Medical. References coming now.' She sent over her credentials in a databurst. 'We're coming in, and we'd appreciate Presley Station's cooperation. We'd like to be connected to your Chief Medical Officer while we maneuver for docking, please.'
'Uh, I,' There was a brief muttering, as if he was speaking to someone else, then he came back on the mike. 'We can do that. Stand by for docking instructions.'
At that point the human left the com, and the AI took over; she woke up Alex and briefed him, then gave him a chance to get dressed and gulp some coffee while she dealt with the no longer routine business of docking. As she followed the AI's fairly simple instructions, she wondered just what, exactly, was going on at Presley Station. Was this the start of the plague, or a false alarm? Or, was this just one outbreak among many?
She waited, impatiently, for the com officer to return online, while Alex gulped down three cups of coffee and shook himself out of the fog of interrupted sleep. It took forever, or at least it seemed that way.
Finally the com came alive again. 'AH-One-Oh-Three-Three, we have the Chief Medical Officer online for you now.' It was a different voice; one with more authority. Before Tia could respond, both voice and visual channels came alive, and she and Alex found themselves looking into the face of a seriously frightened man, a man wearing medical whites and the insignia of a private physician.
'Hello?' the man said, tentatively. 'You, you're from MedServices? You don't look like a doctor.'
'I'm not a doctor,' Alex said promptly. 'I've been authorized by CenCom MedServices to investigate a possible outbreak of a new infectious disease that involves immune deficiency syndrome. We had reason to believe that there's an infectious site somewhere in this sphere, and we've been trying to track the path of the last known victim.'
There was no doubt about it; the doctor paled. 'Let me show you our patient,' he whispered, and reached for something below the screen. A second signal came in, which Tia routed to her side screen.
The patient displayed suppurating boils virtually identical to Kenny's victim; the only difference was that this man was not nearly so far gone as the first one.
'Well, he matches the symptoms of the victim we've been tracking,' Alex said, calmly, while Tia made frantic adjustments to her blood-chemistry levels to get her heart calmed down, 'I trust you have him in full isolation and quarantine.'
'Him and his ship,' the doctor replied, visibly shaking. 'We haven't had any new cases, but decom it, we don't know what this is or what the vector is or,'
'I've got a contact number coming over to you right now,' Alex interrupted, typing quickly. 'As soon as you get off the line with me, get onto this line; it's a doublebounce link up to MedServices and a Doctor Kennet Uhura- Sorg. He's the man in charge of this; he has the first case in his custody, and he'll know whatever there is to know. What we'd like is this; we're the team in charge of tracking this thing to its source. Do you know anything about where this patient came from, what he was doing?'
'Not much,' the doctor said, already looking relieved at the idea that someone at CenCom was 'in charge' of this outbreak. Tia didn't have the heart to let him know how little Kenny knew; she only hoped that since they'd left, he'd come up with something more in the way of a treatment. 'He's a tramp prospector; he came in here with a load we sealed off, and sick as a dog, crawled into port under his own power, but he collapsed on the dock as soon as he was out of the ship, yelling for a medic. We didn't know he was sick when we let him dock, of course.'
The man was babbling, or he wouldn't have let that slip. Interstellar law decreed that victims of disease be given safe harborage within quarantine, but Tia had no doubt that if traffic control hadn't been an AI, the prospector would have never gotten a berth. At best, they would have denied him docking privileges; at worst, they'd have sent a fighter out to blast him into noninfectious atoms. She made a mental note to send that information on to Kenny with their initial report
'When he collapsed and one of the dockworkers saw the sores, he hit the alarm and we sealed the dock off, sent in a crew in decontam suits to get him and put him into isolation. I sent off a Priority One to our PTA, but it takes so long to get an answer from them.'
'Did he say where he thought he caught this?' Alex said, interrupting him again.
The doctor shook his head. 'He just said he was out looking for a good stake when he stumbled across something that looked like an interstellar rummage sale, and he figures that was where he got hit. What he meant by 'interstellar rummage sale' he won't say. Just that it was a lot of 'stuff', he didn't recognize.'
Well, that matched their guess as to the last victim. 'Can we talk to him?' Tia asked.
The doctor shrugged. 'You can try. I'll give you audiovisual access to the room. He's conscious and coherent, but whether or not he'll be willing to tell you anything, I can't say. He sure won't tell us much.'
It was fairly obvious that he was itching to get to a comset and get in contact with MedServices, thus, symbolically at least, passing the problem up the line. If his bosses cared about where the miner had picked up the infection, they hadn't told him about it.
Not too surprising. He was a company doctor. He was supposed to be treating execs for indigestion, while his underlings patched up miners after bar fights and set broken bones after industrial accidents. The worst he was
