The fixer

A Terran woman living among an alien, pelted people becomes an improvised scientific consultant when Telfu is threatened by an airborne, virus-like plague that kills after a latent incubation and spreads asymptomatically. Local chemists have designed a complex protein they believe can combat the disease but cannot produce it in useful yield because the molecule is structurally unstable and resists reprocessing. Drawing on limited Terran scientific knowledge and the idea that gravitic or high electronic-charge techniques might stabilize unstable lattices, she works with leading medico-physicists to adapt unfamiliar methods while negotiating cultural distance and practical constraints.