"All right, Tia-my-love, explain what's going on here, in words of one syllable," Alex said plaintively, when Tia got finished with tracing the maze of orders and counter-orders that had interrupted their routine round of deliveries to tiny two- to four-person Exploratory digs. "Who's on first?"
"And What's on second," she replied absentmindedly. Just before leaving she'd gotten a datahedron on old-Terran slang phrases and their derivation; toying with the idea of producing that popular-science article. If it got published on enough nets, it might well earn her a tidy little bit of credit—and no amount of credit, however small, was to be scorned. But one unexpected side-effect of scanning it was that she tended to respond with the punch lines of jokes so old they were mummified.
Though now, at least, she knew what the CenCom operator had meant by "hang onto your bustle" and that business about the wicked witch who'd had a house dropped on her sister.
"What?" Alex responded, perplexed. "No, never mind. I don't want to know. Just tell me whose orders we're supposed to be following. I got lost back there in the fifth or sixth dispatch."
"I've got it all straight now, and it's dual-duty," she replied. "Institute, with backup from Central, although they were countermanding each other in the first four or five sets of instructions. One of the Excavation digs hasn't been checking in. Went from their regular schedule to nothing, not even a chirp."
"You don't sound worried," Alex pointed out.
"Well, I am, and I'm not," she replied, already calculating the quickest route through hyperspace, and mentally cursing the fact that they didn't have Singularity Drive. But then again, there wasn't a Singularity point anywhere near where they wanted to go. So the drive wasn't the miracle of instantaneous transportation some people claimed it was. Hmm, and some brainships too, naming no names. All very well if there were Singularity points littering the stellarscape like stars in the Core, but out here, at this end of the galactic arm, stars were close, but points were few and far between. One reason why the Institute hadn't opted for a more expensive ship. "If it were an Exploratory dig like my—like we've been trotting supplies and mail to, I would worry a lot. They're horribly vulnerable. And an Evaluation dig is just as subject to disaster, since the maximum they can have is twenty people. But a Class Three—Alex, this one had a complement of two hundred! That's more that enough people to hold off any trouble!"
"Class Three Excavation sites get a lot of graduate students, don't they?" Alex said, while she locked things down in her holds for takeoff with help from the servos. Pity the cargo handlers hadn't had time to stow things properly.
"Exactly. They provide most of the coolie labor when there aren't any natives to provide a work force—that's why the Class Three digs have essentially the same setup as a military base. Most of the personnel are young, strong, and they get the best of the equipment. This one has—" she quickly checked her briefing "—one hundred seventy-eight people between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. That's plenty to set up perimeter guards."
Alex's fingers raced across the keypads in front of him, calling up data to her screens. "Hmm. No really nasty native beasties. Area declared safe. And—my. Fully armed, are we?" He glanced over at the column. "I had no idea archeologists were such dangerous beings! They never told me that back in secondary school!"
"Grrr," she responded. She flashed a close-up of the bared fangs of a dog on one of the screens he wasn't using. In the past several weeks she and Alex had spent a lot of time talking, getting to know each other. By virtue of her seven years spent mobile, she was a great deal more like a softperson than any of her classmates, and Alex was fun to be around. Neither of them particularly minded the standard issue beiges of her interior; what he had done, during the time spent in FTL, was to copy the minimalist style of his sensei's home, taking a large brush and some pure black and red enamel, and copying one or two Zen ideographs on the walls that seemed barest. She thought they looked very handsome—and quietly elegant.
Of course, his cabin was a mess—but she didn't have to look in there, and she avoided doing so as much as possible.
In turn, he expressed delight over her "sparkling personality." No matter what the counselors said, she had long ago decided that she had feelings and emotions and had no guilt over showing them to those she trusted. Alex had risen in estimation from "partner" to "trusted" in the past few weeks; he had a lively sense of humor and enjoyed teasing her. She enjoyed teasing right back.
"Pull in your fangs, wench," he said. "I realize that the only reason they get those arms is because there are no sentients down there. So, what's on the list of Things That Get Well-Armed Archeologists? I have the sinking feeling there were a lot of things they didn't tell me about archeology back in secondary school!"
"Seriously? It's a short list, but a nasty one." She sobered. "Lock yourself in; I'm going to lift, and fast. Things are likely to rattle around." With drives engaged, she pulled away from her launch cradle, acknowledged Traffic Control and continued her conversation, all at once. "Artifact thieves are high on that list—if you've got a big dig, you can bet that there are things being found that are going to be worth a lot to collectors. They'll come in, blast the base, land, kill everyone left over that gets in their way, grab the loot and lift, all within hours." Which was why the hidey was so far from our dome, and why Mum and Dad told me to get in it and stay in it if trouble came. "But normally they work an area, and normally they don't show up anyplace where Central has a lot of patrols. There haven't been any thieves in that area, and it is heavily patrolled."
"So—what's next on the list?" Alex asked, one screen dedicated to the stats on the dig, his own hands busy with post-lift chores that some brawns would have left to their brains. Double-checking to make sure all the servos had put themselves away, for instance. Keeping an eye on the weight-and-balance in the holds. Just another example, she thought happily, of what a good partner he was.
She was clear of the cradle and about to clear local airspace. Nearing time to accelerate "like a scalded cat." Now that's a phrase that's still useful. . . . "Next on the list is something we don't even have to consider, and that's a native uprising."
"Hmm, so I see." His eyes went from the secondary screen where the data on the dig was posted and back to the primary. "No living native sophonts on the continent. But I can see how it could be the Zulu wars all over again."
He nodded, acknowledging her logic, and she was grateful to his self-education in history.
"Precisely," she replied. "Throw enough warm bodies at the barricades, and any defense will go down. In a native uprising, there are generally hordes of fervent fanatics willing to die in the cause and go straight to Paradise. Accelerating, Alex."
He gave her a thumbs-up, and she threw him into his seat. He merely raised an eyebrow at her column and kept typing. "There must be several different variations on that theme. Let's see—you could have your Desecration of Holy Site Uprising, your Theft of Ancient Treasures Uprising, your Palace Coup Uprising, your Local Peasant Revolution Uprising. Uh-huh. I can see it. And when you've overrun the base, it's time to line everyone up as examples of alien exploitation. Five executioners, no waiting."
"They normally don't kill except by accident, actually, or in the heat of the moment," she told him. "Most native sophonts are bright enough to realize that two hundred of Central Systems' citizens, a whole herd of their finest minds and their dependents, make a much better bargaining chip as hostages than they do as casualties."
"Not much comfort to those killed in the heat of the moment," he countered. "So, what's the next culprit on the list?"
"The third, last, and most common," she said, a bit grimly, and making no effort to control her voice-output. "Disease."
"Whoa, wait a minute—I thought that these sites were declared free of hazard!" He stopped typing and paled a little, as well he might. Plague was the bane of the Courier Service existence. More than half the time of every CS ship was spent in ferrying vaccines across known space—and for every disease that was eradicated, three more sprang up out of nowhere. Nor were the brawns immune to the local plagues that just might choose to start at the moment they planeted. "I thought all these sites were sprayed down to a fare-thee-well before they let anyone move in!"
"Yes, but that's the one I'm seriously concerned about." And not just because it was a bug that got me. "That, my dear Alex, is what they don't tell you bright-eyed young students when you consider a career in archeology. The number one killer of xeno-archeologists is disease." And the number one crippler, for that matter. "Viruses and proto-viruses are sneaky sons-of-singularities; they can hibernate in tombs for centuries, millennia, even in airless conditions." She flashed up some Institute statistics; the kind they didn't show the general public. There was a thirty percent chance that a xeno-archeologist would be permanently disabled by disease during his career; a twenty percent chance that he would die. And a one hundred percent chance that he would be seriously ill, requiring hospitalization, from something caught on a dig, at some point in his life.
"So the bug hibernates. Then when the intrepid explorer pops the top off—" Alex looked as grim as she felt.
"Right. Gotcha." She laughed, but it had a very flat sound. "Well, sometimes it's been known to be fortuitous. The Cades actually met when they were recovering from Henderson's Chorea—ah—or so their biographies in Who's Who say. There could be worse things than having the Institute cover your tropic vacation."
"But mostly it isn't." His voice was as flat as her laugh had been.
"Ye-es. One of my—close friends is Doctor Kennet on the Pride of Albion. He's gotten to be a specialist in diseases that get archeologists. He's seen a lot of nasty variations over the years—including some really odd opportunistic bugs that are not only short-lived after exposure to air, but require a developing nervous system in order to set up housekeeping."
"Developing—oh, I got it. A kid, or a fetus, provided it could cross the placental barrier." He shivered, and his expression was very troubled. "Brr, that's a really nasty one."
"Verily, White Knight." She decided not to elaborate on it. Maybe later. To let him know I'm not only out for fortune and glory. "I just wanted you to be prepared when we got there, which we will in—four days, sixteen hours, and thirty-five minutes. Not bad, for an old-fashioned FTL drive, I'd say." She'd eliminated the precise measurements that some of the other shellpersons used with their brawns in the first week—except when she was speaking to another shellperson, of course. Alex didn't need that kind of precision, most of the time; when he did, he asked her for it. She had worried at first that she might be getting sloppy—
No, I'm just accommodating myself to his world. I don't mind. And when he needs precision, he lets me know in advance.
"Well, let me see if I can think of some non-lethal reasons for the dig losing communications—" He grinned. "How about—'the dinosaur ate my transmitter?'"
"Cute." Now that their acceleration had smoothed and they were out of the atmosphere, she sent servos snooping into his cabin, as was her habit whenever a week or so went by, and he was at his station, giving her non-invasive access. "Alex, don't you ever pick up your clothes?"
"Sometimes. Not when I'm sent hauling my behind up the stairs with my tail on fire and a directive from CS ordering me to report back to my ship immediately." He shrugged, completely unrepentant. "I wouldn't even have changed my clothes if that officious b—"
"Alex," she warned. "I'm recording, I have to. Regulations." Ever since the debacle involving the Nyota Five, all central cabin functions were recorded, whenever there was a softperson, even if only a brawn, present. That was regulation even on AI drones. The regs had been written for AI drones, in fact; and CS administration had decided that there was no reason to rewrite them for brainships—and every reason why they shouldn't. This way no one could claim "discrimination," or worse, "entrapment."
"If that officious bully hadn't insisted I change to uniform before lifting." He shook his head. "As if wearing a uniform was going to make any difference in how well you handled the lift. Which was, as always, excellent."
"Thank you." She debated chiding him on his untidy nature and decided against it. It hadn't made any difference before, it probably wouldn't now. She just had the servos pick up the tunic and trousers—wincing at the ultra-neon purple that was currently in vogue—and deposited them in the laundry receptacle.
And I'll probably have to put them away when they're clean, too. No wonder they wanted him to change. Hmm. Wonder if I dare "lose" them? Or have a dreadful accident that dyes them a nice sober plum?
That was a thought to tuck away for later. "Getting back to the dinosaur—com equipment breaks, and even a Class Three dig can end up with old equipment. If the only fellow on the dig qualified to fix it happens to be laid up with broken bones—in case you hadn't noticed, archeologists fall down shafts and off cliffs a lot—or double-pneumonia . . ."
"Good point." He finished his "housekeeping chores" with a flourish and settled back in his chair. "Say, Tia, they're all professorial types—do they ever just get so excited they forget to transmit?"
"Brace yourself for FTL—" The transition to FTL was nowhere near as distressing to softpersons as the dive into a Singularity, but it required some warning. Alex gripped the arms of the seat, and closed his eyes, as she made the jump into hyperspace.
She never experienced more than a brief shiver—like ducking into a freezing-cold shower—but Alex always looked a little green during transition. Fortunately, he had no trouble in hyper itself.
And if I can ever afford a Singularity Drive, his records say he takes those transitions pretty well. . . .
Well, right now, that was little more than a dream. She picked up the conversation where it had left off. "That has happened on Class One digs and even Class Two, but usually somebody realizes the report hasn't been made after a while when you're dealing with a big dig. Besides, logging reports constitutes publication, and grad students need all the publication they can get. Still, if they just uncovered the equivalent of Tutankhamen's tomb, they might all be so excited—and busy documenting finds and putting them into safe storage—that they've forgotten the rest of the universe exists."
He swallowed hard, controlling his nausea. It generally seemed to take his stomach a couple of minutes to settle down. Maybe the reason it doesn't hit me is because there's no sensory nerves to my stomach anymore. . . .
But that only brought back unpleasant memories; she ruthlessly shunted the thought aside.
"So—" he said finally, as his color began to return. "Tell me why you aren't in a panic because they haven't answered."
"Artifact thieves would probably have been spotted, there aren't any natives to revolt, and disease usually takes long enough to set in that somebody would have called for help," she said. "And that's why CS wasn't particularly worried, and why they kept countermanding the Institute's orders. But either this expedition has been out of touch for so long that even they think there's something wrong, or they've got some information they didn't give us. So we're going in."
"And we find out when we get there," Alex finished; and there wasn't a trace of a smile anywhere on his face.
Tia brought them out of hyper with a deft touch that rattled Alex's insides as little as possible. Once in orbit, she sent down a signal that should activate the team's transmitter if there was anything there to activate. As she had told Alex several days ago, com systems broke. She was fully expecting to get no echo back.
Instead—
You are linked to Excavation Team Que-Zee-Five-Five-Seven. The beacon's automatic response came instantly, in electronic mode. Then came the open carrier wave.
"Alex, I think we have a problem," she said, carefully.
"Echo?" He tensed.
"Full echo—" She sent the recognition signal that would turn on landing assistance beacons and alert the AI that there was someone Upstairs—the AI was supposed to open the voice-channel in the absence of humans capable of handling the com. The AI came online immediately, transmitting a ready to receive instructions signal.
"Worse, they've got full com. I just got the AI go-signal."
She blipped a compressed several megabytes of instructions to give her control of all external and internal recording devices, override any programs installed since the base was established, and give her control of all sensory devices still working.
"Get the AI to give me some pictures," he said, all business. "If it can."
"Coming up—ah, external cam three—this is right outside the mess hall and—oh shellcrack—"
"I'll second that," Alex replied, just as grimly.
The camera showed them—somewhat fuzzily—a scene that was anything but a pretty sight.
There were bodies lying in plain view of the camera; from the lack of movement they could not be live bodies. They seemed to be lying where they fell, and there was no sign of violence on them. Tia switched to the next camera the AI offered; a view inside the mess hall. Here, if anything, things were worse. Equipment and furniture lay toppled. More bodies were strewn about the room.
A chill that had nothing to do with the temperature in her shell held her in thrall. Fear, horror, helplessness—
Her own private nightmares—
Tia exerted control over her internal chemistry with an effort; told herself that this could not be the disease that had struck her. These people were taken down right where they stood or sat—
She started to switch to another view, when Alex leaned forward suddenly.
"Tia, wait a minute."
Obediently, she held the screen, sharpening the focus as well as the equipment, the four-second lag-to-orbit, and atmospheric interference would allow. She couldn't look at it herself.
"There's no food," he said, finally. "Look—there's plates and things all over the place, but there's not a scrap of food anywhere."
"Scavengers?" she suggested. "Or whatever—"
Whatever killed them? But there are no signs of an invasion, an attack from outside—
He shook his head. "I don't know. Let's try another camera."
This one was outside the supply building—and this was where they found their first survivors.
If that's what you can call them. Tia absorbed the incoming signal, too horrified to turn her attention away. There was a trio of folk within camera range: one adolescent, one young man, and one older woman. They paid no attention to each other, nor to the bodies at their feet, nor to their surroundings. The adolescent sat in the dirt of the compound, stared at a piece of brightly colored scrap paper in front of him, and rocked, back and forth. There was no sound pickup on these cameras, so there was no indication that he was doing anything other than rocking in silence, but Tia had the strange impression that he was humming tunelessly.
The young man stood two feet from a fence and shifted his weight back and forth from foot to foot, swaying, as if he wanted to get past the fence and had no idea how. And the older woman paced in an endless circle.
All three of them were filthy, dressed in clothes that were dirt-caked and covered with stains. Their faces were dirt-streaked, eyes vacant; their hair straggled into their eyes in ratty tangles. Tia was just grateful that the cameras were not equipped to transmit odor.
"Tia, get me another camera, please," Alex whispered, after a long moment.
Camera after camera showed the same view; either of bodies lying in the dust, or of bodies and a few survivors, aimlessly wandering. Only one showed anyone doing anything different; one young woman had found an emergency ration pouch and torn it open. She was single-mindedly stuffing the ration-cubes into her mouth with both hands, like—
"Like an animal," Alex supplied in a whisper. "She's eating like an animal."
Tia forced herself to be dispassionate. "Not like an animal," she corrected. "At least, not a healthy one." She analyzed the view as if she were dealing with an alien species. "No—she acts like an animal that's been brain-damaged—or maybe a drug addict that's been on something so long there isn't much left of his higher functions."
This wasn't "her" disease. It was something else—deadly—but not what had struck her down. What she felt was not exactly relief, but she was able to detach herself from the situation, to distance herself a little.
You knew, sooner or later, you'd see a plague. This one is a horror, but you knew this would happen.
"Zombies," Alex 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 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 the 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 they could empty the pan again. "When they found the emergency pouches they tore them open, like that woman we watched. But a lot of times, they don't even seem to realize that the pouch has food in it."
"There's two kinds of victims; the first lot, who got hit and died in their sleep or on the way to breakfast," he continued, making his way to the next pan. "Then the rest of them died of dehydration and dysentery because they were eating half-rotten food."
"Those would go hand-in-hand, here," she replied. "With nothing to stop the liquid loss through dysentery, dehydration comes on pretty quickly."
"That's what I figured." He paused to fill another pan. "There'd be more of them dead, of exposure and hypothermia, except that the temperature doesn't drop below twenty Celsius at night, or get above thirty in the daytime. Shirtsleeve weather. Tia—see when this balmy weather pattern started, would you?"
"Right." He must have had an idea—and it didn't take her more than a moment to interrogate the AI. "About a week before the last contact. Does that sound as suspicious to you as it does to me?"
"Yeah. Maybe something hatched." Alex scanned the area for her, and she noted that there were a fair number of insects in the air.
But native insects wouldn't bite humans—or would they? "Or sprouted—this could be a violent allergic reaction, or some other kind of interaction with a mold spore or pollen." Farfetched, but not entirely impossible.
"But why wouldn't the Class One team have uncovered it?" he countered, filling another pan with ration-cubes. "Kibble," the brawns called it. The basic foodstuff of the Central System worlds; the monotonous ration-bars handed out by the PTA to client-planets cut up into bite-sized pieces. Tia had never eaten it; her parents had always insisted on real meals, but she had been told that while it looked, smelled, and tasted reasonable, its very sameness would drive you over the edge if you had to eat it for very long. But every base had emergency pouches of the stuff cached all over, and huge bags stockpiled in the warehouse, in case something happened to the food-synthesizers.
Those pouches must have been what kept the survivors going—until they ran out of pouches that were easy to find.
The dig records were, fortunately, quite clear. "Got the answer to your question—Class One dig was here for winter, only—they found what they needed to upgrade to Class Three within a couple of days of digging. They really hit a big find in the first test trench, and the Institute pushed the upgrade through to take advantage of the good weather coming."
"And initial Survey teams don't live here, they live on their ships." Alex had a little more life in his voice.
"They were only here in the fall," she said. "There's never been a human here during spring and summer."
"Tia, you put that together with an onset of this thing after dark, and what do you get?"
"An insect vector?" she hazarded. "Nocturnal? I must admit that the pattern for venomous and biting insects is to appear after sunset."
"Sounds right to me. As soon as I get done filling the pans again, I'm going to go grab some bedding from one of the victims' beds, seal it in a crate, and freeze it. Maybe it's something like a flea. Can you see if there's anything in the AI med records about a rash of insect bites?"
"Can do," she responded, glad to finally have something, anything, concrete to do.
The sun was near the horizon when Alex finished boxing his selection of bedding and sealing it in a freezer container. He came back out again after loading the container into one of Tia's empty holds. She saw to the sealing of the hold, while he went back out to try and catch one of the Zombies—a name he had tagged the survivors with over her protests.
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.
"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!"
Tia groaned, picturing more neon-purple, or worse. "Don't open the bags, or they'll think I've had a radiation leak."
He mock-pouted. "My dear lady, your taste is somewhere back in the last decade."
"Never mind my taste," she said. "What's the better news?"
"Our patients are on their way to full recovery." At her exclamation, he held up a cautionary hand. "It's going to take them several months, maybe even a year. Here's the story—and the reason why they stripped you of everything that could be considered a fabric. Access your Terran entomology, if you would. Call up something called a 'dust mite' and another something called a 'sand flea.'"
Puzzled, she did so, laying the pictures side by side on the central screen.
"As we guessed, this was indeed a virus, with an insect vector. The culprit was something like a sand flea, which, you will note, has a taste for warm-blooded critters. But it was about the size of a dust mite. The fardling things don't hatch until the temperature is right, the days are long enough, and there's been a rainstorm. Once they hatch, the only thing that kills them is really intense insecticide or freezing cold for several weeks. They live in the dust, like sand fleas. Those archeologists had been tracking in dust ever since the rainstorm, and since there'd been no sign of any problems, they hadn't been very careful about their decontamination protocols. The bugs all hatched within an hour, or so the entomologists think. They bit everything in sight, since they always wake up hungry. But—here's the catch—since they were so small, they didn't leave a bite mark, so there was nothing to show that anyone had been bitten." He nodded at the screen. "Every one of the little beggars carries the virus. It's like E. coli, the human bacillus, living in their guts the way it does in ours."
"I assume that everyone got bitten about the same time?" she hazarded.
"Exactly," he said. "Which meant that everyone came down with the virus within hours of each other. Mostly, purely by coincidence, in their sleep. The virus itself invokes allergic shock in most people it infects. Which can look a lot like a stroke, under the right circumstances."
"So we didn't—" She stopped herself before she went any further, but he finished the statement for her.
"No, we didn't kill anyone. It was the Zombie Bug. And the best news of all is that the Zombie state is caused by interference with the production of neurotransmitters. Clean out the virus, and eventually everyone gets back to normal."
"Oh Alex—" she said, and he interrupted her.
"A little more excellent news—first, that we get a bonus for this one. And second, my very dear, you saved my life."
"I did?" she replied, dumbfounded.
"If I had cracked my suit even once, the bugs would have gotten in. They were everywhere, in your carpet, the upholstery; either they got in the first time we cracked the lock, or the standard decontamination didn't wash them all off the suit or kill them. And I am one of those seventy-five percent of the population so violently allergic to them that—" He let her fill in the rest.
"Alex—I'd rather have you as my brawn than all the bonuses in the world," she said, after a long pause.
"Good," he said, rising, and patting her column gently. "I feel the same way."
Before the moment could get maudlin, he cleared his throat, and continued. "Now the bad news: we're so far behind on our deliveries that they want us out of here yesterday. So, are you ready to fly, bright lady?"
She laughed. "Strap on your chair, hotshot. Let's show 'em how to burn on out of here!"