The harvesting operations quickly went into shutdown and response mode. After only a few seconds, the flashes died away again, and the bloaters were dim and silent again, grayish green islands that floated nowhere.
Pannebaker sent a signal to the admin module. “A few disruptions, Chief, but no overloads. The extra shielding helped. We’ll run diagnostics to determine any damage, but I think we’re set.”
Iswander let out a sigh. “Excellent.” He turned to the green priest. “We have to be careful. The bloaters are volatile, potentially explosive, as my deputy discovered during her first encounter. We’ve instituted rather extreme safety measures, and there’s a full evacuation protocol I can engage, in case of an emergency. But those flashes…”
The flash storms came at intermittent times, widely separated. Sometimes they were faint, while other times the dazzling surges damaged the electronics until Iswander’s people had added extra shielding. This was the first such display Aelin had seen from so close. “I wonder what it means.”
“Nothing to worry about. Just an interesting phenomenon. Now, shouldn’t you get to your duties teaching my son?”
They went into an unoccupied boardroom, and Aelin set his potted treeling across from the boy, ready to tap into the worldforest. Using telink, he touched the verdani mind and accessed information and news, while Arden waited, fidgeting.
Within moments, he received a devastating report from the trees: Shelud and all the members of clan Reeves aboard their alien space city had been exposed to a mysterious plague.
EIGHTY-ONE
SHELUD
Aboard the ghost-filled Onthos city, more and more people fell victim to the strange plague. Clan Reeves was devastated—most were sick now. Nausea and fever consumed them; dark discolorations appeared on their skin from hemorrhaged blood vessels. Dale quarantined himself with Sendra and their two boys, and their condition grew progressively worse.
The Retroamer families clung to one another, initially putting the sick ones into isolation chambers, but there was no escaping infection in the enclosed city. The somewhat healthy ones struggled to remain strong so they could care for the ill. They wore environment suits and specialized survival breathers. Still the disease got through.
Connected to the verdani, Shelud worked nonstop to translate the log entries left behind by the dying Onthos. Although his discoveries in the Onthos records gave the doctors ideas of treatments to try, nothing worked. Nevertheless, he shared the information through the telink network so all green priests could know that forgotten history.
Olaf Reeves imposed extreme measures to prevent the spread of the plague, but he knew full well that the virus saturated the city of Okiah, and the incubation period was long enough that everyone aboard had surely been exposed. The disease that had been dormant and harmless in the Klikiss race had infected the Onthos with a mortality rate of one hundred percent.
Three-quarters of the clan’s members already showed symptoms. “And those are just the ones who’ll admit it,” Olaf said to Shelud in the main hub office. He eyed the green priest up and down. “Do you feel any ill effects?”
“Possibly. Nausea, exhaustion… but that could be just from the tension.”
“That’s what I keep telling myself, too,” said the clan leader. “But it doesn’t sound convincing.”
A delegation of six Roamer men and women barged in to see Olaf; they all looked frightened but otherwise healthy. “If we stay here, we’ll all catch it. Our medicines don’t work,” said a man named Reese Carlin. “We’re healthy. Let us take our ships and fly away from here, bring back medical teams, experimental treatments, whatever we need. We’ve stayed bottled up here for too long. We need to get out of Okiah before it’s too late.”
“Not a good idea,” Olaf said. “If you leave here, that plague will spread to an inhabited planet.”
“We don’t have any other choice!” said a woman, Indira Reeves, whose husband was a cousin of Dale’s. Her husband had fallen sick and gone into quarantine, but Indira remained outside.
Olaf looked angry. “You’re right—we don’t have a choice. If this is a deadly plague, and we’ve all got it, you can’t go spreading the disease everywhere. At least it’s contained here. I won’t turn you loose out in the Spiral Arm.”
“We’ll be careful, Olaf,” Carlin insisted.
“No. We wait for now—that’s my decision.”
“Wait? For what?” said a third man. Shelud didn’t know his name, though he had been trying to memorize every member of the clan Reeves exodus.
“We wait until we recover. That’ll show we’re strong enough to fight this disease. And if we all die, then that proves how deadly it is.”
The delegation left the hub office, trembling with anger and fear.
As soon as they departed, Olaf hammered on the desk communications system. He adjusted to a specific frequency. “Attention, compies. This is Olaf Reeves transmitting directly to you with a priority command. Go to every ship that’s docked to this city—seventeen vessels linked to hatches and in landing bays. Open the hangar bays, use autopilots, and dump those ships out into space—set them adrift. I don’t want anyone able to fly away and cause trouble. Okiah must be quarantined.”
The six clan Reeves compies acknowledged and trudged off to follow the instructions.
Shelud was concerned. “Won’t that cut us off, sir? If we do recover from the plague, we’ll never be able to get away.”
Olaf Reeves clenched his hands together. “That’s a trivial problem compared to what we’re facing now. We know how to be self-sufficient, and we can find a way to round them up if necessary—when the time comes. Or you could send word through the worldforest, if it comes to that.” He shook his head. “Never much liked compies, but now I wish I had a dozen more. Our people can’t do their work, and soon we won’t have enough personnel even to keep life support functioning. Thank the Guiding Star most of it’s automated.”
Olaf coughed and covered his mouth, then his eyes flew open in alarm. He rubbed his neck. “Just a tickle in my throat.”
Shelud didn’t argue with him.
“And where’s my son? Is he getting stronger?”
“Weaker, I think. Dale’s incapacitated. I visited him yesterday in the quarantine chambers.”
Olaf Reeves scanned down at the list of names again. “Eighty percent of my people.” He shook his head. “Probably more.”
Shelud was sure it would be more.
Dale’s son Scott was the first to die. Shock waves rippled through the space city, and the frightened Retroamers tried to make excuses. He was just a boy. Perhaps his immunity was lower than others, maybe he was weaker. They told themselves that one death didn’t necessarily mean the Onthos plague would be fatal in all cases—but they didn’t manage to convince themselves.
Within three days, every member of the indignant delegation that had wanted to leave Okiah on their ships showed signs of the plague. The later the onset of the disease, the more severe the symptoms.
Then Dale Reeves died. Soon people didn’t have time to mourn or hold formal funerals as the death toll mounted.
Olaf followed Shelud into the quarantine section—a quarantine that meant nothing anymore—and sank to his knees beside the bunk where Dale lay dead, little Scott wrapped in a sheet beside him. Sendra and Jamie were both so sick they seemed unaware of what had happened.