For the first time, she was grateful for the monitors. It was amazing how something so simple could change the whole tenor of the cabin. She breathed out as the acceleration eased. A carpet of clouds bubbled below. She was tempted to try to convince herself that the land below belonged to a different world, and that she was leaving it behind.
But it hadn’t been that long since she’d seen the plague during beautiful weather, too.
Her full name was Habidah Um’brael Thayusene Shen, but all that had stopped meaning much a long time ago. For years, she’d been Habidah or Dr Shen. The other names denoted her local and extended clans on her home plane, Caldera. But she hadn’t gone home in over twenty years.
As the shuttle juddered into its descent and her stomach dropped away, she found herself thinking of it again. It was something she did only when she wasn’t looking forward to an assignment. Which was silly. She’d already been here for months. She should have already settled into it, resigned.
But her assignment hadn’t really started until now.
Home was isolated, bound by academic regulation and procedure and tradition. It was small university settlements, bored into the side of the continent-spanning supervolcano that gave her plane its name. Its thousand-year-old university campuses and research satellite towns, originally built to study the volcano and the mantle underneath, remained as small as the day they’d been founded. She rarely saw more than two or three people at a time in its rocky-walled corridors. Ten was a crowd. She hadn’t missed feeling stifled, but her time in Messina’s crowds had turned her memories a shade fonder.
Caldera was just one part of a larger multiverse. It was a member plane of the Unity. The rest of the Unity encompassed more planes than a merely human imagination could hold. Caldera numbered among hundreds of thousands of Unity provincial worlds, among millions of known inhabited planes, among trillions of charted Earth-parallel planes. The moment she’d left Caldera, it seemed impossibly tiny. Every day since made it smaller.
The shuttle’s nose glowed red. It should have been screaming. All Habidah heard, though, was a low rumble. The shuttle’s sound-dampening fields hadn’t been installed for her benefit, but they were certainly nice to have. There weren’t many people in the forests and fields below, but it wouldn’t have done for any of them to know about the shuttle roaring overhead two to three times every night. The fields folded the air to mute the sonic booms, and zippered a pocket of vacuum around the engines to keep them from roaring. Anyone looking up would see at most two flickers of blue engine exhaust, easy enough to mistake as a glimmer of moonlight or trick of the eyes.
It wouldn’t have fooled anyone with technology, of course. The infrared bleed alone shone like another star in the sky. But the people below had nothing more than their eyes.
Many miles south of Lyon, the shuttle descended. The clouds pulled away. Rural France unraveled below: crumpled green parchment dimpled with hills and covered by woods. As the shuttle slowed, one of the camera feeds zoomed in on two lonely, dilapidated buildings: a farmhouse and a barn, surrounded by nothing. The field base was buried underneath the barn. There was something snug about being underground, though she knew she was the only member of her team who felt that way. The others had all come from wealthier planes.
The shuttle circled to bleed its excess velocity, and then settled into the shadow of the barn. Habidah’s safety harness released. Gravity reasserted its solidity.
She was down the outside thirty seconds later. The shuttle’s engines still thrummed. It would be off to pick up Kacienta next. Kacienta was on assignment charting the overland trade routes most likely to be vectors for plague transmission.
The farmhouse’s roof was half-staved in. One of its walls sloped at a dangerous angle. Habidah pulled the farmhouse’s one door aside. Inside, the survey team had made no attempt to keep up the illusion. At the far end of the barn, a silver door sat half-buried in the dirt. It slid open. Polished off-white walls followed a ramp downwards. Lights lined the ceiling and floors, eliminating every shadow.
They’d taken a risk of discovery during the field base’s construction. Flash-manufacturing wasn’t subtle. The construction drones’ light, heat, and noise – like a thunderstorm at dawn – couldn’t be disguised. But Habidah had needed the base built that quickly. Their schedule had been too tight. The plague had already spread through China and Central Asia by the time the Unity’s survey drones had found this world.
Habidah tugged her wimple to the back of her head as she walked. When she reached the door at the bottom, she expected to walk into a vista of silver-blue city, with a sky sparkling with antimatter engine exhaust plumes. Providence Core, Joao’s home plane. He usually monopolized the viewwalls. Instead, she stepped onto a wide row of trimmed purple and yellow vines. A squat, ultramodern violet farmhouse overlooked the vineyard. The vineyard stretched into a featureless horizon, under a sky that was a much lighter blue than the world outside.
It took Habidah a moment to place it. She’d never been to the plane, and needed to consult her demiorganics. This was Rodinia, home of Feliks Vine, her team’s medical specialist.
Rodinia was a quiet little world, one of the oldest settled planes in the Unity. Her demiorganics supplied the statistics. Seventy percent landmass, nitrogen-rich soil, humid atmosphere, an old and hot yellow-white sun, and a unicellular native ecology that had begged to be supplanted by genengineered crops. A perfect agricultural plane. Hundreds of planes whose peoples never heard Rodinia’s name got their foodstuffs from this world. It was mostly NAI-run factory farms, managed by legions of drones and a few very wealthy employee-shareholders. Rodinia exported food, yes, but also pharmaceuticals, narcotics, and a host of other psychoactives.
Her demiorganics laced with the field base’s NAI. An additional layer of data told her where to find the others. Joao was nearest, in the field base’s communication chamber.
The field base had been supplied with a communications gateway, a micrometer-width transplanar portal that served as their link to the Unity. It was just enough to send data. Her team, their construction drones, and their satellites had arrived through larger gateways. When her team would eventually leave, they would be dependent on their university to bring them back.
The gateway was safely concealed behind one of the viewwalls. When Habidah entered the room, the floor and wall thrummed with power. The gateway was active.
Joao sat on a chair seemingly sprung right out of the vineyard. He wore a sheet-black suit that billowed about his wrists and ankles. He looked up as Habidah entered.
Of all the members of Habidah’s team, Joao was the least comfortable here. Habidah had grown up in university warrens, at ease in closed-in spaces. More importantly, she hadn’t had much in the way of creature comforts. Joao had come from an abundance of space and luxury. Here, he had no personal relationship manager NAI, no servant sprites, no immersion libraries, no personal fabricators, or anything else the people of a wealthy plane like Providence Core had spent their whole lives accustomed to.
If it hadn’t been rude, she would have asked him why he’d come, but this was his tenth field assignment. He must have gotten used to it. And he’d done well so far.
He was their systems specialist, which meant that, in addition to his anthropological duties, he was supposed to keep the field base and its shuttle and gateway operating. Or at least monitor the base’s and shuttle’s NAIs while they did that.
Habidah didn’t waste time. “He’s gotten worse already.”
She knew why they were in the middle of Rodinia rather than Providence Core. “The first symptoms have manifested, yeah,” Joao said quietly, as though Feliks might overhear. “He didn’t say anything, but he couldn’t hide it from NAI. And NAI let me know.”
Habidah tried not to be offput that the base’s neutered AI had told Joao rather than her. Then again, Joao spent more time here. In addition to his anthropological duties, he was their systems specialist, in charge of their base
, shuttle, and satellites.
She said, “He must realize it’s not a secret.”
Joao said, “He asked for a view of home. That’s all he said to me.”
There’d been more that she planned to say to Joao, but none of it seemed important. She nodded so as to not seem dismissive. Then she left. Her demiorganics told her that Feliks was in his office on the other side of the field base. Unfortunately, another icon was closing in faster.
Meloku intercepted her in the middle of the corridor that separated the field base’s kitchen from its dining hall. Like the rest of the team, Meloku had altered her appearance so as to better blend in. She’d left her hair as it had been, though: long, night-black, and bound in two rams’ horns in the back. Habidah hoped she hid it well on assignment. The locals saw uncovered women’s hair as lewd.
Whenever Habidah was getting a sense for new team members, she started with their home planes. As Joao had proved, that didn’t mean everything, but it was a start. She had no idea what to make of Meloku’s plane, though. Mhensis was an oceanic plane, a tourist getaway with very few permanent residents. Meloku had been one of those – born there, even. Her plane was split, and starkly, between high-technology sea-skimmers and ships shown to tourists and the artificial islands that had little but housing for the staff and guides.
Meloku couldn’t have arrived that long ago, but she’d already changed into a short-cut blue-white jumper. “I’ve been assigned to Venice,” she said. “I thought I was going to Avignon.”
Habidah retrieved and perused the schedule. Joao had written it, but she saw its logic at once. “The plague ships changed all of our projected contagion routes. I’m sorry, but we need observers in all the major coastal cities.”
“I’ve been studying for Avignon for weeks. There’s still so much we have to learn that I can only discover by being there on the ground.”
“You’ll have a chance to go to Avignon when the plague reaches it. It should only be a few more months. If not sooner.” She kept walking toward Feliks’ office.
Meloku kept up. She could have conducted this conversation entirely by datastream. She’d shown up in person to pressure Habidah. “We’re not just here to watch the plague. We need to study these cities before they’re struck. Otherwise, we won’t have the context to judge how they change.”
She had a point. Not for the first time, Habidah wished she could have gotten a larger team. Five anthropologists would never be enough for a broad-ranging survey like this. But everybody back in the Unity was preparing for the collapse of their own civilization. And there were other survey teams to staff as well. Hundreds of others, from hundreds of universities across the breadth of the Unity.
Habidah struggled to think of how a more socially adept person would handle this. She used to be better at this. She resisted checking her protocol and empathy files for suggestions. That was a crutch she’d used too much when she was younger.
She said, “We have to do the best we can with what the university gives us. You’ll pull through.”
Judging from Meloku’s glower, that had been exactly the wrong thing to say. “I’m not worried about me. I’m worried about the assignment. Avignon is the most important religious center on the continent. It’s unique. I’ll never be able to get a clear understanding of what its people are like and what they’re doing if I only arrive on the eve of its devastation.”
“Then we’ll just have to live with an incomplete understanding.” Habidah felt bad saying it, but she was almost to Feliks’ office and rapidly running out of patience. There was no good way around the truth. Their university’s resources were too strained to give any team more than the bare minimum of personnel. That was going to mean missed data.
Meloku stopped. Habidah did likewise, regret coloring her cheeks. “Look – I’ll rearrange the schedule for the next few weeks, and get you to Avignon as soon as possible. But for now I absolutely need you in Venice. It’s non-negotiable.”
“Sure,” Meloku said, and turned sharply.
Habidah tried not to resent her as she watched her go. She must have known what was going on, where Habidah was headed. Her problem could have waited.
Habidah stopped outside the hidden double-doors that led into Feliks’ office. She needed a moment to recover her breath and gather herself.
She held her hand in front of her nose as she entered. She had been around enough death in the past few days to recognize the smell. The bodies of three plague victims lay on tables inside. There was a wrinkled old man, a bony woman in about her thirties, and one six year-old girl, her black hair pleated behind her. They’d been dead several days, and hadn’t had the best hygiene before. She couldn’t tell if they’d been so hollow-eyed and gaunt before dying or after. The plague didn’t go easy on its victims.
A desk and several workbenches lined the far walls. They and the tables looked very out of place in the otherwise rural-idyllic setting, but Feliks had always been a very practical man. Asking for a view of Rodinia was the most sentimental Habidah had ever seen him.
Feliks had come from the poorer half of Rodinia’s demographic range, which still left him with more resources than most in the Unity. Habidah had no idea what he’d done with himself in his youth, but, as an older man, he’d chosen the dissipation of study over the dissipation of leisure.
He, too, was in native costume: the colorful multi-layered robe of a well-placed courtier. The sleeves of his blue outer tunic peeled away like onion skins to reveal red, gold, and oak brown. He stood in front of the gurney holding the six year-old. A silver-and-glass cairn of microscopes, sensors, recording equipment, and dissection lasers floated above her.
He waved her in apologetically. “I know, I know,” he said. “I’ll get them out of here as fast as I can. I didn’t want to arrest decomp until I’d had a chance to get them under my equipment.” A perfumed breeze flowed from invisible air vents, trying its best to cover the sharp citrus smell of decay. “I can’t get trustworthy measurements through a suspension field.”
Habidah stood beside him and gazed at the girl. All at once, it was like being back in Messina, dead and dying all around her. She held her expression steady.
Feliks explained, “I recovered these from the mass graves of second-wave plague victims in Caffa. There are already new mutations showing up. They’ll reach the rest of Europe before long. It should mix things up quite a bit, beyond what we’d prepared for.”
“We’re already beyond that, and it’s just started.”
Feliks gave her a sardonic little smile. “We always knew things would get interesting.”
Doctors. Habidah never knew what it was with doctors.
To a local, Feliks would have looked healthy, youthful, vigorous. He had broad shoulders and well-sculpted muscles. She was short for higher-gravity Caldera, and he was tall for his lower-gravity plane. Next to her, he was huge. He’d allowed a few signs of his true age to seep into his features. White flecks speckled his mustache and sideburns. His eyes were shadowed, but that was not a sign of age.
Of all the people on her team, Habidah had known only Feliks before this assignment. The two of them had served together on a survey mission five years ago, visiting a variant Earth whose sun had been captured in a far orbit around a trinary star system. Its stellar neighbor been far enough from its siblings to support a stable, life-bearing planetary system. The sight of such tantalizingly close new worlds had pushed its inhabitants down the path of space travel rather than transplanar exploration like most other advanced civilizations. Feliks had discovered three novel genetic adaptions to zero gravity.
As then, he was eager to run down what he’d uncovered. “The plague we’ve examined so far has been spread by fleas infesting black rats,” he said, and nodded to his left. For the first time, Habidah noticed the animal carcasses carefully lined up atop one of the workbenches. “The mass rat die-offs caused by plague have forced the fleas to feed off humans. The plague has been exceptionally virulent,
but the fact that its primary method of transmission has been a rat parasite has put hard limits on the speed it can spread.”
Feliks nodded at the child. “Not so now. One of its new mutations is a pneumonic form. That is, it spreads from person to person via respiration. My best guess is that this strain developed when the older, bubonic form escaped a victim’s lymph system and infected their lungs.” Feliks peeled back the girl’s upper lip with a gloved finger. Her teeth and dry tongue were flecked dark red and brown. “The natives call it the coughing plague. Victims cough up copious blood before they expire.”
He moved on to the next corpse in line, the thin, middle-aged woman. Her skin was so mottled that, for a moment, Habidah thought it had been stained. In Messina, she’d met plenty of woman whose ankles and arms had been blistered and stained black by the caustic soap the natives used. But, no – this discoloration came from somewhere deeper, in tissues under the skin. Her veins were beet-colored. Feliks said, “And now there’s a septicemic variation. Blood plague.” He lifted the woman’s fingers. They were coal-black. “There’s an extraordinary amount of plague bacilli in the decedent’s blood, not just her organs. This one is not as virulent as the pneumonic plague, but it’s far deadlier.
“We knew we’d see some mutations, but this might throw all our projections away. The old bubonic form of the plague has a sixty-five to seventy percent mortality. The victims of the pneumonic plague, however, have a ninety to ninety-five percent mortality rate. And no one we’ve ever observed with the septicemic form has survived at all.”
Habidah listened until he gave her a chance to speak. “All good to know,” she said, though it wasn’t. “How do you feel?”
He’d clearly been hoping she would ask him something about the plague or the bodies. He shrugged. “Like I want to work.”
He remained over the corpse. Aside from a flicker of an awkward glance when she’d come in, he hadn’t yet met her eyes. She waited.
Quietus Page 4
