"If that officious bully hadn't insisted I change to uniform before lifting." He shook his head. "As if wearing a uniform was going to make any difference in how well you handled the lift. Which was, as always, excellent."
"Thank you." She debated chiding him on his untidy nature and decided against it. It hadn't made any difference before, it probably wouldn't now. She just had the servos pick up the tunic and trousers, wincing at the ultra-neon purple that was currently in vogue, and deposited them in the laundry receptacle.
And I'll probably have to put them away when they're clean, too. No wonder they wanted him to change. Hmm. Wonder if I dare 'lose' them? Or have a dreadful accident that dyes them a nice sober plum?
That was a thought to tuck away for later. "Getting back to the dinosaur, com equipment breaks, and even a Class Three dig can end up with old equipment. If the only fellow on the dig qualified to fix it happens to be laid up with broken bones, in case you hadn't noticed, archeologists fall down shafts and off cliffs a lot, or double-pneumonia."
"Good point." He finished his 'housekeeping chores' with a flourish and settled back in his chair. "Say, Tia, they're all professorial types. Do they ever just get so excited they forget to transmit?"
"Brace yourself for FTL." The transition to FTL was nowhere near as distressing to softpersons as the dive into a Singularity, but it required some warning. Alex gripped the arms of the seat, and closed his eyes, as she made the jump into hyperspace.
She never experienced more than a brief shiver, like ducking into a freezing-cold shower, but Alex always looked a little green during transition. Fortunately, he had no trouble in hyper itself.
And if I can ever afford a Singularity Drive, his records say he takes those transitions pretty well.
Well, right now, that was little more than a dream. She picked up the conversation where it had left off. "That has happened on Class One digs and even Class Two, but usually somebody realizes the report hasn't been made after a while when you're dealing with a big dig. Besides, logging reports constitutes publication, and grad students need all the publication they can get. Still, if they just uncovered the equivalent of Tutankhamen's tomb, they might all be so excited, and busy documenting finds and putting them into safe storage, that they've forgotten the rest of the universe exists."
He swallowed hard, controlling his nausea. It generally seemed to take his stomach a couple of minutes to settle down. Maybe the reason it doesn't hit me is because there's no sensory nerves to my stomach anymore.
But that only brought back unpleasant memories; she ruthlessly shunted the thought aside.
"So." he said finally, as his color began to return. "Tell me why you aren't in a panic because they haven't answered."
"Artifact thieves would probably have been spotted, there aren't any natives to revolt, and disease usually takes long enough to set in that somebody would have called for help," she said. "And that's why CS wasn't particularly worried, and why they kept countermanding the Institute's orders. But either this expedition has been out of touch for so long that even they think there's something wrong, or they've got some information they didn't give us. So we're going in."
"And we find out when we get there," Alex finished; and there wasn't a trace of a smile anywhere on his face.
Tia brought them out of hyper with a deft touch that rattled Alex's insides as little as possible. Once in orbit, she sent down a signal that should activate the team's transmitter if there was anything there to activate. As she had told Alex several days ago, com systems broke. She was fully expecting to get no echo back.
Instead, -
You are linked to Excavation Team Que-Zee-Five-Five-Seven. The beacon's automatic response came instantly, in electronic mode. Then came the open carrier wave.
"Alex, I think we have a problem," she said, carefully.
"Echo?" He tensed.
"Full echo." She sent the recognition signal that would turn on landing assistance beacons and alert the AI that there was someone Upstairs, the AI was supposed to open the voice-channel in the absence of humans capable of handling the com. The AI came online immediately, transmitting a ready to receive instructions signal.
"Worse, they've got full com. I just got the AI go-signal."
She blipped a compressed several megabytes of instructions to give her control of all external and internal recording devices, override any programs installed since the base was established, and give her control of all sensory devices still working.
"Get the AI to give me some pictures," he said, all business. "If it can."
"Coming up, ah, external cam three, this is right outside the mess hall and, oh, shells and back!"
"I'll second that," Alex replied, just as grimly.
The camera showed them, somewhat fuzzily, a scene that was anything but a pretty sight.
There were bodies lying in plain view of the camera; from the lack of movement they could not be live bodies. They seemed to be lying where they fell, and there was no sign of violence on them. Tia switched to the next camera the AI offered; a view inside the mess hall. Here, if anything, things were worse. Equipment and furniture lay toppled. More bodies were strewn about the room.
A chill that had nothing to do with the temperature in her shell held her in thrall. Fear, horror, helplessness. Her own private nightmares.
Tia exerted control over her internal chemistry with an effort; told herself that this could not be the disease that had struck her. These people were taken down right where they stood or sat.
She started to switch to another view, when Alex leaned forward suddenly.
"Tia, wait a minute."
Obediently, she held the screen, sharpening the focus as well as the equipment, the four-second lag to orbit, and atmospheric interference would allow. She couldn't look at it herself.
"There's no food," he said, finally. "Look, there's plates and things all over the place, but there's not a scrap of food anywhere."
"Scavengers?" she suggested. "Or whatever, whatever killed them? But there are no signs of an invasion, an attack from, outside."
He shook his head. "I don't know. Let's try another camera."
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.