Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

Arkady left the lab at a dead run with Arkasha close behind him. The last thing he remembered hearing as he left was the brittle crack of Arkasha’s dropped pencil shattering on the floor.

Aurelia dashed through the airlock ahead of them without pausing to let it cycle. So much for the last shreds of the theoretical quarantine.

The rest of the team was clustered on the open slope below the hab module, staring skyward, hands shielding their eyes or held over mouths dropped open in slack-jawed amazement.

“There,” Aurelia urged. “Look!”

It took Arkady a long, stunned moment to understand what he was looking at. Then he realized that the trailing mare’s tail of high cumulus streaming across the sky from horizon to horizon was no cloud at all.

It was a contrail.

“That’s not—” Arkasha began.

“No,” Laid-back Ahmed said. “It’s not ours. The sound’s all wrong. It must be one of the new drives UNSec hasn’t cleared for civilian use.”

“Shouldn’t we have seen them coming in-system?”

“Yes.” There was an edge to Ahmed’s voice that Arkady had never heard there before.

“Unless they were hiding behind the planet,” By-the-Book Ahmed pointed out ominously.

“But wouldn’t they have to know where we were to do that?” Aurelia asked.

“Yes. And where all our mapping satellites are as well.”

“Then…”

Aurelia’s voice trailed off into the general silence just as Arkady came to the realization that however frightening it had been to be alone on Novalis with help four months away, it was many times more frightening to be sharing the planet with a contingent of Peacekeepers.

Arkady remembered the next ten days of the mission as one long continuous slow-motion avalanche of panic.

Bella’s sickness spread through the crew with the ponderous inevitability of an avalanche gathering breadth and power as it flows down a mountainside. First the Ahmeds fell sick. Then both Banerjees and both the Aurelias went down in a single miserable day. Aurelia was unable, even after the most frantic efforts, to isolate the pathogen responsible for the sickness. And meanwhile, a new fight was splintering the crew into ever more violently opposed factions: the fight over whether the undiagnosable sickness and the inexplicable contrail were caused by a single common enemy.

“Come for a walk with me?” Aurelia the surgeon asked Arkady sometime in the middle of the panic.

“Are you up to a walk?” he asked doubtfully. She’d just dragged herself out of bed and back to work that morning.

“Not really. But I want the privacy.”

She was silent all the way to the airlock, and while they cycled through it, and for a good minute after they got outside. Even ravaged by fever, she struck out across the clearing with her usual assertive stride. Just under the shadow of the first rank of trees, she veered sideways and began making a slow circuit of the pasture.

“I’m worried,” she said at last. “And I want to talk to you first because I don’t want to turn this into a fight between Ahmed and Arkasha. It’s too important.”

“What’s too important?”

“Ahmed has been after me to tell him that this sickness is some kind of bioweapon. He wants to thaw out the tacticals.”

“Oh God.”

“That’s about what I said when he sprang it on me.”

“Well,” Arkady said, beginning to think through the implications of Ahmed’s idea. “ Is it?”

Aurelia opened her mouth, then closed it without answering. “Arkasha doesn’t think so. As far as I can make out, he thinks we’ve just walked into the terraforming cross fire. God knows it wouldn’t be the first time. First survey mission I crewed on was cleanup for a team that lost all but two members to some kind of hypermutating fungus before they could even figure out what hit them. And Arkasha is the one looking at the viral payload. I’m just trying to sort out the vector of infection. Which, if you ask me, amounts to MotaiSyndicate running an outrageously unethical immunological experiment on the rest of us poor slobs.” She kicked at the grass in frustration. “God, I wish this was a Rostov mission!”

They walked along in silence, Arkady matching Aurelia’s longlegged stride without thought or effort. She had a point, he reflected. “You still haven’t said what you think about Ahmed’s bioweapon idea.”

“It’s possible, of course. Anything’s possible.” She plucked one of the many-petaled blue flowers that had carpeted the pasture during the recent weeks of sun and began tearing the petals off it in an absentmindedly savage game of she-loves-me-not.

“Then you think it evolved here naturally?”

“No. And no, I can’t tell you why.” She looked down at the flower’s dismembered corpse, frowning as if she’d only just realized the havoc her fingers were wreaking. “It just…it just feels wrong.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.” She turned to face him, looking young and scared and nothing like her usual confident self. Behind her the long pasture ran away toward the hidden river, and the silver grass rippled like the fur of some sleeping beast. “It’s like…it’s like a real frog in an imaginary garden.”

And no matter what he did, Arkady couldn’t get her to say what she meant by those words…or even whether she knew that there was no such thing as a real frog anymore.

Arkasha went down with the virus the next day, and by nightfall he was running a dangerously high fever. The sickness was quirky that way; one person’s symptoms might be merely annoying, while the next person might run a fever that had Aurelia talking darkly about the low survival rates for prophylactic cryo. Arkady and Arkasha were a case in point. Arkady’s brush with the disease had been so mild that he still wasn’t sure if he had escaped it altogether or simply failed to notice it amid the general exhaustion and panic. But Arkasha went down hard.

Arkady nursed his pairmate through seventy-two hours of violent chills and fevers, scrupulously following all Aurelia’s instructions. On the evening of the third day he came back from his first hot meal in days to find Arkasha’s bed empty.

He finally tracked his sib down in the first place he should have looked for him: the lab. Arkasha was still haggard with exhaustion and dehydration. But he was clean and shaved and neatly dressed…and doggedly determined to get back to work.

“Are you sure you’re strong enough to be out of bed already?” Arkady asked worriedly.

“No. But I needed to check on something. I had an idea while I was sick. Something about this virus was ringing a bell somewhere, and I finally remembered what it was. Ever heard of Turing Soup?”

Arkady blinked in surprise. “As in Alan Turing?”

“Yep. I think that’s what we’ve caught. I can’t explain how it got here or who spliced it but at least I think I know what they were trying to accomplish.”

“Aurelia said you weren’t sure it was designed.”

“I wasn’t when I talked to her.” He cocked a sharp eye at Arkady. “Why was she talking to you about that? Did she ask you to stop me from insulting Captain Bligh’s breadfruit?”

Arkady laughed in spite of himself. “Is that his new nickname?”

“Well, it’s what I call him. I can’t repeat what Aurelia calls him within range of your delicate ears.”

“Don’t be mad at her for talking to me. She likes you. She just doesn’t want to watch you make trouble for yourself.”

“I know. And I appreciate it. And I’m sorry about what I said after the last consult. I overreacted. It just…brought back bad memories.”

Arkasha rubbed a hand across his forehead and sat down a bit limply. He still looked feverish to Arkady, and not just with the fever of excitement.