"Sometimes. Not when I'm sent hauling my behind up the stairs with my tail on fire and a directive from CS ordering me to report back to my ship immediately." He shrugged, completely unrepentant. "I wouldn't even have changed my clothes if that officious b- "
"Alex," she warned. "I'm recording, I have to. Regulations." Ever since the debacle involving the Nyota Five, all central cabin functions were recorded, whenever there was a softperson, even if only a brawn, present. That was regulation even on AI drones. The regs had been written for AI drones, in fact; and CS administration had decided that there was no reason to rewrite them for brainships, and every reason why they shouldn't. This way no one could claim 'discrimination', or worse, 'entrapment'.
"If that officious bully hadn't insisted I change to uniform before lifting." He shook his head. "As if wearing a uniform was going to make any difference in how well you handled the lift. Which was, as always, excellent."
"Thank you." She debated chiding him on his untidy nature and decided against it. It hadn't made any difference before, it probably wouldn't now. She just had the servos pick up the tunic and trousers, wincing at the ultra-neon purple that was currently in vogue, and deposited them in the laundry receptacle.
And I'll probably have to put them away when they're clean, too. No wonder they wanted him to change. Hmm. Wonder if I dare 'lose' them? Or have a dreadful accident that dyes them a nice sober plum?
That was a thought to tuck away for later. "Getting back to the dinosaur, com equipment breaks, and even a Class Three dig can end up with old equipment. If the only fellow on the dig qualified to fix it happens to be laid up with broken bones, in case you hadn't noticed, archeologists fall down shafts and off cliffs a lot, or double-pneumonia."
"Good point." He finished his 'housekeeping chores' with a flourish and settled back in his chair. "Say, Tia, they're all professorial types. Do they ever just get so excited they forget to transmit?"
"Brace yourself for FTL." The transition to FTL was nowhere near as distressing to softpersons as the dive into a Singularity, but it required some warning. Alex gripped the arms of the seat, and closed his eyes, as she made the jump into hyperspace.
She never experienced more than a brief shiver, like ducking into a freezing-cold shower, but Alex always looked a little green during transition. Fortunately, he had no trouble in hyper itself.
And if I can ever afford a Singularity Drive, his records say he takes those transitions pretty well.
Well, right now, that was little more than a dream. She picked up the conversation where it had left off. "That has happened on Class One digs and even Class Two, but usually somebody realizes the report hasn't been made after a while when you're dealing with a big dig. Besides, logging reports constitutes publication, and grad students need all the publication they can get. Still, if they just uncovered the equivalent of Tutankhamen's tomb, they might all be so excited, and busy documenting finds and putting them into safe storage, that they've forgotten the rest of the universe exists."
He swallowed hard, controlling his nausea. It generally seemed to take his stomach a couple of minutes to settle down. Maybe the reason it doesn't hit me is because there's no sensory nerves to my stomach anymore.
But that only brought back unpleasant memories; she ruthlessly shunted the thought aside.
"So." he said finally, as his color began to return. "Tell me why you aren't in a panic because they haven't answered."
"Artifact thieves would probably have been spotted, there aren't any natives to revolt, and disease usually takes long enough to set in that somebody would have called for help," she said. "And that's why CS wasn't particularly worried, and why they kept countermanding the Institute's orders. But either this expedition has been out of touch for so long that even they think there's something wrong, or they've got some information they didn't give us. So we're going in."
"And we find out when we get there," Alex finished; and there wasn't a trace of a smile anywhere on his face.
Tia brought them out of hyper with a deft touch that rattled Alex's insides as little as possible. Once in orbit, she sent down a signal that should activate the team's transmitter if there was anything there to activate. As she had told Alex several days ago, com systems broke. She was fully expecting to get no echo back.
Instead, -
You are linked to Excavation Team Que-Zee-Five-Five-Seven. The beacon's automatic response came instantly, in electronic mode. Then came the open carrier wave.
"Alex, I think we have a problem," she said, carefully.
"Echo?" He tensed.
"Full echo." She sent the recognition signal that would turn on landing assistance beacons and alert the AI that there was someone Upstairs, the AI was supposed to open the voice-channel in the absence of humans capable of handling the com. The AI came online immediately, transmitting a ready to receive instructions signal.
"Worse, they've got full com. I just got the AI go-signal."
She blipped a compressed several megabytes of instructions to give her control of all external and internal recording devices, override any programs installed since the base was established, and give her control of all sensory devices still working.
"Get the AI to give me some pictures," he said, all business. "If it can."
"Coming up, ah, external cam three, this is right outside the mess hall and, oh, shells and back!"
"I'll second that," Alex replied, just as grimly.
The camera showed them, somewhat fuzzily, a scene that was anything but a pretty sight.
There were bodies lying in plain view of the camera; from the lack of movement they could not be live bodies. They seemed to be lying where they fell, and there was no sign of violence on them. Tia switched to the next camera the AI offered; a view inside the mess hall. Here, if anything, things were worse. Equipment and furniture lay toppled. More bodies were strewn about the room.
A chill that had nothing to do with the temperature in her shell held her in thrall. Fear, horror, helplessness. Her own private nightmares.
Tia exerted control over her internal chemistry with an effort; told herself that this could not be the disease that had struck her. These people were taken down right where they stood or sat.
She started to switch to another view, when Alex leaned forward suddenly.
"Tia, wait a minute."
Obediently, she held the screen, sharpening the focus as well as the equipment, the four-second lag to orbit, and atmospheric interference would allow. She couldn't look at it herself.
"There's no food," he said, finally. "Look, there's plates and things all over the place, but there's not a scrap of food anywhere."
"Scavengers?" she suggested. "Or whatever, whatever killed them? But there are no signs of an invasion, an attack from, outside."
He shook his head. "I don't know. Let's try another camera."
This one was outside the supply building and this was where they found their first survivors.
If that's what you can call them. Tia absorbed the incoming signal, too horrified to turn her attention away. There was a trio of folk within camera range: one adolescent, one young man, and one older woman. They paid no attention to each other, nor to the bodies at their feet, nor to their surroundings. The adolescent sat in the dirt of the compound, stared at a piece of brightly colored scrap paper in front of him, and rocked, back and forth. There was no sound pickup on these cameras, so there was no indication that he was doing anything other than rocking in silence, but Tia had the strange impression that he was humming tunelessly.
The young man stood two feet from a fence and shifted his weight back and forth from foot to foot, swaying, as if he wanted to get past the fence and had no idea how. And the older woman paced in an endless circle.
All three of them were filthy, dressed in clothes that were dirt-caked and covered with stains. Their faces were dirt-streaked, eyes vacant; their hair straggled into their eyes in ratty tangles. Tia was just grateful that th
e cameras were not equipped to transmit odor.
"Tia, get me another camera, please," Alex whispered, after a long moment.
Camera after camera showed the same view; either of bodies lying in the dust, or of bodies and a few survivors, aimlessly wandering. Only one showed anyone doing anything different; one young woman had found an emergency ration pouch and torn it open. She was single-mindedly stuffing the ration-cubes into her mouth with both hands, like...
"Like an animal," Alex supplied in a whisper. "She's eating like an animal."
Tia forced herself to be dispassionate. "Not like an animal," she corrected. "At least, not a healthy one." She analyzed the view as if she were dealing with an alien species. "No, she acts like an animal that's been brain-damaged, or maybe a drug addict that's been on something so long there isn't much left of his higher functions."
This wasn't 'her' disease. It was something else. Deadly, but not what had struck her down. What she felt was not exactly relief, but she was able to detach herself from the situation, to distance herself a little.
You knew, sooner or later, you'd see a plague. This one is a horror, but you knew this would happen.
"Zombies," Alex whispered, as another of the survivors plodded past without so much as a glance at the woman eating, who had given up eating with her hands and had shoved her face right down into the torn-open ration pouch.
"You've seen too many bad holos," she replied absently, sending the AI a high-speed string of instructions. She had to find out when this happened, and how long these people had been like this.
It was too bad that the cameras weren't set to record, because that would have told her a lot. How quickly the disease, for a plague of some kind would have had an incubation time, had set in, and what the initial symptoms were. Instead, all she had to go on were the dig's records, and when they had stopped making them.
"Alex, the last recorded entry into the AI's database was at about oh-two-hundred, local time, a week and a half ago," she said. "It was one of the graduate students logging in pottery shards. Then, nothing. No record of illness, nothing in the med records, no one even using a voice-activator to ask the AI for help. The mess hall computer programmed the synthesizer to produce food for a few meals, then something broke the synthesizer."
"One of them," Alex hazarded. "Probably."
She looked for anything else in the database and found nothing. "That's about all there is. The AI has been keeping things going, but there's been no interaction with it. So forget what I said about diseases taking several days to set in. It looks like this one infected and affected everyone on the base between, oh, some time during the night, and dawn." If she'd had a head, she would have shaken it. "I can't imagine how something like that could happen to everyone at the same time without someone at least blurting a few words to a voice pickup!"
"Unless... Tia, what if they had to be asleep? I mean, there's things that happen during sleep, neuro transmitters that initiate dream-sleep." Alex looked up from the screen, with lines of strain around his eyes. "If they had to be asleep to catch this thing."
"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 die 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 Al. "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 num
ber 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.
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