s [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

milked this dead queen dry, they'd only get juice from one point in the
yearlong cycle. You couldn't use that on some poor little girl. Today's venom
might kick a gland into high gear, and tomorrow's shut it off again. If you
gave a girl one day's dose without giving her the next day's too, you'd
completely throw off her body's chemical balance. Like the gene treatments
that were supposed to make Sam and me extra special, you might end up with
someone better than average... but you might also make the little girl "a
hopeless retarded idiot."
Would anyone take such an awful risk with a child? Well, yes who knew that
better than me? But it still didn't make sense. Sending nano onto a navy ship
would make the Admiralty as mad as a swarm of hornets. There had to be easier
ways to get a sip of venom than taking on the entire Outward Fleet.
So why did someone do it?
For a second, I wished there was a special venom to makehumans smarter. I
knew I'd never be smart-smart; but I hated the way so many things went
straight over my head.
If Samantha were here,she'd know what was going on.
4
SHIVERING A LOT
The pinpricks on my hand kept stinging. I soaked the sore parts in cold water
and thought about going to sick bay for ointment... but the doctors were dead,
and I wouldn't know what to look for on my own. Instead, I headed for the
captain's quarters again, to keep tabs on the search for the nanites.
An hour later, the computer reported the hold was clean. That didn't mean
we'd killed the intruders they'd just managed to get away to other parts of
the ship. The ship-soul had found a teeny hole chewed through one of the lock
hatches in the vent shafts between the hold and hydroponics next door. No
surprise there; even if most of the nanites were miniature tankers loading up
venom, they'd have an escort of sappers for digging in and out of wherever
they wanted to go.
By now, the nanites might be spread like dust through the whole ofWillow, or
hiding in little bunches, tucked into crawl spaces where no one would notice
them. The ship's scans might trip over a few invaders, but a Security officer
once told me such scans missed at least 95 percent of the bugs that were out
there. It's just monumentally difficult to search every particle of air for
something the size of a virus, especially when the things you're trying to
find are programmed to avoid being caught.
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
The best I could do was tell the ship-soul to station a defense cloud around
the queen's venom sacs in case the invaders came back. I didn't expect the
cloud would have any luck the rotten little thieves knew we were onto them.
But you have to do something, don't you?
I fell asleep in front of the captain's vidscreen, just as ship's day was
dawning. When I woke again, my right handreally hurt the pinprick marks were
redder than before, and turning hot. So I went to sick bay after all, where I
spent half an hour holding up one medicine after another and asking the
ship-soul, "What does this do?" (It's no good reading the packages; they're
all written in doctorese. Big complicated words that are intentionally
invented so people can't understand them.)
Eventually I found something to smear on: an anti-inflammatory, the ship-soul
said, and that sounded like just what I wanted. By then, I was worried the
swelling might be more than a simple infection; there might be eyeball nanites
under my skin, or hunter-killers that had got carried away when they were
cleaning me off. Supposedly the hunter-killers knew enough not to chop up
human tissue... but if they noticed an eyeball burrowing its way into me, they
might decide to claw in after it.
That's not something you want to think about too long.
The infection got worse over the next day. My hand swelled up; I tried icing
it, but after a while I couldn't stand the pain of anything touching my skin.
The red flush of inflammation started creeping past my wrist and slowly up my
arm. I wondered if I should put on a tourniquet or something... but that
seemed like a lot of work, and I was deep-to-the-bone tired. No energy to care [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]