Jupiter's Halo Book Two: The Fall

Chapter Three

Doctor Eric Bramley looked over his notes for a moment before returning his eye to the enlarged display that projected over his desk. The cells he’d been reviewing were behaving unsatisfactorily. He looked at his notes again, added some new annotations and then back to the display.

It was vexing.

No matter what he tried the results were the same. Or to be more accurate, they weren’t the same. So far he hadn’t seen a single case that matched any of the others even closely. The cells he watched deteriorated, shrivelling before disintegrating, their dead grey matter falling to nothing as he cursed under his breath.

Two years they’d been at it, with little success. Two years.

Sure, they’d managed to cultivate the specimens to a certain degree; shorten the life of the pathogen so it would burn itself out, but no matter the approach they took, the same issue arose again and again.

The disease was too unpredictable. It did nothing but destroy. It destroyed healthy cells, cells infected with other viruses, cells that had been irradiated or degraded. Cells that had been bolstered to withstand the onslaught. There was nothing it couldn’t burn through and it did so at such a terrific pace.

That was all on track with the requirements they worked too. But the last piece, the aspect demanded to call the project complete, still eluded them. No matter what he and his team tried, they just couldn’t get it right.

Eric leaned away from the screen, stretching his back and groaning gently at the twinges he felt. He was too old for this. Cutting edge science was a young person's game. The work he’d been so appallingly incapable of completing should have been given to the newer generation to deal with.

But there was no one else who knew what he did. That was the problem with expertise. Once you had it the stuff was damned hard to get rid of. And worse, if people got to know you were the leader in your field… well, that was it. You could never enjoy another peaceful day again.

Not just expertise. Living longer compounded the problem. If he’d been born just a century or two earlier he’d have been long dead by now and finally getting the rest he felt he deserved. Not now though, oh no. It didn’t matter that he was well into his hundred and thirtieth year. It didn’t matter that he’d already given ten decades to the pursuit of science and medicine in the name of the Deorum. No, that still wasn’t enough, apparently.

If he became ill, which was an amusing irony in itself, they would just cure him. There wasn’t much beyond the reach of modern medicine. Except death itself of course. That and the project he worked on now.

If his body failed they could revitalise it. There was no respite, no end. He only wished they could have done something about his hair, maybe that would allow him to live out his extended years with at least a little dignity. Apparently that wasn’t a priority though. He’d been told it was unimportant. To them maybe.

At first, he’d paid for the treatments out of his own pocket; the procedures each more expensive than the last and each time yielding less and less impressive results until finally the funds disappeared and with them so too did his hair.

In the darkness of the nearest window, where this side of the lab ran up against the station’s hull, he could see his own reflection. The light shone as it reflected brightly from his round, pale and utterly bald head. It was a depressing sight, even for a man of his age. At least he could console himself by diving into his work. At least, that had been the case until they’d shipped him all the hells way out here.

He supposed maybe he should call it a porthole, rather than a window. It was an old term and he wasn’t sure if it applied to a station, but the place had decks didn’t it? Surely that meant a maritime theme. 'Window' was a good word; it simply meant an aperture that allowed a view of the outside. That’s exactly what the tick, armoured glass he was staring into did. But there again, so did a porthole…

“I’ve got the latest results from the-” The voice of Lucile Ranchack broke into his musing as she arrived beside his desk and stopped short, staring at the projected display.

“That’s not looking good is it?” She finished as he dragged his eyes from the embarrassment of his reflection and back to his work.

The once clear fluid held under the microscopic lens was now littered with the debris of disintegrated cells. The dead matter floated silently in tiny clumps and specks, making the view seem somehow dirty, like a public street left too long without the attention cleaning bots.

“No, it does not.” He sighed. “It does not look good at all.”

Eric swivelled his chair to bring his body to face the young research assistant and rubbed a tired hand across his face and eyes, before continuing.

“You were saying something about results, I believe?”

Lucile seemed lost in the projection.

“What? Yes, er… sorry. Yes.” She finished with a flourish of returning confidence. “The results, yes. From the marker panels.” She flushed slightly, her high cheeks turning a bright red. “The marrow panels. Bone marrow, I mean. The bone marrow marker panels. The latest ones.” She added as her voice trailed off.

Eric smiled warmly. Her reaction was always the same around him. He hadn’t seen her act in such a way with any other members of the team and were he a younger, fitter man, he might presume she had more than a professional interest in him. She was pretty, although ‘cute’ seemed like a more apt description. There was a youngness to her. Not that Eric found children attractive, that wasn’t it at all. Maybe it was her innocence or the complete lack of guile and bitterness he saw in her unblemished face. Whatever exactly it was, he tried to keep the thoughts from his mind. To remain professional.

It wasn’t completely beyond the realms of imagination that she could be interested like that, but given that he was old enough to be her grandfather, or more accurately, her grandfather’s grandfather, he had to believe the cause was something else. What it could be he couldn’t guess at. He was always polite, unlike a few of the other doctors in the local vicinity, courteous, patient and took every opportunity he could to help the assistants learn. If he’d been dismissive or unpleasant he could understand, but as things were, he was left at a total loss.

He’d considered asking her outright on more than one occasion, but given how flustered she often became in these simple interactions he feared the resulting embarrassment might possibly be terminal. He’d simply have to chalk it up as one of life’s great mysteries and keep the dark thoughts that surfaced late in a cycle when he was alone in his quarters, very much to himself.

Eric reached out his hands gently. Lucile looked as if she was about to recoil when her eyes darted down to the tablet in her hands and understanding dawned on her face. She visibly relaxed, letting out a long breath as she passed the small screen across so he could examine the data it held.

Disappointing. Yet more failure and at a cursory glance it looked like their minor steps of progress were starting to go backwards. Eric sighed and rubbed at his eyes again, screwing them up tight in frustration.

“Bloody bollocksing bollocksy bollocks!”

He heard her sharp intake of breath at his exclamation and dropped his hand to see her leaning away and staring wide-eyed at him. She looked frightened, of him. The thought was so ridiculous it made him smile and again he saw her relax.

“Well, that’s another three months straight down the pisser.” He said more gently. “If we keep going at this rate they’ll be no room left in there for any actual piss.”

She giggled at the joke, poor as it was and a little bit of his heart melted at the sound.

“Do you want me to run them again?” She asked as she took the tablet back from his unprotesting hands. For a second, one of her fingers brushed his and the contact felt like a little spark of electricity passed between them. She curled her lips in, the red flush advancing up her face again and Eric felt the warmth in his own cheeks.

“Er… no. No.” He said as he attempted to gather himself and push away the thoughts that suddenly crowded his mind. “No sense in wasting more time. No, I think we’ll take another look at the effects on irradiated cells first.” He coughed to clear his throat and tried to find something else, anything else in the room to look at other than her face.

His eyes alighted on a sight that was at the same time welcome and entirely unwelcome. Doctor Bloom-Jutteridge, moving at surprising speed for her girth and already too close for him to look away.

“What are you doing here?” She demanded of Lucile.

The research assistant dropped her eyes and held the tablet up as if it were some kind of shield.

“The latest marrow results doctor, I brought them for Doctor Bramley-”

“Yes, yes!” Jutteridge cut her off. “But what are you still doing here? Your job doesn’t include standing around mooning over your betters and getting in the way, does it? Does it?”

Jutteridge bent forward as she spoke, her low hanging cleavage almost landing in Eric’s lap as she leaned across him. She smelled slightly of eggs, he had no idea how given the last time she could have seen one was well over two years previous. There was something else too; a hint of something acidic and sharp.

Lucile paled under the onslaught and bowed her head further. She mumbled something and Jutteridge leaned further forward, her body now pressing uncomfortably against him, allowing no route of escape.

“What was that?”

“I said no doctor.” Lucile squeaked.

“Too right it’s no.” Jutteridge boomed. “Now I’m sure like myself and Doctor Bramley you have actual work to be getting on with.”

Lucile nodded without looking up and turned away. She practically fled the lab and Eric felt a pang of sympathy and a wave of guilt at his lack of intervention.

Technically he was in charge of the research team, including the generally unpleasant Doctor Bloom-Jutteridge, but the truth of the situation was something entirely different. The woman was a force of nature; large in body and spirit, commanding, demanding and utterly incapable of separating her own opinion from fact. Eric had attempted to steer her and the rest of the team for the first few months, but before long he’d found it was simply easier to work around her and encourage everyone else to do the same.

It was the assistants he felt sorry for. Brusque and impolite as Jutteridge may be, she at least treated the doctors with a degree of professional courtesy. The research assistants, Lucile and Zakir, received no such restraint. She was openly abusive to Lucile, often acting as if the girl was nothing more than an emotional punching bag left there for her own amusement. The younger woman seemed petrified of her and generally fled their interactions with tears on her cheeks. Zakir however, acted somewhat differently.

Eric had witnessed one of the first interactions Jutteridge had had with the young man and he’d found himself more than a little in awe. Zakir was barely out of his teens, short and apparently entirely without body fat. When stood anywhere near the doctor he looked so frail and thin it was difficult to imagine she wouldn’t simply reach out and snap him. The boy’s confidence though was something else altogether.

He laughed at her abuse. Actually laughed. To her face. Eric found himself thinking the appropriate phrasing was ‘to her face’.

He’d seen it first hand. Jutteridge had been screaming at him for some minor error and Zakir had simply chuckled. His reaction enraged her and somehow that made him laugh all the harder. She’d gone to strike him, missing as he moved and knocking the tablet from his hands with her clumsy downward swing. Eric had watched the casual way Zakir had glanced down, before shrugging off the loss of his tech as if it were nothing and simply strolling away.

Jutteridge had immediately demanded he be replaced by someone more suitable and Eric had been forced to remind her that their assignment parameters didn’t allow for any replacement members. He’d taken great, if hidden, joy in giving her that news. She was stuck with Zakir for the duration. Unfortunately, that meant they were all stuck with her too, but Eric had decided to attempt N imitation of the young man’s nonchalance and had found the more he got to practice, the better he became.

The memory brought a smile to his lips as Jutteridge turned her eyes from the retreating back of Lucile and glared at him with mild confusion.

“I don’t know why you encourage that young woman.” She started in the tones of someone who really never would. “I know you think I’m too hard on her, but I think she needs to learn she’ll get nowhere in life if she isn’t prepared to put the work in.”

She looked satisfied, righteous about her reasoning.

“I’m right. You know I’m right. Don’t you think I’m right?”

She raised her eyebrows as if waiting for the textbook answer from a daydreaming schoolboy. Eric decided it was time to throw the last of his caution to the wind. He’d had about all he could take of Doctor Bloom-Jutteridge.

“To be honest doctor,” he said, feeling the smile inside strain to twist his lips. “I don’t think anyone could give a puddle-huggers fart about what you think.”

The look of shock on her face was something he knew he would treasure remembering for the rest of his days. He watched her expression turn dark and knew she was readying for an explosion of indignation, but it didn’t matter. Zakir really did have it the right way. Eric sat back, smiling in the face of the oncoming tirade and thought about how happy Lucile would be when she heard about this little exchange.