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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, dealing 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'
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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? Tell 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
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