Gates of Hell by Susan Sizemore Read Free Book Online

about the situation, and an urge to get out there and do something about it. And if an empath couldn’t go on feelings… She sighed, and leaned back in her chair. “Wish we had a few more people to put to work on this.”
    The
Tigris
was a long-range combat vessel with a crew of six hundred, so the sickbay was large and well-equipped. As far as personnel went, however, Roxy’s staff included only Bonita, two medtechs, a meddroid, and two nurses. Captain Merkrates had traded away the larger medical staff his ship rated for the privilege of counting a Physician among his crew. That the Physician was also a koltiri healer tended to make budget-minded MilService bureaucrats question the
Tigris’s
need for even the skeleton staff Roxy supervised. Roxy had to do a lot of snarling and threatening to return to MedService whenever there was talk of transferring her crew. She didn’t know how the legend that koltiri could do it all got started, but it was a real pain dealing with it here in reality. The reason she’d worked very hard to earn the rank of Physician was because the practice of medicine was so much more efficient than committing miracles. If you healed one person, they could go and get infected again; if you found a vaccine for the same illness, you’d taken care of a problem on a larger scale.
    Right now she was fighting the urge to threaten the captain with her transferring back to MedService because he was using the excuse of the ship’s only having a skeleton medical staff when they might be heading into a combat situation on the Rose border to keep her onboard. From her point of view, even the possibility of being needed in battle paled before the threat of Sagouran Fever. She didn’t know quite when she’d stopped thinking like a combat soldier but, after months without any battles, she guessed the war with the Trin was starting to feel like it was finished. It seemed to Roxy that fighting disease on the front lines was where she needed to be these days. She truly, deeply wished that the
Tigris
didn’t seem too small for her when it had been such a haven not so long ago. And maybe Eamon was right when he argued that her blighted mental shielding still hadn’t recovered enough for her to venture away from the familiar shelter the ship offered.
    “More people for
research
?” Dee cocked a cynical eyebrow at Roxy’s complaint. “Why would Command appropriate a proper staff when we have a goddess in our midst?”
    “You are referring to yourself, I hope,” Roxy responded. Dee sneered. It was her way of showing affection.
    Bonita looked from one to the other. “You two have a very bizarre relationship.”
    “Works for us,” Dee and Roxy answered, and laughed. They’d known each other since they were teenagers on Terra, and frequently still acted like teenagers when they were together, much to the Captain’s annoyance.
    The meddroid gave a polite, musical ‘ding’ to get their attention. Roxy took a sip of coffee out of a bright red mug while she glanced at the results the meddroid sent to their datapads. “So much for that.” She sighed again after reading down a list of negative test results. They’d been at this for two days now. Not really much linear time had passed, but it felt like weeks to her. “I feel too isolated from this,” she admitted to someone besides Eamon for the first time. “I need to get a taste of it.”
    Bonita looked at her strangely. “That would require visiting one of the MedService onsites on a quarantined world. You haven’t been off the ship since the war started.”
    “I’ll see if I can get a sample of Sagouran Fever to work with rather than simulations. Then again,” she added. “It doesn’t sound like something we’d want around. Containment would be a worry for the rest of the crew, even with isolation fields and safety protocols. Ships like the
Tigris
that rarely make port are the one place that’s absolutely safe.” She shook her head. “No.