“So—what’s next on the list?” Alex asked, one screen dedicated to the stats on the dig, his own hands busy with post-lift chores that some brawns would have left to their brains. Double-checking to make sure all the servos had put themselves away, for instance. Keeping an eye on the weight-and-balance in the holds. Just another example, she thought happily, of what a good partner he was.
She was clear of the cradle and about to clear local airspace. Nearing time to accelerate “like a scalded cat.” Now that’s a phrase that’s still useful. . . . “Next on the list is something we don’t even have to consider, and that’s a native uprising.”
“Hmm, so I see.” His eyes went from the secondary screen where the data on the dig was posted and back to the primary. “No living native sophonts on the continent. But I can see how it could be the Zulu wars all over again.”
He nodded, acknowledging her logic, and she was grateful to his self-education in history.
“Precisely,” she replied. “Throw enough warm bodies at the barricades, and any defense will go down. In a native uprising, there are generally hordes of fervent fanatics willing to die in the cause and go straight to Paradise. Accelerating, Alex.”
He gave her a thumbs-up, and she threw him into his seat. He merely raised an eyebrow at her column and kept typing. “There must be several different variations on that theme. Let’s see—you could have your Desecration of Holy Site Uprising, your Theft of Ancient Treasures Uprising, your Palace Coup Uprising, your Local Peasant Revolution Uprising. Uh-huh. I can see it. And when you’ve overrun the base, it’s time to line everyone up as examples of alien exploitation. Five executioners, no waiting.”
“They normally don’t kill except by accident, actually, or in the heat of the moment,” she told him. “Most native sophonts are bright enough to realize that two hundred of Central Systems’ citizens, a whole herd of their finest minds and their dependents, make a much better bargaining chip as hostages than they do as casualties.”
“Not much comfort to those killed in the heat of the moment,” he countered. “So, what’s the next culprit on the list?”
“The third, last, and most common,” she said, a bit grimly, and making no effort to control her voice-output. “Disease.”
“Whoa, wait a minute—I thought that these sites were declared free of hazard!” He stopped typing and paled a little, as well he might. Plague was the bane of the Courier Service existence. More than half the time of every CS ship was spent in ferrying vaccines across known space—and for every disease that was eradicated, three more sprang up out of nowhere. Nor were the brawns immune to the local plagues that just might choose to start at the moment they planeted. “I thought all these sites were sprayed down to a fare-thee-well before they let anyone move in!”
“Yes, but that’s the one I’m seriously concerned about.” And not just because it was a bug that got me. “That, my dear Alex, is what they don’t tell you bright-eyed young students when you consider a career in archeology. The number one killer of xeno-archeologists is disease.” And the number one crippler, for that matter. “Viruses and proto-viruses are sneaky sons-of-singularities; they can hibernate in tombs for centuries, millennia, even in airless conditions.” She flashed up some Institute statistics; the kind they didn’t show the general public. There was a thirty percent chance that a xeno-archeologist would be permanently disabled by disease during his career; a twenty percent chance that he would die. And a one hundred percent chance that he would be seriously ill, requiring hospitalization, from something caught on a dig, at some point in his life.
“So the bug hibernates. Then when the intrepid explorer pops the top off—” Alex looked as grim as she felt.
“Right. Gotcha.” She laughed, but it had a very flat sound. “Well, sometimes it’s been known to be fortuitous. The Cades actually met when they were recovering from Henderson’s Chorea—ah—or so their biographies in Who’s Who say. There could be worse things than having the Institute cover your tropic vacation.”
“But mostly it isn’t.” His voice was as flat as her laugh had been.
“Ye-es. One of my—close friends is Doctor Kennet on the Pride of Albion. He’s gotten to be a specialist in diseases that get archeologists. He’s seen a lot of nasty variations over the years—including some really odd opportunistic bugs that are not only short-lived after exposure to air, but require a developing nervous system in order to set up housekeeping.”
“Developing—oh, I got it. A kid, or a fetus, provided it could cross the placental barrier.” He shivered, and his expression was very troubled. “Brr, that’s a really nasty one.”
“Verily, White Knight.” She decided not to elaborate on it. Maybe later. To let him know I’m not only out for fortune and glory. “I just wanted you to be prepared when we got there, which we will in—four days, sixteen hours, and thirty-five minutes. Not bad, for an old-fashioned FTL drive, I’d say.” She’d eliminated the precise measurements that some of the other shellpersons used with their brawns in the first week—except when she was speaking to another shellperson, of course. Alex didn’t need that kind of precision, most of the time; when he did, he asked her for it. She had worried at first that she might be getting sloppy—
No, I’m just accommodating myself to his world. I don’t mind. And when he needs precision, he lets me know in advance.
“Well, let me see if I can think of some non-lethal reasons for the dig losing communications—” He grinned. “How about—‘the dinosaur ate my transmitter?’”
“Cute.” Now that their acceleration had smoothed and they were out of the atmosphere, she sent servos snooping into his cabin, as was her habit whenever a week or so went by, and he was at his station, giving her non-invasive access. “Alex, don’t you ever pick up your clothes?”
“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 gripp
ed 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 shellcrack—”
“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 the 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 maki
ng 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, neurotransmitters 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—”
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