Starfish

37.3

"Are you dud wid da bicroscope yet?"

Nina cringed at the nasal twang in Martin's voice – his nostrils were still stuffed with tissues and he sounded like he had a bad cold; the rings under his eyes had faded from dark purple to an angry red though his eyes were still puffy. Someone had fixed him up after they docked and he now wore a bulky plastic splint with big strips of surgical tape between his eyebrows and across his cheeks. Nina doubted he'd be able to even use the scope – how was he going to get close enough to the eyepiece? - and decided if he hurt himself, he deserved it. "Just a second," she flipped over her shoulder, readjusting the scope so she could capture an image of the Anabaena strain she was observing on the slide below.

"Wad are you doing?"

"I have to document the strain sample they brought me from the cleanup operation," Nina explained, trying to keep the acid out of her voice. "What do you need it for?" There was only one microscope on the Kalpana Chawla, and it lived in the tiny medbay that was mostly used to patch up scrapes and dislocated fingers.

"Dey gabe me a blood samble to look at, dey wand be to do a doxicology on a case of blood boisoning. Sombe idiot cut himbself and dey thing he's god a bug." Martin held up a baggie containing a slide with a brown smear and sighed, "I keeb warning dese peoble aboud andibiodig-resistant bagteria bud dey dever listen."

Nina turned back to the microscope and fixed the lens over the chains of green bacteria, like a string of jade or aventurine floating in the suspension of water molecules and other more-harmless single-celled bugs and plants that were present in every slide, stream, pond and puddle and had been since life began. She triggered the camera with a hand-held clicker and snapped several images before taking her slide off the stage and wiping it down for Martin's blood sample. "All yours." She pushed back from the worktable, her feet coming out of the stability straps on the floor, and floated away. At least he's behaving himself. Martin had been very quiet since they landed, staying well out of Nina's way when they didn't have to be in the same room, though he had turned a little red when the Federation liaison in charge of their enforced residency announced that Martin would be working with Nina and Fred Yang on various parts of the bacterium-identification project. So far Martin had made only basic conversation, relaying relevant information and announcing his arrival when he reported to work. He waited until Nina was well away from the microscope before settling in.

After listening to his irritatingly loud mouth-breathing for about four seconds Nina decided to take her images to another room to write up her identification findings before uploading them to the Fed servers. They had cut off her access to any Dreen networks – even her secure line to the university – and everything she wrote would be scrutinized before it was sent on to (hopefully) Ardus's team planetside. I can't even send him a note, I hope he's okay. After what he'd told her of his reaction to losing Athe's mother, Nina worried that the big guy might be paralyzed with grief. She took her borrowed tablet back to the tiny coffin-sized room she slept in and did what she could, using a stylus to draw arrows and circles around the parts of the bacteria that proved she was indeed looking at Anabaena. 

Outside in the tube-shaped hall she heard the clunk and whisper of the station's resident's soft shoes on the walls and rungs they used to propel themselves around. Nina tried to pretend they were the sounds of the little flying animals that lived in the eaves of Ardus's building. She tried to imagine the scuffling was the muffled sound of rain on the wide glass seaward wall, and that the close walls were those of Ardus's sleeping niche. She pulled herself into a ball to put more space between her body and the walls, trying to believe that her trapped body heat was that of a Dreen. Everything on this human-made station was too small, the rooms and passages cramped and the light harsh and artificial. Nina longed for the warmth of Dreenai's sun on her face, the silky feel of sand between her toes, the air tasting of salt and smelling of sweet green seaweed-