"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 Al. "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 dear. "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, dealing 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.