Village of Hayyam
Krandermore, Survivor’s Refuge
4453.2.15 Interstellar
“There was no dragon mentioned in the contract!” the garage’s proprietress yelled.
Lira yelled back, waving her hands and getting in the small, wizened woman’s face.
Janus ignored them both. Fury was crashing, her heartbeat still twice what it normally was, the capillaries in her eyes and surface blood vessels red and, in some places, broken. “Clear that table!” he snapped at the two garage guards.
One of them swept everything off the small card table.
“Hey!” his fellow guard said.
Janus laid Fury down on the table, although she tried to hang onto him with her little hooked claws.
“Here’s your equipment,” Ryler said, putting Janus’s medical and biological kit down next to him. “What can I do?”
“Do you have any advanced scanning capability in the augments you have installed?” Janus said, looking at Ryler and broaching the topic of his friend’s obvious modifications for the first time.
“None that would help us under these circumstances,” Ryler said.
Fury whimpered and pawed at the air, claws and scales scrabbling on the table.
Janus grunted and started digging into the pack. “Hold her still.”
Ryler held Fury by the shoulder and haunch.
Janus started pulling things from the bag. He thanked his ancestors he’d had the time to run initial tests on Fury in the lab, back in Cofan, or he would have wasted valuable time trying to figure out where and how to treat her. He attached a vital monitor to her ear, which fed her pulse, blood pressure, temperature, and respiration rate to his retinal display. He also took a blood sample from her scaleless inner thigh.
Fury growled, and her mouth glowed, a whiff of thick smoke making Ryler lean his head away, and the two guards took a giant step back.
There were loud voices outside, and someone banged on the garage shutter.
“If it sets fire to this place, I’m going to seize your equipment!” the owner said.
“Quiet!” Janus snapped. He pointed a jet injector at the Pugarian woman. “People followed us here. Get rid of them, and we’ll pay you a premium. If you don’t shut up, I’ll have Lira shut you up.”
Lira gave Janus the obstinate look she always gave him when he made her compromise.
The proprietress looked smug. “Pleasure doing business with you.”
Janus realized he hadn’t specified how much of a premium they would pay, but Lira would deal with it, and he’d hear about it later. He popped a double dose of Niranditus anesthetic into the jet injector, pressed it against Fury’s neck, under her raised mane scales, and pulled the trigger.
The flame dog stopped struggling and went limp against the table.
“Is she better already?” Mick asked.
“That just knocked her out,” Janus said. “What happened out there?”
Mick looked surprisingly guilty. “I took her for a walk. I was trying to figure out what so many of the locals are on. It’s a purple powder they either sniff or rub against their gums.”
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Fury was wheezing with each breath. Janus grabbed a plastic bag, slit the bottom with a multi-tool, then fit it over Fury’s head. He sealed the mouth of the bag around a nebulizer and filled the bag with a bronchodilating mist. “Keep talking.”
“Sometimes they dissolve it in moonshine and inject it?”
Janus looked at the Hunter in stunned surprise. “That sounds incredibly dangerous.”
“A lot of them die, yeah,” Mick said. “I’m guessing that’s not what you’re looking for, though.”
Janus unfocused his eyes to take in Fury’s vitals. The fluctuations weren’t as wide as they’d been initially, but he needed to know more about the substance, its effects, and how much she ingested or inhaled. “Do you have a sample?”
“How much do you need?” Mick asked.
“A few grams.”
Mick pulled one of several small baggies of purple powder out of his hip pouch.
Janus blew a lungful of air out, ran his hand through his hair, and went back to the buggy to grab his compact analyzer.
It took Janus fifteen minutes to prepare the samples and an additional five minutes for initial spectroscopic analysis. By then, the village alarms had stopped ringing, but the sound of the mob outside had gotten louder.
“Mick?” Janus said.
“Yeah, boss?”
“Crowd control.”
The Hunter nodded and grabbed a shotgun from this weapon bag.
“He’s not going to use that, is he?” Ryler asked.
Janus sighed. “He has a variety of non-lethal rounds, but mostly, he’s very intimidating.” He grinned at Ryler.
His old friend chuckled and pinched the bridge of his nose. “This is not how I thought this day would go.”
“Me neither,” Janus said, looking down at Fury. The little flame dog looked smaller than she usually did. She usually had so much personality going for her that she seemed larger than she was.
“How can I help?”
Janus stared blankly at the garage for a moment. He’d taken stims to get on schedule for their arrival in Hayyam, but his body needed water, food, and real rest. He really wished he could take care of that instead of micro-dosing Fury with one counter-agent at a time. If he’d been back in Cofan, he would have had lab assistants and the Motragi server farm to take some of the guesswork out of it. On a whim, he asked, “Can you take the data from this MicroSpec and run simulations of treatment scenarios, updating them channel-by-channel as the results come in?”
“Actually,” Ryler said, “yes, I can. That’s pretty much exactly what I do most days.”
“For the Cult?”
“Yeah.”
Janus took a deep breath. “Never thought I’d say I’m glad you joined the cult.”
They spent the next thirty minutes using the initial results to design three different branching treatment options, which Ryler input as parameters in a simulation he was apparently able to run through his implants along with directly connecting to Janus’s portable lab.
Not only did Ryler identify the second course of treatment as the safest, but he also came up with a branching set of responses if Fury had an adverse reaction to any of the compounds or dosages.
It took an enormous weight off Janus’s shoulders, and it gave him the mental space to think about everything that had happened since they’d arrived in Hayyam, how he’d reacted, and what he wanted to do about it. He turned the idea over in his head like a burned-out electric motor, separating the design flaws from the operator abuse.
“Ready?” Ryler asked.
Janus dragged one of the guards’ chairs over and sat down. He injected the selected compound into a fluid bag and programmed the treatment schedule into the auto-drip before setting Fury up with an IV.
“You’ve gotten good at this in a very short time,” Ryler commented.
Janus smirked. “I’ll tell you about the Motragi Ranger field first aid course I took some time. Lots of pissed-off, injured lizards involved. Not a lot of fun for anyone.”
Lira walked in through the garage side door, looking tired but in control. “How is she?”
“Stable and improving,” Janus said. “Sorry about the premium thing.”
“It’s fine,” Lira said, looking at him with friendly affection. “I actually appreciate that you’d be freaking out even harder if it was me on the table.”
“I’m not freaking out,” Janus said.
“You are freaking out,” Koni said, and Janus jumped. He’d completely lost track of her for the past half hour. “The Pugarians have no doubt sent word to their team that we are here by now, and they will be moving in to kill us.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Janus said.
Lira winced. “They’re actually outside. They want to talk. I need you.”
Janus groaned and looked first to the room with the cots in it, then at Fury.
“I’ll take care of her,” Ryler said. “I’ll call you if anything changes.”
Janus hung his head for a few seconds, eyes closed, to let some of the fatigue drain out of his head. Then he slapped his knees and said, “All right, let’s do this. Koni?”
“What?”
“Watch over these two and the buggies.”
“I was going to do that anyway, Janus,” the Verazlan said. “Someone has to.”
Janus looked at Lira and smiled. They’d both driven more than the others, and they were both tired, but they were aspirants, and there was still work to do. “Let’s get out there,” he said. “We made it through Mercuria. We’ll make it through this.”
He followed Lira outside.
When they were gone, Koni asked Ryler, “What happened in Mercuria?”
Ryler hadn’t been there, but he remembered reviewing the data like it was yesterday. “They got caught in the middle of a gang war and had to fight their way through dozens of people. It caused a revolution.”
“Those two?”
Ryler nodded. “And Mick, but it was mostly Janus. He’s great with meds and machines, but any power structure he runs into tends to break.”