Work, job duties, chemical and radiation exposure—all ruled out. Everyone ate basically the same diet from the same food sources.
She studied a picture of Ilse’s husband in his personnel record. He had light blue eyes and an open, friendly smile in his personnel mug shot.
“Can we wake up Dr. Martinez?”
“Yes.” Ilse spoke from the doorway behind them, where she and Dr. Shourpa stood, listening. “If it’ll help, please, do.”
“We have energy shackles,” Emi told her. “We can keep him restrained so he doesn’t hurt himself or others.”
Ilse nodded. “Whatever you need to do, please, do it.”
Taber and another nurse moved Dr. Martinez to the vacant operating room. Aaron went to retrieve a set of energy shackles and Sam for backup. With the doctor firmly secured to the operating table, Emi started her initial examination. Other than his slight weight loss from the IV fluid and nutrient regimen, he seemed to be in perfect health. Her scanners didn’t pick up anything unusual. She took blood, hair, and skin samples, as well as fingernail clippings and a DNA swab from his mouth.
She glanced at Taber. “I’ll need to examine you, too. Take samples. And the other healthy men.”
“Of course.”
Emi removed the IV before administering an injection to counteract the sedatives. After a few minutes, the doctor’s eyes fluttered open. He looked around in confusion.
Ilse stepped forward and slipped her fingers through his. “Hey, baby,” she whispered, smoothing his dark brown hair away from his forehead. “How you feeling?”
His blue eyes darkened in confusion as he tried to focus on her. Then he spotted Emi, Aaron, and Sam. “Are you from the DSMC?” he asked.
Emi nodded. “Yes, Dr. Martinez. I’m Dr. Emilia Hypatia. This is Captain Aaron Lucio and Officer Sam Johnson. We have three DSMC ships in orbit now. The ISNC is sending reinforcements.”
He finally nodded and looked at his wife. “Are you okay? Did I hurt you?”
She shook her head. “No, you didn’t hurt me. I’m sorry we’ve got to do this to you.”
Emi watched him squeeze his wife’s hand. Emi reached out and touched his leg. She only sensed love and worry from him, not an ounce of anger.
“Hey, it’s okay.” He looked at Emi again. “Please, you’ve got to figure this out.”
“We will, Dr. Martinez.” She checked his vitals again. No change other than the obvious increases in blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration from him being conscious. “Get him some water,” she told Taber. “No solid food yet.”
After an hour, the doctor showed no signs of a rage. Emi had Taber reposition him, still shackled but sitting up on the table.
Ilse wouldn’t leave his side. Emi tried not to think about the woman’s emotions, instead focusing on the job ahead of her. She turned to Sam. “There are three cases of testing supplies on the lander. Please bring them for me.”
He nodded and set off to do it. She turned to Taber. “Get all the men who aren’t infected, and gather them here so we can take samples. We also need samples from the infected men and from all the boys. We’ll do the women after that, but I want to send the samples from the men up to the Braynow Gaston now and let their labs start working on it. Maybe they can figure it out. We also need the info on that resupply freighter so we can see if their crew had any issues.”
“You’ve got it, Doc.” He took off to get the men.
Aaron still hadn’t interrupted her. She watched as he tried to wiggle his nose and upper lip inside his suit’s helmet to scratch an itch. “Will you please go back to the lander now?” she pleaded. “I’m not in any danger. Run a decon cycle in the air lock and get out of that monkey suit.”
“No.”
She sighed in frustration. She picked up her com unit and hailed Donna on the K-2.
“What have you found out?” Donna asked.
“I’m going to sync this info up to both your data banks and the Braynow Gaston. See if you can find anything in it, a pattern or something. I’ll have samples to send up to the Braynow Gaston crew in the next couple of hours.”
“Roger.”
Emi plugged a patch cable into the hand-held. Within a few seconds, the data streamed up to the ships.
Donna paged her. “Got it. I’ll go through it now.”
“Thanks.”
The sound of a rumbling stomach rolled though the room. Dr. Martinez blushed. “Sorry,” he apologized.
“That’s okay. You feel like eating something?”
“I’d kill for a piece of Ilse’s cinnamon toast.”
Ilse laughed. “Figures you’d ask for something like that.”
Emi smiled. “One piece to start with. I don’t want to overload your stomach. I should make you eat soup first.”
Dr. Martinez managed a weak smile. “I’m willing to risk it, Dr. Hypatia.”
Emi cleared him to try a piece of toast. Ilse hurried off to make it. After a few minutes, Emi leaned back and closed her eyes. A tension headache threatened. Nothing in her preliminary scans indicated anything out of the ordinary. Maybe whatever it was had run its course?
“My wife makes the best cinnamon bread,” Dr. Martinez boasted to Emi. “You should try it.”
Then she had a thought. “Cinnamon? You grow that here?”
“Oh, no. That came from Earth.”
Her heart sank. “You’ve been growing your grains here?”
“Almost from the start.” He sighed. “I thought maybe it was a food issue, but everyone’s eating the same things from the same sources.”
He had a point. A food issue should have shown up a lot sooner. “How long did you live here before you started eating planet-grown foods?”
He frowned, thinking about it. “After the first year. That’s when we grew a batch of crops and knew they were safe after we’d completed extensive testing.”
There had to be an answer.
“What about the transport crews? Did they eat food grown here?”
He nodded. “Sure. They loved it, being able to eat fresh food instead of frozen or dried and reconstituted.”
“Livestock?”
“Earth lines brought here. We’ve been eating seafood since the second year on.”
“And nothing wrong with the cattle or other livestock?”
“No. And yes, we grow their food grains here. That was one of the first crops we established and tested so they could be self-sustaining. We couldn’t keep shipping in grains.”
“Corn?”
He nodded. “Corn, alfalfa, barley, and various grazing grasses. Some wheat stocks for horses, pigs, and chickens.”
“You don’t eat horses?”
He laughed. “No. Work and pleasure animals, I assure you. A little low-tech, yes, but it’s easier to grow crops and raise livestock for some tasks than it is to refine energy sources and keep shipping in replacement parts for small equipment. We conserve where we can.”
* * * *
They woke up two more men after restraining them and notifying their wives so they could be present. After four hours, Emi was about to order Dr. Martinez released when she heard a shout from the OR where he was still restrained.
The man couldn’t break the energy shackles, but that didn’t stop him from trying. Ilse had retreated to the corner, crying, while Taber tried to calm the doctor and get him to relax.
“Fuck you!” Dr. Martinez screamed, trying to lean over and bite the man.
Aaron stepped in front of Emi to stop her from getting closer, but she stepped around the table. Taber grabbed a syringe. While Martinez’s attention focused on Emi, Taber jabbed the hypo into the doctor’s shoulder.
He immediately slumped to the table, unconscious.
Dr. Shourpa tried to console her friend, who had slid down the wall to the floor. “He was talking to me!” she sobbed. “He had a little more to eat, and he was fine! Then the rage returned!”
Emi helped Taber reconfigure Dr. Martinez’s rest
raints and restart the IV. “You need to warn the other women,” Emi said. “If he reverted, they will, too. Don’t wake any more patients until we get some lab results back.”
“Okay.”
She stepped away from the table and over to the governor’s side. With Dr. Shourpa’s assistance, Emi helped the woman stand and walk from the room. Behind her, she heard Aaron’s com link whistle and Rob page him. He walked outside the clinic to talk to him.
“Let’s get you home,” Emi said to the governor. “You need to rest.”
She nodded, too distraught to argue. The two women walked her across the compound to a small, nondescript residential pod. Inside, she’d made it look as homey and comfortable as she could in their still relatively spartan setting. Everything was neat and tidy and smelled of cinnamon and baked goods.
Six fresh loaves of cinnamon bread sat on the counter. In a daze, Ilse walked over to the kitchen, retrieved a large plastic storage bag from her cabinet, and put the loaves in it. “Here,” she softly said, handing the bag to Emi. “Take these for your men.”
Not wanting to hurt the woman’s feelings, Emi did. “I will. Now, you need to go lie down and rest. Do you want me to give you a sedative?”
Ilse shook her head. “No.” Finally, her eyes focused. She looked at Emi. “Please, just figure out what’s wrong with them!”
“We will.”
* * * *
Aaron waited for Emi outside the governor’s house. From one grim reality to another, Emi didn’t need her empath skills to know something was seriously wrong.
“What happened?”
He shook his head and indicated they needed to return to the lander. Inside, he removed his protective suit after going through a decon cycle in the air lock. Sam and Gregor looked equally grim. “We’ve got a serious problem.”
“What?” She dropped the bag of bread loaves on a crate as she took a seat.
“ISNC has taken over,” Aaron said. “Unless we figure out what the hell the problem is, the colonists will be evac’d, and the planet will be sterilized.”
“Sterilized?”
“Destroyed, in other words.”
Emi blinked. “They can’t do that!”
Gregor nodded. “Oh, yes, they can. And they will. The ISNC forces coming have orders to evac only people without symptoms and decon the planet.”
“But what about those infected?”
Aaron shook his head.
Emi gasped. “That’s murder!”
“They won’t risk the condition spreading,” Aaron said. “Once they give the final order, that’s it. Anyone who’s infected will be left on the planet and…” He didn’t finish.
“You cannot tell me you’re fucking okay with this!”
“No, I’m not. None of us are. The ISNC underwrote the initial colony and mission expenses to get it up and running. Contractually, they get to have a say in it. The colonists signed contracts with the DSMC to that effect. They understand that.”
“No, I’m sure they don’t understand they can be left behind to be murdered!” She alternately felt stunned and like screaming. “What the fuck, Aar?”
“We have to work fast.”
* * * *
Emi had sent a preliminary shipment of samples up to the Braynow Gaston in an unmanned drone. The three scientists were already crunching results, trying to find a commonality to work with, but had not as of yet figured it out. Later that night, Aaron ordered an exhausted Emi back to the lander so they could return to the Tamora Bight. Gregor and Sam would bunk with them that night, in the cargo bay, and return to the planet with them in the morning.
Emi and Donna sat up half the night on the com link, wracking their brains to come up with something, anything. Captain John Tarrence from the Braynow Gaston hailed them.
“We’ve gone through all the samples you sent. Nothing. There is no reason for those men to have gotten sick. They are, with the exception of some standard conditions like hypertension, healthy. The only common link we can find is that they’re adult men.”
Emi scrubbed her face with her hands. “There has to be something.”
Aaron leaned against the sick bay counter, his arms crossed, listening.
“I’m sorry, Emi. There’s nothing we can find.”
“Look for any genetic differences between the sick and unaffected men.”
“We did. We traced the genetic code. There is nothing.”
Aaron stepped forward. “Thanks, John. We’ll talk to you in the morning. Page us if there’s anything new.”
“Sure thing, Aaron. Braynow Gaston, out.”
Aaron caught Emi’s hand and pulled her to her feet. It was the middle of the night their time, and she was wiped out. “Come on, Doc. To bed with you.” She offered no protest when he scooped her into his arms. She felt bone-weary and couldn’t get Ilse’s haunted look out of her mind.
She couldn’t let them die.
Ford had watch that night. Caph already slept sprawled across their large shared bed. Exhausted, Emi curled up next to him as Aaron settled against her other side and wrapped an arm around her waist.
He kissed the back of her neck. “You’ll figure it out, sweetie. I know you will.”
She didn’t feel so confident. She hoped he was right.
Chapter Nine
Emi found herself alone in bed the next morning when the smell of breakfast awoke her. She grabbed a quick sonic shower, and after she emerged, Ford walked in with a steaming cup of coffee for her.
“There’s my girl,” he said, giving her a quick peck. “Everyone’s in the galley, eating breakfast.”
“Why didn’t you wake me up?” she groused.
“We were going to if you hadn’t got up. We wanted to make sure you got as much rest as you could.” His blue eyes darkened with concern. “You’ll figure it out. Don’t panic, sweetheart. It’ll just cloud your judgment.”
When she broke down crying, he enveloped her in his arms. “What if I can’t?” she whispered. “What if those men die because of me?”
“Don’t think like that.” He led her to the galley where the men, including Sam and Gregor, chowed down on eggs, bacon, and what smelled like cinnamon toast. Emi’s stomach, already bound in knots, wouldn’t tolerate anything more than one egg.
Aaron acted unusually quiet and brooding. She didn’t press him, knowing this situation weighed as heavily on him as it did her. She tried to read him and felt a dark cloud of gloom. Since that didn’t help her confidence, she tuned him out.
Emi spent the trip to the surface in quiet contemplation. She had an idea and hoped the governor would go along with her. Aaron wouldn’t be thrilled, but she had to do it.
“I need to wake Dr. Martinez again.”
Aaron shook his head. “Absolutely not. I don’t want you anywhere near him.”
“We’ll take him to their brig. He won’t be in a rage the entire time. You saw him. He was fine for hours. He might be able to help me and Donna figure this out!”
Aaron looked to Gregor and Sam. “What do you think?”
Sam shrugged. “I’m not really thrilled with the idea either. I’m even less thrilled about standing by and watching people die.”
Gregor nodded his agreement. “The three of us can keep her safe. We’ll tether him with the energy shackles. If he rages we’ll just step out of the cell and let him be until he settles down.”
Aaron leaned in and kissed her before he stood to put his protective suit on. “Please, be careful.”
“I will.”
* * * *
Governor Martinez was more than happy to allow it. Taber helped them move the doctor to a brig cell they emptied. Then they secured him. Taber waited for everyone else to step out of the cell before he gave Dr. Martinez the shot to wake him up.
Dr. Martinez’s blue eyes slowly fluttered open as they filled with confusion. “Where am I?”
Emi stepped forward. “The brig. I’m sorry, but we need to keep you awake. Maybe you can hel
p us figure this out.”
He nodded. His eyes focused on his wife, who stood in the hallway. “Can you all excuse me for a moment? I need to talk to Dr. Hypatia alone.”
Aaron started to protest, but Emi held up a hand. “No, it’s okay. He’s okay. Just keep the cell door open. I’ll run if he rages.”
Taber stepped out as Emi knelt beside the doctor’s bunk. She didn’t dare touch him but sensed his deeper purpose. “What is it?”
His eyes flicked over her shoulder, to everyone watching, then back to her. “I’m a class 1 empath, Dr. Hypatia. And a class 3 clairvoyant. Natural, not trained.” He studied her, his eyes full of unspoken meaning.
Emi silently swore. He knew.
“We have a serious problem, don’t we?” he softly asked.
She nodded.
He glanced over her shoulder, then back to her. “Do they know? Your captain does, I feel it. Do the others?”
“No.”
“How long do we have?”
“ISNC forces will be here in a few days. We have until then.”
He smiled. “Nothing like trying to beat a deadline, huh?” Then his face grew serious. “I worried about this when it first started because I know full well what was in the contract we signed. As a doctor, I know they’re right, that they can’t risk it spreading. But, frankly, I don’t want to die.”
“I know.”
He nodded to the observation window that looked into a conference room. “Can you set up a large display in there? There’s a two-way com. We can go over data together.”
“I’ll get it done right away.”
He nodded and laid his head on the bunk. “Okay. I’ll wait here.” Then he smiled, his blue eyes twinkling with mischief. “I’m a little tied up right now or I’d be a gentleman and help you set things up.”
Emi laughed. She had to save him. All of them.
“Promise me one thing, Dr. Hypatia,” he said.
“Only if you call me Emi.”
“Emi.” He grew serious again. “By whatever means you have to, if we can’t figure this out…” He looked grim. “Drug her if you have to, but get her off this planet if we run out of time. Promise me.”
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