Starfish

37.2

Ardus woke with a start to the sound of his tablet bleeping at him. He rolled towards the noise and batted around, eyes closed, feeling for the tablet. He ended up knocking it over and half groaned, half snarled when he heard it thump to the floor. He swore using a word Nina had taught him, and opened his eyes. His pores flashed, cycling through yellow, orange and pink in his frustration, and Ardus reluctantly swung his legs out of bed and began to search for the tablet. A message from Meem flickered on the screen, now cracked. Compilation complete, need you for data analysis. "Me? Why me?" Nia was perfectly capable of reading the data and so was anyone else in her lab. Something must be wrong. 

"Screamer's guts," Ardus snarled, tossing the tablet onto his bed with disgust. His wrists flashed orange, his throat felt itchy and as he dressed his clothes irritated him. The hormones that had returned with his pores flooded him with flashes of heat and cold, agitating and distracting. In a fit of spite he stopped and made fresh black kelp and found something to eat. Perhaps if they grow impatient with me, they will do it themselves. And it would serve them right, too! Ardus gulped down near-scalding tea, gritting his teeth against the searing burn on the roof of his mouth, and resisted the urge to throw the cup through the wide glass wall to watch it shatter. Instead, he pinched the bridge of his flat nose and ruffled his barbels. Nia likely has her reasons, he rationalized, she would not request my help if she did not think I would have some insight.

Reluctantly he began gathering a few things for his return to the quiet, empty office that had so recently glittered with laughter and the flash of steel-gray eyes like the reflection of sunlight off of the sea. Walking to the university felt like pushing through a wall of heavy fog, each step an effort as memories flooded back to him, some of them painful. As much as he might wish Nina would be there when he arrived, waiting for him with her enormous smile and teasing eyes, Ardus knew rationally it would not be so – she was somewhere far away, and not being able to see her and know she was all right made walking harder. 

At least when Timam died I could understand it, I could touch her body and feel she was not there. With Nina, he had no visual or tactile proof. He'd spent all the previous night lying awake and listening for the door chime, for the pat-pat of her little feet on the floor, praying to Omi and Aku that suddenly her slight weight would disturb his bed and her voice with its human accent would speak his name in the dark. Ardus forced one foot before the other, clawed toes digging into the sand and turf as he left the beach and approached the campus.

Nia's main laboratory buzzed with chatter, voices seeping into the hallway before Ardus even touched the door. Pulling on a smock and cleaning his hands with sharp-smelling soap he listened to her many assistants and technicians rattling off numbers and working through the strange names of Earth-born cyanobacteria and their toxins. The air seemed electrified, pores glittering blue and green and turning workspaces into strobing cubicles as Dreen squeezed in around screens and murmured about their findings. It reminded Ardus so much of his graduate years, huddled in front of a computer terminal reading excitedly as the results began to fill the screen with lines of data, that the old feeling of anxious excitement began to tremble around his heart. Trying to be discreet he leaned towards a cluster of techs and heard them whisper excitedly about amino acids and sodium channels, watching them scribble notes and punch commands with an absorbing wonder. 

Before he could gather more, a hand in a laboratory glove curled around his wrist and Ardus turned towards it. Nia, her face shield glowing yellow and green from the bright pores on her cheeks, forehead and neck, bared her dirks in an enormous and wild-looking smile and her slit nostrils flared. "You're here! Ardus, we've got it!"

Stunned, Ardus blinked rapidly. "You... But how? Only yesterday-"

"Didn't you see it? She was all over the media this morning talking about it!" Nia tugged on his arm, "Tell me you saw it!"

"Saw what-" Ardus began, but Nia began to drag at his arm. 

"Come on, my office." Pardoning herself loudly Nia pulled Ardus through the graduates and technicians to the more private room in the back and shoved him into her chair. "We got a message from the humans last night; the night crew that feeds the specimens called me at dawn to tell me about it. I thought about sending it to you but I didn't know if you'd got any sleep – that's why I had Meem send you a message." After a few commands to her terminal Ardus watched Nina – his Nina – speaking a language he didn't understand into a camera while a hasty translation scrolled along one side of the screen. At the sight of her Ardus's heart thumped painfully, and his hands curled in on themselves for want of her soft, brown little body. In the video recording Nina's hair floated in zero-gravity and Ardus remembered how her hair had floated in the sea. How he missed her warm skin, the smell of her hair, the funny bump of her nose and the little ring she wore there! He forced himself to read the translation: "-possible that the water wasn't heated to the point of sterilization and thus the cyanobacteria grew an algal bloom that produced cyano- and saxitoxins that were then aerosolized – reduced to a fine mist – that was then inhaled by the Dreen present at the Port during and after the accident. Since Dreen are much larger than humans it's possible that more Dreen have been exposed than were affected, but their size is protecting them from the worst-"

"Now do you understand?" Nia pointed excitedly at the screen, "She figured it out! Look here," she produced Nina's notes, scribbled now with Nia's commentary and calculations, "it's exactly as she said! The processors just spit out this exact chemical structure, it's shellfish poisoning! We can treat this!"

Dragging his attention from Nina's face – she looked tired, the skin around her eyes dark – to Nia's he asked, "How?"

"She mentioned aminopyridine, we've been using the stuff to experiment with Meem's worms! We'll have to test it on the samples you brought me, but if the computer analysis is anything to go by we could have a solution in a few days. Days!" Nia squeezed his shoulder hard, the glove the only protection between her claws and his skin. "Do you understand? This means we can get Doctor Nina back."

Ardus's breath caught in his chest, a feeling like a metal cage wrapping around his ribs and closing like a fist. His hands itched to hold her, his nose and lungs aching to breathe in her sweet, clean smell that was so strange but so dear... "But... Should our focus be on the affected Dreen instead?"

"They'll be fine," Nia brushed his words away. "Now that we know what it is we can start treating the worst cases tonight – it's just a little tetrodotoxin, we all probably get a little bit in our lungs every time we walk by a particularly stagnant tide pool, Omi knows how much when we come up for air too fast." She patted his shoulder. "You should probably give Athe a call, let him know Boda will be fine." She handed him a tablet, already primed for a call. "Here, use mine."

Ardus took the tablet, hands shaking. His claws rattled on the hard metal back and he gripped to still them, wincing as a claw screeched across the case. The video of Nina explaining the origin of the paralysis had restarted, the screen dimming briefly to black before it stuttered on again and a male voice spoke, the translation reading "We're good. Start any time you want." The bands around Ardus's lungs grew tight again as Nina began to speak, introducing herself to whoever was behind the camera. 

Ardus had watched recordings of Timam after her passing, to recall the sound of her voice or watch the play of light across her chest as she shared some piece of knowledge or explained her methods, and each time his heart had twisted in his chest knowing that the recordings were all he had left of her. This time, watching Nina speak from a station or a vessel somewhere far above Dreenai's atmosphere, the ache in his heart was different. It was the anticipatory ache of missing something that was within reach, the longing for familiar sights while returning from a journey afield, knowing that just beyond the next swell, over the next great rise, was a familiar bed and the long-missed faces of loved ones. Be patient, starfish, Ardus typed the code that would connect him with Athe's tablet, I am going to bring you home.