Page 19 of Cloverleaf Station

Thud. THUD. CRUNCH-CRUNCH-CRUNCH.

“Impact on—”

Elenus shut the audio off.

Kieron knew he wasn’t going to turn around. Not while he was in control of the ship. Which meant …

He could kiss his future here goodbye.

“Fuck it,” he muttered and—one, two, a sharp elbow to Elenus’s ribcage to get him bent over and a second strike to his temple to put him down, and Kieron slid into the pilot’s seat and reversed their course immediately. They took more hits, more than he cared for, but after a few tense minutes, they were back out into a section that the AI could handle. He detached his sweaty fingers from the controls and sat back with a sigh, wondering how long it was going to be after his boss woke up that he was kicked off the station.

Wait … what was that red blinking light? Kieron tapped it, then turned the audio back on for good measure.

“—cal emergency! Medical emergency! Lifesaving measures must be taken now! Medical emergency! Medical emergency! Lifesaving measures must be taken now!”

Medical emergency? What the … Kieron looked back at where he’d laid Elenus on the floor, and … oh shit.

Oh … shit. Was he even still breathing?

Kieron dove for the ship’s specialized med kit. Let Lizzie pilot herself back to the station—he had to keep Elenus alive until then.

Chapter eight

In the quiet of the infirmary, Kieron glanced at Elenus’s vitals for what felt like the hundredth time since he’d gotten the man in there. Stable. Normal. His brain function was fine, his blood chemistry was fine … Looking at him now, you’d never guess that less than an hour ago, he’d been on the verge of a fatal hematoma to the brain after also suffering two broken ribs. Apparently, one of them had come perilously close to puncturing one of his kidneys.

Great. Just great. Kieron had nearly killed his boss. Fan-fucking-tastic.

The urge to sink into a familiar well of despair called to him, but he fought it off and used his implant to query the larger computer database. He directed the results to be sent to his tab—reading for too long inside his own head made him dizzy—and began to read up on humanity’s issues with Regen and how they could manifest.

The most common issue with Regen was rejection, either in the form of simple allergies or a perilously complex inability to use the technology at all. The allergies could be cured with time and a lot of genetic exposure therapies, but people who couldn’t use Regen at all—dubbed naturals—were shit out of luck. They didn’t get the benefits of Regen: the slowed aging and increased health and massive boost to healing. They simply lived like humans had lived for hundreds of thousands of years before Regen existed, and they died that way too.

Elenus wasn’t a natural, that was clear. In the modified Regen tank, his body was taking the therapy very well if in a highly targeted way. The healing fluid was only allowed in contact with the parts of his body that had been damaged—everything else was left alone.

Okay, that was a clue. Kieron did a little more winnowing. Not an allergy … probably not the result of a strange drug interaction … probably not the result of the guy getting on the bad side of an organ harvester … gah. There were just too many results to go through. The universe was a big place, and the reasons for Regen to fail were growing all the time, thanks to new generations of genetic modification and—ah.

[AI, show Gania-specific, population-wide, Regen-related diseases.]

Aha, there it was, right there at the top. An autoimmune disorder expressed by five percent of the male population of Gania, point two percent of the female population.

Elfshot Disease. That’s a fanciful name. Ganians, Kieron was slowly learning, were a strangely fanciful people. At least, Elenus was.

Back to the description. Random internal attacks … weakening of cell structures … periods of intense decline and equally intense improvement … inability to undergo full Regen submersion … Oh god, the pictures of the Ganians who had been fully submerged in Regen were hideous, their bodies growing out of control as their capricious immune systems misinterpreted “healing” as “assault.”

When the therapy was targeted and carefully controlled, though, the Regen worked exactly as it was meant to. Apparently, there was a damage threshold in there somewhere although the text said it was different for every one of the afflicted.

Kieron was grateful he hadn’t gone over it. Bad enough he was going to be tossed out into space after assaulting his boss so badly that the man had to get fucking Regen for it, he’d really be dead if—

No. He needed to calm down. There were extenuating circumstances, and those were firmly on Kieron’s side. Elenus had been out of control, so focused on finding Catalina that he hadn’t cared about the damage the Lizzie was taking. Much deeper into that asteroid field and the ship would have been too damaged to make it back to Cloverleaf, and then they’d have had the distinct displeasure of dying of radiation together once the Lizzie’s shields failed if they weren’t pulverized by asteroids first.

Kieron could argue that to a court. He had visuals, he had data, he had the ship itself as evidence. He can’t get rid of you yet. It should have felt reassuring but sitting there watching the purplish-blue bruise he’d put on Elenus’s temple slowly vanish under the effect of the Regen, all Kieron felt was guilty.

He hated that he felt emotionally invested enough to feel guilty, but there was something about Elenus that seemed to sweep Kieron along with him. He was so … lively, and to a person who’d been expecting to spend nearly half a standard year by himself out here on the station, that liveliness was both obnoxious and thrilling.

“You stare as loudly as you speak,” Elenus said.

Kieron startled right out of his chair. He’d been so wrapped up in his own head that he’d missed the signs that treatment was ending. His pulse raced, and half a dozen questions fought their way toward his lips.

What the hell was going on out there? Why didn’t you tell me you have Elfshot disease? Do you realize you could have gotten us both killed?