'Kenny, he couldn't possibly have shown any symptoms while he was in space. They'd have pitched him out the airlock,' Tia pointed out. 'That means he probably went through incubation while they were in FTL and only showed symptoms once they hit port.'
'Right. I'll have that calculated for you and get you the survey records for that sphere, then it'll be up to you and the other teams.' Kenny signed off, and Alex swiveled his chair to face Tia's column.
'There's an information lag for that area,' Alex pointed out. 'Yamahatchi is on the edge of known space. Survey is still working out there, except for really critical stuff, it's going to take weeks, months, even years for information to make it here. We need a search net, not just a couple of search teams.'
'So, how about if we have Kenny call in not just Medical Services, but Decontamination?' she asked. 'They don't have any BB teams either, but they do have the AI drones and the med teams assigned to them. They can run the net as well as we can. Slower, but that may not be so bad.'
'I'll get on it,' Alex replied instantly. 'He can be mobilizing every free ship and team they've got while we compute the likely targets.'
'And Intelligence!' she added, as Alex got back on the horn with Kenny and his team. 'Get Kenny to get in touch with Intel, and have their people inside that sphere be on the watch for more victims, rumors of plague or of plague ships, or ships that have mysteriously lost half their crews!'
That would effectively increase their available eyes and ears a hundred-thousandfold.
'Or of ships that vanish and don't come into port,' Alex said grimly. 'Somewhere along the line that so called tramp freighter is going to do just that; go into hyper and never come out again. Or come out and drift with no hand on the helm.'
Tia wished she could still shiver; as it was, she felt rather as if her hull temperature had just dropped to absolute zero.
No computer could match the trained mind for being able to identify or discard a prospect with no data other than the basic survey records. Alex and Tia each took cone-shaped segments of the calculated sphere and began running their own kind of analysis on the prospects the computer search came up with.
Some were obvious; geologic instability that would uncover or completely bury the caches. Unpredictable weather that did not include snow, weather that did not include rain. Occupied planets with relatively thick settlements, or planets with no continents, only tiny island chains.
Some were not so obvious. Terrain with no real landmarks or landmarks subject to change. Terrain with snow and rain, but with snow piling up twelve feet thick in the winter; too deep to dig in. The original trove must have been uncovered by accident, perhaps during the construction of a rudimentary base, or by someone just outside, kicking around dirt.
Places with freelance mining operations were on the list; agri-colonies weren't. Places marked by the Institute for investigation were, places with full Institute teams weren't. While Tia would not have put it past someone with problems to sell out to smugglers, she didn't think that they'd care to cover up a contagious disease this hideous.
As soon as they finished mapping a cone, it went out to a team to cover. They had another plan in mind for themselves: covering free-trade ports, looking for another victim. They could cover the ports a lot faster than any of the AI or softperson-piloted ships; the only one fester would have been someone with a Singularity Drive. Since those were all fully occupied, and since, as yet, they had only one victim and not a full-scale plague in progress, there was no chance of getting one reassigned to this duty. So AH One-Oh-Three-Three would be doing what it could, and trying to backtrack the 'freighter' to its origin point. They were running against the clock, and everyone on the project knew it. If this disease got loose in a large, space-going population, the chances of checking it before millions died were slender.
'Alex,' Tia called for the third time, raising the volume of her voice a little more. This time he answered, even though he didn't turn his dark-circled eyes away from his work.
'What, m'love?' he said absently, his gaze glued to a topographical map on the screen before him, despite the fact that he could hardly keep his eyes open.
She overrode the screen controls, blanking the one in front of him. He blinked and turned to stare at her with weary accusation.
'Why did you do that?' he asked. 'I was right in the middle of studying the geography.'
'Alex!' she said with exasperation. 'You hadn't changed the screen in half an hour; you probably hadn't really looked at it in all that time. Alex, you haven't eaten anything in over six hours, you haven't slept in twenty, and you haven't bathed or changed your clothes in forty-eight!'
He rubbed his eyes and peered up at the blank screen. 'I'm fine,' he protested feebly.
'You're not,' she countered. 'You can hardly hold your head up. Look at your hand shake! Coffee is no substitute for sleep!'
