Page 6 of Stellar Drift (Central Galactic Concordance)

Being a ranger had its benefits, and one of them was the freedom to arrange his day however he liked, especially with Matsurgan gone again.

His only deadline was the ten-day report.

It would take him all of ten minutes to clone a previous report, change the dates, add a sanitized sentence about the meeting four…

no, five days ago, and send it off as usual.

For his own personal records, he would describe everything he could remember about the meeting.

It would torque Matsurgan’s jets if he knew Houyen recorded detailed data and observations about all his projects.

And he’d go supernova if he discovered the small hypercube of data Houyen had collected on infinity fever.

Houyen was convinced that the source was a periodic insect infestation.

He wasn’t a finder, able to pull patterns out of thin air, but this one he could almost feel once he’d put the data together.

Thanks to Matsurgan, Houyen couldn’t ask the region’s entomologist and insect-affinity minder for help, but he knew one of the locals had a similar, if lower-level, talent.

He’d proposed an expedition to the three river towns to look for the breeding ground, since they knew the terrain better than he did.

They’d agreed in principle, but wanted to think about it and ask Sairy her opinion.

According to them, she had better maps than anyone.

That had been the last discussion topic before he’d left the meeting in Irakat. Maybe that was why he’d dreamed of her.

Because his full bladder insisted, he stood up and tested his balance, then walked out of the bedroom and into the fresher.

According to the mirror, he looked better than yesterday, but according to his nose, he didn’t smell any better.

Though that was likely because he’d left his muddy clothes in a heap on the floor next to the solardry unit instead of loading them in the sanitizer to work its magic.

Roughing it in the field for days and weeks at a time as part of his job had given him an abiding appreciation of civilization’s modern conveniences.

Nothing like a diet of military mealpacks to bring home the luxury of a high-end restaurant.

Maybe if he ever left the ranger service, he could start a career nurturing plants for the food-service industry. At least he’d eat well.

After a shower and a successful raid of the community kitchen, he took his mixed bounty back to eat in his quarters. Once he’d mollified his stomach, he set himself up for a deep dive into the ranger service records.

His first question was easily answered. No one named Sairy had ever signed a cooperative agreement with the Makaan Nature Reserve in the last ninety years. Furthermore, no new agreements had been signed by anyone at all in Irakat Collective or the nearest eight towns in the last decade.

That wasn’t entirely surprising. Agreements weren’t required for locals who weren’t taking and profiting from the natural resources, and registered families often didn’t list individuals so they wouldn’t have to keep updating the agreement every time they had a child or a cousin left for school.

The few government entities at any level that might have cared had lost track of those citizens long ago.

Trade and barter systems were exempt from taxes because they were impossible to track.

Answers to his second question took every bit of stubbornness he possessed.

The financial and logistics records were decent, but everything else in the ranger service records made a twisted tangle of parasitic plant roots seem neat and orderly.

An alarming percentage of them were misfiled, mis-tagged, or missing altogether.

If they’d ever been cross-referenced, the keys were long gone.

The only good news was that he’d already been collecting data on infinity fever whenever he ran across it.

Unlike the ranger records, his own were well organized and thoroughly indexed.

That habit had saved his career more than once.

The sweet, clean taste of orange during breakfast had given him an unexpected feeling of déjà vu , followed by a sudden intuition that maybe his missing four days had been lost to infinity fever. He didn’t know why, but it felt right.

To prove it, he needed to know what the symptoms were. That had been a good enough reason to delve the depths of the ranger records, but he had to admit Matsurgan’s determined denial was an added incentive. Houyen had always had a contrary streak.

He certainly wasn’t a medic, but he was a scientist and could apply logic to the problem.

He started by documenting what he remembered of the meeting in Irakat Collective, because after a good night’s sleep, his memory had improved.

While his minder talents didn’t include being a filer, with perfect recall of everything he had ever experienced, he had taught himself to keep memories organized in his head until he could write them down.

The fog of the missing days made it seem like it had been at least a ten-day since that meeting, so he just recorded his thoughts in random order.

His idea to find the breeding ground and Sairy Sarvand’s knowledge of the area topped the list. He hadn’t known her family name until the Irakat administrator mentioned it.

Not that it mattered to anyone but him, but he liked the sound of it.

He remembered he’d brought chems and reusable sample collectors for Irakat’s biologic test kit.

It wasn’t against regulations to donate CPS supplies for goodwill purposes, but it would probably send Matsurgan on another tirade about the local leeches.

Houyen had asked the three town administrators about any patterns they’d noticed about the illness and explained to them his theory that a periodic insect infestation might be the source.

They hadn’t noticed a predictable schedule, but they acknowledged the infestation of wuzzy bugs — the suspect insect — was confusingly unpredictable, too.

In the last four or five years, northwestern towns got hit before Irakat Collective and Axolotl Bend.

They hadn’t seen any deaths in the last three years.

As far as they knew, no one had caught the fever twice, but a mild case might not have been noticed.

That gave him hope that immune-response tests could help researchers find the path to a cure.

The administrators disagreed about how communicable the disease was or wasn’t, but then something had interrupted their debate.

Oh, yes. Four loud idiots from Falco Joro’s so-called construction crew had landed their flitters in Irakat’s public landing pad.

When they realized they’d missed the regular trading day, they started going door to door, noisily looking to buy fun-time chems the locals sometimes traded.

If Joro’s swaggering, well-armed crew even knew what an earth-mover or a glass-welder looked like, Houyen would personally fly them to the biggest chems and alterants shop on the continent.

Irakat Collective, one of the oldest towns in the rainforest, had long experience in dealing with troublemakers and soon convinced the idiots to find their bliss somewhere else.

Houyen helped by standing with Garamont, Irakat’s administrator, making sure his ranger uniform was visible as he tracked the visitors with a steady gaze.

Joro’s crew had childishly over-torqued their flitter’s engines to make as much noise as possible on their way out of town.

He couldn’t remember if he’d told the meeting participants which insect he suspected as the cause.

It would have helped if Ranger Brannezzo, a trained entomologist with a minder talent that gave him an instinctive understanding of insect life, had been willing to consult.

Prickly Brannezzo seemed to think hoarding knowledge was job security.

Houyen couldn’t press the matter without Matsurgan finding out, so Houyen had stumbled along on his own.

After Joro’s crew left, the other administrators had decided to make themselves scarce in case of further drama.

From there, Houyen’s memory grew hazy. He seemed to recall turning down a lunch invitation, and maybe he promised somebody something as he was leaving. His last clear memory was lifting off in his aircar. After that, nightmare-world.

Based on his research, he was pretty sure he’d had infinity fever.

Delirium, high fever, exhaustion, headaches, and flaky dry skin that should have been impossible in the ambient humidity were all consistent with the records.

He’s missed the ear pain, but still had the less common temporary sensory hypersensitivity that some people reported.

In his case, he was constantly assaulted by the smell of nearly everything, from the chemicals in the clothes sanitizer to the discordant waft of odors from the cold box in the base’s community kitchen.

After an unplanned nap on his uncomfortably flat desk, he awoke with two startling conclusions. One, that his memories of spending time with Sairy Sarvand were likely somewhat accurate.

Two, that she had treated him for infinity fever. That was an altogether outlandish hypothesis, but his intuition was insistent. According to the records, people with rapid-onset symptoms as virulent as his usually stayed sick for weeks or died.

Why, how, and where she’d treated him were mysteries he couldn’t solve right then. But he would. And he had the perfect excuse to see her again when he asked for her help in locating the insect source.

Before he did that, though, he needed to deal with his disappointment to realize Sairy had a partner.

Apparently, he’d been holding onto a secret hope that she might be as interested in him as he was in her.

He should have known better. Nothing in his career had ever been compatible with a steady relationship.

Especially if he succeeded in isolating the source of infinity fever and proving its existence.

Matsurgan would make sure Houyen’s next assignment would be one in cryosleep on an exploration expedition to the Andromeda galaxy.

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