Orussian Quarantine : Chapter 2/10

This post is the second of the ten chapters of the speculative fiction scifi story Orussian Quarantine. If you havn't read the first chapter yet, it is available here.

Golden opportunities

Gabriëlla had been working really hard to get noticed for quite some time now, but now for the first time, a real opportunity seemed truly within grasp. While she was still only a level 2 member of the medical guild, and while she hated the nasty smell of these creatures, the Lilith incident had made Gabriëlla's post with the mining guild probably the best level 2 post in her entire guild. She now had the opportunity to truly make a name for herself, and if she played her cards right, she may not have to spend the 32 standard-day period that constitutes the southern Uhm high summer wearing a thermo-suit twenty-four-seven. Uhm, or Orus-2 as non-Orussians referred to it, was the only planet in the Orus system that had truly been colonized, but it was also the least pleasant of the four life-supporting planets in the system. Orus-5, or Scayune as Orussians referred to it, the bio-guild's prime breeding planet, also had something approaching a population, but nothing compared to Uhm. South Uhm City was the most densely-populated city on Uhm. Officially it had about one hundred million inhabitants, but those were just the official counts. Only guild members and aspirant guild members from the guild clans were counted as citizens. The medical guild was the only guild that recognized the existence of the non-citizens dwelling in the Great Dam. According to the medical records kept by the guild, there were somewhere between forty and fifty million non-citizens, or Dammons as they were often referred to, living somewhere inside of or even in improvised structures on top of the city dam.
The Great Dam was a large structure built to dam the artificial south-pole landmass from the south Uhmian sea. It was built to withstand the violently boiling southern sea during high summer. It was never built to house millions of people.
Thus the living conditions that were present for those millions of dam dwellers who spent most of their lives there created ideal medical training grounds for their lower level members. Gabriëlla was extremely disappointed when she didn't get assigned to a post near the Great Dam. While the big dam was basically an oven, and people living inside it could only hope to survive by continuously wearing thermo suits, at least the Dammons were Orussians. Instead she was assigned to a post at the mining guild, working with those vile-smelling ant-monkeys. The Lilith incident, however, had made her position with the mining guild so much more desirable.
After the Lilith incident all the Orus-5 breeding plants were quarantined. Nobody knew for how long. Possibly indefinitely. As ant-monkeys had been rather cheap, medical care had not been a top priority for the mining guild until recently. But now that the Scayune ant-monkey production was unavailable to the guild, keeping the existing stock alive and healthy had become priority number one—so much so that Gabriëlla's guild master would need to take some level 2 members with her this summer to handle all the paperwork. Orus-2 was mostly a desert planet. Its proximity to the Orus star made most of the planet too hot for settlement. Only at the poles could settlements exist.
This meant that while winters in South Uhm City were without sunlight, they were the most bearable season. Summers in South Uhm City were hot. Extremely hot. Especially close to the dam.
The Uhmian elite either lived far from the dam, close to the ultimate south, or migrated to one of the two north-pole cities for summer. The richest spent their summers in the city of Ga. Others, like her guild master, continued their work on Lot peninsula. If she played her cards right, she would be joining her master when he and the mining guild masters moved to Lot to escape the southern summer season.

Continue with Chapter 3