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CHAPTER 34:
Detective Work



United States Space Force @USSFActual

We are sad to announce that Percheron captain, Commander Gee LeBlanc, and her chief engineer, Lieutenant Commander Angus Scott, have lost their lives in the performance of their duties. Captain LeBlanc suffered from a previously undiagnosed liver failure, while Engineer Scott lost his life to vacuum exposure during an extravehicular activity.

We previously delayed announcements until the families of the affected crew could be contacted.

George J @spacefan

@OSIGenBoatright, is this true? And what about the widespread sickness that was reported?

USSF Office of Scientific Integration

@OSIGenBoatright

@spacefan, yes, George, this is unfortunate but true. We haven’t yet been able to confirm if Captain LeBlanc’s condition is related to the illness previously reported. Rest assured that Colonel Glenn Shepard is aboard Percheron as my personal representative. He will get to the bottom of it.

ChirpChat, October 2043


Glenn and Yvette agreed on an order of examinations for everyone to be seen in med bay. Her manner was completely professional; he hoped it continued long enough for the exams to be productive.

The most severe were Bialik, Takeda and Katou; they would start with those three. Both Bialik and Takeda were lying on treatment beds in the med bay. Glenn wanted to start with Hana Takeda because she’d collapsed about thirty minutes before he’d arrived, and she looked as if she’d need dialysis as soon as possible. The hydroponics technician was pale, with a yellowish tinge to her skin. She was also delirious—a sign of advanced uremia—because her kidneys could not remove all of the uric acid and other toxic metabolites from the bloodstream. Dialysis was almost always the treatment-of-choice under those conditions, and it pained Glenn that Yvette had not diagnosed and prescribed dialysis before this point.

Yvette and Glenn both looked for the dialysis tubing and cannula that should have been stocked in the med bay. They were unable to find the supplies, so Glenn simply directed her to open the large protective case he’d brought with him from Bat’s supplies. In it were most of the items he expected to need that day, including dialysis supplies. Hana was already lying on the biobed, so it was a simple matter of unpacking tubing and catheter, inserting the sterile tube through a vein under the collarbone, connecting it to ports behind a panel in the bed itself, then slowly advancing the catheter down to the superior vena cava while watching the progress on a combination ultrasound/infrared/x-ray imaging monitor. Once the tip was at the entrance to the heart, the double-barreled catheter would both draw venous blood to pass through the dialysis machine, and return the filtered blood to be pumped onward by the heart.

Again, Yvette performed efficiently and competently, with no hint she’d ever been opposed to the treatment. What was strange, though, was that not only had she been telling the truth about not having (or at least being able to find) the dialysis supplies, the access panel for the dialysis ports was still factory sealed. In addition, the software menu for programming the dialysis was in a hidden menu and locked with the factory access codes. Fortunately, Glenn’s preparations had included learning everything he could about the biobeds. It didn’t all add up yet, but in this, Yvette had been telling the truth.

They moved on to Marta Bialik. Her pancreatic failure was causing wild swings in blood sugar due to erratic insulin production. Abnormally high and low blood glucose levels were beginning to cause extreme pain from damage to nerves in her fingers and toes—a symptom usually associated with advanced type 2 diabetes. With two biobeds in the med bay, they could also put Bialik on dialysis. That would at least help control the blood glucose and other toxins to stabilize the medic for now. Yvette prepped her second patient, and started the dialysis, which went considerably easier the second time.

With two crewmembers being treated in the main room of the med bay, they needed facilities for examining the other patients. There was an additional room designed for isolation of a patient with contagious illness. It was a small room with a single chair and an adjustable cot that doubled as patient transport or examination platform. There were fewer treatment options, but sufficient examination instruments to examine the rest of the Percheron crew. It also had an extremely large observation window so that he could keep an eye on Yvette and his two existing patients while he met with the remainder, or he could swap places and keep an eye on her.

The only problem was the door lock. It was meant to be operated from the outside to prevent an infectious patient from getting out. Glenn checked his heads-up display for med bay access, and found that as captain, he could disable the door lock remotely and disallow any other access—in fact, he was the first person on the ship to access any door lock control subroutine. It was an odd fact, especially given Taketani’s comments about being locked in. He would need to look into that, later.

With that worry taken care of, he called Mila Katou to the med bay. Her condition was better than Bialik and Takeda, but just barely. She was weak, had evidence of recent small hemorrhages on chest, back and abdomen; soreness of, and possible bleeding in, her esophagus; and several red, inflamed patches of skin that were hard to the touch. Glenn checked her eyes, and noted yellowing of the sclera—the whites of her eyes.

Much like the reports on Captain LeBlanc, Katou was showing serious signs of liver failure. There was medication she could be given right now. Dialysis would help with the fluid retention and once they identified the agent causing the damage, removing that cause should help with recovery. If not, he would perform a detailed tissue scan of the liver to see the extent of the damage. If the damaged tissue was less than two-thirds of the organ, he could surgically remove the damage and let the remaining good tissue regenerate itself. Worst case, she’d need a liver transplant.

There was a bioprinter on the Marsbase, but he was uncertain if Percheron had been provided with one. Still, he’d need some of Mila’s stem cells to seed the printer if it was available.

Yvette must have been thinking along the same lines. “You know, we have stem cells banked for everyone aboard. They are in the deep-cold storage aft of the water tanks. We could probably work up a treatment for her.”

That was true, with the right differentiating agents, he could resect her liver and regenerate it from a stem cell culture. It was worth thinking about. It also brought to mind the question of what Yvette had done with the captain’s corpse.

“Yvette? I’d like to compare Katou’s symptoms with LeBlanc’s. Where did you store the body?”

“Gee? I mean, the captain? The same deep-cold unit. It’s set at minus eighty degrees Celsius. The Marsbase crew stored seed, ova, sperm, and other long-term reserved biologicals in there on the outbound trip. It had plenty of room for the body. Just the stem cell bank and some emergency biologicals in there now. I debated putting it in the galley freezer, but figured it wasn’t cold enough.”

“What? With the food?”

“No, we stored the food in Cargo Bay One. It was in vacuum already.”

“Weren’t you afraid of desiccating it?”

“The food or the body? Don’t be silly. Although, now that I think about it, Maxim wanted to store the captain’s body in Cargo Bay One, and Gavin said we should just pitch her out an airlock and tie her off to the outside, but as you said it’s cold and in vacuum, so that wouldn’t do.”

Yvette continued. Her voice and mannerisms had been light and somewhat playful, but now she turned serious. “That’s why I had to take command and have them stay in their rooms. They act like silly little children, always doing whatever pops into their heads.”

Now that wasn’t creepy at all.

Glenn swallowed and cleared his throat. “Okay, when we’re done with exams and can move Marta or Hana off of a treatment bed, we need to go get LeBlanc’s body so I can do an exam.”

“No need, I’ll just tell Eric and Jonas to fetch her. They’ll do anything I ask them to. Such puppy dogs.”

Glenn desperately needed to change this conversation, there was a strange look in Yvette’s eyes, and he’d seen something like it when she’d attacked him three days ago.

“No problem, let’s finish the exams first. The rest of the Percheron personnel are next.”

Scott, the engineer, had been lost during the depressurization of Cargo Bay One. There would be only the records of his symptoms and Yvette’s exam. Without a body, there wasn’t much else he could do. The other three males—Dvorak, Philips, and Christenson—were sick with gastrointestinal complications and some neurological symptoms. He’d already seen signs of aberrant behavior in Dvorak and Philips—the first officer had brought one of his ponies to the exam and kept cuddling and stroking it; the engineering technician answered all questions with a Scottish brogue, but declined to say why he’d affected the accent. Jonas Christensen was nervous and anxious. His eyes continually darted around the room. They seldom stopped, except when he looked toward Yvette and she was not looking back. Those times, his eyes opened wide and his pupils dilated.

He’s afraid, Glenn thought. No! He’s in love!

Glenn now had some idea why Dvorak and the others hadn’t objected to Yvette taking over command. Their neuropsychological symptoms ranged from the sick—way too many; the afraid—and he wasn’t entirely sure how many those were; to the adoring. So far, Philips and Christensen fell into the latter category.


The Marsbase personnel showed a similar pattern with female members more severely affected than males. Organ failure had yet to appear in any of them, but they all showed some form of neurological symptoms such as migraines, insomnia, anxiety, and something like attention deficit disorder. Doctor Melissa Green, the Marsbase botanist and dietician, was the worst affected—that is, if Glenn reserved judgement on Yvette—with erratic behavior that bordered on schizophrenic. Her brother, Stephen, the lead construction engineer, was also the most severely affected male. He alternated bouts of insomnia during the ship’s “night” with narcolepsy during the waking hours, resulting in extreme fatigue and inability to concentrate on any complex tasks.

Glenn found the two quite intriguing—they were fraternal twins, with as close to the same genetics as he was going to get onboard. He expected any environmental contaminant to affect them equally. The fact that Melissa was so much more severely affected than Steve meant that the apparent sexual dimorphism with respect to susceptibility was real, and not coincidental to different genetics, exposure sites, times, or durations. He needed to be looking for something that was either made worse by estrogen, or counteracted by testosterone.

Surya Mishra and Victor Grigorescu, the two men he’d seen removing food from Cargo Bay Two, were the least affected, although their tests revealed high blood alcohol content. After those two exams were complete, Yvette confided that Dvorak and Taketani suspected the pair had built a still and were making their own booze. Given all of the other problems, neither leader had felt it worthwhile to hunt down the still and halt production. They felt that if the two wanted to drink away their problems . . . well, it was no worse than anyone else’s coping mechanism. While Glenn understood the sentiment, it was his job to get everyone home safely . . . and sober. He would need to run additional tests to ensure that the two were not getting any metal toxins from the distillation process.

Habitat engineer Rachel Amit and geologist Maia D’Cruz were the final two Marsbase crew, and the last two females. They reported digestive problems, particularly a phenomenon known as “dumping” where the intestines emptied themselves almost as fast as food could arrive from the stomach. One of the characteristics of the disorder was liver inflammation, as it attempted to keep up with the production of bile salts depleted due to the extremely fast emptying of bowels. Aside from the recurring indications of liver involvement, none of this made sense.

On the one hand, some of the symptoms appeared to be consistent with metal toxicity. On the other, there were symptoms consistent with a gastrointestinal toxin. In either case, it was unclear if the toxin was biological or environmental in source. Neither the exams they’d just conducted, nor Yvette’s prior analyses, had shown any sign of virus or bacteria that could be responsible for these symptoms.

He turned his attention to the possibility of metal poisoning from Mishra and Grigorescu’s still. He asked Yvette if she had run tests for heavy metal contamination, and she showed him the results. The tests had been run over a month ago, though, and while there were traces, it was nothing specific. On the other hand, both were showing signs of dehydration now—and had been when the tests were run. They were likely drinking more of their moonshine than water, so it would have been easy to miss.

He needed more samples.

Glenn was contemplating whether an Earth virus or bacterium could have mutated either in space or on Mars to cause this malady, when twin notifications announced the end of the first cycle of dialysis for Bialik and Takeda. The system retained the dialysate—the fluid and dissolved substances—removed from the bloodstream of the two crewmembers. It could provide additional clues as to what was affecting the crew.

One wall of the med bay, adjacent to the one with the treatment beds, was completely filled with medical laboratory instrumentation. A small drawer was provided to input solid tissue samples, another for semisolids such as bodily wastes and blood, while two injection ports were dedicated to liquid samples. A small console allowed the doctor to select from standard blood analyses, biopsies, chromatography, spectroscopy, and pretty much every medical test the ship designers could include. After Glenn’s experience when he’d had to perform an appendectomy—alone—on a fellow astronaut while orbiting the Moon, his input had been solicited for design of this med bay. Thus, Glenn knew what tests should be possible, and he’d programmed the treatment beds to automatically send dialysate samples to the “lab wall” for a comprehensive panel of tests.

There was still one crew exam left undone, but Glenn was deliberately stalling on that one. As he went to the lab console to inspect the test results, he reflected on the fact that things had been going so well between himself and Yvette throughout the afternoon. He was reluctant to change that dynamic by insisting on including her in the crew exams. He injected the blood samples from Mishra and Grigorescu and queued up a test for heavy metals before he opened the reports on Bialik and Takeda.

The screen first showed colorimetric and microscopic images of Bialik’s samples. The first item that struck Glenn was the color of her samples—dialysate was mostly a buffer solution plus blood plasma with the blood cells removed. It should have been straw-colored, but this was a light bluish-green. Certain metals would cause that, but then, so would excess chlorophyll from green, leafy plants in the diet.

The problem was that the dietary supplementation from shipboard aeroponics and hydroponics wouldn’t provide enough chlorophyll to turn plasma this particular color.

Microscopy of the Bialik’s dialysis was relatively normal, although the presence of broken and ruptured white blood cells was high, which was to be expected from the inflammation and immune system damage that accompanied pancreatic disease.

Takeda’s dialysate was similar to Bialik’s, with a more distinct greenish tint, but similar cellular debris. Neither patient showed any sign of bacterial or viral contamination, and there were no fragments of parasites or fungus.

Glenn felt that the green color was important and programmed the lab wall to perform the same heavy metal tests on the dialysate that he’d programmed for Mishra and Grigorescu’s blood samples. Takeda was awake, now, and looking better, so Glenn dismissed her back to her quarters to rest, with instructions to return in eight hours for another session.

With that done, he couldn’t put it off any longer . . . 


“Yvette time for your checkup.”

“Okay. Do you want to do this right here? Or where we did the other exams?” She seemed to be taking it well and Glenn took that as a positive sign.

“Let’s do it in the isolation room. We have all of our instruments back there.”

“Good. We have more privacy, too.”

Oops, Glenn thought to himself.

Yvette practically rushed back to the exam room. They still had no rotational gravity, so she just flung herself across the med bay to the open door of the isolation chamber and disappeared from his view. Glenn took his time, though, pausing to look at Bialik who now appeared to be sleeping comfortably without the signs of obvious pain she’d had earlier—even when unconscious. Her skin color looked better, too.

As he drifted through the open doorway to the isolation room. He felt a hand reach out and grab the neck ring of his ship suit. Once clear of the doorway, the door closed, and he could hear the latch engage. Yvette put her other hand at the back of his neck and struggled with the helmet catch as she lifted the faceplate and gave him the long kiss she’d attempted earlier that day.

He’d gotten through the entire day without even lifting the faceplate, but now she’d opened it and was kissing him. If the disease was infectious through personal contact, he was exposed now.

When she came up for air, she stopped struggling with his helmet, leaving it still attached, but only partially latched. She started removing her clothes.

“No! No, Yvette, you can’t do this.”

“Oh, but you wanted to examine me, Shep. I thought this would make it so much easier for you.”

“In this case, I’m your doctor. I must remain professional, and I know you don’t really want to do this. It’s not right.”

“Oh, but I want to. I want you so badly,” Yvette replied in a husky voice. “I’ve missed you, Shep, and I want you. I know you want me too.”

“Yvette, this is not right. Us . . . we . . . that was so long ago, and I’m . . . I’m with someone.”

“She’s not here now, is she?”

“Well, no, but . . .”

“Then she doesn’t matter. I’m engaged too, but he’s not here, either. You are. It’s been so long, Shep, I need you!”

“They do matter, Yvette. We made promises.” In the heat of the moment, he couldn’t take the time to consider whether her supposed fiancé was real or imaginary. He had to take that at face value for now.

She was completely naked and pressed herself against him. He was still in his skinsuit; the tight weave dulled sensations on his skin, but not completely. Moreover, he could feel her body heat radiating through the thin material. It was starting to invoke a physical reaction . . . he needed to stop this.

“Yvette, this isn’t right. You’re acting irrationally.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth. He knew it was a mistake.

“Irrational? You think I’m irrational!” Just that quickly, Yvette’s mood changed. Now instead of trying to get him out of his skinsuit, Yvette started scratching and clawing at him. She braced her feet on the table and pushed him forcefully toward the ceiling, causing him to hit the bulkhead hard enough for the back of his head to hit the inside of his helmet.

That hurt, he thought to himself.

He also felt the helmet separate from the neck ring even though the latch was still partially engaged. His own motion made the helmet come loose and start to drift. With a damaged helmet and neck ring, his plan of trying to remaining isolated—at least from the rest of the crew—while solving the mysterious disease was now completely out of the question. The helmet separation also caused his self-contained air supply to cut off. He was breathing ship’s air, now. He hoped the causative agent wasn’t airborne, or at least that it wouldn’t affect him quickly.

That was for later. Right now, he was under attack and needed to stop Yvette before she hurt him.

There was a spray hypodermic of midazolam on the instrument table over by the cot. It was a strong sedative that was good for stopping seizures. It would also work to at least slow down a person intent on violence. Glenn had included it as a precaution in case any of the other crew had been irrational.

The problem of course, was that it was on the opposite side of the room, and Yvette was coming at him, swinging her fists. In zero gee, the motions were causing her whole body to twist and drift off course, but she was still between him and the table. She began to scream at him, that he was “working for them” and here to “take us all away.” Her eyes were wild and unfocused.

As soon as Yvette’s motions brought her close to Glenn, she tried to hit him on the head, even though that sent her tumbling back in the opposite direction. The next approach, she extended her fingers and attempted to jab at his eyes. His helmet was also drifting about the room—out of reach, of course—so he had no protection other than to put his arm across his eyes and attempt to push her away with the other hand.

The drifting helmet hit the instrument table, and now the hypo, scissors, a biopsy needle and various bits of gauze and tape joined the floating mess. She grabbed at his ears, pulled him close, and tried to bite him. Fortunately, that brought him closer to the drifting implements and he grabbed the spray hypo. Instead of attempting to turn toward Yvette, he hooked his feet below the cot and waited for her to come at him again while he held the hypo low and to his side. When she reached out again to claw at his face, he grabbed the side of her neck with one hand, pressed the autoinjector in the hollow just under her collarbone and triggered the injection.

Unfortunately, no matter how fast acting, the sedative didn’t work immediately, and he needed to push her away and try to keep his distance, lest she actually manage to catch his eyes or ears again. They struggled for several more minutes, while Glenn accumulated scratches. Since he was still wearing his skinsuit, his head and neck were the only things she could reach.

Eventually Yvette stopped fighting and her body went limp. She drifted slowly across the exam room, and Glenn took a moment to catch his breath before he pulled himself to the bulkhead, then reached out to grab the sedated woman and strap her down to the cot. It occurred to him that he still had not done her examination. Given his concerns with how she would react, this was the time to do it. As much as it disturbed him to be examining an unconscious, naked woman—he had to do it.

The exam revealed that she was exhibiting early signs of organ failure. More importantly, she was suffering from encephalitis. The fluid-filled membrane protecting the surface of the brain had become inflamed, putting pressure on the frontal and prefrontal cortex—areas associated with personality and the ability to make rational decisions. Of all of the crew, this reaction was unique to Yvette, but it also explained her irrational actions and changes in personality.

It was also a clue.

There was a particular metal toxicity that could account for everything—every symptom from insomnia to encephalitis—including the irrational behavior of Yvette, Taketani’s OCD, and LeBlanc’s hallucinations.

He just needed to check the blood and dialysate tests for copper. If he was right, the detective work was over. He needed to find the source and start the crew on chelation treatments. It would stop the deterioration, and reverse the symptoms . . . if he was in time.

He had to be. Failure was not an option.


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