by S MacDonald
‘Yes, I know,’ Alex had discussed this human trait with her many times, and grinned, ‘Though imagining what might happen and feeling anxiety about that is a functional survival trait that keeps us out of danger.’
‘Tuh!’ said Silvie, greatly on her dignity and pointing a finger at him. ‘You’re not going to talk about the shark thing again, are you?’
‘Me?’ Said Alex, all innocence. ‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’ As this too got a burst of laughter and Silvie shook her head, he changed his tone and looked at her with genuine apology. ‘I am sorry that the anxiety on the ship was so uncomfortable for you, though.’
She waved that aside, though she had been unable to sleep with the ship in such a state of worry and had retreated to her sea-garden, soothing her own nerves by feeding the corals and playing with the fish.
‘I already said it’s fine,’ she said, ‘All part of the learning curve.’ She reached contentedly for another cookie and dropped back out of the conversation, seeing that CPO Martins had come onto the command deck. It needed no empathic ability to recognise that he wanted to speak to the skipper, or that he was a little uneasy about it.
‘Got a minute, skipper?’ He asked, and at Alex’s inviting gesture, sat down at the datatable, mustering his thoughts and looking a little apologetic. ‘I know the timing of this isn’t great…’ he admitted, and passed a file from his comp to the screens in front of the captain. ‘Geology report, skipper.’
Alex knew there must be a problem, or Martins would simply have filed the report in the usual way.
‘Thank you.’ Alex cast an eye over the bullet-point precis at the head of the report, closed his eyes briefly and dropped his head in comical despair. ‘Arrrrrgh!’
Martins gave a broad grin. His deep set eyes twinkled at the skipper as everyone else looked at him with surprise and confusion.
Alex lifted his head. ‘There is,’ he said, ‘going to be an earthquake.’
It was unlikely that that announcement had ever got such a reaction before – as the skipper dropped his head back into his hands in theatrical gloom, just about everyone else on the ship cracked up laughing. It wasn’t funny, really, but coming so pat in the wake of the storm, just as they’d stopped panicking about one thing to have to deal with another struck them as preposterous. Alex’s own reaction, too, was reassuringly jokey.
‘All right,’ Alex called thing back to order himself after a few seconds, though with an easy grin. ‘We don’t need to panic,’ he observed. ‘It isn’t due till next week. And I think, you know,’ he glanced at Buzz, who smiled agreement with what he knew the skipper was going to say, ‘we are going to have to get used to seeing these things as natural events, rather than natural disasters. So – let’s take a look at this.’
He put the report on shared view and went through it with Martins. The original geological map of the planet had been filled in with a very detailed scan of all the plates, faults and pressure zones. Two undersea plates sliding against one another in the northern hemisphere had built up a very high degree of tension at a particular sticking point, and the computer was predicting a catastrophic failure in approximately eight days, with an estimated earthquake intensity of 6.5 to 7.2. Because it was an undersea earthquake there was also a risk of tsunami, and this was estimated at six to fifty centimetres in height depending on the amount of sea floor dislodged.
‘We’ll have much more accurate predictions twenty five hours before,’ Martins explained. ‘But the affected islands should be put on alert as soon as possible.’
Alex nodded. There were rings around the epicentre which showed that two islands were likely to be affected by the earthquake itself, one much more so than the other, while a further nine were in the direct firing line of the tsunami at heights which might flood their villages. Thirty eight more might experience varying levels of wave, but without risk to homes.
‘All right,’ Alex nodded, ‘Thank you, Mr Martins. If you’ll stand by to answer any questions…’
Martins smiled assent and stayed where he was, as Alex made the first call himself. As always, it took a few minutes to get through greetings and chat before he was able to get to business, speaking to the chief elder. On this island the chief was a remarkably young man, not yet thirty. He had achieved his status because the other elders on the island were a notoriously quarrelsome bunch and Ladur had the highly regarded ability to keep the peace between them.
This time, Alex did not call and tell them what to do. Instead, he asked for explanation.
‘Tell me – do your people know when there is going to be an earthquake?’ The Carrearranian word was ‘ubirak’ meaning ‘worldshake’, which Alex had to look at the translation system for. It wasn’t a word he’d felt the need to include in his Carrearranian vocabulary, till then.
‘No, they just happen,’ Ladur looked at him with interest. ‘They happen when rocks strain against each other under the sea, and break, or when magma is rising in a volcano.’
The Carrearranian words for magma and volcano translated directly, and Alex took a moment to adjust his thinking. Again, he had to remind himself that these people understood their world. They had no mythology of earthquakes being caused by fighting giants, nor of volcanoes being the anger of gods. They understood the natural processes of their world because the Guardian had told them, right from the start of their colony, what caused these things. They did not live on the islands where there were explosive volcanoes – for one thing there were no singing stones on those islands and they never settled islands without them, and for another, as Arak had remarked, only an idiot would live on an island which might explode at any time.
‘So – what do you do when there is an earthquake?’ Alex asked.
‘Lay down on the ground,’ said Ladur, in a tone which made it clear he was speaking from experience, ‘and then we run.’ He gave a wry grin. ‘We do not stop to take down houses or gather more than the belongings we can take in our hands right then. We run, and we stay up on the hills. There is often a worldshake wave that sucks the sea away and throws it back, very fast, very dangerous, so we stay up on the hills until we are sure that all the worldshaking is over and it is safe. People are sometimes killed or hurt in worldshakes, and houses are often damaged.’
‘Ah.’ Alex said. ‘Then we may be able to help – the sensor drones tell us that there will be an earthquake in eight days – we will be able to tell you exactly when, how strong it will be and how high the wave will be the day before it happens.’
Ladur looked pleased. ‘That is helpful,’ he said, and gave a cheery grin. ‘Thanks, Alex.’
The news was received just as casually on the other islands called, and Martins had no questions to answer as the Carrearranians already knew about plate tectonics and readily accepted that the Fourth could predict an earthquake, even if they were hilariously over-anxious about storms.
With that, Alex hoped, things might settle down again. He was able to go to bed shortly after midnight assured that all was well with the ship and nothing extraordinary happening on the planet. It was with weary relief that he climbed into his bunk; it had been a very long, demanding day even by his standards. He settled down, pulling the cover over himself and closed his eyes. Detecting that he was ready for sleep, the cabin systems dimmed the lights to emergency minimum and muted the open comms so the noise of the ship was no more than a soporific murmur.
‘Sorry to disturb you, skipper…’
Alex would have sworn that he had not even fallen asleep yet, so there was a moment of disorientation when he saw that it was now nearly half past two in the morning. Two hours sleep, he thought. Well, he’d worked longer on less.
‘Yes?’ He registered who was making the call, ‘Ms Fishe?’
‘Sorry,’ Martine said again, well aware of how little sleep the skipper had had over the last couple of days. ‘But could you join us on the command deck, skipper? Rangi would like a word.’
Alex said he’d be right there, an
d was, still fastening his collar as he came out of his cabin and went straight onto the command deck. There, he saw the ship’s medic sitting at the table alongside Martine, who was holding the watch. Rangi looked odd. There were those who might say that Rangi always looked odd – his long limbs often seemed slightly out of his control and his boyish, naïve enthusiasm was more like that of a student than a frigate’s medical officer. Alex, though, was accustomed to Rangi in all his eccentricities and recognised at once that he was in a state of high emotion. He looked as if he wasn’t quite sure whether to laugh or burst into tears. He was quivering, too, with tension that made him tremble and fidget.
‘Skipper!’ he burst out, as soon as Alex came in sight, practically shouting the news at him. ‘I’ve found pathogens!’
Alex sat down, holding up a hand to silence Rangi while he caught up with the fact that there was no medical emergency and began to understand what the medic was talking about.
‘Right,’ he said, after a moment, but held up his hand again to stop Rangi bursting forth with a torrent of excited information. ‘Before you start,’ he said, ‘I want coffee.’ He looked fixedly at the younger man, making it clear that he meant that to be on top of his usual daily ration. It was indicative of Rangi’s state of mind that he acceded to that without a thought.
‘Yes, yes!’ he waved a hand impatiently and Alex glanced over at the duty rigger, who grinned and made gestures indicating that he’d get right on it.
‘All right.’ Again, Alex stifled the outburst that would have swamped him in gabble if he’d allowed Rangi to start. ‘Breathe,’ he instructed, and with slightly malicious amusement, ‘Be the tree.’
Rangi gave a crack of laughter – he had always used tree visualisation as a calming technique and had taught it to anyone who’d allow him to, as well, encouraging them to squish their toes as if rooting themselves into the ground, to feel their core strong and their arms loose, to be at one with the life force of the cosmos. This technique had become infamous after Silvie had remarked on it shortly after she first came aboard, describing Rangi as the madman who kept wanting to be a tree. Even Rangi himself had never quite been able to take the technique seriously, since.
‘I’m fine, skipper, honestly,’ he said, though still talking twice as fast as normal and rather higher and louder than was normal for him, too. ‘It’s just that I can’t tell you how…’ he caught his breath, ‘There are pathogens, skipper!’ He looked intently at Alex, hoping to see an equally excited response. ‘We’ve been assuming it’s a zero-pathogen environment!’ he pointed out. ‘But it isn’t. They have viral pathogens there! And, and…’ he barely paused and his voice was rising into a falsetto, ‘they’re descended from the Red Death. AND,’ he concluded on a final crescendo, ‘the Carrearranians are infected!’
Alex accepted the coffee the rigger brought him, giving him an absent nod of thanks before turning back to Rangi.
‘Explain,’ he said, and held up a warning finger as Rangi drew a deep breath and was about to fling himself into full-throttle explanatory mode. ‘In,’ Alex commanded, ‘less than two minutes – and without using the word Orthomyxoviridae.’
This too made Rangi laugh, referencing a talk he had given to the Mindful society some months before. In that particular case he had pitched it rather too far above the heads of his audience and when it came time to open the floor to questions, there’d been a long silence before the bravest of them raised a hand and ventured, ‘What’s an Orthomyxoviridae?’
Everyone knew what it meant, now, but Rangi understood the skipper to mean that he was to keep his explanation short, straightforward and non-technical. As usual, when he was given specific instructions to frame his report, it focussed him immediately. He paused, then, took another breath and ordered his thoughts.
‘We’ve been doing atmospheric analysis,’ he said, still fast but in a normal speaking tone, ‘and I’ve been looking at the air around villages, looking for smoke pollution, pollen and fungal spores, general air quality, using random cubic centimetre samples, three thousand a second.’
Alex gave a slight nod, indicating that he understood. What that meant was that Rangi had set up a programme to randomly select a cubic centimetre of atmosphere within the defined zones, which the drone sensors would focus their microscopic scopes on for a snapshot which could then be analysed to identify all the particles within it. The drones were capable of taking a great many more than three thousand such remote-view samples per second, but the micro-sensor capacity was not infinite and Rangi was having to share it with all the other people who wanted to see things down to microscopic levels. He would have been building data over time, analysing patterns and trends as the dataset mounted.
‘Just an hour ago, one of the samples flagged as spotting a virus. I thought it was a misidentification, of course, but when I looked, there it was, clear as day, a…’ he checked himself, remembering not to get technical, ‘a type of flu virus,’ he said. ‘Respiratory infection, perfectly obvious, and clearly a mutated descendant of the original Red Death pathogen. So I started chasing it down – and I tracked it back to people – I’ve found three people on different islands all breathing out live pathogens, and that’s just the start! I can’t prove it yet, but I’ll lay you any odds you like that they’re all infected.’
All starship skippers were required to have a basic level of understanding of infectious diseases and their various means of transmission, as starships were an obvious way by which pathogens might be carried from one world to another where the population had no immunity to them. Alex also knew that the people of Carrearranis did not get sick – not from infectious diseases, anyway.
‘You mean – they’re carriers?’ he ventured, at which Rangi gave a quick shake of his head.
‘I don’t think they’re asymptomatic carriers,’ he said. ‘Carriers are minority incidents which infect the majority. This looks to me like the virus is in vertical transmission… that means it’s evolved into a symbiotic virus – the population is infected by it but it doesn’t do them any harm.’
Alex accepted the distinction, which was clearly something Rangi considered important. He was, himself, just getting to grips with the implications of this discovery.
‘But – it’s not a pristine biosphere?’
Another shake of the head, this time more emphatic.
‘Far from it. The global levels will be tiny, of course, because so is the population, but I’m willing to bet that we’ll find more, perhaps a lot more, and in any case I can tell you now that there are viral pathogens on Carrearranis, recognisably descended from the Red Death, so we are not dealing here with a population which has never been exposed to infection. And that, skipper,’ he told him, in portentous tones, ‘is a game changer.’
Alex sipped his coffee, cradling the mug in both hands as he thought about that.
‘I should say it is,’ he agreed, and a light began to sparkle in his own eyes as he understood what it actually meant. Dealing with a pristine world with a population who had no immunity to any kind of infection would require full sterile quarantine with little hope of ever moving past that. If, however, they were dealing with an already infected world, quarantine could be gradually stepped down through a programme of cross-infection precautions and vaccinations. It would still take time, but once this was confirmed with full data and physical sampling, it was possible that they could work towards a day when they could invite Carrearranians onto their ship and visit the islands themselves with no need for full-body decontam or survival suits. That point might be months or even years away, but it was an amazing possibility. No wonder, Alex thought, that Rangi had felt the need to tell him straight away, even at the cost of waking him up…
A further thought occurred, and Alex moved subtly from ambassadorial to skipper mode.
‘Hold on…’ he gave the medic an interrogatory stare. ‘You made this discovery an hour ago?’ As Rangi nodded confirmation, Alex’s eyes narrowed. ‘So – why ar
e you working in the nightwatch?’
Rangi had hoped that the skipper wouldn’t notice that in the excitement of the discovery, or if he did notice he wouldn’t enquire into it too closely. He should have known better; after all the grief he’d given Alex over workload restrictions, there was no way the skipper was going to let this go.
‘I do have an EC card, skipper,’ Rangi attempted an air of injured innocence, as if shocked that the skipper could even suspect that he would be guilty of dodging the workload regulations he enforced so assiduously on the rest of them. Rangi himself signed exceptional circumstance permits for the rest of the crew, but was required to have any he issued for himself countersigned by the watch officer.
‘Hmph.’ Alex had called up Rangi’s activity log and could see that he had managed to convince Very Vergan to sign off on an exceptional circumstance permission for Rangi to work until three in the morning, even though nobody was supposed to work between midnight and six unless scheduled for nightwatch and even though Rangi had already reached his workload limit for the past three days. A further glance at a record of that from the log revealed that Rangi had hit Very with a blaze of medical terminology, bewildering him with it and persuading with his overwhelming urgency.
Alex looked at Rangi. If he’d tried that when either he or Buzz was on the command deck, or with Martine Fishe, they would have insisted on being told what he wanted to do in terms that they could understand. Alex was in no doubt that Rangi had picked his moment, and his officer, strategically.
