But there was brown sticky stuff in the filters. Shit. It’s everywhere. Carl cleaned them carefully with a water jet and flushed his covered bucket into the outbound tube—one-way flash vaporization that dumped directly into free space.
This odd-looking mess wasn’t supposed to be here. Prefilters should take out the big stuff and sift it for useful solids. These backup filters should catch impurities and crystallize them.
Maybe there was something special about this particular sticky stuff. He filled a sample bottle—the bio types nagged him incessantly for traces of anything odd—and kicked off toward sleep slot 1. Malenkov should have a look at this.
Cycling through the big lock into Central Complex, he realized that he missed Jeffers. The founding crew were all safely slotted now, making things a bit lonely for the First Watch. Captain Cruz had made him senior petty officer, which merely meant he roamed more than the others, checking—but the minor honor pleased him.
He liked working alone, anyway—gliding smoothly and surely through the locks and shafts with Bach or Mozart weaving in his ears. Maybe I’m a natural hermit, he thought. I wonder if the crew selection people could tell that from their psychoinventory tests. He had hardly seen anyone these last few days.
When he entered the aft port of Life Sciences the first thing he heard was loud talking.
“He goes in now! I make no compromises,” Nikolas Malenkov’s gravelly voice cut through.
“I want a sample to study,” Saul persisted.
“I have taken samples.” Malenkov put his hands on his hips and leaned forward menacingly. “Epidermis and fluids only.”
“I’ll need more than that to find out what—”
“No! Later, we revive him, maybe! When we know what killed him. If you take samples from internal organs, that will make it harder for us to bring him back later.”
Carl frowned. “Hey, what’s—”
Saul wiped his nose with a handkerchief, ignoring Carl, and said, “You can’t cure him unless you know what killed him!”
“You have smears from throat, urine, blood samples—”
“That might not be enough. I—”
“Hey!” Carl cut in. “Will someone tell me what’s going on?”
Malenkov noticed Carl for the first time. His expression suddenly changed from tight-lipped rage to sad-eyed dejection. “Captain Cruz.”
Carl felt suddenly lightheaded, incredulous. “What? That’s… But I saw him just two days ago!”
Neither of the two other men spoke—there was still steam in their argument. Virginia said quietly, “He had a fever yesterday and went to bed. When Vidor went to find him this morning he… would not waken. He died within an hour. Apparently there were no other symptoms.”
“Fever? That’s it?”
“It doesn’t seem he ever woke up.”
The shock of it was only now penetrating, filling Carl with a sensation of falling. Commander Cruz had been the center, the heart and brains of the entire expedition. Without him…
“What… what’ll we do?”
Malenkov mistook Carl’s question. “Sleep slot him—now. There is yet little or no neural damage.”
Dazed, Carl said, “Well… sure… but I meant…”
Saul said, “I still feel we must have more data to study these cases—”
“We are not certain how long he ran a high temperature. Any more time, he risks brain damage.” Malenkov waved a hand brusquely in front of Saul, erasing any objections. “Come.”
They all went numbly to the hub of the sleep-slot complex. Carl was stunned. He tried to think, chewing his lip. The sociosavants had written extensively about how small, high-risk enterprises had to have a clearly superior, Olympian leader to avoid factionalism and weather hard times. A Drake, a Washington. Without the leader…
In the sealed prep room Samuelson and Peltier were running checks and planting diagnostics around a body that was already wrapped in a gray shroud of web circuitry. Miguel Cruz-Mendoza’s face was calm, and still projected a powerful sense of purpose.
Wisps of fog laced the air as the workroom dropped in temperature. Malenkov spoke to the two laboring techs through a mike and the party watched the last procedures of interment.
“So you’d authorized slotting even before our little argument,” Saul noted calmly.
“I wanted you should see my logic. While Matsudo is in slots, I am responsible for health of the whole expedition,” Malenkov said stiffly.
“Indeed you are.” Saul’s voice carried only a dry hint of irony.
“I hope we can bring him back soon—very soon,” Malenkov said. “Damnation! At the very beginning!”
Virginia said gamely, “We’ll all pull together. Of course, we’ll have to…”
“Pick a new commander,” Saul finished for her. “That’s obvious— Bethany Oakes. She’s next in line.”
Carl nodded reluctantly. Another Ortho. All the senior crew were. And Oakes wasn’t even a spacer.
They watched in silence as Peltier and Samuelson rolled the commander’s body into a sleep slot and opened the valves to feed fluids. The tube fitted snugly into a broad wall of similar nooks, gleaming steel certainly wreathed in gauzy fog. So much like death, yet it was the only hope of life to come. It they could figure out what had killed him. If.
Malenkov sighed. “We should have some ceremony. But there was no time.”
Saul said, “And perhaps it’s not such a good idea to assemble everyone in one place.”
Still numb, Carl thought, Miguel Cruz wouldn’t want a stiff little ritual. Some of us’ll get together and hoist a few for him later. The captain would understand that.
And maybe that might dull the pain, when numbness turned to grief.
“Dispersal, yes.” Malenkov nodded silently, frowning. Carl realized they were still talking about what had killed Cruz and whether it was communicable. “Osborn here can adjust job schedules until we thaw Oakes.”
“I am going back to the lab,” Saul said. “I want a full dress review of the lab results.”
“I think not,” Malenkov said stiffly.
Carl saw that Saul was already half-lost in thought about paths of inquiry to follow, checks to make. Saul did not reply at once, but gazed off into space, toward the slot cap that had closed on Cruz. Then he turned slowly to Malenkov. “Ummm? What?”
“Is your turn, Saul.”
“What?”
“This death makes me more firm.” Malenkov bunched his lips together, whitening them, his jaw muscles set rigidly.
“We risk exposure to you even by this talking.” Malenkov gestured brusquely. “Into a slot.”
“That’s ridiculous.” Saul looked irked, as if Malenkov were pursuing a bad joke. “I can help. Hell, if some of my suspicions are true—”
“You are not so big and essential,” Malenkov said stiffly. “Peltier, she knows the immunology well—”
“I insist—”
“I will not risk you dropping dead, my friend.”
“Nicholas, I don’t have whatever killed Miguel Cruz!”
“Look at you—eyes red, nose running.” Malenkov gestured. “You have something. A microbe caught in your lab, could be.”
Virginia stepped to Saul’s side and felt his brow. “You’re hot,” she said.
Carl watched sourly as she put her hand on Saul’s face with unselfconscious intimacy. He looks damned sick to me. Malenkov may be right.