Ship Who Searched (17 page)

She finally established the comlink while he was still out in the compound, fruitlessly chasing one after another of the survivors and getting nowhere. He was weighted down with his pressure-suit; they were weighted down by nothing at all and had the impetus of fear. He seemed to terrify them, and they did not connect the arrival of food in the pans with him, for some reason.

“They act like I’m some kind of monster,” he panted, leaning over to brace himself on his knees while he caught his breath. “Since they don’t have that reaction to each other, it has to be this suit that they’re afraid of. Maybe I should—”

“
Stay in the suit,
” she said, fiercely. “You make one move to take that suit off, and I’ll sleepygas you!”

“Oh, Tia—” he protested.

“I’m not joking.” She continued her conversation with the base brain in rapid, highly compressed databursts with
horribly
long pauses for the information to transmit across hyperspace. “You stay in that suit! We don’t know what caused all this—”

Her tirade was interrupted by a dreadful howling and the external camera bounced as Alex moved violently. At first she thought that something awful had happened to Alex—but then she realized that the sound came from his
external
suit-mike, and that the movement of the camera had been caused by his own violent start of surprise.

“
What the—”
he blurted, then recovered. “Hang on, Tia. I need to see what this is, but it doesn’t sound like an attack or anything.”

“Be careful,” she urged fearfully. “Please—”

But he showed no signs of foolhardy bravery; in fact, as the howling continued under the scarlet light of the descending sun, he sprinted from one bit of cover to another like a seasoned guerrilla-fighter.

“Fifty meters,” Tia warned, taking her measurement from the strength of the howls. “They have to be on the other side of this building.”

“Thanks.” He literally crept on all fours to the edge of the building and peeked around the corner.

Tia saw exactly what he did, so she understood his sharp intake of breath.

She couldn’t count them, for they milled about too much, but she had the impression that every survivor in the compound had crowded into the corner of the fence nearest the sunset. Those right at the fence clung to it as they howled their despair to the sun; the rest clung to the backs of those in front of them and did the same.

Their faces were contorted with the first emotion Tia had seen them display.

Fear.

“They’re scared, Tia,” Alex whispered, his voice thick with emotions that Tia couldn’t decipher. “They’re afraid. I think they’re afraid that the sun isn’t going to come back.”

That might have been the case—but Tia couldn’t help but wonder if their fear was due to something else entirely. Could they have a dim memory that something
terrible
had happened to them in the hours of darkness, something that took away their friends and changed their lives into a living hell? Was that why they howled and sobbed with fear?

When the last of the light had gone, they fell suddenly silent—then, like scurrying insects, they dropped to all fours and scuttled away, into whatever each, in the darkness of his or her mind, deemed to be shelter. In a moment, they were gone. All of them.

There was a strangled sob from Alex. And Tia shook within her shell, racked by too many emotions to effectively sort out.

“You have two problems.”

Tia knew the name to put to the feeling she got when her next transmission from the base was not from some anonymous CS doctor but from Doctor Kenny.

Relief. Real, honest, relief.

It flooded her, making her relax, clearing her mind. Although she could not speak directly with him, if there was
anyone
who could help them pull this off, it would be Doctor Kenny. She settled all of her concentration on the incoming transmission.

“You’ll have to catch the survivors and keep them alive—and you’ll have to keep them from contaminating your brawn. After that, we can deal with symptoms and the rest.”

All right, that made sense.

“We went at this analyzing your subjects’ behavior. You were right in saying that they act in a very similar fashion to brain-damaged simians.”

This was an audio-only transmission; the video portion of the signal was being used to carry a wealth of technical data. Tia wished she could see Doctor Kenny’s face—but she heard the warmth and encouragement in his voice with no problem.

“We’ve compiled all the data available on
any
experiments where the subjects’ behavior matched your survivors,” Doctor Kenny continued. “Scan it and see if anything is relevant. Tia, I can’t stress this enough—no matter
what
you think caused this disease,
don’t let Alex get out of that suit.
I can’t possibly say this too many times. Now that he’s gone out there, he’s got a contaminated surface. I want you to ask him to stay in the suit, sleep in the suit, eat through the suit-ports, use the suit-facilities. I would prefer that he stayed out in the compound or in your airlock even to sleep—every time he goes in and out of the suit, in and out of your lock, we have a chance for decontamination to fail. I know you understand me.”

Only too well,
she thought, grimly, remembering all that time in isolation.

“Now, we’ve come up with a general plan for you,” Doctor Kenny continued. “We don’t think that you’ll be able to catch the survivors, given the way they’re avoiding Alex. So you’re going to have to trap them. My experts think you’ll be able to rig drop-traps for them, using packing crates with field generators across the front and rations for bait. The technical specs are on the video-track, but I think you have the general idea. The big thing will be not to frighten the rest each time you trap one.”

Doctor Kenny’s voice echoed hollowly in the empty cabin; she damped the sound so that it didn’t sound so lonely.

“We want one, two at most, per crate. We’re afraid that, bunched together, they might hurt each other, fight over food—they’re damaged, and we just don’t know how aggressive they might get. That’s why we want you to pack them in the hold in the crates. Once you get them trapped, we want you to put enough food and water in each crate to last the four days to base—and Tia, at that point, leave them there. Don’t do anything with them. Leave them alone. I trust you to exercise your good sense and not give in to any temptation to intervene in their condition.”

Doctor Kenny sighed, gustily. “We bandied around the idea of tranking them—but they
have
to eat and drink; four days knocked out might kill them. You don’t have the facilities to cold-sleep fifty people. So—box them, hope the box matches their ideas of a good place to hide, leave them with food and water and shove them in the hold. That’s it for now, Tia. Transmit everything you have, and we’ll have answers for you as soon as we’re able. These double-bounce comlinks aren’t as fast as we’d like, but they beat the alternative. Our thoughts are with you.”

The transmission ended, leaving her only with the carrier-wave.

Now what? Give Alex the bad news, I guess. And calculate how many packing crates I can pack into my holds.

“Alex?” she called. “Are you having any luck tracking down where the survivors are?”

“I’ve turned on all the exterior lights,” Alex said. “I hoped that I’d be able to lure some of them out into the open, but it’s no good.” She activated his helmet-camera and watched his gloved hand typing override orders into the keyboard of the main AI console. Override orders had to be put in by hand, with a specific set of override codes, no matter how minor the change was—that was to keep someone from taking over an AI with a shout or two. “Right now I’m giving myself full access to everything—I may not need it, but who knows?”

“I’ve got our first set of orders,” she told him. “Do you want to hear them?”

“Sure.” Typing in a pressure-suit was no easy task, and Tia did not envy him. It took incredible patience to manage a normal keyboard in those stiff gloves.

She retransmitted Doctor Kenny’s message and waited patiently for his response when she finished.

“So I have to stay in the suit.” He sighed gustily. “Oh, well. It could be worse, I suppose. It could be two weeks to base, instead of four days.” He typed the last few characters with a flourish and was rewarded by the “Full Access, Voice Commands Accepted” legend. “No choice, right? Look, Tia, I know you’re going to be lonely, but if I have to stay in this suit, I might just as well sleep out here.”

“But—” she protested, “—what if they decide you’re an enemy or something?”

“What, the Zombies?” He snorted. “Tia, right now they’re all crammed into some of the darnedest nooks and crannies you ever saw in your life. I couldn’t pry them out of there with a forklift. I know where they all are, but I’d have to break bones to get them.
Their
bones. They’re terrified, even with all the floodlights on. No, they aren’t going to come after me in the dark.”

“All right,” she agreed reluctantly. She knew he was right; he’d be much more comfortable out there—there was certainly more room available to him there.

“I’ll be closer to the Zombies,” he said wearily, “and I can barricade myself in one of the offices, get enough bedding from stores to make a reasonable nest. I’ll plug the suit in to keep everything charged up, and you can monitor the mike and camera. I snore.”

“I know,” she said, in a weak attempt to tease him.

“You would.” He turned, and the camera tracked what he was seeing. “Look, I’m here in the site supervisor’s office. There’s even a real nice couch in here and—” He leaned down and fiddled with the underside of the piece of furniture. “Ah hah. As I thought. There’s a real bed in the couch. Bet the old man liked to sneak naps. Look—” He panned around the office. “No windows. One door. A full-access terminal. I’ll be fine.”

“All right, I believe you.” She thought, quickly. “I’ll look over those plans for traps and transmit them to the AI, and I’ll find out where everything you’ll need is stored. You can start collecting the team tomorrow.”

What’s left of them, she thought sadly. What isn’t already stored in the freezer.

“See what you can do about adding some sleepygas to the equation,” he suggested, yawning under his breath. “If we can knock them out once they’re in the boxes, rather than trapping them with field generators, that should solve the problem of frightening the others.”

That was a good suggestion. A much better one than Doctor Kenny’s.
If
she had enough gas. . . .

But wait; this was a fully-stocked station. There might be another option. Crime
did
exist wherever there were people, and mental breakdowns—sometimes it was necessary to immobilize someone for his protection and the protection of others.

She interrogated the AI and discovered that, indeed, there were several special low-power needlers in the arms locker. And with them, full clips of anesthetic needles.

“Alex,” she said, slowly, “how good a shot are you?”

“When this is over, I’m requisitioning an ethological tagging kit,” she said fiercely, as Alex crouched on the roof of the mess hall and waited for his subject’s hunger to overcome her timidity. She hesitated, just in front of the crate—she smelled the food, and she wanted it, but she was afraid to go inside after it. She swayed from side to side, like one of the first three survivors they’d seen; that swaying seemed to be the outward sign of inner conflict.

“Why?” he asked. The woman stopped swaying and was creeping, cautiously, into the crate. Alex wanted her to be all the way inside before he darted her, both to prevent the rest from seeing her collapse and to avoid having to haul her about and perhaps hurt her.

“Because they have full bio-monitor contact-buttons in them,” she replied. “Skin adhesive ones. They’re normally put inside ears, or on a shaved patch.”

After a bit more consultation with Kleinman Base and Doctor Kenny, darting the survivors had been given full approval—and since they were going to be out, a modification in the setup had been arranged for. There would be shredded paper bedding in the crates as well as food and water—and each victim would wear a contact-button glued to the spine between the shoulder blades with surgical adhesive. With judicious reprogramming, a minimal amount of medical information could come from that—heart rate, respiration, skin temperature. Tia had reprogrammed the buttons; now it was her brawn’s turn to live up to his title.

“I sure never thought my marksmanship would ever be an asset,” he said absently. The woman had only a foot or so to go. . . .

“I never thought I was going to be packing my hold with canned archeologists.” The packing crates would fit—but only if they were stacked two deep. Alex had already set up the site machine shop servos to drill air holes in all of the crates, and there would be an unbreakable bio-luminescent lightstick in each. They were rated for a week of use. Hopefully that much light would be enough to keep their captives from panicking.

“That’s a good girl,” Alex crooned to the reluctant Zombie. “Good girl. Smell the nice food? It’s really good food. You’re hungry, aren’t you?” The woman took the last few steps in a rush and fell on the dish of ration-cubes. Alex darted her in the same moment.

The trank took effect within seconds, and she didn’t even seem to realize that she’d been struck. She simply dropped over on her side, asleep.

Alex left the needler up on the roof where he’d rigged a sniper-post with a tripod to hold the gun steady. He trotted down the access steps to the first floor and hurried to get out where he could be seen before someone else smelled the food and came after it. As he burst out into the dusty courtyard, a hint of movement at the edge of the camera-field told Tia there
was
another Zombie lurking out there.

After many protests, she had begun calling the survivors “Zombies,” too—it helped to think of them as something other than humans. She admitted to Doctor Kenny that without that distancing it was hard to keep working without strong feelings getting in the way of efficiency.