Dalton, Tymber - Bightmares [Deep Space Mission Corps 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (13 page)

Ilse talked as they walked across the compound. “I mean, if it was all the males, then I could understand that, and Dr. Shourpa would have a starting point to work from. But it’s not all the men. We haven’t been able to isolate a common factor that would lead us to a diagnosis. Keep in mind, we’ve been here for several years now. Nothing’s changed, there was nothing like an impact from a meteorite or something, nothing. Nothing has changed!”

Emi doubted that. What she suspected was a change they didn’t recognize, didn’t notice because they lived here.

But she wondered if she, a stranger to the planet, could find it.

* * * *

To say the small medical complex was overcrowded would have been an understatement of Jupiter-sized proportions. Unconscious men were hooked to IV drips, many of which hung on makeshift poles. With only fifteen patient rooms, they had filled those as well as their emergency room triage area and all but one operating room. Dr. Cayce Shourpa looked overwhelmed and exhausted. When Emi shook hands with her, the woman’s deep despair washed through Emi.

“Thank the gods you’re here!” she cried, hugging Emi. “I just…” She broke down crying. “I don’t know what to do! I’ve done all I can!”

Emi felt the other reason for her anguish. “Your husband, too?”

The vet nodded. “He was one of the first.”

The nurse and med tech, a man by the name of Shello Taber, sat at a desk with Emi. He passed her a hand-held. “Here are all the records we have, all the data we’ve amassed.”

“You’re not infected? You’ve had no symptoms?”

“No. I don’t know why some of us are and some aren’t. The new infections were coming at least one or two a day there, sometimes more. I don’t know why they stopped.” Dark circles lined his bloodshot, green eyes. He also neared exhaustion, Emi sensed. “The rest of us men, we isolated ourselves from the women at first, when this started, after Kale and John were killed.” He took a deep breath. “Now that the infection seems contained, we’ve given that up. We need every available person to help care for them.”

Emi quickly scanned the information while Aaron silently stood behind her and kept a watchful eye on Taber. Before the colony lost their top research and medical staff to the rages, they had ruled out airborne and waterborne issues. The situation had deteriorated dramatically before they could determine what the infected men had in common. Blood type and underlying health issues had been ruled out.

“All the infected men had been here from the beginning?” Emi asked.

Taber nodded. “From the start.”

“No new personnel?”

“Nope. In fact, our last resupply arrived over six months ago. No crew stayed behind.”

“What happens if you wake one of them up?”

He shrugged. “Usually they’re fine, for a while. One guy was fine for two days, and then, just as we thought maybe he’d gotten over it, he attacked me. Back to sedation. Usually they go anywhere from a few hours to almost a day. We haven’t brought anyone out of it for over a week now. It’s too risky.”

Emi studied the files. The first symptoms differed from man to man. One commonality was many of them experienced extreme irritability before the rages first started. The subsequent rages literally came from out of the blue without any apparent trigger. One woman was rescued when her fifteen-year-old daughter heard her father attacking her mother in the middle of the night. She shot him with a stunner.

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!”