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.
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.'
