Bightmares

Chapter Eight

The transmitter, it turned out, had been damaged by the head communications engineer. He became ravaged by the disease as they broadcasted their distress call.

“We tried to fix it,” Ilse, as she’d insisted Emi and Aaron call her, said. “Then our head electrical engineer and two others who could have repaired it all came down with it.”

Aaron punched his com link. “Hey, Sam? There’s a portable telecom base in there somewhere. Can you put on a suit and bring it in here? Get it hooked up for them. Their transmitter’s toast, and their com staff isn’t…available.”

“Roger, Aaron. On my way.”

He looked at Ilse. “Where are you holding the men?”

“In the hospital. It’s overloaded now. We’re nearly out of supplies to keep them sedated.” She choked back another sob. “There’s no predicting the rages. They can be okay for hours or even days, then they try to kill anyone who comes near them.” She shook her head. “We don’t have a brig large enough to hold them all!”

“How many?” Emi asked.

“Thirty-eight.”

Emi’s eyes widened. Over ten percent of their entire population. “How many men are in your colony?”

Ilse went quiet. “There were one hundred and three.”

“Were?”

“Five have died because of this…whatever it is. Two died, killed in self-defense by their wives when the men went crazy. One was killed by another man who went into a rage. Two more died from wounds they received while raging.”

The revelation stunned Emi. Nearly forty percent of their men were infected.

Ilse continued. “Our veterinarian, Dr. Shourpa, she tried to figure it out. The best she could do was eliminate the obvious suspects. It’s not a bacteria or a virus, no biological agent or amoeba or anything like that. She couldn’t detect changes in their blood work from their pre-arrival results. She’s not a human doctor, there was only so much she could do.”

“And it’s only men, no women, no children?”

“The youngest infected is sixteen.”

Emi’s mind raced. “So who is in charge of research now? Of trying to figure it out?”

Ilse shook her head. “No one. There is no one with the knowledge or skill. Our other human doctor is also infected. The remaining med staff has its hands full trying to manage everyone and keep them alive. They’re using volunteers from other divisions to monitor vital signs, manage IV nutrition, and handle care. We’ve practically had to cease operations because we need our other staff for critical services, and some of them are doing double or triple duty to keep the colony running.”

“Take us to them.”

Sam appeared, wearing a protective suit. He carried the transmitter and a bag of tools. Aaron got him started before he followed Emi and Ilse from the building.

Emi didn’t miss how Aaron hung back and didn’t interfere with her job, although he kept one hand on the butt of the energy pistol strapped to the hip of his protective suit. She also didn’t miss how on edge he felt, hypervigilant to any potential threat to her.

Ilse talked as they walked across the compound. “I mean, if it was all the males, then I could understand that, and Dr. Shourpa would have a starting point to work from. But it’s not all the men. We haven’t been able to isolate a common factor that would lead us to a diagnosis. Keep in mind, we’ve been here for several years now. Nothing’s changed, there was nothing like an impact from a meteorite or something, nothing. Nothing has changed!”

Emi doubted that. What she suspected was a change they didn’t recognize, didn’t notice because they lived here.

But she wondered if she, a stranger to the planet, could find it.

To say the small medical complex was overcrowded would have been an understatement of Jupiter-sized proportions. Unconscious men were hooked to IV drips, many of which hung on makeshift poles. With only fifteen patient rooms, they had filled those as well as their emergency room triage area and all but one operating room. Dr. Cayce Shourpa looked overwhelmed and exhausted. When Emi shook hands with her, the woman’s deep despair washed through Emi.

“Thank the gods you’re here!” she cried, hugging Emi. “I just…” She broke down crying. “I don’t know what to do! I’ve done all I can!”

Emi felt the other reason for her anguish. “Your husband, too?”

The vet nodded. “He was one of the first.”

The nurse and med tech, a man by the name of Shello Taber, sat at a desk with Emi. He passed her a hand-held. “Here are all the records we have, all the data we’ve amassed.”

“You’re not infected? You’ve had no symptoms?”

“No. I don’t know why some of us are and some aren’t. The new infections were coming at least one or two a day there, sometimes more. I don’t know why they stopped.” Dark circles lined his bloodshot, green eyes. He also neared exhaustion, Emi sensed. “The rest of us men, we isolated ourselves from the women at first, when this started, after Kale and John were killed.” He took a deep breath. “Now that the infection seems contained, we’ve given that up. We need every available person to help care for them.”

Emi quickly scanned the information while Aaron silently stood behind her and kept a watchful eye on Taber. Before the colony lost their top research and medical staff to the rages, they had ruled out airborne and waterborne issues. The situation had deteriorated dramatically before they could determine what the infected men had in common. Blood type and underlying health issues had been ruled out.

“All the infected men had been here from the beginning?” Emi asked.

Taber nodded. “From the start.”

“No new personnel?”

“Nope. In fact, our last resupply arrived over six months ago. No crew stayed behind.”

“What happens if you wake one of them up?”

He shrugged. “Usually they’re fine, for a while. One guy was fine for two days, and then, just as we thought maybe he’d gotten over it, he attacked me. Back to sedation. Usually they go anywhere from a few hours to almost a day. We haven’t brought anyone out of it for over a week now. It’s too risky.”

Emi studied the files. The first symptoms differed from man to man. One commonality was many of them experienced extreme irritability before the rages first started. The subsequent rages literally came from out of the blue without any apparent trigger. One woman was rescued when her fifteen-year-old daughter heard her father attacking her mother in the middle of the night. She shot him with a stunner.

Work, job duties, chemical and radiation exposure—all ruled out. Everyone ate basically the same diet from the same food sources.

She studied a picture of Ilse’s husband in his personnel record. He had light blue eyes and an open, friendly smile in his personnel mug shot.

“Can we wake up Dr. Martinez?”

“Yes.” Ilse spoke from the doorway behind them, where she and Dr. Shourpa stood, listening. “If it’ll help, please, do.”

“We have energy shackles,” Emi told her. “We can keep him restrained so he doesn’t hurt himself or others.”

Ilse nodded. “Whatever you need to do, please, do it.”

Taber and another nurse moved Dr. Martinez to the vacant operating room. Aaron went to retrieve a set of energy shackles and Sam for backup. With the doctor firmly secured to the operating table, Emi started her initial examination. Other than his slight weight loss from the IV fluid and nutrient regimen, he seemed to be in perfect health. Her scanners didn’t pick up anything unusual. She took blood, hair, and skin samples, as well as fingernail clippings and a DNA swab from his mouth.

She glanced at Taber. “I’ll need to examine you, too. Take samples. And the other healthy men.”

“Of course.”

Emi removed the IV before administering an injection to counteract the sedatives. After a few minutes, the doctor’s eyes fluttered open. He looked around in confusion.

Ilse stepped forward and slipped her fingers through his. “Hey, baby,” she whispered, smoothing his dark brown hair away from his forehead. “How you feeling?”

His blue eyes darkened in confusion as he tried to focus on her. Then he spotted Emi, Aaron, and Sam. “Are you from the DSMC?” he asked.

Emi nodded. “Yes, Dr. Martinez. I’m Dr. Emilia Hypatia. This is Captain Aaron Lucio and Officer Sam Johnson. We have three DSMC ships in orbit now. The ISNC is sending reinforcements.”

He finally nodded and looked at his wife. “Are you okay? Did I hurt you?”

She shook her head. “No, you didn’t hurt me. I’m sorry we’ve got to do this to you.”

Emi watched him squeeze his wife’s hand. Emi reached out and touched his leg. She only sensed love and worry from him, not an ounce of anger.

“Hey, it’s okay.” He looked at Emi again. “Please, you’ve got to figure this out.”

“We will, Dr. Martinez.” She checked his vitals again. No change other than the obvious increases in blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration from him being conscious. “Get him some water,” she told Taber. “No solid food yet.”

After an hour, the doctor showed no signs of a rage. Emi had Taber reposition him, still shackled but sitting up on the table.

Ilse wouldn’t leave his side. Emi tried not to think about the woman’s emotions, instead focusing on the job ahead of her. She turned to Sam. “There are three cases of testing supplies on the lander. Please bring them for me.”

He nodded and set off to do it. She turned to Taber. “Get all the men who aren’t infected, and gather them here so we can take samples. We also need samples from the infected men and from all the boys. We’ll do the women after that, but I want to send the samples from the men up to the Braynow Gaston now and let their labs start working on it. Maybe they can figure it out. We also need the info on that resupply freighter so we can see if their crew had any issues.”

“You’ve got it, Doc.” He took off to get the men.

Aaron still hadn’t interrupted her. She watched as he tried to wiggle his nose and upper lip inside his suit’s helmet to scratch an itch. “Will you please go back to the lander now?” she pleaded. “I’m not in any danger. Run a decon cycle in the air lock and get out of that monkey suit.”

“No.”

She sighed in frustration. She picked up her com unit and hailed Donna on the K-2.

“What have you found out?” Donna asked.

“I’m going to sync this info up to both your data banks and the Braynow Gaston. See if you can find anything in it, a pattern or something. I’ll have samples to send up to the Braynow Gaston crew in the next couple of hours.”

“Roger.”

Emi plugged a patch cable into the hand-held. Within a few seconds, the data streamed up to the ships.

Donna paged her. “Got it. I’ll go through it now.”

“Thanks.”

The sound of a rumbling stomach rolled though the room. Dr. Martinez blushed. “Sorry,” he apologized.

“That’s okay. You feel like eating something?”

“I’d kill for a piece of Ilse’s cinnamon toast.”

Ilse laughed. “Figures you’d ask for something like that.”

Emi smiled. “One piece to start with. I don’t want to overload your stomach. I should make you eat soup first.”

Dr. Martinez managed a weak smile. “I’m willing to risk it, Dr. Hypatia.”

Emi cleared him to try a piece of toast. Ilse hurried off to make it. After a few minutes, Emi leaned back and closed her eyes. A tension headache threatened. Nothing in her preliminary scans indicated anything out of the ordinary. Maybe whatever it was had run its course?

“My wife makes the best cinnamon bread,” Dr. Martinez boasted to Emi. “You should try it.”

Then she had a thought. “Cinnamon? You grow that here?”

“Oh, no. That came from Earth.”

Her heart sank. “You’ve been growing your grains here?”

“Almost from the start.” He sighed. “I thought maybe it was a food issue, but everyone’s eating the same things from the same sources.”

He had a point. A food issue should have shown up a lot sooner. “How long did you live here before you started eating planet-grown foods?”

He frowned, thinking about it. “After the first year. That’s when we grew a batch of crops and knew they were safe after we’d completed extensive testing.”

There had to be an answer.

“What about the transport crews? Did they eat food grown here?”

He nodded. “Sure. They loved it, being able to eat fresh food instead of frozen or dried and reconstituted.”

“Livestock?”

“Earth lines brought here. We’ve been eating seafood since the second year on.”

“And nothing wrong with the cattle or other livestock?”

“No. And yes, we grow their food grains here. That was one of the first crops we established and tested so they could be self-sustaining. We couldn’t keep shipping in grains.”

“Corn?”

He nodded. “Corn, alfalfa, barley, and various grazing grasses. Some wheat stocks for horses, pigs, and chickens.”

“You don’t eat horses?”

He laughed. “No. Work and pleasure animals, I assure you. A little low-tech, yes, but it’s easier to grow crops and raise livestock for some tasks than it is to refine energy sources and keep shipping in replacement parts for small equipment. We conserve where we can.”

They woke up two more men after restraining them and notifying their wives so they could be present. After four hours, Emi was about to order Dr. Martinez released when she heard a shout from the OR where he was still restrained.

The man couldn’t break the energy shackles, but that didn’t stop him from trying. Ilse had retreated to the corner, crying, while Taber tried to calm the doctor and get him to relax.

“Fuck you!” Dr. Martinez screamed, trying to lean over and bite the man.

Aaron stepped in front of Emi to stop her from getting closer, but she stepped around the table. Taber grabbed a syringe. While Martinez’s attention focused on Emi, Taber jabbed the hypo into the doctor’s shoulder.

He immediately slumped to the table, unconscious.

Dr. Shourpa tried to console her friend, who had slid down the wall to the floor. “He was talking to me!” she sobbed. “He had a little more to eat, and he was fine! Then the rage returned!”

Emi helped Taber reconfigure Dr. Martinez’s restraints and restart the IV. “You need to warn the other women,” Emi said. “If he reverted, they will, too. Don’t wake any more patients until we get some lab results back.”

“Okay.”

She stepped away from the table and over to the governor’s side. With Dr. Shourpa’s assistance, Emi helped the woman stand and walk from the room. Behind her, she heard Aaron’s com link whistle and Rob page him. He walked outside the clinic to talk to him.

“Let’s get you home,” Emi said to the governor. “You need to rest.”

She nodded, too distraught to argue. The two women walked her across the compound to a small, nondescript residential pod. Inside, she’d made it look as homey and comfortable as she could in their still relatively spartan setting. Everything was neat and tidy and smelled of cinnamon and baked goods.

Six fresh loaves of cinnamon bread sat on the counter. In a daze, Ilse walked over to the kitchen, retrieved a large plastic storage bag from her cabinet, and put the loaves in it. “Here,” she softly said, handing the bag to Emi. “Take these for your men.”

Not wanting to hurt the woman’s feelings, Emi did. “I will. Now, you need to go lie down and rest. Do you want me to give you a sedative?”

Ilse shook her head. “No.” Finally, her eyes focused. She looked at Emi. “Please, just figure out what’s wrong with them!”

“We will.”

Aaron waited for Emi outside the governor’s house. From one grim reality to another, Emi didn’t need her empath skills to know something was seriously wrong.

“What happened?”

He shook his head and indicated they needed to return to the lander. Inside, he removed his protective suit after going through a decon cycle in the air lock. Sam and Gregor looked equally grim. “We’ve got a serious problem.”

“What?” She dropped the bag of bread loaves on a crate as she took a seat.

“ISNC has taken over,” Aaron said. “Unless we figure out what the hell the problem is, the colonists will be evac’d, and the planet will be sterilized.”

“Sterilized?”

“Destroyed, in other words.”

Emi blinked. “They can’t do that!”

Gregor nodded. “Oh, yes, they can. And they will. The ISNC forces coming have orders to evac only people without symptoms and decon the planet.”

“But what about those infected?”

Aaron shook his head.

Emi gasped. “That’s murder!”

“They won’t risk the condition spreading,” Aaron said. “Once they give the final order, that’s it. Anyone who’s infected will be left on the planet and…” He didn’t finish.

“You cannot tell me you’re fucking okay with this!”

“No, I’m not. None of us are. The ISNC underwrote the initial colony and mission expenses to get it up and running. Contractually, they get to have a say in it. The colonists signed contracts with the DSMC to that effect. They understand that.”

“No, I’m sure they don’t understand they can be left behind to be murdered!” She alternately felt stunned and like screaming. “What the fuck, Aar?”

“We have to work fast.”

Emi had sent a preliminary shipment of samples up to the Braynow Gaston in an unmanned drone. The three scientists were already crunching results, trying to find a commonality to work with, but had not as of yet figured it out. Later that night, Aaron ordered an exhausted Emi back to the lander so they could return to the Tamora Bight. Gregor and Sam would bunk with them that night, in the cargo bay, and return to the planet with them in the morning.

Emi and Donna sat up half the night on the com link, wracking their brains to come up with something, anything. Captain John Tarrence from the Braynow Gaston hailed them.

“We’ve gone through all the samples you sent. Nothing. There is no reason for those men to have gotten sick. They are, with the exception of some standard conditions like hypertension, healthy. The only common link we can find is that they’re adult men.”

Emi scrubbed her face with her hands. “There has to be something.”

Aaron leaned against the sick bay counter, his arms crossed, listening.

“I’m sorry, Emi. There’s nothing we can find.”

“Look for any genetic differences between the sick and unaffected men.”

“We did. We traced the genetic code. There is nothing.”

Aaron stepped forward. “Thanks, John. We’ll talk to you in the morning. Page us if there’s anything new.”

“Sure thing, Aaron. Braynow Gaston, out.”

Aaron caught Emi’s hand and pulled her to her feet. It was the middle of the night their time, and she was wiped out. “Come on, Doc. To bed with you.” She offered no protest when he scooped her into his arms. She felt bone-weary and couldn’t get Ilse’s haunted look out of her mind.

She couldn’t let them die.

Ford had watch that night. Caph already slept sprawled across their large shared bed. Exhausted, Emi curled up next to him as Aaron settled against her other side and wrapped an arm around her waist.

He kissed the back of her neck. “You’ll figure it out, sweetie. I know you will.”

She didn’t feel so confident. She hoped he was right.