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knew this would happen.
"Zombies," AJex 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 making 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, neuro transmitters 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."
"Or if the first symptom was sleep ..." She couldn't help herself; she wanted
to shiver with fear. "Alex, I have to set down there. You can't do anything
for those people from up here."
"No argument" He strapped himself in. "Okay, lady. Get us down as fast as you
can. There's one thing I have to do, quick, before we lose any more."
She broke orbit with a sudden acceleration that threw him into the back of his
seat; he didn't bat an eye. His voice got a little more strained, but that was
all.
"I'll have to put on a pressure-suit and get into the supplies; put out food
and pans of water. They're starving and dehydrated. Spirits of space only know
what they've been eating and drinking all this time. Could be a lot of them
died of dysentery, or from eating or drinking something that wasn't food." He
was thinking out loud; waiting for Tia to put in her own thoughts, or warn him
if he was planning to do something really stupid. "No matter what else we do,
I have to do that"
"Open up emergency ration bags and leave pans of the cubes all over the
compound," she suggested, as her outer skin heated up to a glowing red as she
hit the upper atmosphere. "Do the same with the water. Like you were feeding
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animals."
"I am feeding animals," he said, and his voice and face were bleak. "I
have to keep telling myself that. Or I'll do something really, really stupid.
You get a line established to Kleinman Base, ASAP"
"Already in the works." A hyperwave comlink that far wasn't the easiest thing
to establish and hold.
But that was why she was a brainship, not an AI drone.
"Hang on," she said, as she hit the first of the turbulence. "It's going to be
a bumpy burn down!"
The camera and external mike on Alex's helmet gave her a much clearer view of
the survivors than Tia really wanted. Of the complement of two hundred at this
base, no more than fifty survived, most of them between the ages of fifteen
and thirty.
They avoided Alex entirely, hiding whenever they saw him, but they came out to
huddle around the pans of food and water he put out, stuffing food into their
faces with both hands. Alex had gotten three of the bodies he'd found in their
beds into die med-center, and the diagnosis was the same in all three cases;
complete systemic collapse, which might have been stroke. The rest, the ones
that had not simply dropped in their tracks, had died of dysentery and
dehydration. Of the casualties, it looked as if half of the dead had keeled
over with this collapse, all of them the oldest members of the team.
After the third, Alex called a halt to it; instead he loaded the bodies
into the base freezer. Someone else would have to come get them and deal with
them. Tia had recorded his efforts, but could not bring herself to actually
watch the incoming video.
He completed his grisly work and returned to caring for the living.
"Tia, as near as I can guess, this thing hits people in one of two ways.
Either you get a stroke or something and die, or you turn into, that." She
saw whatever he was looking at by virtue of the fact that the helmet-camera
was mounted right over his forehead. And 'that' was something that had once
been a human boy, scrambling away out of sight.
"That seems like a good enough assumption for now," she agreed. "Can you tell
what happened with the food situation? Are they so far gone that they can't
remember how to get into basic supplies?"
"That's about it," he agreed, wearily. "Believe it or not, they can't even
remember how to pop ration packs. They seem to have a vague memory of where
the food was stored, but they never even tried to open the door to the supply
warehouse." He trudged across the compound to one of the pans he had set out.
It was already empty, without even crumbs. He poured ration-cubes into it from
a bag he carried under his arm. She caught furtive movement at the edge of the
camera-view; presumably the survivors were waiting for him to go away so that
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