James Gardner - Space Inc (collection)

Shielded areas—including the infirmary and telesurgery stations—are reinforced against meteorites and solar flares. But this is neither. Now I can hear the pilot’s voice through my audio, speaking very fast, reciting what she’s seeing, what she’s doing, as though her instruments, her actions, were not being recorded and transmitted. And then she says, “Initiating cargo sterilization. Ejecting,” and the cabin-pod cracks away on a cleft of fire, cast into the shallowness of space.

Text screeds down both sides of my screen. At such moments I go word-blind, even as my visual perception expands and my time sense explodes. The pilot is still reciting what she’s doing as she rides the shuttle through the telelink, trying to turn it away from the platforms. She’s still talking when the whole side of the shuttle peels apart from an eruption that is for the briefest of moments brighter than the clouds of Earth. And then there’s a silence and murmured prayer.

Against the Earth light, the fragments are invisible, except for those large enough to contain their own shadow; they flicker, tumbling, Earthward, or obliquely past IMS-1. But we know the unseen ones by their passing: thin through the walls of the pod, the decompression alarms begin to squeal, and in the periphery of the display, as I have programmed it to do, the decompression warning icon blinks.

Faces bloom across my display, all the duty-docs, Julian Sutherland, space medicine; Tonia Sundralingham, radiation medicine; Nuria al-Hassam, psychiatry; and Y’, who must just have gotten to sleep. Medical emergency coordinator comes around in rotation, rather like the one shell in Russian roulette. Guess who is gazing into the little black eye of fate tonight?

“Load medical emergency coordinator expert system,” I… squeak. No, it’s not the atmosphere. Deep breathing.

Earth, clouds, the absent shuttle, are all replaced by a schematic of nodes, my preferred representation. Each node indicates a particular function or aspect of the disaster, color-coded according to priority for my attention. The colors dance as everyone except Y’ starts routing data toward it and me. The bioreads of scared and injured people. A map of the immediate vicinity, charting impacts, decompression reports. A report from Desert Rose’s duty-doc: They’ve been struck by debris, have lost solar panels, have four—five— perfed pods, one torn open to the point of explosive decompression, and can anyone kindly tell them what just came through their walls?

Luther Igorin, the EBDD specialist on Semmelweis, is trying to answer that question. No question about the need-to-know now, and he spreads out the shuttle’s manifest for us. It’s fungi. In the later years of the bioterrors, fungi in particular were bioengineered to withstand heat, desiccation, radiation, taking tips from Deinococcus radiodurans and other extremophiles. He’s highlighted two entries on the cargo manifest as radiation-resistants. The question is whether the radiation dose was adjusted to take account of that, whether the shuttle’s cargo got the full sterilization before the shuttle came apart. I’ve never seen Luther sweat the way he’s sweating now.

The shuttle crew announces their survival with a restrained, “I realize this may not be a good time, but we could use a pickup here.” Someone in the background is retching.

Luther withdraws from the team room temporarily to get more information from the shuttle pilot. He’s replaced by Jay McPhearson Leaphorn, responsible for rescue and retrieval. Jay traces descent from chiefs of clan and tribe, and his square, terra-cotta face reflects the stoicism of both traditions; nobody has ever sees him sweat.

Jay says, with his usual politeness, “My team have almost completed their hazard assessment. Do you have a casualty assessment, please?”

The expert system is crunching the biosensor readings, emergency calls, environmental readout, and other data, generating a list of urgent-attention cases in all the affected platforms. “I’m still waiting on a provisional list—”

“I’ll be back for your review. Excuse me,” and he blinks out.

The lit-up nodes now include: decompression, environmental compromise, radiation exposure, potential infectious agent exposure, psychological trauma.

Luther dumps the fingerprints of the shuttle’s manifest to the pathogen-sensors of all platforms above our horizon. I have a bad feeling that this means he is not satisfied that the cargo was sterilized. We should all be grateful for a man who appreciates priorities; some of his IBDD colleagues would still be trying to limit “exposure” of sensitive information. This doesn’t address the problem that, although there’s a minimum standard for platform atmospheric monitoring, not everyone has the grade of biosensors that we do, affinity sensors with a wide range of receptors associated with pathogenicity rather than specific to individual pathogens. But… I subclone the display again, in time to see one, two, three, four, five… potential positives.

I’ve gone cold, seeing the signal imposed on the familiar blueprint.

Now, the fingerprints Luther sent over have a strong bias for sensitivity over specificity: no surprise, since the consequences of failing to detect these spores are far worse than the consequences of getting excited over some innocuous mold.

Only my parents and I were in Montana in June 2034. Global warming coming atop sustained overuse and over-irrigation had cost the Prairies their place as the continent’s breadbasket; most of the Americas were dependent upon the sea, or imports from outside. I was on a student elective at a rural clinic and my parents were working on one of multiple drought-resistant engineering projects, efforts violently opposed by the Earth Redeemers. Since the Redeemers opposed genetic engineering of any organism, no one anticipated the anthrax bombing. My family had been vaccinated against all known strains ourselves, because of other areas my parents had worked; so we only got to watch other people die.

Transport of medicines and vaccines was delayed; the delay, it emerged, was because of concerns in Washington that further attacks might come, that the vaccines might be needed and better used elsewhere… in the important, economically valuable regions of the country, rather than in the depopulated, dust bowl Prairies.

Out of the outrage unslaked by the impeachment of the president, John Rand Brierly established his own Senate in Atlanta and built the New Secessionist movement. Four years after that, after an el Ninõ decimated the sea’s relied-upon harvest, Brierfy’s forces launched the first attack in what became the pan-American War. By then, I was in Africa, completing my training, falling in love with Luis and Michel, planning a future that had nothing to do with a continent half a world away splintering under environmental stress and political, religious, and racial extremities—Africa’s renaissance, after all, had come after decades of it.

“Helen,” says Nuria.

Almost unseen in all the clutter of texts and symbols is the warning signal of excessive stress on the surgical gloves. I unlock my hands and pull them out of the gloves. This is not the time to break equipment.

The other faces in the team room freeze. Only Nuria’s is animate. “I’ve locked them out for a moment,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you privately. Would you prefer to—”

“ No .” And, more temperately, “The expert system will backstop my judgment. So will my colleagues and friends. We all lived through these times.”

She has a still, well-schooled face; even after five years in such proximity I cannot say I know her. Yet some shift of expression makes me wonder what she herself lived through, during the years the Islamic nations were isolated behind the “Iron Veil.”