Ship Who Searched (18 page)

“That’s all right, Tia,” he soothed on his next transmission. “Even I have to stop thinking of my patients as people and start thinking of them as ‘cases’ or ‘case studies’ sometimes. That’s the nature of this business, and we’ll both do what we have to in order to get as many of these people back alive as we can.”

She would have liked to ask him if he’d ever thought of
her
as a “case study,” but she knew, in her heart of hearts, that he probably had. But then, look what he had done for her. . . .

No, calling these poor people “Zombies” wasn’t going to hurt them, and it would keep her concentrating on what to do for them, and not on
them.

Alex had been boxing Zombies all morning, and now he had it down to a system. Wheeling out of the warehouse, under the control of the AI, came a small parade of servos laden with the supplies that would keep the woman—hopefully—alive and healthy in her crate for the next five or six days. A bag of finely shredded paper, to make a thick nest on the bottom of the box. A whole bag of ration-cubes. A big squeeze-bottle of water. A tiny chemical toilet, on the off-chance she
might
remember how to use it. The bio-luminescent lightstick. Inside of fifteen minutes, Alex had his set up. The big bottle of water was strapped to one wall, the straps glue-bonded in place, the bottle bonded to the straps. The toilet was bonded to the floor in the corner of the six foot by six foot crate. The bag of ration-cubes was opened at the top, and strapped and bonded into the opposite corner. Paper was laid in a soft bed over the entire floor, and the unconscious woman rolled onto it, with the contact-button glued to her back. Lastly, the bio-luminescent tube was activated and glue-bonded to the roof of the crate, the side brought up and fastened in place, and the crate was ready for the loader.

That was Tia’s job; she brought the servo-forklift in from the warehouse under her control rather than the AI’s. Alex did not trust the AI to have the same fine control that Tia did. The lift bore the now-anonymous crate up her ramp, and she stored it with the rest, piled not two but three high and locked in place. Each crate was precisely eight inches from the ones next to it, to allow for proper ventilation on four sides. There were twelve crates in the hold now. They hoped to have twelve more before nightfall. If all went well.

Thirty minutes for each capture. . . .

They couldn’t have done it if not for Tia’s multitasking abilities and all the servos under her control. Right now, a set of servos were setting up crates all over the compound, near the hiding places of the Zombies. The Zombies seemed just as frightened of the servos as they were of Alex in his suit. By running the servos all over the compound, they managed to send every one of the Zombies into hiding. They ran servos around each hiding place until they were ready to move to that area for darting and capture. By now, the Zombies were getting hungry, which was all to the good, so far as Alex and Tia were concerned. One trap was being baited now—and Alex was on his way to the hidden sniper position above it. Meanwhile, the rest of the servos were patrolling the compound
except
in the area of that baited crate, keeping the Zombies pinned down.

A second hair-raising moment had occurred at dawn, bringing Alex up out of his bed with a scream of his own. The Zombies had gathered to greet the rising sun with another chorus of howls, although this time they seemed more—well, not joyous, but certainly there was no fear in the Zombie faces.

Once the first servo appeared, and frightened the Zombies into hiding again, the final key to their capture plan was in place.

They would catch as many of the Zombies as possible during the daylight hours. Alex had marked their favorite hiding places last night, and by now those patrolling servos had those that were not occupied blocked off. More crates would be left very near those blocked-off hiding holes. Would they be attractive enough for more of the Zombies to hide in them? Alex thought so. Tia hoped he was right—for every Zombie cowering in a crate meant one more they could dart and pack up—one more they would not have to catch tomorrow.

One less half-hour spent here. If they could keep up the pace—if the Zombies didn’t get harder to catch.

Alex kept up a running dialogue with her, and she sensed that he was as frightened and lonely as she was, but was determined not to show it. He revealed a lot, over the course of the day; she built up a mental picture of a young man who had been just different enough that while he was mildly popular—or at least, not unpopular—he had few close friends. The only one who he really spoke about was someone called Jon—the chess and games player he had mentioned before. He spent a lot of time with Jon—who had helped him with his lessons when he was younger, so Tia assumed that Jon must have been older than Alex.

Older or not, Jon had been, and still was, a
friend
. There was no mistaking the warmth in Alex’s voice when he talked about Jon; no mistaking the pleasure he felt when he talked about the message of congratulation Jon had sent when he graduated from the academy—

Or the laughter he’d gotten from the set of “brawn jokes” Jon had sent when Tia picked Alex as her partner.

Well, Doctor Kenny, Anna, and Lars were my friends—and still are. Sometimes age doesn’t make much of a difference.

“Hey, Alex?” she called. He was waiting for another of the timid Zombies to give in to hunger. The clock was running.

“What?”

“What do you call a brawn who can count past ten?”

“I don’t know,” he said good-naturedly. “What?”

“Barefoot.”

He made a rude noise, then sighted and pulled the trigger. One down, how many more to go?

They had fifty-two Zombies packed in the hold, and one casualty. One of the Zombies had not survived the darting; Alex had gone into acute depression over that death, and it had taken Tia more than an hour to talk him out of it. She didn’t dare tell him then what those contact-buttons revealed; some of their passengers weren’t thriving well. The heart rates were up, probably with fear, and she heard whimpering and wailing in the hold whenever there was no one else in it but the Zombies. The moment any of the servos or Alex entered the hold, the captives went utterly silent. Out of fear, Tia suspected.

The last Zombie was in the hold; the hold was sealed, and Tia had brought the temperature up to skin-heat. The ventilators were at full-strength. Alex had just entered the main cabin.

And he was reaching for his helmet-release.

“
Don’t crack your suit,
” she snapped. How could she have forgotten to tell him? Had she? Or had she told him, and
he
had forgotten?

“What?” he said—then—“Oh,
decom
it. I forgot.”

She restrained herself from saying what she wanted to. “Doctor Kenny said you have to stay in the suit. Remember? He thinks that the chance we might have missed something in decontamination is too much to discount. He doesn’t want you to crack your suit until you’re at the base. All right?”

“What if something goes wrong for the Zombies?” he asked, quietly. “Tia, there isn’t enough room in that hold for me to climb around in the suit.”

“We’ll worry about that if it happens,” she replied firmly. “Right now, the important thing is for you to get strapped down, because
their
best chance is to get to Base as quickly as possible, and I’m going to leave scorch-marks on the ozone layer getting there.”

He took the unsubtle hint and strapped himself in; Tia was better than her word, making a tail-standing takeoff and squirting out of the atmosphere with a blithe disregard for fuel consumption. The Zombies were going to have to deal with the constant acceleration to hyper as best they could—at least she knew that they were all sitting or lying down, because the crates simply weren’t big enough for them to stand.

She had been relaying symptoms—observed and recorded—back to Doctor Kenny and the med staff at Kleinman Base all along. She had known that they weren’t going to get a lot of answers, but every bit of data was valuable, and getting it there ahead of the victims was a plus.

But now that they were on the way, they were on their own, without the resources of the abandoned dig or the base they were en route to. The med staff might have answers—but
they
likely would not have the equipment to implement them.

Alex couldn’t move while she was accelerating—but once they made the jump to FTL, he unsnapped his restraints and headed for the stairs.

“Where are you going?” she asked, nervously.

“The hold. I’m in my suit—there’s nothing down there that can get me through the suit.”

Tia listened to the moans and cries through her hold pickups; thought about the contact-buttons that showed fluttering hearts and unsteady breathing. She knew what would happen if he got down there.

“You can’t do anything for them in the crates,” she said. “You know that.”

He turned toward her column. “What are you hiding from me?”

“N-nothing,” she said. But she didn’t say it firmly enough.

He turned around and flung himself back in his chair, hands speeding across the keyboard with agility caused by days of living in the suit. Within seconds he had called up every contact-button and had them displayed in rows across the screen.

“Tia, what’s going on down there?” he demanded. “They weren’t like this before we took off, were they?”

“I think—” She hesitated. “Alex, I’m not a doctor!”

“You’ve got a medical library. You’ve been talking to the doctors. What do you think?”

“I think—they aren’t taking hyper well. Some of the data the base sent me on brain-damaged simians suggested that
some
kinds of damage did something to the parts of the brain that make you compensate for—for things that you know should be there, but aren’t. Where you can see a whole letter out of just parts of it—identify things from split-second glimpses. Kind of like maintaining a mental balance. Anyway, when that’s out of commission—” She felt horribly helpless. “I think for them it’s like being in Singularity.”

“For
four days
?” he shouted, hurting her sensors. “I’m going down there—”

“And do what?” she snapped back. “What are you going to do for them? They’re afraid of you in that suit!”

“Then I’ll—”

“You do, and I’ll gas the ship,” she said instantly. “I
mean
that, Alex! You put
one finger
on a release and I’ll gas the whole ship!”

He sat back down, collapsing into his chair. “What can we do?” he said weakly. “There has to be something.”

“We’ve got some medical supplies,” she pointed out. “A couple of them can be adapted to add to the air supply down there.
Help
me, Alex. Help me find something we can do for them. Without you cracking your suit.”

“I’ll try,” he said, unhappily. But his fingers were already on the keyboard, typing in commands to the med library, and not sneaking towards his suit-releases. She blanked for a microsecond with relief—

Then went to work.

Three more times there were signs of crisis in the hold. Three more times she had to threaten him to keep him from diving in and trying to save one of the Zombies by risking his own life. They lost one more, to a combination of anti-viral agent and watered-down sleepygas that they
hoped
would act as a tranquilizer rather than an anesthetic. Zombie number twenty-seven might have been allergic to one or the other, although there was no such indication in his med records; his contact-button gave all the symptoms of allergic shock before he died.

Alex stopped talking to her for four hours after that—twenty-seven had been in the bottom rank, and a shot of adrenaline would have brought him out—
if
it had been allergic shock. But his crate was also buried deep in the stacks, and Alex would have had to peel the whole suit off to get to him. Which Tia wouldn’t permit. They had no way of knowing if this was really an allergic reaction, or if it was another development of the Zombie Bug. Twenty-seven had been an older man, showing some of the worst symptoms.

Although Alex wasn’t talking to her, Tia kept talking at him, until he finally gave in. Just as well. His silence had her convinced that he was going to ask for a transfer, and that he hated her—if a shellperson could be in tears, she was near that state when he finally answered.

“You’re right,” was all he said. “Tia, you were right. There are fifty more people there depending on both of us, and if I got sick, that’s the mobile half of the team out.” And he sighed. But it was enough. Things went back to normal for them. Just in time for the transition to norm space.

Kleinman Base kept them in orbit, sending a full decontamination team to fetch Alex as well as the Zombies, leaving Tia all alone for about an hour. It was a very lonely hour. . . .

But then another decontamination team came aboard, and when they left again, two days later, there was nothing left of her original fittings. She had been fogged, gassed, stripped, polished, and refitted in that time. All that was left—besides the electronic components—were the ideographs painted on the walls. It still looked the same, however, because everything was replaced with the same standard-issue, psychologically approved beige—

Only then was she permitted to de-orbit and land at Kleinman Base so that the decontamination team could leave.

No sooner had the decontamination team left, when there was a welcome hail at the airlock.

“Tia! Permission to come aboard, ma’am!”

She activated her lock so quickly that it must have flown open in his face, and brought him up in the lift rather than waiting for him to climb the stairs. He sauntered in sans pressure-suit, gave her column a jaunty salute, and put down his bags.

“I have good news and better news,” he said, flinging himself into his chair. “Which do you want to hear first?”

“The good news,” she replied promptly, and did
not
scold him for putting his feet up on the console.

“The good news is all personal. I have been granted a clean bill of health, and so have you. In addition, since the decontamination team so rudely destroyed my clothing and anything else that they couldn’t be sure of, I have just been having a
glorious
spending-spree down there at the Base, using a CS unlimited credit account!”