by Ian Douglas
Throughout the coming century, special care had been taken both to avoid contaminating alien environments, and to avoid accidentally bringing back pathogens. By the early to mid twenty-first century, though, exobiologists had developed the concept of the Trans-Biospheric Barrier, or TBB. Microorganisms, it turned out, were highly specialized critters. Bacteria and viruses both had evolved over billions of years to infect certain specific life forms. Usually, a bug that made one species sick could not make the jump to another species. Usually . . .
Within a given biosphere—on Earth, for instance—things were not so cut and dried. Some pathogens could mutate and jump species—human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, was a case in point—but were usually extremely specific in their preferred hosts. So it was possible.
However, cross-species infection became almost impossible when it came to life forms evolved on entirely different planets. Organisms that might mutate enough to cross species on the same world were blocked when the hosts were completely alien life forms, often with completely different types of proteins, sugars, and lipids.
All that meant that the chances humans might be infected by microbes from an alien biome dropped to virtually nil.
Medical AIs and human doctors kept watch against the possibility, of course, but in three centuries of spaceflight and encounters with dozens of alien species, alien bacteria or viruses capable of infecting humans had never been found. A human had a much better chance of catching a cold from a microbe found beneath the bark of a sequoia tree than of getting sick from anything encountered Out There.
“The chances of encountering a genuinely alien microbial life form that can infect humans are literally on the order of trillions to one,” the AI told him as if reading his mind. “I would sooner suspect a human microbe that has mutated in an alien environment. However, I can find no genetic correlations between this organism and the terrestrial biome. Similarities, yes . . . but no direct genetic correlations. In fact, the mycoplasmid in question does not seem to be based on DNA.”
He ignored what that might mean for a second. “Eight other members of the crew?”
“Here is the list, Admiral.”
The names, ranks, and duty stations of six men and two women scrolled through an open window in Gray’s mind. “Have you found any similarities here?”
“Yes. All of them had contact with members of the Deep Time One crew. Some invited members of that crew back to America during our layover at that station, while others requested liberty on board DT-1. It is likely that physical intimacy occurred in all cases.”
Gray felt an inward jolt at that. “Good God! An STD?”
“A distinct possibility, Admiral.”
A possibility . . . and a damned unpleasant one. While standard operational protocols were in place against casually inviting aliens on board, there’d been no prohibition against inviting humans over from the station. Each visitor would have been processed, of course, and given a standard medical scan at America’s quarterdeck. If any human passing through that checkpoint had been infected with something strange, something alien, the scan should have picked it up.
“Okay, so what you’re saying,” Gray ventured, “is that members of the DT-1 crew have already been infected. We showed up, and those of us who had physical encounters with them caught it, whatever it is.” He had another thought. “How many members of America’s crew went on board the Deep Time station? A damned sight more than seven . . .”
“According to the records, over one hundred personnel from America crossed over to DT-1. Most of them were either engaged in offloading supplies for the station, or installing some updated electronics. Five appear to have picked up the infection there . . . all while on liberty. Three others, including yourself, Admiral, brought guests from the station on board this vessel.”
He noted the names on the list: Chief Roger Drummond, from America’s electronics department, and Commander Dean Mallory, the ship’s tactical officer. Chief Drummond, according to the visitor’s log, had brought back a civilian electronicist named Paul Bremerton, ostensibly to look at one part of America’s electronics suite. Mallory had invited a Marine officer from DT-1’s security detail, Major Sara Taylor.
And, of course, Gray had invited Harriet McKennon.
Had all of the people on the medicAI’s list had sexual contact with personnel from Deep Time? That was an important question, and one they would need to investigate. A microorganism that spread through touch or by way of airborne particles would be a lot harder to stop than one that only spread through sexual activity.
“You’ll need to question them about whether they had sex with DT-1 people,” Gray said.
“I know. I began following the course of the disease as soon as the first personnel reported their symptoms. I have already begun questioning the others, seeking to build a comprehensive medical history. Two have not yet gotten back to me, but I should have at least a preliminary report for you in a few hours.”
“We need answers right away,” Gray warned. “They won’t let us dock at SupraQuito if we report an unknown disease.”
“Correct.”
Another thought arose. “The other ships of the battlefleet,” he said. “Some of them had liberty parties ashore at Deep Time as well.”
“Indeed. Three ships: Bunker Hill, Deutschland, and Burke, all of which are transitting to Sol with us. There are also the Leland and the Verdun, and the heavy monitor Ceres, which remained at DT-1. Altogether, I estimate a further forty-two hundred personnel are at risk besides our own crew. Of course, we won’t know until emergence if any were infected.”
Starships under Alcubierre Drive were for all intents and purposes isolated within their own tight little black-hole universe while surfing their gravitic spacetime waves at FTL velocities. They couldn’t transmit and they couldn’t receive until they were back in normal space.
“So . . . how bad do you think it is?”
“It’s too early to say. However . . . at least so far, four weeks after the probable initial exposure, symptoms appear to have been confined to the original personnel. That argues for low virulence and a low rate of contagion. Symptoms appear no worse than a mild case of flu.”
“Can you treat it?”
“Once I isolate the organism, it should be relatively simple to program a nanobiotic swarm to eliminate the infection. This does not appear to be a serious problem, and I would estimate that we can have the situation fully resolved by the time we return to Earth.”
Gray nodded. “Keep me posted.”
The USNA Navy was fairly relaxed when it came to sex. Centuries ago, the entire topic had been taboo; even in the wet-navy days of the late twentieth century, the subject had been avoided . . . or alluded to with juvenile snickers and salacious grins. Even in NASA, where the unspoken law of public relations had been “better to be dead than to look bad,” the possibility of astronauts experimenting with sex in space was pointedly ignored . . . and married astronaut couples were never sent into space on the same mission. Even that much official disapproval had vanished with the first Mars missions, though, when married couples had been assigned to the first crews in the hope of maintaining a psychological balance over the months required for interplanetary flight in those days.
Nowadays, the assumption was that naval personnel were human, and that they would behave like humans when they were locked up together in mixed crews for long periods of time and under frequently stressful conditions. A second assumption went hand in hand with the first: naval personnel would act responsibly, and not allow human nature to get in the way of the mission.
And for the most part, those assumptions held out reasonably well.
There were some naval personnel who tried to live up to the mystique of the old wet navies, though . . . with wild liberties ashore whenever the vessel was in port, and attempts to find private time for coupling on board ship during long deployments. Fighter pilots, especially, (the male ones at least), seemed to be out to p
rove something in terms of their sexual prowess, as though a man’s ability to maneuver a fighter was somehow enhanced by massive jolts of testosterone. That much had been a part of the breed since the days of canvas-winged biplanes.
Every now and then a directive would come down from on high warning personnel against fraternization . . . or against personal behavior that might degrade mission effectiveness. Navy HQ and the Hexagon frowned on more senior personnel having relationships with those of lower ranks simply because of the power imbalance and the potential for serious abuse. For the most part, though, the Navy command hierarchy simply didn’t care. The two issues that had crippled the effectiveness of mixed-gender combat forces in the past—sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancies—were no longer problems. Medical nanobot swarms could be programmed to eliminate STD agents almost at the moment of infection, and effective contraceptives for both sexes had long since made pregnancy a matter of choice, not accident. So long as sex within military units was kept low key and didn’t jeopardize good order and discipline, people could pretty much do as they pleased.
But something like this—an infectious disease that appeared to have an extraterrestrial origin and was spread by casual sex—that would almost certainly change everything. Military rules and regs might well snap back to the bad old days, when acting human was treated as a crime. Morale would suffer, discipline would suffer, and naval crews might again find themselves subjected to segregation and to intrusive monitoring of their every public and private moment. Hell, the ship AIs already monitored literally everything that happened on board Navy vessels. Privacy was not an issue because they simply kept the information to themselves.
It wouldn’t be hard at all to eliminate privacy completely.
But then, it would be worse—infinitely worse—if America’s crew returned an extraterrestrial disease to Earth, and caused a wholesale biological catastrophe.
Gray was very much aware of the irony of the situation—a former Prim, a monogie for God’s sake, conflicted—no, angry about the possibility that something so basic as casual, non-monogamous sex might become a thing of the past thanks to this incident.
Maybe, he thought, he’d managed to assimilate into North American culture more completely than he’d realized.
New White House
Washington, D.C.
United States of North America
1705 hours, EST
“Our assets, Mr. President,” Lawrence Vandenberg said, “are stretched entirely too thin. There’s no way we can cover everything that needs to be covered.”
President Koenig scowled at his secretary of defense, then shook his head. “Not good enough, Larry. I know you’ve got a juggling act going, but we need to stay on top of all of this.”
Koenig was closeted with a number of his closest advisors in a subbasement briefing room beneath the New White House. A holographic map floated in the air above the conference table, showing stars and the bright green icons marking ships, task forces, and battlegroups. The map showed the nearest star systems—those out to within a couple of hundred light years from Sol, though a window set off toward the general direction of the galactic center showed the teeming stellar swarm of Omega Centauri. Another peripheral window a third of the way around the table from the first showed the mysterious orange pinpoint known as Tabby’s Star, which lay more than 1400 light years distant in the direction of the constellation Cygnus.
Among all of those stars gleaming above the table, only a handful had planets that were enough like Earth to allow humans to live there without extensive life support: Kore, Cerridwen, Osiris, New Earth, Chiron . . . a total of eighteen worlds where humans could walk unprotected in the open. Perhaps ten times that many worlds were sealed within airtight habitation modules, like those within Luna or on Mars, or—like the Pan-European base at Heimdall—were orbital facilities. Humankind was now an interstellar species . . . but its hold on the cosmos still was tenuous and thin. More than once, the various star-faring races of the far-flung Sh’daar Collective had taken some of those worlds and threatened to extinguish the human presence within its minute speck of the galactic disk.
Once, Koenig thought, looking down into the starglow, human philosophers arguing for reaching out into the cosmos had stressed the need to spread Humankind across a number of star systems in order to ensure the species’ long-term survival. It was foolish, they’d argued, for humans to put all of their resources, assets, and hopes in a single planetary basket.
Establishing off-world colonies, however, had not markedly improved Humankind’s position. The species would survive a cataclysm powerful enough to eliminate the homeworld’s biome . . . but they were learning that there were serious threats out there to all of humanity.
Hell, even the Sh’daar were terrified of one of those threats. . . .
“The war hurt us damned badly, Mr. President,” Vandenberg reminded him. “Very badly. With the loss of the Intrepid out at 40 Eridani, we’re down to just seven carrier battlegroups, and the Saratoga, the Independence, and the Constellation all are still undergoing repairs or refits in SupraQuito spacedock.”
“True,” Eva Morgottini pointed out. She was the current SecCol—the secretary of colonial development. “But on the other hand, Constitution’s repairs have been completed, Declaration is wrapping up her space trials, and the Lexington is finally ready to launch, so that’s something, at least.”
Each battlegroup showed up on the map as a bright green icon, the Constitution and the Lexington at Sol—at SupraQuito, actually—and the Declaration next door at Chiron, the colony at Alpha Centauri.
“And America is due back within a week or so,” Admiral Armitage added. America’s battlegroup was not on the map, however. If they had been on sched, they should at least have returned to Tprime by then, but they were still somewhere between Sol and the TRGA at Texaghu Resch, their exact position unknown.
Of course, all that hinged on whether they’d survived their visit to the remote past, and that remained to be seen. Koenig hoped they would arrive at Earth within the next few days, but he wouldn’t know when that would be until they actually emerged from Alcubierre metaspace somewhere in the outer reaches of the Sol System.
“So . . . we need a battlegroup to cover Kapteyn’s Star,” Koenig said, trying to pull the disparate bits of data together, “and another one for this new mission out to Tabby’s Star. And we need to build a task force to join the Sh’daar if they send ships. Operation Omega . . .”
That was the code name of the proposed probe of whatever the hell was out there at the core of Omega Centauri. The mission planners at Mars HQ had been assuming America would be a part of that, if only because America’s battlegroup was already—presumably—working with the Sh’daar.
“Sounds straightforward enough,” the director of the National Security Council, Phillip Caldwell, said. “We have four available battlegroups and three missions, . . .”
“But we also desperately need a fleet—preferably a star-carrier battlegroup—to provide a deep-recon screen out here, in the outer Sol System, Mr. President,” Armitage said, “and it would be nice to have another to cover near-Earth space, just in case the Confederation decides to take advantage of things.”
Koenig gave the head of the USNA Joint Chiefs of Staff a hard look. “Do we have any reason to suppose that they will, Gene? Phil?”
“The armistice is holding, Mr. President,” Caldwell told him. “Things should stay quiet on that front, at least.”
“I concur,” Dr. Horace Lee added. He was a special advisor to the president, an expert in recombinant memetics, and part of the team that had finally brought the USNA’s war with the Earth Confederation to a close. “The Pan-Europeans are wholeheartedly sick of war. Thanks to our memetic attack on the Geneva Net, they share a tremendous collective guilt for what happened at Columbus. There’s always a potential for action by rogue groups, but for the moment, at least, the armistice is solid.”
“I wish I
felt your optimism, Dr. Lee,” Armitage said.
“The biggest threat from the Confederation,” Lee said, “is that they’re so sick of war that they’re willing to give away the farm when it comes to working with the Sh’daar. We might find that we’ve won the civil war with the Confederation . . . and surrendered to the Sh’daar.”
“We won’t know about that until we hear from the America battlegroup,” Koenig said. “So we won’t buy trouble . . . and we’ll trust what Konstantin is telling us. The Russians, the Chinese, and the North Indians all are still pretty solidly with us. Pamela?”
“I agree, Mr. President,” Pamela Sharpe, the secretary of state, replied.
“Okay,” Koenig said, “carrier battlegroups. What do we need . . . and where?” He glanced at Armitage. “Not what would be nice. What do we need?”
“At least two carrier groups for Operation Omega,” Vandenberg said. “Three would be better. That’s going to be a big one. We were planning on America—because she’s been working with the Sh’daar back in Tee-sub-minus, of course—plus the Declaration and the Constitution.” He saw Koenig’s expression and held up one hand. “I know, sir, I know. Just what’s needed.”
“The Pan-Europeans have been screaming for help out at Kapteyn’s Star,” Armitage said. “Heimdall—the orbital station out there, anyway—has been knocked out by something, almost certainly the Rosette Aliens. Putting a carrier group there is absolutely essential, partly because helping the Europeans will strengthen our new alliance with them, but mostly because Heimdall is twelve light years from Earth and that puts the Rosetters smack in our backyard, astronomically speaking.”