Chapter 13

We made some rail-line transfers on the monorail system, and arrived at Uwishin Hospital in about fifteen minutes. I asked my two Native hosts if Uwishin, the namesake of the hospital, was a famous doctor, perhaps one of the original Gaian settlers.

Colette explained with unhidden pride that Uwishin – pronounced oo-wee-sheen' – was a Shuar word for medicine man. The Shuar people, she said, had lived along the Ecuadorian rivers back on Earth, in the foothills of the Andes and on up to the highlands of Peru. An uwishin was a healer who worked with medicinal plants and with spirit powers. The word, she added, also meant ‘someone who knows all the secrets.’

“Let’s hope your Uwishin Hospital holds a few helpful secrets for your daughter,” I said.

She bravely mustered a smile in response, and fraternally took hold of my arm as she did so.

The hospital was a simple structure, and very busy inside. I followed the two as they knowledgably wended their way through the corridors and bustling human and gurney traffic around us. We passed through a double-wide set of doors, and entered a quieter area.

A nurse at the desk in front of us smiled at the sight of us. “Well, hello there, Ms. Thornbush. Haven’t seen you a while.”

Colette placed her arms across the desk. “Hi, Myra. I’ve…been away. How’s my baby?”

“She’s a trooper,” she smiled. Myra picked up a nearby chart and stood up to lead us to Naya’s room.

The four of us walked past a couple doors, then entered a large room with two beds. White curtains with pretty flowers separated the two beds, giving its occupants what little privacy was possible in a crowded hospital. We passed the first bed – I looked over at its occupant and saw a young, pallid boy sleeping – then we passed the curtain divider and entered Naya’s small space.

Colette rushed to Naya’s side, gushing affections and clutching her tightly, as if for dear life. “I missed you so much, honey,” Colette whispered as she frantically kissed the girl’s head.

The child on the bed looked simply awful. Her skin was a ghostly pale, her face covered in ugly splotches of black and green as if covered with bruises. She was bald, and several electrical wires sprouted from her bald head and flowed behind her hospital bed, presumably joined to the large monitor beside the bed. Naya’s face and hair – as well as her gown, I noticed – were soaked from sweat, and her lips trembled and chattered as she clung to her mommy, her weak voice eking out quiet little cries of joy and relief. I had never seen anything so alarming, so heartbreaking.

Sash, standing quietly and stoically beside me, must have noticed my expression. “It’s the treatments,” he whispered to me. “It’s a combination of high-dose, high-risk medicine and radiation therapy. It’s very hard on the body, especially for children. The treatment’s almost as bad as the poisoning. And the electrodes in her head send constant impulses to her brain to try to keep the neuron pathways active and connected. It is a necessary but ultimately futile effort. The rimonium in her body is systematically destroying those pathways, destroying all the neural activity in her brain.”

“My god,” I murmured, staring at the suffering creature before me. “And that’s from rimonium in the groundwater?”

“A trace is all it takes,” Sash replied.

“Will she be ok?” I asked stupidly.

Sash shook his head ever so slightly, and his voice fell a few more decibels, so quiet now that I had to strain to hear him. “In a matter of weeks, she will be clinically brain dead. Then she will begin to experience excruciating pain as the rimonium literally rots her brain from the inside. Death does not come quickly enough for these dear souls.”

“Jesus.”

“Without the Koralizine…” his voice faltered, then he looked directly at me. “Naya has no hope.”

“The Koralizine?”

“It’s an antidote of sorts. It doesn’t come without long-term costs, but it can reverse the rimonium poisoning in a few weeks. Administered soon enough, the patient suffers no lasting effects from the poisoning itself.”

I stared at him. “Don’t you have any?”

His eyes turned again to me, taking me in. They were deep, I could see, and passionate. “No. Atlas does have some, for its own personnel as a…precaution. Of course, they never need it. In any case, they won’t give any of it to us.”

My eyes grew wider. “What do you mean, they won’t give it to you?” I pressed, my hand gesturing in Naya’s direction. “Isn’t it their fault that she’s in this condition?”

He chuckled softly. “I don’t know if Colette has filled you in on the particulars, or if you keep up on the news. But there’s a garrison of Earth Marines here on our peaceful planet, with the sole purpose of protecting Atlas property and operations as they stand.” Sash shook his head softly. “No, things have gone far beyond mutual first aid agreements.”

I didn’t understand that. I didn’t understand it all. Still, I pursued another approach. “What about the manufacturer? Surely Atlas doesn’t make this stuff. Contact the manufacturer, get some of your own. Or just buy the formula from them. You can make it yourself.”

If Sash’s eyes were deep and passionate, they were also patient. “The manufacturer, my dear Sean, is an Earth company, and is allowed only to sell this product to ‘specified local purchasers.’ In other words, approved Earth companies, like Atlas. And no drug company will sell or reveal its formula until they absolutely have to. That’s business finance 101.” Sash sighed. “No, there is very little Koralizine, it’s very expensive, and they have what little of it there is.” His eyes gestured out the window, and I could see the mining cloud I had asked about earlier, from this vantage point much closer, larger, and more ominous.

I felt sick to my stomach. Here I was standing in front of a dying child, and the company that could help her – my company – would not surrender even a milligram of its life-saving medicine to help her, not to mention three thousand of her peers. A stream of intelligent, rational objections zipped through my brain, including armed aggression, but as I was getting ready to choose one to start with, I was hit by a sudden wave of vertigo. Quickly, I stumbled to the bathroom and closed the door. I reached for the faucet, and released a gush of cold water. I splashed it hastily on my face, trying to recover control of my own reeling body.

Why was I here? How could I even stand in the same room with these people? Everything I stood for, everything I represented for the last fifteen years of my life, was responsible for this horrible, genocidal crime, and no one could seem to do anything about it. I couldn’t understand why Sash hadn’t cuffed me to the ground and shot me in the back of the head by now. Not that it would have changed anything, but I would have understood it. With waves of nausea threatening, I stumbled to the toilet and knelt down, ready for the ultimate surrender to the horror of my situation.

With my head pressed against the cool porcelain, I took steady, measured breaths as best I could. The shame and guilt so deeply shook my core that the strength in my body had completely left me. I hadn’t done anything wrong, I knew that. But I was inextricably associated with what had been done wrong.

I suddenly understood Colette’s reasoning. She knew that all she had to do was get me here. She hadn’t bothered to argue politics with me, or negotiate some sort of elaborate deal. She knew that if she could just get me here, by free will or by force, everything else would take care of itself. The sight of her daughter alone, and the abhorrent facts that went with them, would secure my total commitment to evict Atlas from this planet and make them pay for what they had done.

But as I hung on to the toilet, praying for relief in whatever form it might come, I knew that it hadn’t worked out that way. I felt so horrified, so ashamed, that I couldn’t see myself fighting Atlas as Colette had intended…I couldn’t see myself ever stepping out of this bathroom. I couldn’t imagine ever standing in public again, ever facing another human being, with that Atlas stain painted across my back. I reminded myself that I hadn’t done anything wrong. I knew I would have never allowed something like this to have happened. But to have left the kind of legacy I had with Atlas, to have been a proud part of it for so many years, to have earned them so much money and to have promoted even more growth…these were things I could never undo or deny. They were part of me, because I had put my heart and soul into my work. And now it was betraying me in the most vile of ways. I felt profoundly, so elementally ashamed. A headstrong wave of bile crested my throat, and I choked it out into the toilet.

There was a knock at the door. I heard Sash’s deep voice from behind the door. “Are you alright, Mr. Brennan?”

I clung to the toilet, breathing raggedly, trying to steady it. Trying to find some pocket of strength, left somewhere in my body.

“Mr. Brennan?”

“Yeah,” I croaked. “Yeah, I’ll…just give me a minute.”

I rolled my forehead against the cold ceramic of the toilet tank, and tried to bring some sense of order and control back to myself.

After a few minutes, I managed to stand up, flush the toilet, and wash my hands and face. I didn’t know where I was going to go from here. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was on a strange planet, in a strange culture, surrounded by people who would rightly want to rip my throat out. I truly didn’t know if I could be of any help at all. I doubted so, but I knew I was in way over my head, and I would have to trust my life with the people who had brought me here, until I could get off this blasted rock and crawl safely back into that dark and anonymous cranny I had been so rudely yanked away from.

I rubbed my eyes, and found a point of focus, a technique I had used throughout my life during frightening and turbulent moments. I thought about Geelan. How he stole my money. Twenty years of savings. Hundreds of millions of credits in one abominable swipe of my signature. He left me homeless, penniless. I had to hock my precious museum piece, the only thing that really mattered to me, to go fix the fucking mess he made of my life. And that fucker was on this very goddamn planet. Sitting somewhere in that goddamn genocidal mining facility, cutting deals and laughing it up with his cronies in the mining industry. I was going to get him. I was going to kill him. I was going to rip him limb from limb and shove the pieces down his throat. I was going to get every red cent back from that sniveling little shit, and I was going to take the interest out of his sick albino hide. There wouldn’t be enough blood to mop him up with when I was done with him. And then I was going to head over to that mining facility, and bring that operation down in one earth-scorching ball of flames.

I took a sustained, focused breath, and stared at myself in the mirror. I was beginning to feel strong again. Centered. Relevant. I had a cause, and I had a mission. I had some serious ass-kicking to do, and the referee had just blown the starting whistle.

I stayed a moment longer, allowing myself a final, defiant glance in the mirror, then I barged out of the bathroom on hell’s own wheels.