The other man nodded. “I get it. This is a rough gig. And if we were the type who could just turn off our feelings about it, well, I guess we wouldn’t be here in the first place.”
Ruiz gave a hollow chuckle. “I guess you’re right. Um . . . I’m Antonio. Antonio Ruiz.”
“Albert Sims. Call me Al.” They shook hands. “You look like you could use a cup o’ coffee. How about it?”
“That’d be good, thanks.”
Once they were in the cantina, away from the abundance of full cots and the overabundance of freshly empty ones, Ruiz was able to relax somewhat. “If you don’t mind my asking,” Sims said, “those don’t seem like the hands of a medical professional.”
Ruiz rubbed his callused fingertips together. “Good catch. I came here as a mining engineer. But all the mining countries got the plague and then M’Tezir moved in and kicked us out. I could’ve just gone back home to Cuba, but . . . well . . . I couldn’t just leave these people.”
“I get it.” Sims studied him. “Cuba, huh? Was . . . is your family from . . .”
Ruiz sensed what he wasn’t saying. No one from Earth would ever forget that day in March 2153 when the Xindi weapon had carved a path of devastation through Florida, Cuba, Jamaica, and parts of Colombia and Venezuela. “No, my family’s from farther west, near Havana.” He lowered his gaze. “But I had a girl in Santa Clara.”
“I’m sorry, man.”
“You lost somebody, too, huh?” Ruiz asked. He had noted a trace of the American Southeast in Sims’s voice.
“No, I . . . I knew people who did,” Sims replied. Ruiz found it hard to believe that the haunted look in his eyes could have come at second hand. Well, maybe he was just that compassionate. He’d come here, after all.
Ruiz tried to avoid sending a bitter thought Laila Alindogan’s way. She had been unable to cope with the spreading plague and the growing hostility from the Saurians, so she had left two weeks ago for an asteroid-mining job in the Vega system. He couldn’t decide if it was because she’d lacked the compassion to stay or been too empathetic to bear any more of it. Either way, whatever relationship they shared hadn’t meant enough to Laila to make her stay. One more casualty, he thought, before chastising himself for such an insensitive comparison.
“I’ve done a bit of engineering myself here and there,” Sims was saying. “Well, spaceship maintenance. I came here on an ECS freighter, nursemaiding the computers. Saw what was goin’ on here and decided to lend a hand. Besides, I may have had a bit of a . . . flirtation goin’ with the first mate’s wife, and it woulda made the return trip pretty uncomfortable.”
The man made the latter confession a bit too easily, making Ruiz suspect he was downplaying his own selflessness. Or maybe Ruiz just needed to feel optimistic about something. “Well, good for you, friend. The Saurians need all the help they can get.”
Sims frowned. “Yeah, about that. This Maltuvis guy’s supposed to have a cure, right? So why hasn’t he spread it around? Shared it with everyone on the planet?”
Ruiz grimaced. “Well, first, it’s just a treatment—it keeps the symptoms at bay, but you have to keep taking it. Which, according to el Rey Maltuvis, means it’s awfully expensive to make enough to treat everybody. So it’s only practical to give the cure to countries willing to pay for the privilege—and willing to accept M’Tezir troops on their soil to ‘coordinate’ their missions of mercy.” He scoffed.
“Well, if that don’t just . . . Why not just share the damn formula with the rest of the planet?” Sims demanded.
“He says it’d take too long to train other doctors in the necessary skills.”
“He also says the countries have to kick aliens out so we won’t re-infect people. You buy any of that?”
Ruiz sighed. “I don’t know. Doctor Lucas, Doctor Sobon, all the others, they insist there’s no evidence of cross-species infection. But somehow the disease keeps cropping up in the cities where offworlders are living—and the places that have kicked them out are doing okay. That’s why so many countries have agreed to Maltuvis’s terms. They can see how fishy it looks, but they’re afraid to take the chance. And you know how people get when they’re scared.”
Sims puffed breath through his lips. “Damn. I’m amazed they even let us stay here in Veranith.”
“Well, the Veranith are old enemies of M’Tezir. They don’t trust Maltuvis and they’re not about to let his troops on their soil.” Ruiz stared at his coffee cup for a moment. “But not everyone here feels the same. They’re scared, too.”