(This is part of an occasional series of linked sci-fi stories. To read from the beginning: Bad Habit Double Dutch Mishpocheh in Space)
Donovan knew when to fold ’em. His grapes were coming in and me—I got less fancy enthusiasms but the trapdoor royalties mak it Christmas every day. And I been recommended to keep to more placid adventures.
But Ozorof, damn him—thinks he’s everybody’s grandpa. Volunteered himself onto that crew of hotshot kids sent out in the new freighter.
You pair of old ladies, he’d said. By the time we get back, me and Amansky, we’re gonna own the rest of them for the next ten years.
Pinochle game was legendary but everybody knew they didn’t diddle virgins.
We shut up, but brooded. The alloy-meisters triumphed in the latest turf war and the ship was lifting off wet from the shell, so to speak. Every kilogram shaved from the payload was priceless, they were drunk on their numbers and it worried us.
Sure—I know what that sounds like coming from me. But this was just money.
They made it back in six months with a full haul. Smashed all the records for the weight class.
Command made love to themselves so hard we all felt sticky. So why didn’t we feel all foolish, trying to ruin the children’s fun with an unwarranted fit of the vapors?
***
“He's not himself,” said Donovan.
“No kidding,” I said. Ozorof had come back quiet.
I’ve got a baby rosé just about ready to be unswaddled, Donovan told him, and it wants both its uncles to cheer its first steps. Cashed in big chips to get you on tomorrow’s shuttle. I’m gonna be real cranky if you don’t show up.
I did the honors dockside, with Donovan so occupied tending the smoker.
“I’m fine,” Ozorof rumbled, I was handling him so tenderly. He swatted my back to prove he wasn’t lying and really, the pain was worth it. “Hang on till we get there,” he said, “why should I tell it twice?”
***
Brisket was fully demolished now and the dessert plate had set him off and running in a different direction a good hour and a half already.
Third moon was just up and the hills were glowing. We’d been nice towards that infant rosé but it was time for the grownups’ hour and Donovan took out the Arcturian brandy.
“So,” Ozorof said, “I had a little feeling about those cricket hops.”
Donovan topped up our tumblers.
“And I thought, let me buzz Amansky. Piece of luck he was bonecrusher on the run. Won’t hock you with questions just for the joy of his own voice. But you want a little companion on a breadcrumb trail, he don’t mind skipping along.”
We duly toasted Amansky.
“ ‘Gonif,’ I say to him,” Ozorof said, “ ‘where are you?’
“ ‘Fore,’ he says, and there I am aft.
“ ‘What time you got?’ and he tells me.
“ ‘Thanks,’ I say.
“ ‘That’s it?’ he says.
“ ‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘OK,’ he says.
“So I start a little log, and maybe two-three times every twenty-four hours, I check in with Amansky, where he is and what time he got.
“And then I scribble up some equations. And what do you know? A negative time vacuum amidships whenever we traversed a hop. Teeny one. And the skin is built to take it, that’s why they don’t bother anymore installing chronograph banks throughout the ship. They already factored in these little pinches, right?”
We knew already we weren’t gonna like anyplace this ended up.
“Enough pinches,” Ozorof said, “maybe you get a bruise. And this route we’re on, it’s built on cricket hops. Nice big schoolyard and then we’re all home free, right?
“So one night, Amansky comes by for a little pinochle. Funny thing, he says. Kid presents with rash and malaise, a little bit of fever. Feels like he’s got a touch of flu. But everyone was clean before we left, we’re well past incubation periods; no subsequent contact with vectors.
“I scan him, he says. I biopsy him, run his bloods. And I’m a little troubled. It’s almost what I’d call a pseudo-autoimmunological response. I don't think it really is what it seems to be.
“So I ask him, says Amansky, what he's been doing lately.
“The boy’s our zooarcheologist,” said Ozorof, “and he’d been in our nice new cargo bay with all those bones we were bringing back.
“Amansky shows me a section of the ultra-high resolution scan he took of the kid’s skin, and he asks me what I think.
“And I tell him they look like puncture wounds, and there you go, he says.
“Titanium-niobium, that bay,” said Ozorof, “light and strong and corrosion-resistant.”
“Brittle, though,” Donovan said.
“Brittle,” said Ozorof. “And that negative time event caused some interesting metallurgical stress. On the nano-level, of course.
“It's a bio-compatible alloy,” said Ozorof, “and shouldn't have bothered the kid at all, beyond the momentary discomfort of being pierced to the marrow by nano-shards.”
Ozorof took a big swallow.
“It's just,” he said, “that they passed through those fossils first. They’d been in permafrost, not much the worse for wear.
“Amansky didn't tell him. What would’ve been the point? He kept taking blood samples once a week. But he destroyed them once we landed. There’d been no evidence of parasitic or microbial replication, the kid wasn’t infectious, he stayed a little achy for awhile but the rash cleared up and he looked like he’d gotten over whatever he’d seemed to have.
“Amansky wasn’t gonna let them turn the kid into a lab rat.
“In addition to whatever the hell else he might turn into anyway.”