**A Preview of a Novel by Hollis Rentchler **
Cross Contamination
By
Hollis Rentchler
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Flinging open a window in the bedroom allowed the ship’s recirculated fresh air in from the fake outdoors. Dr. Frankie Mesu breathed in the comforting smells of undisturbed dust and musty air mingled with the re-circulated fresh air on the fake breeze. Her quarters were exactly the way she’d left them fifteen hours ago, standard Terran issue: bare white-gray military walls with barracks style furniture. She’d lived here for three years, while working her way up the corporate ladder of the Titan science ship Mother’s Milk. She’d just never gotten around to personalizing her quarters. She’d become Director of the Infectious Diseases Laboratory by hard work and perseverance. Frankie never spent that much time in her quarters if she could avoid it. It was just a place to crash when she couldn’t work any more.
Her kitchen cupboards were just as barren as the rest of her quarters, but only because she’d forgotten to requisition supplies, again. Fortunately, she’d grabbed a late bite as she dragged her way home.
The giant Titans had been generous in the depths and height, if not width and breadth, of the Terran sector of the ship. Her bedroom had a magnificent view of the Terran great outdoors from the pseudo-east end of the Terran sector at a fourteenth-story height. Frankie wondered briefly if the Titans had been as generous with the other two alien species on board.
She looked around at her room. A single bed and the cleaning closet made up the entire furniture in the room. She didn’t count the shed clothing littering the floor, the detritus of her last several flops at the apartment. She scooped it all up and crammed it into the cleaning closet. Once the housework was done, she announced, “Planner, book me for my regular at the baths.”
The computer replied, “Unable to comply. There is a semi-private opening in the mud baths. All other bathing tomorrow is public.”
Just my luck, Frankie thought. Her day off from the lab and nothing would go right. “Fine, fine. Just get me whatever privacy is available.”
She grabbed her slick, neon-purple-over-glittering-yellow mud suit from the clean side of the closet and stepped into the little bathroom for a shower. If she put the suit on tonight she could sleep later in the morning. The computer voice returned. “You are scheduled for a semi-private mud bath at 10:00. All the rest are public. Swim at 11:00, hot and cold at 11:30, and long soak at 12:00.”
“Good enough.”
Even after her shower one look in the bathroom mirror was enough to frighten several years off her life. Frankie stared at her wiry black hair, flattened out here, sticking out there, and in desperate need of cutting. She usually kept it so short she didn’t need to bother with it. Now she couldn’t remember when her last haircut was. Her brown-black eyes were surrounded with creases, and they were usually her best feature. Surprisingly, pulling down on her lower lids to better survey the crimson blood vessels crawling over her eyeballs didn’t improve things. Her normally dark-brown skin looked dull and sallow.
“You’re just not used to normal Terrans. You’ve spent too much time with the lab rats, who’re mostly Deuces,” Frankie told herself sternly, referring to her underlings in the lab, as she turned away. It didn’t sound convincing, not even spoken aloud. “Fine, fine,” she assured her reflection, “I’ll take a few mega doses of vitamins and get a haircut.”
Frankie kicked her shed clothing into the corner behind the toilet. That extra few minutes of sleep sounded better with every passing moment.
Opening the bathroom door, Frankie noticed a strange, sugar-sweet smell. Her toes stubbed against something warm and squishy, but firm. Looking down she saw a Deuce romeo squatting on the floor beside the bathroom door. Of course Frankie had never actually seen one before, only line drawings, but it was unmistakable.
Quick, she thought, what do I know about romeos? They are the separate, independently mobile, sexual organs of the male of the Deuces. The words came to her from the ship’s new arrival briefings. What else? Romeos and juliets, the females, seek each other out during the sleep periods of the Deuces. No one was to speak of them to the Deuces, or within earshot of the Deuces. None of which was helpful in the current situation.
It shuffled to a standing position. It was, as the briefing indicated, about half a meter tall. It stood on six legs, looking rather like a large, bony, hairless, purple spider. It had no head, face, or eyes, only a smelling organ, on what could be called the front, facing Frankie. Supposedly it found its way about through smell and touch. She noticed nervously that it stood between her and the door to the hallway.
Deuces didn’t come into the Terran section of the ship. They wouldn’t. It never, ever happened. There was no sign of a Deuce main body in her bedroom. That she’d recognize. So how did it get here?
Stay calm, it’s probably just lost, Frankie thought. There were rumors of occasional reports of romeos being sighted outside the Deuce sector. Who would have guessed they were true?
Her nervousness turned to outright alarm, when the thing executed an incredibly graceful maneuver turning itself upside down. It still stood up on its tentacles with the smeller facing towards her. On the now-revealed underside, just beyond the smeller, was the tiny mouth it used for eating. After that a gaping hole, that kept enlarging as she watched.
Now seemed like an excellent time to panic. Frankie grabbed her old, soft, fuzzy, green robe off the hook behind the door, she threw it over her garish mud suit, and ran as fast as she could around the romeo, to the hall leading to her exterior door. She dashed to the front door, flung it open, and crashed through to the apartment corridor.
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