I couldn’t risk taking more than that in the time before we left.
Fiona recoiled in shock. “That’s not enough. There are thousands of kids.”
Yes, but I was only one body. “Knowing Mareeka and Surral, they’ve already imposed a quarantine of their own to try to minimize contagion. Not everyone will be infected.” I hoped.
“Yeah, true,” Fiona said. “Still, keep looking. Maybe more bags will turn up.”
I nodded, my already minimally appetizing lunch turning over in my stomach and making it cramp. I ate my noodles anyway. I needed to keep up my strength.
* * *
A few hours later, I delivered the blood and syringes to Fiona. I must have done a good job of pretending I wasn’t about to collapse, because she didn’t seem to notice anything strange about me. I made it back to my room without seeing anyone else, drank a bottle of water, and then took a nap with Bonk. Cats sure slept a lot.
When I woke up, I drank another bottle of water and ate a protein bar while I sent a message to Mareeka, telling her I had a cure and to get the sickest ten percent of the orphans ready for a round of shots.
Reading between the lines of her message back, I could tell she wanted me to be cautious, but she also wasn’t going to refuse something that could save her kids. I could also tell that ten percent wasn’t going to cover it. Double that, and maybe we had a chance.
Shit.I felt nauseous just thinking about it, but if I took a bag each morning and evening for the next three days, that was six additional bags we could use to prepare more shots. It wasn’t the nine I’d already given, but it was more, and I could probably do it without totally incapacitating myself.
For now, though, it was time to rest.
Leaning over, I rummaged in my bag and pulled out the book Susan had given me on the Mornavail. It took a while to get used to the flowery writing, but the farther in I got, the more convinced I became that it wasn’t a religious text at all, but rather a thickly veiled retelling of the final Sambian War from the winner’s perspective.
The Mornavail—Dad and his goons, if I was reading this right—were good, righteous, the answer to so many prayers.
“Nope,” I muttered, scratching under Bonk’s chin as I read.
Susan seemed to have taken the poetic, handwritten text literally, even though it wasn’t that old, buying into its suggestion that the Sky Mother had set up some new group of people to spread her light. Personally, I saw an attempted allegory for our new “peace,” who had brought it, and how it had been won.
True, orderhadbeen restored after decades of war, but stability hadn’t been so much offered as imposed, with one freedom after another being tossed in the garbage and replaced by the Overseer’s fanatical prose.
As a young man, my father had already been an imperialistic mastermind. Early in his career, he’d finished what the two generations before him had started by conquering the remaining free Sectors and bringing them one by one into the giant galactic machine, whether they wanted to be there or not. The Dark Watch was born, and before anyone knew what was happening, Dad’s reign was official, and his goons were more numerous than the stars.
Narrow-minded ideas about the natural order of all things, including how people should think and act, became law. What to learn wasn’t a vast choice anymore, but instead determined by statistical analysis and apparent strengths, with no regard for human interests or desires. Lifestyle choices turned limited, at least publicly, and the concept of self-determination got tossed out the door. It had already begun over the course of the previous Sambian Wars, spreading across the galaxy like a plague, but then my father had come along with the heaviest hand of all.
I sighed, stroking Bonk’s soft fur. “Dad’s a Mornavail,” I told him. “In case you’re wondering, that’s a four-letter word.”
Bonk purred.
Susan had said I was like them, but she must have gotten the story all wrong. She’d grasped onto the idea of the Mornavail being a light to follow. Flip the pages of recent history, though, and they grew dark with blood.
When I finished reading the book, I got up and locked it in my closet. Maybe I was wrong about it. I hadn’t found a single mention of the wordSambianin the whole story. It was possible I was overthinking things, and this was simply the ramblings of some zealot who’d been convinced the Sky Mother and Her Powers had tried again, making People 2.0 or something, because regular people just weren’t good enough.
Since I was firmly agnostic, it was a lot easier to believe the Mornavail were the winners of the last Sambian War, with my father now lording over us all from what was once the Sambian System but was now Sector 12 and the heart of galactic imperialism.
Home sweet home.
