Ship Who Searched

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Or if the first symptom was sleep . . .” She couldn’t help herself; she wanted to shiver with fear. “Alex, I have to set down there. You can’t do anything for those people from up here.”

  “No argument.” He strapped himself in. “Okay, lady—get us down as fast as you can. There’s one thing I have to do, quick, before we lose any more.”

  She broke orbit with a sudden acceleration that threw him into the back of his seat; he didn’t bat an eye. His voice got a little more strained, but that was all.

  “I’ll have to put on a pressure-suit and get into the supplies; put out food and pans of water. They’re starving and dehydrated. Spirits of space only know what they’ve been eating and drinking all this time—could be a lot of them died of dysentery, or from eating or drinking something that wasn’t food.” He was thinking out loud; waiting for Tia to put in her own thoughts, or warn him if he was planning to do something really stupid. “No matter what else we do, I have to do that.”

  “Open up emergency ration bags and leave pans of the cubes all over the compound,” she suggested, as her outer skin heated up to a glowing red as she hit the upper atmosphere. “Do the same with the water. Like you were feeding animals.”

  “I am feeding animals,” he said, and his voice and face were bleak. “I have to keep telling myself that. Or I’ll do something really, really stupid. You get a line established to Kleinman Base, ASAP.”

  “Already in the works.” A hyperwave comlink that far wasn’t the easiest thing to establish and hold—

  But that was why she was a brainship, not an AI drone.

  “Hang on,” she said, as she hit the first of the turbulence. “It’s going to be a bumpy burn down!”

  The camera and external mike on Alex’s helmet gave her a much clearer view of the survivors than Tia really wanted. Of the complement of two hundred at this base, no more than fifty survived, most of them between the ages of fifteen and thirty.

  They avoided Alex entirely, hiding whenever they saw him—but they came out to huddle around the pans of food and water he put out, stuffing food into their faces with both hands. Alex had gotten three of the bodies he’d found in their beds into the med-center, and the diagnosis was the same in all three cases; complete systemic collapse, which might have been stroke. The rest—the ones that had not simply dropped in their tracks—had died of dysentery and dehydration. Of the casualties, it looked as if half of the dead had keeled over with this collapse, all of them the oldest members of the team.

  After the third, Alex called a halt to it; instead he loaded the bodies into the base freezer. Someone else would have to come get them and deal with them. Tia had recorded his efforts, but could not bring herself to actually watch the incoming video.

  He completed his grisly work and returned to caring for the living. “Tia, as near as I can guess, this thing hits people in one of two ways. Either you get a stroke or something and die, or you turn into—that.” She saw whatever he was looking at by virtue of the fact that the helmet-camera was mounted right over his forehead. And “that” was something that had once been a human boy, scrambling away out of sight.

  “That seems like a good enough assumption for now,” she agreed. “Can you tell what happened with the food situation? Are they so—far gone that they can’t remember how to get into basic supplies?”

  “That’s about it,” he agreed, wearily. “Believe it or not, they can’t even remember how to pop ration packs—they seem to have a vague memory of where the food was stored, but they never even tried to open the door to the supply warehouse.” He trudged across the compound to one of the pans he had set out. It was already empty, without even crumbs. He poured ration-cubes into it from a bag he carried under his arm. She caught furtive movement at the edge of the camera-view; presumably the survivors were waiting for him to go away so that they could empty the pan again. “When they found the emergency pouches they tore them open, like that woman we watched. But a lot of times, they don’t even seem to realize that the pouch has food in it.”

  “There’s two kinds of victims; the first lot, who got hit and died in their sleep or on the way to breakfast,” he continued, making his way to the next pan. “Then the rest of them died of dehydration and dysentery because they were eating half-rotten food.”

  “Those would go hand-in-hand, here,” she replied. “With nothing to stop the liquid loss through dysentery, dehydration comes on pretty quickly.”

  “That’s what I figured.” He paused to fill another pan. “There’d be more of them dead, of exposure and hypothermia, except that the temperature doesn’t drop below twenty Celsius at night, or get above thirty in the daytime. Shirtsleeve weather. Tia—see when this balmy weather pattern started, would you?”

  “Right.” He must have had an idea—and it didn’t take her more than a moment to interrogate the AI. “About a week before the last contact. Does that sound as suspicious to you as it does to me?”

  “Yeah. Maybe something hatched.” Alex scanned the area for her, and she noted that there were a fair number of insects in the air.

  But native insects wouldn’t bite humans—or would they? “Or sprouted—this could be a violent allergic reaction, or some other kind of interaction with a mold spore or pollen.” Farfetched, but not entirely impossible.

  “But why wouldn’t the Class One team have uncovered it?” he countered, filling another pan with ration-cubes. “Kibble,” the brawns called it. The basic foodstuff of the Central System worlds; the monotonous ration-bars handed out by the PTA to client-planets cut up into bite-sized pieces. Tia had never eaten it; her parents had always insisted on real meals, but she had been told that while it looked, smelled, and tasted reasonable, its very sameness would drive you over the edge if you had to eat it for very long. But every base had emergency pouches of the stuff cached all over, and huge bags stockpiled in the warehouse, in case something happened to the food-synthesizers.

  Those pouches must have been what kept the survivors going—until they ran out of pouches that were easy to find.

  The dig records were, fortunately, quite clear. “Got the answer to your question—Class One dig was here for winter, only—they found what they needed to upgrade to Class Three within a couple of days of digging. They really hit a big find in the first test trench, and the Institute pushed the upgrade through to take advantage of the good weather coming.”

  “And initial Survey teams don’t live here, they live on their ships.” Alex had a little more life in his voice.

  “They were only here in the fall,” she said. “There’s never been a human here during spring and summer.”

  “Tia, you put that together with an onset of this thing after dark, and what do you get?”

  “An insect vector?” she hazarded. “Nocturnal? I must admit that the pattern for venomous and biting insects is to appear after sunset.”

  “Sounds right to me. As soon as I get done filling the pans again, I’m going to go grab some bedding from one of the victims’ beds, seal it in a crate, and freeze it. Maybe it’s something like a flea. Can you see if there’s anything in the AI med records about a rash of insect bites?”

  “Can do,” she responded, glad to finally have something, anything, concrete to do.

  The sun was near the horizon when Alex finished boxing his selection of bedding and sealing it in a freezer container. He came back out again after loading the container into one of Tia’s empty holds. She saw to the sealing of the hold, while he went back out to try and catch one of the Zombies—a name he had tagged the survivors with over her protests.

  She finally established the comlink while he was still out in the compound, fruitlessly chasing one after another of the survivors and getting nowhere. He was weighted down with his pressure-suit; they were weighted down by nothing at all and had the impetus of fear. He seemed to terrify them, and they did not connect the arrival of food in the pans with him, for some reason.

  “They act like I’m some
kind of monster,” he panted, leaning over to brace himself on his knees while he caught his breath. “Since they don’t have that reaction to each other, it has to be this suit that they’re afraid of. Maybe I should—”

  “Stay in the suit,” she said, fiercely. “You make one move to take that suit off, and I’ll sleepygas you!”

  “Oh, Tia—” he protested.

  “I’m not joking.” She continued her conversation with the base brain in rapid, highly compressed databursts with horribly long pauses for the information to transmit across hyperspace. “You stay in that suit! We don’t know what caused all this—”

  Her tirade was interrupted by a dreadful howling and the external camera bounced as Alex moved violently. At first she thought that something awful had happened to Alex—but then she realized that the sound came from his external suit-mike, and that the movement of the camera had been caused by his own violent start of surprise.

  “What the—” he blurted, then recovered. “Hang on, Tia. I need to see what this is, but it doesn’t sound like an attack or anything.”

  “Be careful,” she urged fearfully. “Please—”

  But he showed no signs of foolhardy bravery; in fact, as the howling continued under the scarlet light of the descending sun, he sprinted from one bit of cover to another like a seasoned guerrilla-fighter.

  “Fifty meters,” Tia warned, taking her measurement from the strength of the howls. “They have to be on the other side of this building.”

  “Thanks.” He literally crept on all fours to the edge of the building and peeked around the corner.

  Tia saw exactly what he did, so she understood his sharp intake of breath.

  She couldn’t count them, for they milled about too much, but she had the impression that every survivor in the compound had crowded into the corner of the fence nearest the sunset. Those right at the fence clung to it as they howled their despair to the sun; the rest clung to the backs of those in front of them and did the same.

  Their faces were contorted with the first emotion Tia had seen them display.

  Fear.

  “They’re scared, Tia,” Alex whispered, his voice thick with emotions that Tia couldn’t decipher. “They’re afraid. I think they’re afraid that the sun isn’t going to come back.”

  That might have been the case—but Tia couldn’t help but wonder if their fear was due to something else entirely. Could they have a dim memory that something terrible had happened to them in the hours of darkness, something that took away their friends and changed their lives into a living hell? Was that why they howled and sobbed with fear?

  When the last of the light had gone, they fell suddenly silent—then, like scurrying insects, they dropped to all fours and scuttled away, into whatever each, in the darkness of his or her mind, deemed to be shelter. In a moment, they were gone. All of them.

  There was a strangled sob from Alex. And Tia shook within her shell, racked by too many emotions to effectively sort out.

  “You have two problems.”

  Tia knew the name to put to the feeling she got when her next transmission from the base was not from some anonymous CS doctor but from Doctor Kenny.

  Relief. Real, honest, relief.

  It flooded her, making her relax, clearing her mind. Although she could not speak directly with him, if there was anyone who could help them pull this off, it would be Doctor Kenny. She settled all of her concentration on the incoming transmission.

  “You’ll have to catch the survivors and keep them alive—and you’ll have to keep them from contaminating your brawn. After that, we can deal with symptoms and the rest.”

  All right, that made sense.

  “We went at this analyzing your subjects’ behavior. You were right in saying that they act in a very similar fashion to brain-damaged simians.”

  This was an audio-only transmission; the video portion of the signal was being used to carry a wealth of technical data. Tia wished she could see Doctor Kenny’s face—but she heard the warmth and encouragement in his voice with no problem.

  “We’ve compiled all the data available on any experiments where the subjects’ behavior matched your survivors,” Doctor Kenny continued. “Scan it and see if anything is relevant. Tia, I can’t stress this enough—no matter what you think caused this disease, don’t let Alex get out of that suit. I can’t possibly say this too many times. Now that he’s gone out there, he’s got a contaminated surface. I want you to ask him to stay in the suit, sleep in the suit, eat through the suit-ports, use the suit-facilities. I would prefer that he stayed out in the compound or in your airlock even to sleep—every time he goes in and out of the suit, in and out of your lock, we have a chance for decontamination to fail. I know you understand me.”

  Only too well, she thought, grimly, remembering all that time in isolation.

  “Now, we’ve come up with a general plan for you,” Doctor Kenny continued. “We don’t think that you’ll be able to catch the survivors, given the way they’re avoiding Alex. So you’re going to have to trap them. My experts think you’ll be able to rig drop-traps for them, using packing crates with field generators across the front and rations for bait. The technical specs are on the video-track, but I think you have the general idea. The big thing will be not to frighten the rest each time you trap one.”

  Doctor Kenny’s voice echoed hollowly in the empty cabin; she damped the sound so that it didn’t sound so lonely.

  “We want one, two at most, per crate. We’re afraid that, bunched together, they might hurt each other, fight over food—they’re damaged, and we just don’t know how aggressive they might get. That’s why we want you to pack them in the hold in the crates. Once you get them trapped, we want you to put enough food and water in each crate to last the four days to base—and Tia, at that point, leave them there. Don’t do anything with them. Leave them alone. I trust you to exercise your good sense and not give in to any temptation to intervene in their condition.”

  Doctor Kenny sighed, gustily. “We bandied around the idea of tranking them—but they have to eat and drink; four days knocked out might kill them. You don’t have the facilities to cold-sleep fifty people. So—box them, hope the box matches their ideas of a good place to hide, leave them with food and water and shove them in the hold. That’s it for now, Tia. Transmit everything you have, and we’ll have answers for you as soon as we’re able. These double-bounce comlinks aren’t as fast as we’d like, but they beat the alternative. Our thoughts are with you.”

  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.”