Brain Ships

by Anne McCaffrey

  The transmission ended, leaving her only with the carrier-wave.

  Now what? Give Alex the bad news, I guess. And calculate how many packing crates I can pack into my holds.

  "Alex?" she called. "Are you having any luck tracking down where the survivors are?"

  "I've turned on all the exterior lights," Alex said. "I hoped that I'd be able to lure some of them out into the open, but it's no good." She activated his helmet-camera and watched his gloved hand typing override orders into the keyboard of the main AI console. Override orders had to be put in by hand, with a specific set of override codes, no matter how minor the change was—that was to keep someone from taking over an AI with a shout or two. "Right now I'm giving myself full access to everything—I may not need it, but who knows?"

  "I've got our first set of orders," she told him. "Do you want to hear them?"

  "Sure." Typing in a pressure-suit was no easy task, and Tia did not envy him. It took incredible patience to manage a normal keyboard in those stiff gloves.

  She retransmitted Doctor Kenny's message and waited patiently for his response when she finished.

  "So I have to stay in the suit." He sighed gustily. "Oh, well. It could be worse, I suppose. It could be two weeks to base, instead of four days." He typed the last few characters with a flourish and was rewarded by the "Full Access, Voice Commands accepted" legend. "No choice, right? Look, Tia, I know you're going to be lonely, but if I have to stay in this suit, I might just as well sleep out here."

  "But—" she protested, "—what if they decide you're an enemy or something?"

  "What, the Zombies?" He snorted. "Tia, right now they're all crammed into some of the darnedest nooks and crannies you ever saw in your life. I couldn't pry them out of there with a forklift. I know where they all are, but I'd have to break bones to get them. Their bones. They're terrified, even with all the floodlights on. No, they aren't going to come after me in the dark."

  "All right," she agreed reluctantly. She knew he was right; he'd be much more comfortable out there—there was certainly more room available to him there.

  "I'll be closer to the Zombies," he said wearily, "and I can barricade myself in one of the offices, get enough bedding from stores to make a reasonable nest. I'll plug the suit in to keep everything charged up, and you can monitor the mike and camera. I snore."

  "I know," she said, in a weak attempt to tease him.

  "You would." He turned, and the camera tracked what he was seeing. "Look, I'm here in the site supervisor's office. There's even a real nice couch in here and—" He leaned down and fiddled with the underside of the piece of furniture. "Ah hah. As I thought. There's a real bed in the couch. Bet the old man liked to sneak naps. Look—" He panned around the office. "No windows. One door. A full-access terminal. I'll be fine."

  "All right, I believe you." She thought, quickly. "I'll look over those plans for traps and transmit them to the AI, and I'll find out where everything you'll need is stored. You can start collecting the team tomorrow."

  What's left of them, she thought sadly. What isn't already stored in the freezer.

  "See what you can do about adding some sleepygas to the equation," he suggested, yawning under his breath. "If we can knock them out once they're in the boxes, rather than trapping them with field generators, that should solve the problem of frightening the others."

  That was a good suggestion. A much better one than Doctor Kenny's. If she had enough gas. . . .

  But wait; this was a fully-stocked station. There might be another option. Crime did exist wherever there were people, and mental breakdowns—sometimes it was necessary to immobilize someone for his protection and the protection of others.

  She interrogated the AI and discovered that, indeed, there were several special low-power needlers in the arms locker. And with them, full clips of anesthetic needles.

  "Alex," she said, slowly, "how good a shot are you?"

  * * *

  "When this is over, I'm requisitioning an ethological tagging kit," she said fiercely, as Alex crouched on the roof of the mess hall and waited for his subject's hunger to overcome her timidity. She hesitated, just in front of the crate—she smelled the food, and she wanted it, but she was afraid to go inside after it. She swayed from side to side, like one of the first three survivors they'd seen; that swaying seemed to be the outward sign of inner conflict.

  "Why?" he asked. The woman stopped swaying and was creeping, cautiously, into the crate. Alex wanted her to be all the way inside before he darted her, both to prevent the rest from seeing her collapse and to avoid having to haul her about and perhaps hurt her.

  "Because they have full bio-monitor contact-buttons in them," she replied. "Skin adhesive ones. They're normally put inside ears, or on a shaved patch."

  After a bit more consultation with Kleinman Base and Doctor Kenny, darting the survivors had been given full approval—and since they were going to be out, a modification in the setup had been arranged for. There would be shredded paper bedding in the crates as well as food and water—and each victim would wear a contact-button glued to the spine between the shoulder blades with surgical adhesive. With judicious reprogramming, a minimal amount of medical information could come from that—heart rate, respiration, skin temperature. Tia had reprogrammed the buttons; now it was her brawn's turn to live up to his title.

  "I sure never thought my marksmanship would ever be an asset," he said absently. The woman had only a foot or so to go. . . .

  "I never thought I was going to be packing my hold with canned archeologists." The packing crates would fit—but only if they were stacked two deep. Alex had already set up the site machine shop servos to drill air holes in all of the crates, and there would be an unbreakable bio-luminescent lightstick in each. They were rated for a week of use. Hopefully that much light would be enough to keep their captives from panicking.

  "That's a good girl," Alex crooned to the reluctant Zombie. "Good girl. Smell the nice food? It's really good food. You're hungry, aren't you?" The woman took the last few steps in a rush and fell on the dish of ration-cubes. Alex darted her in the same moment.

  The trank took effect within seconds, and she didn't even seem to realize that she'd been struck. She simply dropped over on her side, asleep.

  Alex left the needler up on the roof where he'd rigged a sniper-post with a tripod to hold the gun steady. He trotted down the access steps to the first floor and hurried to get out where he could be seen before someone else smelled the food and came after it. As he burst out into the dusty courtyard, a hint of movement at the edge of the camera-field told Tia there was another Zombie lurking out there.

  After many protests, she had begun calling the survivors "Zombies," too—it helped to think of them as something other than humans. She admitted to Doctor Kenny that without that distancing it was hard to keep working without strong feelings getting in the way of efficiency.

  "That's all right, Tia," he soothed on his next transmission. "Even I have to stop thinking of my patients as people and start thinking of them as 'cases' or 'case studies' sometimes. That's the nature of this business, and we'll both do what we have to in order to get as many of these people back alive as we can."

  She would have liked to ask him if he'd ever thought of her as a "case study," but she knew, in her heart of hearts, that he probably had. But then, look what he had done for her. . . .

  No, calling these poor people "Zombies" wasn't going to hurt them, and it would keep her concentrating on what to do for them, and not on them.

  Alex had been boxing Zombies all morning, and now he had it down to a system. Wheeling out of the warehouse, under the control of the AI, came a small parade of servos laden with the supplies that would keep the woman—hopefully—alive and healthy in her crate for the next five or six days. A bag of finely shredded paper, to make a thick nest on the bottom of the box. A whole bag of ration-cubes. A big squeeze-bottle of water. A tiny chemical toilet, on the off-chance she might remem
ber how to use it. The bio-luminescent lightstick. Inside of fifteen minutes, Alex had his set up. The big bottle of water was strapped to one wall, the straps glue-bonded in place, the bottle bonded to the straps. The toilet was bonded to the floor in the corner of the six foot by six foot crate. The bag of ration-cubes was opened at the top, and strapped and bonded into the opposite corner. Paper was laid in a soft bed over the entire floor, and the unconscious woman rolled onto it, with the contact-button glued to her back. Lastly, the bio-luminescent tube was activated and glue-bonded to the roof of the crate, the side brought up and fastened in place, and the crate was ready for the loader.

  That was Tia's job; she brought the servo-forklift in from the warehouse under her control rather than the AI's. Alex did not trust the AI to have the same fine control that Tia did. The lift bore the now-anonymous crate up her ramp, and she stored it with the rest, piled not two but three high and locked in place. Each crate was precisely eight inches from the ones next to it, to allow for proper ventilation on four sides. There were twelve crates in the hold now. They hoped to have twelve more before nightfall. If all went well.

  Thirty minutes for each capture. . . .

  They couldn't have done it if not for Tia's multitasking abilities and all the servos under her control. Right now, a set of servos were setting up crates all over the compound, near the hiding places of the Zombies. The Zombies seemed just as frightened of the servos as they were of Alex in his suit. By running the servos all over the compound, they managed to send every one of the Zombies into hiding. They ran servos around each hiding place until they were ready to move to that area for darting and capture. By now, the Zombies were getting hungry, which was all to the good, so far as Alex and Tia were concerned. One trap was being baited now—and Alex was on his way to the hidden sniper position above it. Meanwhile, the rest of the servos were patrolling the compound except in the area of that baited crate, keeping the Zombies pinned down.

  A second hair-raising moment had occurred at dawn, bringing Alex up out of his bed with a scream of his own. The Zombies had gathered to greet the rising sun with another chorus of howls, although this time they seemed more—well, not joyous, but certainly there was no fear in the Zombie faces.

  Once the first servo appeared, and frightened the Zombies into hiding again, the final key to their capture plan was in place.

  They would catch as many of the Zombies as possible during the daylight hours. Alex had marked their favorite hiding places last night, and by now those patrolling servos had those that were not occupied blocked off. More crates would be left very near those blocked-off hiding holes. Would they be attractive enough for more of the Zombies to hide in them? Alex thought so. Tia hoped he was right—for every Zombie cowering in a crate meant one more they could dart and pack up—one more they would not have to catch tomorrow.

  One less half-hour spent here. If they could keep up the pace—if the Zombies didn't get harder to catch.

  Alex kept up a running dialogue with her, and she sensed that he was as frightened and lonely as she was, but was determined not to show it. He revealed a lot, over the course of the day; she built up a mental picture of a young man who had been just different enough that while he was mildly popular—or at least, not unpopular—he had few close friends. The only one who he really spoke about was someone called Jon—the chess and games player he had mentioned before. He spent a lot of time with Jon—who had helped him with his lessons when he was younger, so Tia assumed that Jon must have been older than Alex.

  Older or not, Jon had been, and still was, a friend. There was no mistaking the warmth in Alex's voice when he talked about Jon; no mistaking the pleasure he felt when he talked about the message of congratulation Jon had sent when he graduated from the academy—

  Or the laughter he'd gotten from the set of "brawn jokes" Jon had sent when Tia picked Alex as her partner.

  Well, Doctor Kenny, Anna, and Lars were my friends—and still are. Sometimes age doesn't make much of a difference.

  "Hey, Alex?" she called. He was waiting for another of the timid Zombies to give in to hunger. The clock was running.

  "What?"

  "What do you call a brawn who can count past ten?"

  "I don't know," he said good-naturedly. "What?"

  "Barefoot."

  He made a rude noise, then sighted and pulled the trigger. One down, how many more to go?

  * * *

  They had fifty-two Zombies packed in the hold, and one casualty. One of the Zombies had not survived the darting; Alex had gone into acute depression over that death, and it had taken Tia more than an hour to talk him out of it. She didn't dare tell him then what those contact-buttons revealed; some of their passengers weren't thriving well. The heart rates were up, probably with fear, and she heard whimpering and wailing in the hold whenever there was no one else in it but the Zombies. The moment any of the servos or Alex entered the hold, the captives went utterly silent. Out of fear, Tia suspected.

  The last Zombie was in the hold; the hold was sealed, and Tia had brought the temperature up to skin-heat. The ventilators were at full-strength. Alex had just entered the main cabin.

  And he was reaching for his helmet-release.

  "Don't crack your suit," she snapped. How could she have forgotten to tell him? Had she? Or had she told him, and he had forgotten?

  "What?" he said—then—"Oh, decom it. I forgot."

  She restrained herself from saying what she wanted to. "Doctor Kenny said you have to stay in the suit. Remember? He thinks that the chance we might have missed something in decontamination is too much to discount. He doesn't want you to crack your suit until you're at the base. All right?"

  "What if something goes wrong for the Zombies?" he asked, quietly. "Tia, there isn't enough room in that hold for me to climb around in the suit."

  "We'll worry about that if it happens," she replied firmly. "Right now, the important thing is for you to get strapped down, because their best chance is to get to Base as quickly as possible, and I'm going to leave scorch-marks on the ozone layer getting there."

  He took the unsubtle hint and strapped himself in; Tia was better than her word, making a tail-standing takeoff and squirting out of the atmosphere with a blithe disregard for fuel consumption. The Zombies were going to have to deal with the constant acceleration to hyper as best they could—at least she knew that they were all sitting or lying down, because the crates simply weren't big enough for them to stand.

  She had been relaying symptoms—observed and recorded—back to Doctor Kenny and the med staff at Kleinman Base all along. She had known that they weren't going to get a lot of answers, but every bit of data was valuable, and getting it there ahead of the victims was a plus.

  But now that they were on the way, they were on their own, without the resources of the abandoned dig or the base they were en route to. The med staff might have answers—but they likely would not have the equipment to implement them.

  Alex couldn't move while she was accelerating—but once they made the jump to FTL, he unsnapped his restraints and headed for the stairs.

  "Where are you going?" she asked, nervously.

  "The hold. I'm in my suit—there's nothing down there that can get me through the suit."

  Tia listened to the moans and cries through her hold pickups; thought about the contact-buttons that showed fluttering hearts and unsteady breathing. She knew what would happen if he got down there.

  "You can't do anything for them in the crates," she said. "You know that."

  He turned toward her column. "What are you hiding from me?"

  "N-nothing," she said. But she didn't say it firmly enough.

  He turned around and flung himself back in his chair, hands speeding across the keyboard with agility caused by days of living in the suit. Within seconds he had called up every contact-button and had them displayed in rows across the screen.

  "Tia, what's going on down there?" he demanded. "They weren't like this
before we took off, were they?"

  "I think—" She hesitated. "Alex, I'm not a doctor!"

  "You've got a medical library. You've been talking to the doctors. What do you think?"

  "I think—they aren't taking hyper well. Some of the data the base sent me on brain-damaged simians suggested that some kinds of damage did something to the parts of the brain that make you compensate for—for things that you know should be there, but aren't. Where you can see a whole letter out of just parts of it—identify things from split-second glimpses. Kind of like maintaining a mental balance. Anyway, when that's out of commission—" She felt horribly helpless. "I think for them it's like being in Singularity."

  "For four days?" he shouted, hurting her sensors. "I'm going down there—"

  "And do what?" she snapped back. "What are you going to do for them? They're afraid of you in that suit!"

  "Then I'll—"

  "You do, and I'll gas the ship," she said instantly. "I mean that, Alex! You put one finger on a release and I'll gas the whole ship!"

  He sat back down, collapsing into his chair. "What can we do?" he said weakly. "There has to be something."

  "We've got some medical supplies," she pointed out. "A couple of them can be adapted to add to the air supply down there. Help me, Alex. Help me find something we can do for them. Without you cracking your suit."

  "I'll try," he said, unhappily. But his fingers were already on the keyboard, typing in commands to the med library, and not sneaking towards his suit-releases. She blanked for a microsecond with relief—

  Then went to work.

  * * *

  Three more times there were signs of crisis in the hold. Three more times she had to threaten him to keep him from diving in and trying to save one of the Zombies by risking his own life. They lost one more, to a combination of anti-viral agent and watered-down sleepygas that they hoped would act as a tranquilizer rather than an anesthetic. Zombie number twenty-seven might have been allergic to one or the other, although there was no such indication in his med records; his contact-button gave all the symptoms of allergic shock before he died.