Brain Ships Read online

This one was outside the supply building—and this was where they found their first survivors.

  If that's what you can call them. Tia absorbed the incoming signal, too horrified to turn her attention away. There was a trio of folk within camera range: one adolescent, one young man, and one older woman. They paid no attention to each other, nor to the bodies at their feet, nor to their surroundings. The adolescent sat in the dirt of the compound, stared at a piece of brightly colored scrap paper in front of him, and rocked, back and forth. There was no sound pickup on these cameras, so there was no indication that he was doing anything other than rocking in silence, but Tia had the strange impression that he was humming tunelessly.

  The young man stood two feet from a fence and shifted his weight back and forth from foot to foot, swaying, as if he wanted to get past the fence and had no idea how. And the older woman paced in an endless circle.

  All three of them were filthy, dressed in clothes that were dirt-caked and covered with stains. Their faces were dirt-streaked, eyes vacant; their hair straggled into their eyes in ratty tangles. Tia was just grateful that the cameras were not equipped to transmit odor.

  "Tia, get me another camera, please," Alex whispered, after a long moment.

  Camera after camera showed the same view; either of bodies lying in the dust, or of bodies and a few survivors, aimlessly wandering. Only one showed anyone doing anything different; one young woman had found an emergency ration pouch and torn it open. She was single-mindedly stuffing the ration-cubes into her mouth with both hands, like—

  "Like an animal," Alex supplied in a whisper. "She's eating like an animal."

  Tia forced herself to be dispassionate. "Not like an animal," she corrected. "At least, not a healthy one." She analyzed the view as if she were dealing with an alien species. "No—she acts like an animal that's been brain-damaged—or maybe a drug addict that's been on something so long there isn't much left of his higher functions."

  This wasn't "her" disease. It was something else—deadly—but not what had struck her down. What she felt was not exactly relief, but she was able to detach herself from the situation, to distance herself a little.

  You knew, sooner or later, you'd see a plague. This one is a horror, but you knew this would happen.

  "Zombies," Alex whispered, as another of the survivors plodded past without so much as a glance at the woman eating, who had given up eating with her hands and had shoved her face right down into the torn-open ration pouch.

  "You've seen too many bad holos," she replied absently, sending the AI a high-speed string of instructions. She had to find out when this happened—and how long these people had been like this.

  It was too bad that the cameras weren't set to record, because that would have told her a lot. How quickly the disease—for a plague of some kind would have had an incubation time—had set in, and what the initial symptoms were. Instead, all she had to go on were the dig's records, and when they had stopped making them.

  "Alex, the last recorded entry into the AI's database was at about oh-two-hundred, local time, a week and a half ago," she said. "It was one of the graduate students logging in pottery shards. Then—nothing. No record of illness, nothing in the med records, no one even using a voice-activator to ask the AI for help. The mess hall computer programmed the synthesizer to produce food for a few meals, then something broke the synthesizer."

  "One of them," Alex hazarded.

  "Probably." She looked for anything else in the database and found nothing. "That's about all there is. The AI has been keeping things going, but there's been no interaction with it. So forget what I said about diseases taking several days to set in—it looks like this one infected and affected everyone on the base between—oh—some time during the night, and dawn."

  If she'd had a head, she would have shaken it. "I can't imagine how something like that could happen to everyone at the same time without someone at least blurting a few words to a voice pickup!"

  "Unless . . . Tia, what if they had to be asleep? I mean, there's things that happen during sleep, neuro transmitters that initiate dream-sleep—" Alex looked up from the screen, with lines of strain around his eyes. "If they had to be asleep to catch this thing—"

  "Or if the first symptom was sleep . . ." She couldn't help herself; she wanted to shiver with fear. "Alex, I have to set down there. You can't do anything for those people from up here."

  "No argument." He strapped himself in. "Okay, lady—get us down as fast as you can. There's one thing I have to do, quick, before we lose any more."

  She broke orbit with a sudden acceleration that threw him into the back of his seat; he didn't bat an eye. His voice got a little more strained, but that was all.

  "I'll have to put on a pressure-suit and get into the supplies; put out food and pans of water. They're starving and dehydrated. Spirits of space only know what they've been eating and drinking all this time—could be a lot of them died of dysentery, or from eating or drinking something that wasn't food." He was thinking out loud; waiting for Tia to put in her own thoughts, or warn him if he was planning to do something really stupid. "No matter what else we do, I have to do that."

  "Open up emergency ration bags and leave pans of the cubes all over the compound," she suggested, as her outer skin heated up to a glowing red as she hit the upper atmosphere. "Do the same with the water. Like you were feeding animals."

  "I am feeding animals," he said, and his voice and face were bleak. "I have to keep telling myself that. Or I'll do something really, really stupid. You get a line established to Kleinman Base, ASAP."

  "Already in the works." A hyperwave comlink that far wasn't the easiest thing to establish and hold—

  But that was why she was a brainship, not an AI drone.

  "Hang on," she said, as she hit the first of the turbulence. "It's going to be a bumpy burn down!"

  * * *

  The camera and external mike on Alex's helmet gave her a much clearer view of the survivors than Tia really wanted. Of the complement of two hundred at this base, no more than fifty survived, most of them between the ages of fifteen and thirty.

  They avoided Alex entirely, hiding whenever they saw him—but they came out to huddle around the pans of food and water he put out, stuffing food into their faces with both hands. Alex had gotten three of the bodies he'd found in their beds into the med-center, and the diagnosis was the same in all three cases; complete systemic collapse, which might have been stroke. The rest—the ones that had not simply dropped in their tracks—had died of dysentery and dehydration. Of the casualties, it looked as if half of the dead had keeled over with this collapse, all of them the oldest members of the team.

  After the third, Alex called a halt to it; instead he loaded the bodies into the base freezer. Someone else would have to come get them and deal with them. Tia had recorded his efforts, but could not bring herself to actually watch the incoming video.

  He completed his grisly work and returned to caring for the living. "Tia, as near as I can guess, this thing hits people in one of two ways. Either you get a stroke or something and die, or you turn into—that." She saw whatever he was looking at by virtue of the fact that the helmet-camera was mounted right over his forehead. And "that" was something that had once been a human boy, scrambling away out of sight.

  "That seems like a good enough assumption for now," she agreed. "Can you tell what happened with the food situation? Are they so—far gone that they can't remember how to get into basic supplies?"

  "That's about it," he agreed, wearily. "Believe it or not, they can't even remember how to pop ration packs—they seem to have a vague memory of where the food was stored, but they never even tried to open the door to the supply warehouse." He trudged across the compound to one of the pans he had set out. It was already empty, without even crumbs. He poured ration-cubes into it from a bag he carried under his arm. She caught furtive movement at the edge of the camera-view; presumably the survivors were waiting for him to go away
so that they could empty the pan again. "When they found the emergency pouches they tore them open, like that woman we watched. But a lot of times, they don't even seem to realize that the pouch has food in it."

  "There's two kinds of victims; the first lot, who got hit and died in their sleep or on the way to breakfast," he continued, making his way to the next pan. "Then the rest of them died of dehydration and dysentery because they were eating half-rotten food."

  "Those would go hand-in-hand, here," she replied. "With nothing to stop the liquid loss through dysentery, dehydration comes on pretty quickly."

  "That's what I figured." He paused to fill another pan. "There'd be more of them dead, of exposure and hypothermia, except that the temperature doesn't drop below twenty Celsius at night, or get above thirty in the daytime. Shirtsleeve weather. Tia—see when this balmy weather pattern started, would you?"

  "Right." He must have had an idea—and it didn't take her more than a moment to interrogate the AI. "About a week before the last contact. Does that sound as suspicious to you as it does to me?"

  "Yeah. Maybe something hatched." Alex scanned the area for her, and she noted that there were a fair number of insects in the air.

  But native insects wouldn't bite humans—or would they? "Or sprouted—this could be a violent allergic reaction, or some other kind of interaction with a mold spore or pollen." Farfetched, but not entirely impossible.

  "But why wouldn't the Class One team have uncovered it?" he countered, filling another pan with ration-cubes. "Kibble," the brawns called it. The basic foodstuff of the Central System worlds; the monotonous ration-bars handed out by the PTA to client-planets cut up into bite-sized pieces. Tia had never eaten it; her parents had always insisted on real meals, but she had been told that while it looked, smelled, and tasted reasonable, its very sameness would drive you over the edge if you had to eat it for very long. But every base had emergency pouches of the stuff cached all over, and huge bags stockpiled in the warehouse, in case something happened to the food-synthesizers.

  Those pouches must have been what kept the survivors going—until they ran out of pouches that were easy to find.

  The dig records were, fortunately, quite clear. "Got the answer to your question—Class One dig was here for winter, only—they found what they needed to upgrade to Class Three within a couple of days of digging. They really hit a big find in the first test trench, and the Institute pushed the upgrade through to take advantage of the good weather coming."

  "And initial Survey teams don't live here, they live on their ships." Alex had a little more life in his voice.

  "They were only here in the fall," she said. "There's never been a human here during spring and summer."

  "Tia, you put that together with an onset of this thing after dark, and what do you get?"

  "An insect vector?" she hazarded. "Nocturnal? I must admit that the pattern for venomous and biting insects is to appear after sunset."

  "Sounds right to me. As soon as I get done filling the pans again, I'm going to go grab some bedding from one of the victims' beds, seal it in a crate, and freeze it. Maybe it's something like a flea. Can you see if there's anything in the AI med records about a rash of insect bites?"

  "Can do," she responded, glad to finally have something, anything, concrete to do.

  The sun was near the horizon when Alex finished boxing his selection of bedding and sealing it in a freezer container. He came back out again after loading the container into one of Tia's empty holds. She saw to the sealing of the hold, while he went back out to try and catch one of the Zombies—a name he had tagged the survivors with over her protests.

  She finally established the comlink while he was still out in the compound, fruitlessly chasing one after another of the survivors and getting nowhere. He was weighted down with his pressure-suit; they were weighted down by nothing at all and had the impetus of fear. He seemed to terrify them, and they did not connect the arrival of food in the pans with him, for some reason.

  "They act like I'm some kind of monster," he panted, leaning over to brace himself on his knees while he caught his breath. "Since they don't have that reaction to each other, it has to be this suit that they're afraid of. Maybe I should—"

  "Stay in the suit," she said, fiercely. "You make one move to take that suit off, and I'll sleepygas you!"

  "Oh, Tia—" he protested.

  "I'm not joking." She continued her conversation with the base brain in rapid, highly compressed databursts with horribly long pauses for the information to transmit across hyperspace. "You stay in that suit! We don't know what caused all this—"

  Her tirade was interrupted by a dreadful howling and the external camera bounced as Alex moved violently. At first she thought that something awful had happened to Alex—but then she realized that the sound came from his external suit-mike, and that the movement of the camera had been caused by his own violent start of surprise.

  "What the—" he blurted, then recovered. "Hang on, Tia. I need to see what this is, but it doesn't sound like an attack or anything."

  "Be careful," she urged fearfully. "Please—"

  But he showed no signs of foolhardy bravery; in fact, as the howling continued under the scarlet light of the descending sun, he sprinted from one bit of cover to another like a seasoned guerrilla-fighter.

  "Fifty meters," Tia warned, taking her measurement from the strength of the howls. "They have to be on the other side of this building."

  "Thanks." He literally crept on all fours to the edge of the building and peeked around the corner.

  Tia saw exactly what he did, so she understood his sharp intake of breath.

  She couldn't count them, for they milled about too much, but she had the impression that every survivor in the compound had crowded into the corner of the fence nearest the sunset. Those right at the fence clung to it as they howled their despair to the sun; the rest clung to the backs of those in front of them and did the same.

  Their faces were contorted with the first emotion Tia had seen them display.

  Fear.

  "They're scared, Tia," Alex whispered, his voice thick with emotions that Tia couldn't decipher. "They're afraid. I think they're afraid that the sun isn't going to come back."

  That might have been the case—but Tia couldn't help but wonder if their fear was due to something else entirely. Could they have a dim memory that something terrible had happened to them in the hours of darkness, something that took away their friends and changed their lives into a living hell? Was that why they howled and sobbed with fear?

  When the last of the light had gone, they fell suddenly silent—then, like scurrying insects, they dropped to all fours and scuttled away, into whatever each, in the darkness of his or her mind, deemed to be shelter. In a moment, they were gone. All of them.

  There was a strangled sob from Alex. And Tia shook within her shell, racked by too many emotions to effectively sort out.

  * * *

  "You have two problems."

  Tia knew the name to put to the feeling she got when her next transmission from the base was not from some anonymous CS doctor but from Doctor Kenny.

  Relief. Real, honest, relief.

  It flooded her, making her relax, clearing her mind. Although she could not speak directly with him, if there was anyone who could help them pull this off, it would be Doctor Kenny. She settled all of her concentration on the incoming transmission.

  "You'll have to catch the survivors and keep them alive—and you'll have to keep them from contaminating your brawn. After that, we can deal with symptoms and the rest."

  All right, that made sense.

  "We went at this analyzing your subjects' behavior. You were right in saying that they act in a very similar fashion to brain-damaged simians."

  This was an audio-only transmission; the video portion of the signal was being used to carry a wealth of technical data. Tia wished she could see Doctor Kenny's face—but she heard the warmth and encouragemen
t in his voice with no problem.

  "We've compiled all the data available on any experiments where the subjects' behavior matched your survivors," Doctor Kenny continued. "Scan it and see if anything is relevant. Tia, I can't stress this enough—no matter what you think caused this disease, don't let Alex get out of that suit. I can't possibly say this too many times. Now that he's gone out there, he's got a contaminated surface. I want you to ask him to stay in the suit, sleep in the suit, eat through the suit-ports, use the suit-facilities. I would prefer that he stayed out in the compound or in your airlock even to sleep—every time he goes in and out of the suit, in and out of your lock, we have a chance for decontamination to fail. I know you understand me."

  Only too well, she thought, grimly, remembering all that time in isolation.

  "Now, we've come up with a general plan for you," Doctor Kenny continued. "We don't think that you'll be able to catch the survivors, given the way they're avoiding Alex. So you're going to have to trap them. My experts think you'll be able to rig drop-traps for them, using packing crates with field generators across the front and rations for bait. The technical specs are on the video-track, but I think you have the general idea. The big thing will be not to frighten the rest each time you trap one."

  Doctor Kenny's voice echoed hollowly in the empty cabin; she damped the sound so that it didn't sound so lonely.

  "We want one, two at most, per crate. We're afraid that, bunched together, they might hurt each other, fight over food—they're damaged, and we just don't know how aggressive they might get. That's why we want you to pack them in the hold in the crates. Once you get them trapped, we want you to put enough food and water in each crate to last the four days to base—and Tia, at that point, leave them there. Don't do anything with them. Leave them alone. I trust you to exercise your good sense and not give in to any temptation to intervene in their condition."

  Doctor Kenny sighed, gustily. "We bandied around the idea of tranking them—but they have to eat and drink; four days knocked out might kill them. You don't have the facilities to cold-sleep fifty people. So—box them, hope the box matches their ideas of a good place to hide, leave them with food and water and shove them in the hold. That's it for now, Tia. Transmit everything you have, and we'll have answers for you as soon as we're able. These double-bounce comlinks aren't as fast as we'd like, but they beat the alternative. Our thoughts are with you."