Anne McCaffrey - The Ship Who Searched

Thirty minutes for each capture.

They couldn't have done it if not for Tia's multitasking abilities and all the servos under her control. Right now, a set of servos were setting up crates all over the compound, near the hiding places of the Zombies. The Zombies seemed just as frightened of the servos as they were of Alex in his suit By running the servos all over the compound, they managed to send every one of the Zombies into hiding. They ran servos around each hiding place until they were ready to move to that area for darting and capture. By now, the Zombies were getting hungry, which was all to the good, so far as Alex and Tia were concerned. One trap was being baited now, and Alex was on his way to the hidden sniper position above it. Meanwhile, the rest of the servos were patrolling the compound except in the area of that baited crate, keeping the Zombies pinned down.

A second hair-raising moment had occurred at dawn, bringing Alex up out of his bed with a scream of his own. The Zombies had gathered to greet the rising sun with another chorus of howls, although this time they seemed more, well, not joyous, but certainly there was no fear in the Zombie faces.

Once the first servo appeared, and frightened the Zombies into hiding again, the final key to their capture plan was in place.

They would catch as many of the Zombies as possible during the daylight hours. Alex had marked their favorite hiding places last night, and by now those patrolling servos had those that were not occupied blocked off. More crates would be left very near those blocked-off hiding holes. Would they be attractive enough for more of the Zombies to hide in them? Alex thought so. Tia hoped he was right, for every Zombie cowering in a crate meant one more they could dart and pack up. One more they would not have to catch tomorrow.

One less half-hour spent here. If they could keep up the pace. If the Zombies didn't get harder to catch.

Alex kept up a running dialogue with her, and she sensed that he was as frightened and lonely as she was, but was determined not to show it. He revealed a lot, over the course of the day; she built up a mental picture of a young man who had been just different enough that while he was mildly popular, or at least, not unpopular, he had few close friends. The only one who he really spoke about was someone called Jon. The chess and games player he had mentioned before. He spent a lot of time with Jon, who had helped him with his lessons when he was younger, so Tia assumed that Jon must have been older than Alex. Older or not, Jon had been, and still was, a friend. There was no mistaking the warmth in Alex's voice when he talked about Jon; no mistaking the pleasure he felt when he talked about the message of congratulation Jon had sent when he graduated from the academy.

Or the laughter he'd gotten from the set of 'brawn jokes' Jon had sent when Tia picked Alex as her partner.

Well, Doctor Kenny, Anna, and Lars were my friends, and still are. Sometimes age doesn't make much of a difference.

"Hey, Alex?" she called. He was waiting for another of the timid Zombies to give in to hunger. The clock was running.

"What?"

"What do you call a brawn who can count past ten?"

"I don't know," he said good-naturedly. "What?"

"Barefoot'"

He made a rude noise, then sighted and pulled the trigger. One down, how many more to go?

They had fifty-two Zombies packed in the hold, and one casualty. One of the Zombies had not survived the darting; Alex had gone into acute depression over that death, and it had taken Tia more than an hour to talk him out of it. She didn't dare tell him then what those contact-buttons revealed; some of their passengers weren't thriving well. The heart rates were up, probably with fear, and she heard whimpering and wailing in the hold whenever there was no one else in it but the Zombies. The moment any of the servos or Alex entered the hold, the captives went utterly silent. Out of fear, Tia suspected.

The last Zombie was in the hold; the hold was sealed, and Tia had brought the temperature up to skin-heat. The ventilators were at full-strength. Alex had just entered the main cabin.

And he was reaching for his helmet-release.

"Don't crack your suit," she snapped. How could she have forgotten to tell him? Had she? Or had she told him, and he had forgotten?

"What?" he said. Then, "Oh, decom it. I forgot!"

She restrained herself from saying what she wanted to. "Doctor Kenny said you have to stay in the suit. Remember? He thinks that the chance we might have missed something in decontamination is too much to discount. He doesn't want you to crack your suit until you're at the base. All right?"

"What if something goes wrong for the Zombies?" he asked, quietly. "Tia, there isn't enough room in that hold for me to climb around in the suit."

"We'll worry about that if it happens," she replied firmly. "Right now, the important thing is for you to get strapped down, because their best chance is to get to Base as quickly as possible, and I'm going to leave scorch-marks on the ozone layer getting there."

He took the unsubtle hint and strapped himself in; Tia was better than her word, making a tail-standing takeoff and squirting out of the atmosphere with a blithe disregard for fuel consumption. The Zombies were going to have to deal with the constant acceleration to hyper as best they could. At least she knew that they were all sitting or lying down, because the crates simply weren't big enough for them to stand.

She had been relaying symptoms, observed and recorded, back to Doctor Kenny and the med staff at Kleinman Base all along. She had known that they weren't going to get a lot of answers, but every bit of data was valuable, and getting it there ahead of the victims was a plus.

But now that they were on the way, they were on their own, without the resources of the abandoned dig or the base they were en route to. The med staff might have answers, but they likely would not have the equipment to implement them.

Alex couldn't move while she was accelerating, but once they made the jump to FTL, he unsnapped his restraints and headed for the stairs.

"Where are you going?" she asked, nervously.

"The hold. I'm in my suit. There's nothing down there that can get me through the suit."

Tia listened to the moans and cries through her hold pickups; thought about the contact-buttons that showed fluttering hearts and unsteady breathing. She knew what would happen if he got down there. "You can't do anything for them in the crates," she said. "You know that."

He turned toward her column. "What are you hiding from me?"

"N-nothing," she said. But she didn't say it firmly enough.

He turned around and flung himself back in his chair, hands speeding across the keyboard with agility caused by days of living in the suit. Within seconds he had called up every contact-button and had them displayed in rows across the screen.

"Tia, what's going on down there?" he demanded. "They weren't like this before we took off, were they?"

"I think..." She hesitated. "Alex, I'm not a doctor!"

"You've got a medical library. You've been talking to the doctors. What do you think?"

"I think, they aren't taking hyper well. Some of the data the base sent me on brain-damaged simians suggested that some kinds of damage did something to the parts of the brain that make you compensate for, for things that you know should be there, but aren't. Where you can see a whole letter out of just parts of it, identify things from split-second glimpses. Kind of like maintaining a mental balance. Anyway, when that's out of commission," She felt horribly helpless. "I think for them it's like being in Singularity."

"For four days?" he shouted, hurting her sensors. "I'm going down there."