Ship Who Searched (30 page)

“Fine—but why go ahead and sell to you if he didn’t know you?” Tia asked.

“Because I was in the right bar, making all the right moves, and I didn’t act like the Arm or Intel.” Alex rubbed his thumb against the sides of the vase. “I was willing to go through the barkeep to pay, which I don’t think Intel would do. I had the right ‘feel,’ and I suspect he was watching to see if any of his buddies got picked up after they sold to me. And lastly, once again, we were lucky. Because
he
doesn’t know what his bosses are using the phony artifacts for. He thought the worst that could happen is a wrist-slap and fine, for importing art objects without paying customs duty on them.”

“Maybe
his
bosses aren’t using the artifacts for smuggling,” she pointed out, thinking out all the possibilities. “Maybe they are just passing them on to a second party.”

“In this station, that’s very possible.” Alex put the vase down carefully. “At any rate, I think the Arm suspected this cluster of stations all along, and they’ve got a ship out here somewhere—which is why we got an answer so quickly. I
thought
that was a ship-contact number when I saw it, but I didn’t say anything.”

“Hmm.” Tia ran through all the things
she
would have done next and came up with a possible answer. “So now they just find the messenger that goes to ‘Rockwall’ at noon from a ship that isn’t ours, and tags the ship for watching? Or is that too simple?”

Alex yawned and stretched. “Probably,” he said, plainly bored with the whole game now. “He probably won’t send the messenger from his ship. They’ll do their spy-work somehow; we just gave them what they didn’t have in the first place, a contact point. It’s out of our hands, which is just as well, since I’d rather not get involved in a smuggler versus Intel shoot-out. I’m
tired
.”

“Then you should get some rest,” she said immediately. “And get that jumpsuit out of my cabin before it burns out my optics.”

He laughed—but he also headed straight for his bed.

Tia didn’t even bother to wake her brawn as she approached Presley Station and hailed their traffic control. She expected the usual automated AI most mining stations had; she got a human. Although it was audio-only, there was no doubt that this was a real human being and not an AI-augmented recording.

Because, from the strain in the voice, it was a very nervous and unhappy human.

“AH-One-Oh-Three-Three, be advised we are under a Code Five quarantine,” the com officer said, with the kind of hesitation that made her think he wasn’t on a microphone very often. “We can let you dock, and we can refuel you with servos, but we can’t permit you to open your airlock. And we’d like you to move on to some other station if you have the reserves.”

He can’t deny us docking under a Code Five, but he’s frightened. And he really wants us to go away.

Tia made a quick command decision. “Presley Station, be advised that we are on assignment from CenCom Medical. References coming now.” She sent over her credentials in a databurst. “We’re coming in, and we’d appreciate Presley Station’s cooperation. We’d like to be connected to your Chief Medical Officer while we maneuver for docking, please.”

“Uh—I—” There was a brief muttering, as if he was speaking to someone else, then he came back on the mike. “We can do that. Stand by for docking instructions.”

At that point the human left the com, and the AI took over; she woke up Alex and briefed him, then gave him a chance to get dressed and gulp some coffee while she dealt with the no longer routine business of docking. As she followed the AI’s fairly simple instructions, she wondered just what, exactly, was going on at Presley Station.

Was this the start of the plague, or a false alarm?

Or—was this just one outbreak among many?

She waited, impatiently, for the com officer to return online, while Alex gulped down three cups of coffee and shook himself out of the fog of interrupted sleep. It took forever, or at least it seemed that way.

Finally the com came alive again. “AH-One-Oh-Three-Three, we have the Chief Medical Officer online for you now.” It was a different voice; one with more authority. Before Tia could respond, both voice and visual channels came alive, and she and Alex found themselves looking into the face of a seriously frightened man, a man wearing medical whites and the insignia of a private physician.

“Hello?” the man said, tentatively. “You—you’re from MedServices? You don’t look like a doctor.”

“I’m not a doctor,” Alex said promptly. “I’ve been authorized by CenCom MedServices to investigate a possible outbreak of a new infectious disease that involves immune deficiency syndrome. We had reason to believe that there’s an infectious site somewhere in this sphere, and we’ve been trying to track the path of the last known victim.”

There was no doubt about it; the doctor paled. “Let me show you our patient,” he whispered, and reached for something below the screen. A second signal came in, which Tia routed to her side screen.

The patient displayed suppurating boils virtually identical to Kenny’s victim; the only difference was that this man was not nearly so far gone as the first one.

“Well, he matches the symptoms of the victim we’ve been tracking,” Alex said, calmly, while Tia made frantic adjustments to her blood-chemistry levels to get her heart calmed down. “I trust you have him in full isolation and quarantine.”

“Him
and
his ship,” the doctor replied, visibly shaking. “We haven’t had any new cases, but
decom
it, we don’t know what this is or what the vector is or—”

“I’ve got a contact number coming over to you right now,” Alex interrupted, typing quickly. “As soon as you get off the line with me, get onto this line; it’s a double-bounce link up to MedServices and a Doctor Kennet Uhua-Sorg. He’s the man in charge of this; he has the first case in his custody, and he’ll know whatever there is
to
know. What we’d like is this; we’re the team in charge of tracking this thing to its source. Do you know anything about where this patient came from, what he was doing—”

“Not much,” the doctor said, already looking relieved at the idea that someone at CenCom was “in charge” of this outbreak. Tia didn’t have the heart to let him know how little Kenny knew; she only hoped that since they’d left, he’d come up with something more in the way of a treatment. “He’s a tramp prospector; he came in here with a load we sealed off, and sick as a dog—crawled into port under his own power, but he collapsed on the dock as soon as he was out of the ship, yelling for a medic. We didn’t know he was sick when we let him dock, of course—”

The man was babbling, or he wouldn’t have let that slip. Interstellar law decreed that victims of disease be given safe harborage within quarantine, but Tia had no doubt that if traffic control
hadn’t
been an AI, the prospector would have never gotten a berth. At best, they would have denied him docking privileges; at worst, they’d have sent a fighter out to blast him into noninfectious atoms. She made a mental note to send that information on to Kenny with their initial report.

“—when he collapsed and one of the dockworkers saw the sores, he hit the alarm and we sealed the dock off, sent in a crew in decontam suits to get him and put him into isolation. I sent off a Priority One to our PTA, but it takes so long to get an answer from them—”

“Did he say where he thought he caught this?” Alex said, interrupting him again.

The doctor shook his head. “He just said he was out looking for a good stake when he stumbled across something that looked like an interstellar rummage sale, and he figures that was where he got hit. What he meant by ‘interstellar rummage sale’ he won’t say. Just that it was a lot of ‘stuff’ he didn’t recognize.”

Well, that matched their guess as to the last victim.

“Can we talk to him?” Tia asked.

The doctor shrugged. “You can try. I’ll give you audiovisual access to the room. He’s conscious and coherent, but whether or not he’ll be willing to tell you anything, I can’t say. He sure won’t tell us much.”

It was fairly obvious that he was itching to get to a comset and get in contact with MedServices, thus, symbolically at least, passing the problem up the line. If his bosses cared about where the miner had picked up the infection, they hadn’t told
him
about it.

Not too surprising. He was a company doctor. He was supposed to be treating execs for indigestion, while his underlings patched up miners after bar fights and set broken bones after industrial accidents. The worst he was ever supposed to see was an epidemic of whatever new influenza was going around. He was
not
supposed to have to be dealing with a plague, at least, not by his way of thinking. Traffic control was supposed to be keeping plague ships from ever coming near the station.

“Thanks for your cooperation, Doctor,” Alex said genially. “Get that link set up for us, if you would, and we’ll leave you to your work.”

The doctor signed off—still without identifying himself, not that Tia was worried. Her recordings were enough for any legal purposes, and at this point, now that he had passed authority on to them, he was a nonentity. They didn’t need to talk to him anymore. What they needed was currently incarcerated in an isolation room on that station—and they were going to have to figure out how to get him to talk to them.

“Okay, Alex,” she said when the screen was safely blank. “You’re a lot closer to being an expert on this than I am. How do we get a rock-rat to tell us what we want to know?”

“Hank, my name’s Alex,” the brawn said, watching the screen and all the patient-status readouts alongside. “I’m a brawn from CS, on loan to MedServices; you’ll hear another voice in a moment, and that’s my brainship, Tia.”

“Hello, Hank,” she said, very glad that she was safely encased in her column with no reactions for Hank to read. Alex was doing a good job of acting; one she knew she would never be able to match. Just looking at Hank made her feel—twitchy, shivery, and quite uncomfortable; sensations she hadn’t known she could still have. “I don’t know if anyone bothered to tell you, but we were sent out here because there’s someone else with what you’ve got; it’s very contagious, and we’re trying to keep it from turning into a plague. Will you help us?”

“Give him the straight story,” Alex had said; Kenny had agreed to that when they got hold of him, right after the company doctor had called him. “There’s no point in trying to trick him. If he knows how bad off he is, he just might be willing to cooperate.”

The sores only grew worse when you bandaged them, so Hank was lying in a gel-bed—a big pan full of goo, really, with a waterbed mattress beneath the goo. Right now only the opaque green gel covering him was keeping him from outraging modesty. The gel was a burn-treatment, and something Kenny had come up with for the other man.
He
was still alive, but no better than when they had left. They still had no idea who or what he was, besides horribly unlucky.

Hank peered up at the screen in the corner of his room, through a face grotesquely swollen and broken-out. “These company goons won’t give me any kind of a straight story,” he said hoarsely. “All they do is try an’ brush me off. How bad off am I?”

“There’s no cure,” Alex said, flatly. “There’s one other known victim. The other man is worse than you, and they haven’t found anything to reverse his condition. That’s the truth.”

Hank cursed helplessly for about four or five minutes straight before he ran out of breath and words. Then he lay back in the gel-bed for another couple of minutes with his eyes closed.

Tia decided to break the silence. “I don’t know how you feel about the rest of the universe, Hank, but—we need to know where you came down with this. If this got loose in any kind of population—”

“’Sall right, lady,” he interrupted, eyes still closed. “You’re preachin’ to the choir. Ain’t no percentage in keeping my mouth shut now.” He sighed, a sound that sounded perilously close to a sob. “I run across this place by accident, and I ain’t sure how I’d find it again—but you guys might be able to. I give you what data I got. I’d surely hate t’ see a kid in the shape I’m in right now.”

“Thanks, Hank,” Alex said, with quiet gratitude. “I wish there was something we could do for you. Can you think of anything you’d like?”

Hank shook his head just a little. “Tell you what; I got some serious hurt here, an’ what they’re given me ain’t doin’ much, ’cause they’re ’fraid I’m gonna get hooked. You make these bozos give me all the pain meds I ask for—if I ever get cured up, I’ll dry out
then.
You think you can do that for me?”

“I’ll authorize it,” Tia said firmly. At Alex’s raised eyebrow, she printed: Kenny’s authorizations include patient treatments. We’ve got that power, and it seems cruel not to give him that much relief.

Alex nodded. “Okay, Hank, my partner says she can boss the docs here. So, fire away; we’re recording. Unless you want something now.”

“Naw. I wanta stay on this planet long enough t’ give you what little info I got.” Hank coughed. “First off, my boat’s an old wreck; falls outa hyper all the time, and the recorder don’t always work when she takes a dive. Basically, what happened was she fell out, and there was a Terra-type planet not too far from where she dropped. My holds was pretty empty, so I figured I’d see if there was anything around. Registered somethin’ that looked like wrecked buildings in one spot, went down t’ take a look-see.”

“That was where you caught this thing?” Alex asked.

“I’m gettin’ to that. Weren’t no signs of life, okay? But there was some buildings there, old and kinda busted up, round, like them flyin’ saucers people used to see—I figgered maybe I’d hit some place where the archies hadn’t got to, mebbe I could pick up somethin’ I could peddle. I went ahead an’ landed, okay? Only I found somethin’ that looked like somebody else had been there first. Looked like—I dunno, like somebody’d been collectin’ and hoardin’ for a long, long time, buryin’ the stuff in caves by the buildings, stashin’ it in the buildings that wasn’t busted up. Some of it was dug up already, some of it somebody’d just started t’ dig up.”