Beyond the Ice Limit

51

BRAMBELL HAD NEVER felt so shattered in his life. He was weary to the marrow. He sank into the chair in his clinic, eased his legs out one after the other, and leaned back. His limbs felt like lead.

He and Sax had lost both patients, one after the other. In the first case the parasite had killed Reece while it was being extracted; in the second, Brambell had followed Rios’s recommendation and injected the parasite with hydrochloric acid, which did in fact kill it—but not quickly enough. As soon as he stuck the needle in the worm, it lashed out and killed the patient.

After Stahlweather had died on the operating table, he’d been forced to give the near-hysterical Dr. Sax a sedative, but to prevent her from sleeping he added to it a cocktail of mild stimulants, caffeine and methylphenidate Hcl, that had put her into a wakeful but dissociated state. He had installed her in a chair in the back room of the clinic, where she was resting but not sleeping. He had checked on her several times and found she was alert enough. Not that he really believed there were worms hiding in the clinic. They had killed both worms recovered from the patients, blending them into paste and incinerating them. The cuts on his arm were sore, but they were just cuts—so far there was no sign of any exposure to toxins. Which made sense: the worm’s tooth did not have a channel to inject venom, as a viper’s fang did, nor did there appear to be any venom-containing organs inside the creature.

His dispensary, down the hall and currently in the pharmacist’s care, had been dispensing pills all night long. The steady stream of patients had ended, and it was close to dawn. He himself had not taken the speed. He had been a doctor too long to think it was a good idea, and he was surprised and even dismayed that Glinn had ordered it. But there it was: Glinn was not someone who consulted him on decisions like this. Brambell feared the wakeful atmosphere on board the ship more than he feared the unlikely possibility of being parasitized. The stress and fear, he believed, could easily deteriorate into stimulant-induced psychosis in many crew members.

In this ruminative state he found his eyes closing, and he jerked himself awake. Just two more hours to sunrise. What he should be doing was keeping busy, and the best way to do that was to start working on a blood test that would show if someone had been parasitized.

Brambell had drawn vials of blood from the two patients—and if he could find something unusual in that blood, something anomalous, something not present in the blood of an uninfected person, that could be used as a blood test.

He roused himself and shuffled over to the equipment cabinets. He would start with a standard CBC on the blood, measuring hemoglobin and red and white blood cell numbers. From there he would go on to a basic metabolic panel testing heart, liver, and kidney function, blood glucose, calcium, potassium and other electrolyte levels. Maybe a lipoprotein panel next, if nothing anomalous showed up. He hoped to God something would show up. And it very well might: surely the body would react in some way to having a six-inch parasite moving around in the brain.

God, he was tired. Stay on your feet. You couldn’t accidentally fall asleep on your feet, he knew. Maybe he should take just half a pill…Once again, he put this thought out of his head. No amphetamines—he needed to keep his head as clear as possible.

Removing the rack of vials from the refrigerator—he had taken thirteen vials of blood from each patient—he began sorting and labeling them for the various tests. Then he went through the equipment lockers, taking out the necessary equipment and setting it up while going through the steps in his mind. As a doctor, he normally sent tests like this off to a lab. But back in medical school at RCSI, he had learned how to do them himself. On top of that he had the Internet, and surely somewhere there he would find the lab protocols. He jacked his laptop into the ship’s network and went online. Yes: there it all was, in exacting detail.

He would start with a simple blood smear test. He took a drop of blood from one of the vials and spread it on a gridded slide, stained it, and covered it. He put the slide under the microscope and, pencil in hand, began counting the number, size, and shape of red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets per grid, jotting down the figures. But he was so tired he was having trouble focusing. He blinked, blinked again, and adjusted the focus on the stage. God, his eyes were so shot from the failed operations he couldn’t see through the eyepieces. And it had to be admitted he wasn’t as young as he once was, less able to stand up to the grueling hours he had once endured as a resident.

He blinked again, then took some eyedrops out of the medicine cabinet and applied them to his eyes.

Once again he gazed through the eyepieces, but it was like trying to see underwater. Bloody hell. What he needed was a ten-minute break with his eyes shut. His judgment was growing affected; he needed to be sharp in order to continue the tests.

He glanced at the chair. Could he close his eyes without dropping off to sleep? But a quick ten-minute nap hardly seemed dangerous and, in fact, might work wonders. The idea that there were worms lurking somewhere in the room, waiting for him to go to sleep, was absurd. There would be no danger in just a ten-minute nap; and it would do him, and the work he had to do, a world of good. The ship was huge and the clinic was small and had watertight bulkhead doors all around, which could be dogged shut.

He went to the main door into the clinic, eased it shut, and dogged it. He shut the door to the inner lab as well. Then he took his cell phone out of his pocket, set the alarm to ring in ten minutes, and placed it on the counter, starting the timer as he did so.

God, he could hardly wait. He eased himself into the chair, leaned back, and closed his eyes. What a glorious feeling it was…

A dream woke him: a nightmare. With a muffled cry he jerked awake, feeling a sudden stinging pain, a horrible rasping vibration, inside his head. His mind, confused and frightened, took a moment to clamber up out of darkness into the real world; his hands flew to his face and he felt something and he fell out of the chair to the ground.

Good God in heaven, there was something on him. It was like a wriggling cable, hard and cold as steel; it was on his face and inside his nose. Digging into his nose. With a second muffled cry he managed to grasp the tail end of it and tried to pull it out; he could feel the thing’s incredibly strong muscles rippling in his frantic grasp as he tugged, but it wouldn’t come free. It had fixed itself inside and was working its way deeper, rasping and digging into his nasal cavity. He rolled about on the floor, hanging on to the thing’s tail with maniacal intensity, trying to keep it from going deeper, but it was too well anchored, working its way in despite his every painful effort to pull it out.

Suddenly he felt, deep inside his head, a snapping of bone—like a finger poked through an eggshell—and then everything changed. The terror vanished and he felt a wonderful, spreading sensation of peace and contentment, and a blessed feeling of sleep stole over him: beautiful, serene sleep.

Dr. Antonella Sax stood in the doorway of the inner lab, rubbing her eyes and trying to focus. She had heard something, a cry perhaps, although she wasn’t sure. But nothing was awry. Dr. Brambell lay on the floor, sleeping. His hands were folded on his chest and an expression of contentment lay across his face.

She leaned over to wake him up, gave him a little shake. “Dr. Brambell?”

No response. The poor man had been going thirty-six hours straight and was out like a light. He had locked the door and she noticed his cell phone on the lab table counting down the seconds. She picked it up. He had set it for a ten-minute nap and had two more minutes to go.

The poor tired man—ten minutes seemed like nothing. Seeing him asleep so peacefully made her feel the lure of sleep, herself. The shot Brambell had given her seemed to be wearing off, or at least it was no longer able to counteract the tidal wave of fatigue that pressed at her mind. She was aware that her rationality was still somewhat affected by the shot, that she wasn’t thinking as clearly as she normally did—but who could be expected to, after the ordeal they had just gone through?

God knew the doctor needed a longer rest; and so did she. What risk would there be in a half-hour nap? That would be a lot more effective than ten minutes. The door to the clinic was securely dogged. And surely Glinn’s no-sleep edict did not apply to herself and Brambell, who needed to be as sharp as possible if they were going to be effective.

She reset the phone alarm to go off in thirty minutes, and then eased herself into a lab chair and sat back, placing her feet up on the table, closing her eyes, and falling almost immediately into a delicious sleep.