"Is Ionoth in KOTIS?"
"Not confirmed yet," Jeh said, but then the message change to Incursion 2. "Confirmed now."
Then there was an exceedingly tedious period where Ketzaren and Jeh stood guarding me and obviously talking to people over the interface. I didn’t like to ask any more questions when they were tensed for attack, and after a while I gave up and started playing around with interface settings. I still hadn’t decided on the decoration for my rooms, and had found a vast array of images I could purchase to use, and yet couldn’t settle on any of them.
Ketzaren made a sound, so I stopped playing with the interface and looked at her only to find her looking back at me with a strange expression.
"They found the incursion," she said. "That Ionoth cat from the Maze Rotation must have followed–"
She broke off. I guess I must have done some sort of major colour change. I certainly felt sick right through: lightning nausea. "It hurt someone?"
"No." She gave me a quizzical frown. "Don’t jump to conclusions. Here, have a chair." She steered me into the nearest and shook her head at me.
"Probably simplest to show her rather than explain," Jeh said. "I’ll route it."
Perhaps the oddest thing ever about living on Tare is that when you watch what people have recorded with their own eyes and ears, you not only have it filtered by factors like bad hearing or red-green colour blindness, but you also see it through the frame of their face. Just as how you can see the edges of your nose but usually tune it out. Whoever had made the recording Jeh sent me blinked a lot, had a long fringe, and wore a stud in their nose.
The recording started out with the Ionoth cat, sitting on top of a high cabinet in a huge and busy industrial kitchen, staring down at something below it. It was all coiled and intent, tail twitching, and the person who was recording called out to the other people in the kitchen, drawing attention to it. The cat didn’t seem to care, staring down at this guy standing just beneath it. Some girl made a joke and the guy looked up and looked confused, and stepped away. The cat’s tail twitched even faster and then it leapt at him, making a lot of people shout and shriek, and it would have landed right on his chest, except it went right through him. And he gasped and shuddered and sat down in a heap and there was the cat on the floor on the other side of him, with something in its mouth that looked like a big silverfish with octopus tendencies. The cat shook the thing briskly, then held it down with a paw and bit it in a particularly final way, crunch. Then it picked the body up, jumped up to the nearby counter and on top of another cabinet, and vanished.
"Is stickie?" I asked, still feeling sick about the whole thing. The Ionoth cat had followed me home because I’d petted it. If it had attacked the cook instead of the bug-octopus, then it would have been my fault.
"A new type." Ketzaren sat down with a sigh, apparently deciding we weren’t in immediate danger of attack. "One that’s beyond the current scans, which is a huge problem. It’s too much to hope that that’s the only one. It’s far more likely that there’s a more developed originator, and that we’re looking at a minor or even major plague of the things. And that could get extremely nasty. Stickies don’t kill you quickly, but they’re fatal left unchecked, even if the host doesn’t have a psychotic break. And if we can’t detect them, we can’t even tell how far they’ve spread."
"What happen now?"
"We stay in lockdown. They’ll start with the kitchens and try every kind of scan available to see if they can detect any Ionoth. If that fails, they’ll randomly treat some unlucky volunteers with unpleasantly painful sonics and see if anything falls out. And if it does–" She wrinkled her nose. "More attempts to find some way to detect them. And if they don’t, a very high chance they’ll treat everyone in KOTIS with sonics, and issue a general health alert so civilians have the option of being treated, which most of them won’t because it’s unpleasant. And then people will start to sicken and die and the majority will get treated but a few won’t and there’ll be an endless cycle of infection and outbreak hotspots."
I stared at her. I think she meant it.
"Lohn was right," Jeh said, placidly
Ketzaren lifted her eyebrows and said: "Only rarely. What this time?"
"He said Caszandra is lucky. Which she is, to have survived Muina. To have been rescued. To have put Ruuel in the right place to find that Pillar. And now for meeting a cat which eats stickies." She smiled at me, but then added: "Not that you should ever go petting any other Ionoth which come walking up to you. That truly was–"
"Dumb." I sighed. I can tell I’m never going to live that down.
We stayed in the waiting room for three hours. Ketzaren and Jeh told me about the last major stickie outbreak, which happened nearly fifty Tare-years ago, and then a few stories about stupid things they’d done early in their training. Jeh had been really good at falling off things whenever she went into the Ena and Ketzaren had once walked through the gate next to the one everyone else went through.
When they finally figured out a way to scan for the new type of stickie, we had to report to be scanned and I was really glad to learn there was no octopus-silverfish living in my chest. But they’ve found something like five hundred infected people so far, and have extended the scans to the rest of the island and they’ll be part of elevator security on all of Tare in the future.
But they haven’t found the cat yet. And I’m glad.
Saturday, February 23
Bring out the whips
Mara took my training seriously today. Dodging right after breakfast (ow), and then we went jogging slowly around a running track which had an obstacle course in the middle which a bunch of kids were scrambling their way through in a terrifically professional kind of way. Setari of the future.
The whole squad met up for lunch, and talked about the progress of the stickie cleansing. KOTIS have found what they think was the original infection point – a food supply place out in the city – and the number of cases has risen to thousands. KOTIS only had a secondary infection hub. I’d already seen some of this on the news, but the real numbers involved aren’t publicly announced, and all of First Squad were looking relieved and worried both. From their point of view this is just another sign of the increasing strength of the Ionoth, in numbers or in ability, and no-one understands what’s changed which has made the problem increase so much these past few years.
I feel more a part of the team rather than a guest now, settling in to that caddie-type role I was thinking of earlier. But my assignment to First Squad isn’t going to last, which sucks. I’ve got testing with Seventh Squad tomorrow. Their Captain was the one pretending to be nice to Zan at the pool, the one who called me it, so I’m not looking forward to having anything to do with them. I’m really not sure what I’ll do working with squads who have people I’m not comfortable with or who make me feel bad. Especially if we go out on rotation in the Ena. What I said to Lohn and Mara is close to how I feeclass="underline" going out there is scary, but I’m not panicked by it because I trust First Squad. I wonder if I’ll ever be given any choice about who I work with?