Meanwhile, I know Roan has been thinking hard on the device. But such consideration takes time, and time is passing. It is now well into afternoon on the third day and progress is not great. Kuylen's men have finished deploying and now only await the word to move; the silence that has settled over the city now is disconcerting.
Time is certainly passing you by.
"Well... it is hardly a conventional treatment... but then again, no conventional treatments exisst. I'm sorry, I really don't know much about that type of thing; you would have to speak to his Doctor."
No treatment indeed, Gallagher for you have indeed heard of the Lichen- as a curiosity.
The planet Floria is a rather benighted jungle world, all the more benighted for the fact that no-one will go there because they are afraid of contagion.
That's a pretty vague fear. Less than one in ten thousand beings in the Galaxy are actually susceptile to catching it, which seems to be based on a quirk of genetics that no-one has ever identified (the contagion rate is more or less identical in all species that have yet encountered it). It is also totally impossible to catch it off someone else.
The Lichen itself- named for the effect it produces, rather than its nature, which is bacterial- lives naturally in the Florian eco-system. Due to a quirk of nature, however, it is ferociously compatible with just about any bio-system. To put that in perspective, most alien biospheres have a compatibility of about zero percent with other biospheres; if the Lichen was like that the contagion risk would be about one in a billion, or less. To reach one in ten thousand is astounding.
As it is, its microbes suffuse the planet. If you are susceptible, you will catch it simply by going there. The microbes, if compatible, lodge into your skin, and then attach themselves to your bodily cells at a mircroscopic level. Once they imbed themselves, they can never be removed.
Any lifeform they are in contact with, they use as a breeding ground. An infected person starts a slow process of being consumed and turned into a plant- it mainfests itself at first in green, moss-like patches- the 'lichen'. On the skin, where the first symptoms materialise, they are simply a painful nuisance. The embedded lichen spread as years go by. Eventually they will grow in blood cells, blood vessels, bones, and organs, up to and including the brain. The lingering, painful deaths from this are quite horriffic.
"Suh a shame," remarks the nurse. "He was only there on a charity mission. The Universe has an odd sense of justice sometimes."
"Yes, it's quite sad when the good people in this galaxy end up living tortuous lives." Andro appears reflect on something a moment then, "Well, thank you for your time, if you ever come across the Abbot, please pass on our sympathies." he turns to leave but just before he's out of sight he faces the lady again. "Oh, I was wondering. Have you ever heard of aspidrol? I overheard some folks talking about it once on another planet, but didn't believe it was a real drug. I've never heard of it."
She smiles amiably at you, not actually bright enough to get the insinuation.
Ok, well, we have at least established that the hospital uses aspidrol as a stimulant in operations- never for casual use.
That complicates things. The amount of aspidrol that the Order reckons is coming out this place is gargantuan- enough to supply its market, which covers almost a quarter of the Galaxy. From what you understand, aspidrol has a powerful size/potency rate, so it is very compact, but even so, they would have to be shipping out tons of the stuff all the time. If it;s not actually used very often, you are at a loss to explain how anyone even gets the chance to nab it and take it somewhere else, And if they took it from stores... then surely someone would notice that the demand the hospital had for taking the stuff in was totally out of proportion! Unless they were doing hundreds of operations per day, and as you already fgound out, the clinical treatment rooms often lie unused.
As they walk away from the dizzy pharmacist, Andro talks to Gallagher.
"Well, that didn't help as much as I hoped it would. I hate how Varm keeps popping up, but the that Florian Lichen thing the Abbot has sounds hard to fake. Something really weird is going on here, whether it has to do with drugs or not. What do you want to do next?"