Plague Ship

on it. The sea bubbled like a thermal hot spring while the Robinson hovered overhead.

Max whispered Juan’s name and crossed himself when the top of the funnel was a foot from disappearing completely. A blast of air suddenly belched from the stack, ejecting a yellow object as if from a cannon. It rose twenty feet, flapping in the air like a bird trying to take flight.

“Holy sh—” He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

The yellow object was one of their biohazard suits and the flapping was Cabrillo’s arms windmilling and his legs bicycling. Juan’s trajectory carried him from the smokestack and over the railing before he crashed back into the sea. The impact must have stunned him, because he lay still for a couple of seconds before starting to swim away from the sinking vessel. Eric tracked him with the searchlight as Juan swam to the overturned lifeboat. He heaved himself onto its back, faced the Oregon on his knees, and made a deep, theatrical bow.

Eric saluted him with a blast from the ship’s horn.

CHAPTER 9

DR. HUXLEY WAS CONCENTRATING SO HARD THAT she didn’t hear Mark Murphy and Eric Stone rush into the lab adjacent to the medical bay. Her mind was immersed in the minute realm revealed by her powerful microscope, and it wasn’t until Murph cleared his throat that she looked up from her computer screen. There was a frown on her face from being disturbed, but seeing the two men’s grins she thrust aside her irritation.

Behind them, her patient lay in isolation, shut off from the rest of the ship by a sterile glass enclosure whose air was pumped through sophisticated purifiers and into a thousand-degree furnace before being allowed to leave the ship. Juan slouched in a chair by Janni’s bed, still wearing his yellow biohazard suit.

Until Julia knew if his brief exposure to the water in the engine room had infected him with whatever pathogen had killed the men and women aboard the Golden Dawn, she had to treat him as though he were a carrier. Her microscope, with its potentially infectious samples, was also in the isolation ward, and she could view them only by either wearing a bulky suit or through a dedicated computer feed.

“What is it?” she asked.

“We ran the numbers,” Murph said breathlessly. Like Julia, he had gone straight to work and wore the same sweaty clothes he’d had on underneath his discarded biohazard suit. His longish hair lay limp and oily against his scalp. “There’s no way the Chairman or the girl are infected.” This time Julia didn’t suppress her annoyance. “What are you talking about?” He and Eric noticed Jannike Dahl for the first time. “Whoa!” Stone said as he eyed the young woman asleep in the isolation ward, her black hair fanned out around her pale oval face. “What a babe!”

“Forget it, Stoney,” Murphy said quickly. “I was in on her rescue, so I get to ask her out first.”

“You didn’t even leave the bridge,” Stone protested. “I have as much right as you.”

“Gentlemen,” Julia said sharply. “Please check your under-exercised libidos at the door and tell me why exactly you are here.”

“Oh, sorry, Doc,” Murph said sheepishly, but not without a last glance at Janni. “Eric and I gamed the scenario, and we know that neither of them could have possibly been infected. We knew about twenty minutes ago about the Chairman’s results, but the girl’s numbers just came back.”

“Do I need to remind you that this is about science—biology, in particular—and not some computer program spitting out mathematical gibberish?”

Both men looked hurt.

Eric said, “But you, most of all, should know all science is mathematics. Biology is nothing more than the application of organic chemistry, while chemistry is nothing more than applied physics, using the strong and weak nuclear forces to create atoms. And physics is mathematics writ in the real world.” He spoke so earnestly that Julia knew her young patient had nothing to fear from him. Eric wasn’t bad looking, but he was such a geek she couldn’t imagine him screwing up enough courage to even talk to her. And behind Mark Murphy’s skater-punk facade and scraggly beard beat the heart of the consummate computer nerd.

“Have you found any trace of a virus or toxin anywhere in the samples you’ve taken?” Murph asked.

“No,” Hux admitted.

“And you won’t, because neither was infected. The only way to kill an entire shipload of people without causing a mass panic, as some succumb quicker than others, is food poisoning.” He held up his hand and ticked off his fingers as he made his case. “An airborne pathogen wouldn’t hit people who were out on the decks when it was released. Poisoning the water supply is even less likely, because not everyone is going to drink at the same time, unless you hit first thing in the morning when people are brushing their teeth.”

Eric interrupted. “People with weaker immune systems would have died throughout the day, and, as we saw, everyone was dressed to party.”

“Same thing if a poison was applied to surfaces around the ship like handrails and doorknobs,” Murph concluded. “The killer couldn’t guarantee that they would get to everyone.”

“So you think it was the food?” Julia asked, unable to find fault in their logic.

“Has to be. Juan didn’t eat anything while he was on board, and I bet she didn’t eat tonight either.” Murphy jerked his head at the glass partition separating the lab from isolation.

“To be on the safe side,” Eric said, “we also ran some numbers in case there was an airborne toxin trapped in the engine room. Even if the air was saturated, the volume of water pouring in when Juan cut his suit would have cut the viral load or toxicity levels down from parts per million to parts per hundreds of billions.”

Murph crossed his arms. “Besides, it’s been five hours since the Chairman’s exposure. From what Eddie related about your brief interrogation of your patient aboard the ship, her friends visited her just an hour or two before they were hit. Juan and the hottie are fine.” Julia had already come to the same conclusion concerning Juan, but she wasn’t convinced these two were right about Jannike. Diagnosis was about dogged research, checking and double-checking lab results, until you knew what you were faced with. Just because she hadn’t found a virus in Janni’s blood, spinal fluid, saliva, or urine didn’t mean it wasn’t lurking in her kidney or liver or some other tissue Julia hadn’t tested yet, waiting silently to explode out and overwhelm Janni’s immune system and then move on to its next potential victims, the Oregon’s crew.

She shook her head, “Sorry, boys, but that’s not good enough for me. I think you’re right about Juan, but Jannike stays in isolation until I am one hundred percent certain she isn’t infected.”

“You’re the doctor, Doc, but it’s a waste of time. She isn’t.”

“It’s my time to waste, Mark.” She pushed back on her wheeled lab stool and rolled across the tiled floor to an intercom mounted on the wall. She hit the button. “Juan, can you hear me?” Inside the ward, Cabrillo jerked upright in the chair. Rather then dwell on the fact his body could be harboring a deadly infection, he’d fallen asleep. He stood and threw Julia a thumbs-up and then waved at Murph and Stone. He gathered up the spare batteries used to keep his hazmat suit functioning for so long.

“You’re cleared,” Julia said. “You can head into the air lock for a decontamination shower. Go ahead and leave the suit inside. I’ll dispose of it later.” It took fifteen minutes to cycle the air lock to the isolation ward and for Juan to stand under a thundering shower of bleach and antiviral agents before it was safe for him to hop into the lab.

“Wow, you’re a mite gamey,” Julia said, wrinkling her nose.

“You spend that much time sweating in one of those damned suits and see how you smell.” Julia had already taken the precaution of having one of Cabrillo’s artificial limbs sent down from his cabin. She handed it over, and he settled it onto the stump below his right knee. He gave it a few experimental flexes, then lowered his trouser cuff. “There,” he said, standing. “Nothing a long shower and a good bottle of Scotch won’t cure.” He turned to Eric and Mark, who still crowded near the lab’s entrance. “How’d you make out, Murph?” With his suit’s radio damaged during the engine-room flood, the Chairman had been out of the loop since being brought aboard.

“I salvaged about thirty percent of the ship’s computer archives, including everything about her last voyage.” He held up a hand to forestall Cabrillo’s next question. “I haven’t gone through anything yet.

Eric and I were helping figure out if you and that piece of eye candy in there had been infected.” Juan nodded, although he didn’t think he and their guest should have been their top priority. “Going through those logs is now job one for you two. I want to know everything that took place aboard that ship since this voyage began. I don’t care how trivial.”

“I saw you talking to our patient earlier,” Julia interrupted. “How is she doing?”

“Tired and scared,” Juan replied. “She has no idea what happened to everyone, and I didn’t really want to