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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
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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
Uhua-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 ever
supposed to see was an epidemic of whatever new influenza was going around. He
was not supposed to have to be dealing with a plague, at least, not by his way
of thinking. Traffic control was supposed to be keeping plague ships from ever
coming near the station.
"Thanks for your cooperation, Doctor," Alex said genially. "Get that link set
up for us, if you would, and we'll leave you to your work."
The doctor signed off, still without identifying himself, not that Tia was
worried. Her recordings were enough for any legal purposes, and at this point,
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now that he had passed authority on to them, he was a nonentity. They didn't
need to talk to him anymore. What they needed was currently incarcerated in an
isolation room on that station, and they were going to have to figure out how
to get him to talk to them.
"Okay, Alex," she said when the screen was safely blank. "You're a lot closer
to being an expert on this than I am. How do we get a rock-rat to tell us what
we want to know?"
"Hank, my name's Alex," the brawn said, watching the screen and all the
patient-status readouts alongside. "I'm a brawn from CS, on loan to
MedServices; you'll hear another voice in a moment, and that's my brainship,
Tia."
"Hello, Hank," she said, very glad that she was safely encased in her column
with no reactions for Hank to read. Alex was doing a good job of acting; one
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