The Archangel Chronicles part Eight: Fumbling Through Delirium

"I don’t mean to. I don’t know how long I’ll be here now. The ship needs massive repairs, so it may be longer than we hoped."

"It would have been anyway, it always is. My transom time is almost up."

"I love you, Sen."

"I love you too. And I can’t wait to be with you again. We will talk."

With that her time ended; her face blinked out and Daniel found himself staring at the stone wall. He laid back down and tried to go back to sleep.

* * *

For the first time in days, Rhian awoke with a purpose. Just before she’d drifted off to sleep on her bed in Mater Damaris’s guest room, Ghan’s voice spoke her name over the local pipeline and asked if she felt up to assisting him in the lab the next morning. He wanted her help in his examination of the dead creature encountered by the Archangel in orbit. At first she said yes only as a matter of course, but when Ghan uploaded to her all the notes gathered from the reports of Marin, Margrace, Ully, and Orin she realized that this was a real task he was asking her to perform. She was going to get to work on what could be the first alien dissection performed by human scientists.

The thought removed from her any chance that she would be able to sleep, so she read the crews’ stories, and looked over Ghan’s rudimentary scans. Nothing in the creature’s body indicated that it would have the ability to transmit directly into software imbedded in a human brain. What then? Did it emit some sort of hallucinogenic gas? That was her best guess, but the scans didn’t show any biological system that would account for it. Besides, the crew had been suited, how would they have inhaled any such gas?

She finally slept, fitfully. Her dreams full of her mother’s numbers and plant sprouts twining around clean wire strands built to support them.

She clutched her printed notes in her hands as she walked to Ghan’s laboratory the next day, dressed in the nearest approximation of her old working clothes she could find: loose blue slacks, a tight black shirt with sleeves that ended at the elbow. She tied what was left of her hair behind her head. She hoped Ghan would have whatever protective gear he required her to wear. He seemed the type to damn the precautions and rush headlong into his research: it was probably why he was now practicing medicine on this backwater colony.

Ghan opened after her third set of rapping knocks on the door to his clinic. He stood before her, clearly groggy, rubbing at the stubble on his chin, his short wavy hair flying away from his head in all directions. He was not yet dressed, wore only a pair of loose grey pajama bottoms.

"Dr. Ghan?" She asked as she took a step back from the door.

"He held it open, yawned, and said, "Apologies. I was awake most of the night. Come in, have coffee, while I get dressed."

She nodded and slipped under his outstretched arm. He let the door slam shut and walked through the vestibule and past the clinic to an open door that led to his dimly lit apartment.

Ghan’s apartment displayed little in the way of possessions. He led her though a tiny sitting room, cluttered by piles of old books and strange tools, lit by an oddly slanted window cut into the seam where the wall joined the ceiling.