Wildcatter

“That time. Dylan was in serious pain after the second fall. I had to help him back to the Mercury. He weighed a thousand kilos, but we got there, and I got him into the EVA decon. And we cut no corners! Old Doddery didn’t want to believe me, later, but we went through the full sterilization treatment, every bit of it. Dylan was weeping with the pain in his arm, but I insisted we stand there for the entire fifteen-minute cleansing. I swear to you that there was not one single microbe or virus particle left on our suits!”

“I believe you,” Seth said, not entirely truthfully. The toughest test an EVA suit ever had to survive was the returning disinfection, and yet something had contaminated the shuttle. He wondered if the shuttle itself might have been breached in the fall. Control should have reported loss of the over-pressure needed to keep out biohazards, but the electronics might have been damaged also.

“At that time we couldn’t be certain that his suit had not been punctured, so Mariko and I put him in the quarantine room. She got his suit off of him and treated him as well as she could. His arm was a mess, but she deadened it and did a rough set, all we could manage.”

The KR745 shuttle was a flying hotel. Niagara had no quarantine room, and the Gut doubled as EVA decon area.

“Did you test his suit?”

“Don’t you try and tell me my job, Seth Whatever-your-name-is. I may be blonde but I am not dumb! You beat me out for the Mighty Mite job, but Galactic hired me ahead of four hundred other applicants. Yes, I tested both suits, just like GenRegs say. I inflated them both and neither lost a millibar of pressure in the next eight hours. They had not been compromised in any way. Next morning Dylan was going in and out of convulsions and delirium.”

“Concussion?” Seth guessed.

“Could be, but concussion doesn’t make you run a fever of forty-one degrees. Granted a shuttle med-kit is not the highest of high-techs, but it did have his blood sample and it did report mild concussion, but mainly it was screaming Unknown Infective Agent. Dylan was a big guy. When he went into convulsions, Mariko had to tie him down. We tried every antibiotic and antiviral we had without success.

“The weather was hellish all day. By nightfall, Earth time-we have no real darkness here yet-Mariko was running a fever too. That’s another mystery. She was a biologist, fergawsake, so she knew all about biohazard. She’d tended Dylan by the book, wearing her lab aseptic suit, showering… Her infection is just as hard to explain as his was.

“That was our Day 363, I think. By the next day I had them both tied to their bunks, Dylan still in the quarantine room, Mariko in the biologists’ dorm. By noon, ship time, I felt shitty-awful. The med-kit diagnosed an unknown infective agent. At that point there was no point my trying to preserve asepsis. I was starting to worry. Duddridge was talking of sending down an unmanned shuttle, but I couldn’t carry even Mariko in this gravity, and Dylan would need a crane. In any case, squalls kept coming through, so the shuttle never launched. There may have been a storm surge or a very high tide, because the ponds rose, and I had centaur visitors bouncing around the outside of the shuttle, warbling away. I did not open the door.”

“Inhospitable of you.”

“Very. I napped for an hour or so. When I awoke, Mariko was hallucinating and Dylan had died. My memory gets a bit fuzzy around then.

“It was likely the next day when I found I was tied to a bunk in the biologist’s dorm and Mariko was looking after me, although she could barely walk, she was so dizzy. She kept telling me were both going to die.”

“Commander Duddridge reported that an unmanned shuttle was sent down about then, but it crashed.”

“I spoke to him and he told me that, but we saw no signs of it. I don’t know what day it was when the storm surge came and I found myself turning cartwheels in bed and Mercury ended up on its side like this. All systems dead. I’ve told you the rest. Dammit, someone’s been sandblasting my throat.”

“Take a break. You’ve done very well.”

Day 413, Continued

002.001 When any expedition, whether exploratory or development, has significant reason to believe it has encountered a sentient species, it must immediately:

[a] terminate all contact with that species,

[b] discontinue sampling,

[c] withdraw all personnel, equipment, refuse, and all signs of its presence,

[d] post a Sentience Alert Beacon as defined in001.874.

General Regulations

InterStellar Licensing Authority

2375 edition

The pond was washing into the cave with every wave. That water must be fresh, although it was certainly not sterile. There was no sign of a break in the torrential rain.

“Prospector to Golden Hind.”

“Go ahead, Seth.” It was JC himself on watch.