Lecton asked, an edge of panic showing under the pompous impatience in his tone.
“Take it easy, Doctor,” Kas repeated. “You’re not in trouble. Just grab your safety line at your waist. That’s it. Now pull yourself along it until you reach the big guide line. Good. Now just start pulling yourself along the guide line. That’s it. See? No problem.”
Ro-Lecton’s heavy, rasping breathing began to slow as he lost the edge of panic he’d been feeling. “Rather more excitement than I’d expected,” he commented in an almost-normal tone.
Kas coached him through reversing his position so he’d hit feet-first, and reminded him to turn on the boots’ magnets. Kas grinned at the sigh of relief that escaped the doctor as his boots stuck to the cruiser’s hull.
Ro-Lecton indicated the suited body tethered outside the airlock. “Well,” he began, “That’ll be one cadaver that won’t be hard to retrieve.”
Kas stiffened. “That’s one cadaver that you won’t be retrieving, doctor. The Emperor is anxiously awaiting Lieutenant Fan-Jertril’s arrival, so he can award him a posthumous Empire Star and a ceremonial funeral. He was one of the last three survivors, and the Rekesh ’s last Commanding Officer.”
Ro-Lecton frowned. “You say one of the last three? Then there are two others. That’s all right then. You must understand, Commodore. I’m going to need to autopsy some of the earliest victims, and very importantly, the very last to die. I gather that the last three didn’t die of the plague?”
Kas frowned. “Sorry. I forgot that you don’t know the story. Yes, there should be two others, in suits, at the ships other two personnel locks. Frankly, we haven’t checked. But they’re the ones that opened the ship to space.”
Ro-Lecton sighed. “Yes. I have mixed emotions about them opening the ship to space. Oh, I understand their reasoning. Of course, they were assuming that the infection agent was airborne, which we don’t know. But it greatly complicates my job. It would be much easier if I had a sample of the live virus, or whatever it is.”
Kas shuddered. “I’d just as soon you never had a live sample, Doctor. It killed almost two thousand people in a matter of weeks.” He paused. “But if you need contaminated atmosphere, I’ll have my crew check the other locks to make sure they’ve been opened. One of the others might have lost his nerve and not opened her. Even if they did, and the entire ship is in vacuum some contaminated atmosphere should remain in the last men’s space suits — though the oxygen might be depleted.”
“Would they still be holding air after a hundred years?”
Kas shrugged and pointed. “That one is. And there’s been nothing that could degrade the suits except micrometeorites. You might say they’ve been stored in vacuum.” He started into the lock. “Prepare yourself, Doctor,” he continued. “Three thousand people don’t just lie down and die quietly. This ship saw two mutinies, riots, and even drunken orgies. The bodies were gathered up, as I mentioned — but there are bloodstains and signs of battle everywhere we’ve been aboard her.” He hesitated. “The survivors were too sick to worry about cleaning up the mess.”
Kas saw the doctor’s grim nod through his clear faceplate. “I’m an epidemiologist, Commodore,” he replied. “I’ve seen the aftermath of plagues before. I was in charge of a team on Acqueon.”
Kas shuddered. Acqueon had been a settled, populous planet — a trading hub. Somehow, a plague had broken out. The Empire sent immediate help, but the final survival rate had been just over five percent. Those few survivors had been relocated to other planets. There were simply too few keep civilization going on the planet. Acqueon was still uninhabited thirty years later, despite the fact that the plague had been identified and a cure found. The only visitors to Acqueon now were the particularly brave or particularly foolish salvagers that sneaked past the picket buoys to strip the empty cities. Maybe Ro-Lecton was more than a pompous dilettante after all.
The design of stellar class battle cruisers hadn’t changed significantly in more than two centuries. Kas didn’t need maps or schematics — she was identical to the Ka-Tora, on which Kas had served as a Lieutenant Commander. So he was able to lead Ro-Lecton straight to the sickbay and its attached bio lab.
Even in the blackness relieved only by the stark pools of their hand lights, it was obvious the sickbay was in ruins. Oh, there were signs of battle, all right, but most of the damage seemed to have come from looting and vandalism. That wasn’t surprising. More than a few of the crew would have decided that if they were going to die they’d do it in a drug-induced haze. Others would have been looking for poisons, for a quick, painless end. The vandalism would be the result of resentment of the medical personnel who’d failed them.
Ro-Lecton’s tone was businesslike. “Obviously, it could take some time to search through this for memory crystals. I hope the bio lab’s in better shape.”
There was an improvised barricade in front of the separate airlock of the bio lab, and a litter of weapons drifted in the weightlessness. Obviously, someone — probably medical personnel — had fought to defend the lab. The bio lab’s airlock doors were latched back. Kas brushed aside a crude axe whose head was covered with black stains drifting in the weightlessness.. He stepped through, followed by the doctor.
Ro-Lecton breathed a huge sigh of relief as his light revealed little damage or destruction. The light steadied on an empty rack atop a table. “This must be where your Lieutenant gathered those memory crystals,” he commented. “He just grabbed all that were in plain view.”
Kas grinned sourly. “He did have a few other things on his mind at the time, Doctor.”
Ro-Lecton’s suit bobbed slightly and Kas assumed that the doctor had nodded. “I’m sure he did.” The tone was dry. “But I’m also sure that any competent medical personnel would make sure that records of their work survived. There should be a storage… Ah!” The triumph in his tone was clear. Ro-Lecton hurried clumsily toward a small file cabinet in a corner of the lab.
“If I were a med tech and I knew that rioters might get in here and vandalize the place, I’d put the memory crystals in a plain box and stuff them into the back of the bottom drawer of a cabinet full of papers where nobody looking for drugs or poisons would bother with them,” the little man continued. He jerked open the bottom drawer of the cabinet and shifted the file folders it contained. Behind the file folders was a stack of papers lying flat. Ro- Lecton cursed as his clumsy gloved hands lifted the papers, which began to drift away. A small box lay on the bottom of the drawer. The doctor pounced on the box. “Ha! I was sure…”
Kas chuckled. “You might want to look inside the box before you congratulate yourself, Doctor. You might be getting all excited about a box of rubber bands.”
But the box was nearly full of memory crystals as Ro-Lecton had predicted. It was all Kas could do to get the little man to contain his enthusiasm and concentrate on working his way back out of the dead ship.
Ro-Lecton almost assaulted him when he told the little doctor that he would not be able to take the box of crystals to his stateroom for study but Kas was adamant. “You’ll take them to your bio lab. Nothing from that ship goes anywhere else aboard Starhopper,” he insisted. Then he found himself trapped into escorting Ro-Lecton to the bio lab, since he himself had decreed that no one aboard was to work in vacuum alone.
Kas decided it was a good thing the lasers Starhopper mounted were on tracks. Only with them in their deployed position near the open cargo doors was there room for the portable bio lab. The lab formed a flat cylinder some twenty meters in diameter and three high. It consisted of pie-shaped sections that had been bolted together and sealed. A cylindrical airlock protruded from the main cylinder, its exterior festooned with the components of the decontam system.
They entered the airlock and Kas secured the outer hatch. As soon as the hatch was secured the decontam routine began. Both men stood with legs apart and arms stretched outward from their shoulders as their suited forms were bathed in rays that would be lethal to an unsuited man. Finally, a cloud of gas appeared, designed to penetrate the tiniest crack or crevice in their suits. As the gas was sucked into vents near the nozzles Kas took two deep breaths, held his breath and unsealed his helmet.
The lock was now pressurized, but with an inert gas. Kas grabbed for the breathing mask that dangled from the ceiling of the lock, and looked to make sure that Ro-Lecton was following his lead. He cursed himself silently as he realized that the little doctor would be much more familiar with decontam procedures than Kas was.
With the breathing mask secured to his face, he unsuited. Any contaminants that had survived the earlier treatments should be destroyed by the lack of oxygen. He hoped.
They hung the space suits on a rack near the lock’s outer door. Ro-Lecton handed Kas an isolation suit that resembled an oversized, thin space suit made of clear plas. In place of the self-contained air tanks on the back, these had a large umbilical hose that slid along a track in the ceiling. They also had gloves that were much more useful than those of a space suit. These had to be pulled on, stretching into place and gave the wearer the ability to easily handle delicate tasks. The isolation suit’s air was fresh but had that definite but indefinable taste that marked
