There were twelve of them, all ten years old or less. They were the smartest kids I had ever met. With the greatest of caution they gathered around us, one by one. Their clothes were dirty and ragged. Their hands and faces needed washing. Erin conducted the dialog. Wilson and I tried to look friendly. They understood everything. They knew it was the water. They knew their parents were sick. They knew to be afraid. They had been told to watch for rescuers.
They told us the adults were gathered in various groups around the ship. The adults were unable to speak coherently. They migrated about but returned to their group unless they were excommunicated. Sometimes they were violent. Most of the time they were just afraid of things. There was plenty of food. You just had to sneak around to get it.
News of our newly made friends astounded and excited the doctor. There had been no reference to children in the Med Lab documentation. He theorized that the discovery of the children’s immunity came after the medical staff had succumbed to the infection. He badly wanted blood samples, but we begged off saying “not yet.”
The children were the best support we could have had. They knew the ship. They knew the disease. They knew the victims. Most of all, they knew the cooling systems crisis matrix. There were several instances as Erin and Wilson laid out their cyclic plan one of the particularly adept nine year olds would point and shake his head, causing all of us to stare at each other in wonder.
With that one frozen valve now resolved, we suddenly had an army of little engineers ready to launch into the tunnels to effect our cooling plan. These were not only the smartest children I had ever seen, they were also the bravest. The setup allowed the three of us to stand guard and coordinate in Engineering, though no visits from the infected were forthcoming.
When things had settled, I finally had a chance to talk to Erin. “Erin, that was a nice job you did bringing out the kids.”
“But that’s not what you wanted to talk to me about.”
“Erin, you repressed your suit without telling me.”
“You were going into those crawlways alone, Adrian. If you had gotten into trouble or needed an extra set of hands, someone had to be available. Wilson’s kind of too much of a hulk for that, don’t you agree? It had to be me. If there had been trouble with no one to go in after you, we all would have gone up in the cascade. I started recomp as soon as you headed for the lift. I didn’t mention it because it didn’t seem to matter much at that point.”
“Okay, but you’ve got to let me have the illusion that I’m in charge. It just blows the fantasy all to hell when crew does that kind of stuff.”
“Yes, Commander.”
“You’ve got to be careful about taking matters into your own hands without thinking, like running into a dark corridor alone. You can’t cover your back when you’re by yourself. That’s why the rule is secured area, or teams of at least two.”
“You’re right. That was stupid. I’ll be more careful. But you came from sickbay alone.”
“It was the only way. Besides, I have certain experience.”
“Like the scar on your shoulder?”
“It makes for elevated instincts.”
Wilson came over hoping to provide interference. “May I finally de-suit now, Adrian?”
“Since at least one of us is still suited, we can make a quick trip to Griffin. They’ll have water and some light food for us. I’ll go with you and wait outside the airlock. That is, now that I know Erin is going to be more careful. You’ll need help carrying that stuff once you’re back in gravity. We’ll lock down Engineering before we go.”
The crew on Griffin gathered up every candy bar in every spacesuit and locker and packed them up with food. Wilson made the EVA alone, though I never let him out of my sight. When he returned with the supplies in tow we divided it up in the airlock and made a stop at sickbay to stock up the Doctor. On the way back to Engineering we turned a corner and ran into a line of Akuma adults walking in single file to nowhere. We froze and readied ourselves only to watch them casually march by, glazed eyes forward, no interest in us at all. The leader was calling out a marching chant. Not one follower was in step.
In engineering the candy bars went fast. I never expected to see young ladies drawing chalk squares on the metal floor of a spacecraft’s most critical area, but there it was. It was some form of hopping game, which they delighted in playing under the protection of non-infected adults. The boys had some form of sandbag pitching game. Wilson and I were hastily shown the rules, attempted to compete, and got our clocks cleaned. Areno was brought down from sickbay and reunited with his owner, resulting in a celebration so moving it caught me off guard and choked me up for a few seconds. At some point during the evening, RJ finished establishing an uplink from sickbay and began relaying all the medical information to Earth, where it was quickly relayed to JSA and from there to the medical rescue ship coming to take control of Akuma.
The first security rescue ship was scheduled to drop of out of light at 07:00 for rendezvous. Somewhere around 05:00, I began to worry. I took a seat away from the others and made a call.
“Hey, Doc.”
“What’s up, Adrian?”
“What happens when the first security vessel gets here?”
“Well, they’ll take charge of the Akuma until the medical ship arrives.”
“They’ll decide who comes and who goes?”
“Not really. They’ll decide nobody comes and nobody goes.”
“That’s not good.”
“I see where you’re going with this.”
“We’re officially quarantined right now, correct?”
“Correct.”
“But at this time, you are the ranking medical officer, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Are we contagious?”
“No. None of us are even infected.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“You see what I’m thinking, right?”
“Yes.”
“How much trouble could you get into if we weren’t here when they arrived?”
“Boy, that’s a tough one. I’d either have to declare the quarantine lifted, or certify our crew members as not exposed.”
“That second one sounds better. Have any of us been exposed?”
“Technically, no. In this case you can only be exposed if you ingest the water. An argument could be made however, that we have been exposed to simple water vapor in the air and are therefore suspect. The purpose of quarantine is to contain anyone and everything that may have come in contact with the virus.”
“Until they have been certified as uncontaminated?”
“You actually make a good case, Adrian. If we remain here until the security vessel boards, we will not be allowed to leave probably until well after the Akuma is back in Earth orbit.”
“That will blow our Nadir launch date.”
“Yes, almost certainly.”
“I’m thinking that gives us no choice, do you agree?”
No answer.
I persisted. “We will be long gone on Nadir before any inquiries can be arranged.”
“Yes, but they’ll be waiting for us when we return.”
“We had no choice in coming here.”
“No. No choice.”
“This ship would no longer exist if we hadn’t come.”
“No one can argue that.”
“What if I told you I had some pull which would guarantee you no repercussions of any kind when we got back?”
“That would help greatly with the ugly questions I’ll get when we return just from this trip. The real bureaucracy will probably not have had time to kick in yet, though.”
“Let’s do it. Let’s get out of here as soon as the security vessel docks.”
“We’ll need to dot every ‘I’ and cross every ‘T’. Make it look like every examination and decontamination procedure was followed to the letter. They’ll know every step in the manual was covered, but they’ll als
o know the spirit of the off-world quarantine rules were not adhered to.”
“What do we need to do?”
“Bring each one up here, one at a time.”
“You’ve got it.”
And that was what we did. It was our only ticket off the ship. We could not leave the children alone, so a plan was devised for two of us to remain behind until security officers arrived and entered the airlock. We had preplanned escape routes on both sides of the Akuma, and would use the side opposite their docking. We explained our situation in simplified terms to our new young friends and, at 06:00 suited Wilson and Doc up and sent them to the Griffin. When the first rescue security ship appeared off Akuma’s starboard side, Erin and I disappeared out the opposite airlock and jetted back, keeping our departure masked by Akuma’s superstructure. Because of the Doctor’s work, the officers arriving knew they could dock and enter without suits. But it still took a bit of time with the airlock, and then a bit more to realize we were not on board. That occurred after Griffin had bid a private, symbolic farewell and jumped silently away. Erin and I made the jump still inside our pressurized suits, locked in the spacesuit docking stations in the aft airlock. Danica dropped us out at the brown dwarf near a particularly large pyramid-shaped asteroid that looked like a huge fishing weight. At least, that’s what it looked like to me.
When things had settled down and everyone had drifted off in the wonderment of everything we had just been through, I found Doc mag’d into a seat in the science lab, his feet up and crossed as if there were a hassock supporting them though nothing was. He had an amber beer bottle in his hand and as I entered, he suspended another in midair and shoved it at me. “Weird goin’ back into zero-G, isn’t it?” he said, and drank. There was a touch of slur in his speech.
I looked around and tapped the door closed and locked.
“A parting gift from the Akuma,” he said.
“I guess there’s no danger of Akuma water.”
“Red Moon, a product from Terra Firma. They say it only takes one with these. I’ve not found that to be true.”
I unscrewed the cap, flipped it like a coin and watched it bounce off the walls and keep going. “Here’s to unsung heroes.”
He took a drink. “Here’s to prosecuted heroes.”
“Not going to happen.”
“Somehow I believe you.”
We both drank.
“There’s some shit you don’t know,” he said, “and I do not use the term lightly.” He took another drink as though he needed it.
“Hold on. Let me check my shit meter. Uh-oh, it’s already almost on full from Denard’s shit.”
He laughed. “You’d better make more room.”
“Yeah, the man’s taking up everybody else’s space.”
“Don’t worry. What I’m talking about is somebody else’s shit and it makes Denard look like a saint.” He took another drink and his expression began to worry me.
“Seriously?”
He gave me a cold stare that almost made me shiver. “The Akuma virus did not come from the water.”
“But you said…”
“I said it was in the water, but it didn’t get there from the Oort Cloud. It was put there by a crewman.”
“That can’t be true.”
“He was supposed to inject it in the water if the Akuma did not find a mother load. When the pulse damaged the ship, the mission was abandoned. They were going to come back empty handed. The accident dumped all their water so the saboteur couldn’t plant the virus. Then, when they dragged the ice in, it became the perfect opportunity to make it look like the ice was contaminated. The bastard had been told he had been given an immunization, and that he would secretly be picked up after a rescue ship came too late to help the others. The truth was he was not immune at all. They expected him to die along with the crew, and the truth with him.”
Doc paused for another drink. “It was a designer virus. What really twists me up is that they knew it wouldn’t kill its victims. They knew what would happen. They knew the ship could not be maintained, and would eventually destruct and it would look like a shipboard accident. No way to ever figure out what really happened. Easy to explain. No loose strings. Their patsy figured out too late that he’d been screwed. He’d already been drinking the water and he flips into this personality thing where he thinks he’s a secret agent. Finds himself a tuxedo and begins searching for the secret way out. Found it, too. He puts the whole story in a personal log and labels it top secret, with no password or protection at all, just before becoming too incoherent to write. His final entries were garbage. I’m in there searching files with key words on the virus and his pops up. That’s how I know the whole story.”
“But who?”
A conglomerate called Omega. An international group of investors. They went in deep on this mission. They expected gold deposits along Akuma’s field search route, but they gambled too much. They couldn’t chance failure. You can’t insure a mission in space so that if it comes back empty handed you recover your losses, but you can insure the spacecraft and crew.
“You’re not serious.”
“If the Akuma came back with anything less than big-time finds, the Omega group was decimated. If the Akuma was destroyed, however, they’d lose nothing. That is why information has not been so forthcoming from the company. They are in a tizzy, you might say.” He tipped his bottle at me, and took a drink.
“Who knows?”
“I transmitted it all through RJ’s link. It’s been sent to all the various agencies. There will be no covering it up.”
“What about the people? Can they be cured?”
“A good chance. It will take a team of specialists mapping the new DNA mutations, but there was no actual damage to the brain. So there’s a good chance with maybe a year's worth of work they will bring them back from the brink. The ones still alive, anyway.”
“So, we found a doomed ship, rescued it, and solved a murder mystery, all in one shot. I believe you’ve outdone yourself, Holmes.”
“It doesn’t abdicate my fear of man, my dear Watson.”
“How many of those have you had?”
“Not enough, I think.”
Chapter 24