Jonathan and Gaby had the use of an entire team to prepare cold storage for the victims and had to disinfect the room, to remove all the shelving so that the freezer could serve as morgue until the bodies could be offloaded for investigation and return to their families.

  Another room they set up as examination centre. Gaby intended to perform at least one port-mortem, but might do more.

  She explained, “I’ll do as many as it takes before I know what has killed them. I don’t expect the cause of death to vary between people, but it may be more obvious in one than another.”

  Jonathan refrained from asking about the details.

  She would be assisted by the ship’s single doctor, a man who, in keeping with the company spirit, looked barely old enough to have left high school. He was constantly undoing and doing up the buttons on his medical overalls.

  Gaby would be in charge of the storage of the bodies and of the post-mortems, while Jonathan was in charge of removing the bodies and then decontamination of the auditorium.

  Using the map of Astoria Station, Jonathan created a circuit so that people removing the bodies wouldn’t get in each other’s way. From the docks, empty trolleys would come in the long way and full ones the short way.

  The bodies would then be loaded onto the shuttle and Kenzie would fly them to the ship.

  Because no one knew what caused the deaths, everyone who was in the same room with the victims would wear a full protection suit, even when they worked in the freezer rooms on the ship.

  Jonathan informed the captain about which parts of the ship they’d be using so that the passengers could be kept away.

  Most of the afternoon was simply hard work.

  Once Jonathan had gotten over the fact that they were carrying dead people, some of them in the beginning stages of decomposition, he heaved the bags onto the trolleys as if they were sacks of potatoes. He and Lance, working in a team, made their way into the dock, where Kenzie waited with the shuttle, and then they went back again.

  Lance was big and strong, and that was a definite plus. Fortunately, he also kept his mouth shut.

  After all was done, Jonathan stood in the shower for a very long time before joining Gaby in the canteen, where he could do little more than stare at his dinner. Normally the kitchens did a decent job, but the fare was particularly unappetising today, some kind of protein cubes with artificial mushrooms—don’t ask.

  "You have to eat something. I don't want you fainting on the job," Gaby said.

  She was tucking into her meal as if she had last eaten a week ago.

  He breathed out heavily. "I just feel that wherever we go, death always follows us."

  "And what do you expect when you travel with a doctor? The only time we see people is when they are sick, and sometimes you can't do anything about it. The older people get, the more often they see a doctor and that way, the doctors end up seeing mostly sick people. We doctors like the ones that just come for an infected toe or something small like that, but the reality is, those easily-cured patients are only a very small proportion of our daily job."

  "It must be depressing to work in a hospital."

  "Not half as depressing as trying to sort out this mess."

  He saw in her face that she dreaded tomorrow, when she would have to start on the autopsies.

  "Do make sure you keep in contact with me while you work,” Jonathan said.

  He was going to go back into the station to look at the recycling plant to see if he could pinpoint a reason that all inhabitants had suddenly died.

  He remembered that he meant to look at the data he downloaded from the recycling computer, and knew that it would be futile to that today, because he was simply too tired to mentally process any of the information.

  He longed to pass this case onto the Space Corps’ Civilian Unit. His first impression was that this looked unlikely to have been caused by an alien organism, and this meant he was out of his depth.

  “By the way, I asked again if I could speak to Rachel Sinclair,” Gaby said.

  “And?”

  “Same answer. I’m pretty sure they don’t want us talking to her. But I think I have found another way in. I’ve looked at the staff list of Ceres Station hospital and I recognise one of the doctors there. I knew him reasonably well when we were studying. He went into mental health, and there is a good chance that he is treating her. I can contact him separately through the medical channels. It might bring up something interesting.”

  “What do you expect to find?”

  “It depends on what we find tomorrow. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re dealing with a criminal case. I doubt Rachel would have the answers, but she might give us some interesting clues.”

  Jonathan agreed.

  Gaby said that she was going to go to bed, because she was tired and tomorrow would be a big day.

  They walked together through the corridors.

  In front of the door to Gaby’s cabin, Jonathan stopped her. "Are you okay?"

  "As well as I could be when dealing with hundreds of dead people."

  "Now you're joking, and I know that when you start making jokes you're not okay."

  Gaby shrugged. "It's all horrible. Especially the kids. I don't know what’s happened but I can't imagine that anyone would want to kill those poor kids. You could even see them being led into the auditorium by their teacher. Led to their deaths.”

  "Hey," Jonathan said and he put his hand on her shoulder.

  She reached up to it and held it for a while before turning around and going into her cabin.

  Chapter Six

  Jonathan went to his cabin as well and although he’d intended to go to bed early, he spent a long time looking through the data from the recycling plant.

  As with some of the cameras, the recorder had met with limited data storage space, because that was apparently related to a process that needed occasional input from a human.

  This time, however, the later data had overwritten the earlier data, which meant that measurements from the supposed time of the incident were no longer available.

  That was frustrating.

  Jonathan didn’t understand why. The one area where wisdom—and university lecturers—said you should never cut corners was habitat safety. And in practice, habitat safety was constantly compromised by station directors or captains who grew annoyed with the cost of safety procedures.

  And this was the result.

  Over three hundred people dead.

  He spent a good part of the night worrying about this. There were microbial infections that could wipe out entire settlements, and recycling processes that could potentially turn the atmosphere deadly if problems were not addressed.

  Could it happen that quickly?

  It was hard to believe, but it wouldn’t be the first time he’d seen quick deaths.

  But not over three hundred of them in the same room. Yet if there had been a crime, something about the scene would have pointed in that direction.

  Then he worried about Gaby having to do autopsies and direct two medical staff, a young doctor and a nurse, who had little experience. Gaby hadn’t seemed all right.

  He wished they didn’t have to hold up this professional facade and he could be with her.

  But she acted much calmer in the morning, and when Jonathan asked about her wellbeing, she said she’d been so tired she never had the energy to spend much time worrying.

  “Maybe tonight,” she said, with a wry grin. “Depending on what we find.”

  They each went about their tasks after breakfast.

  Unfortunately, not having Gaby as companion meant that Jonathan would have to go back into the station alone with Lance.

  Kenzie was making regular trips now. She was wearing her protective suit, and Lance was making comments about how she looked much better without.

  It was kind of creepy, and Jonathan was glad when they arrived, and there were other things to do.

  He put on his breathing apparatus and helmet, and then helped Lance to get into his.

  "So what are we looking for?" Lance asked while they stood in the air lock. It was kind of intrusive to have Lance’s voice come out of the same loudspeakers where he would normally hear Gaby.

  Jonathan replied, “I’m going to look at the recycling plant. I need to take samples and check the contents of the vats and air recycling filters for poisons. I’m sorry it might be a bit boring for you."

  “I can help.”

  "How much do you know about recycling?" Jonathan asked.

  Lance gave him a dumb look. Not much, Jonathan guessed.

  Seriously what a dumbwit.

  It was quite unfortunate that Gaby couldn't come.

  Jonathan sent her a message, saying I miss you already.

  Then he thought it might be a bit suggestive if someone else read it, and he added, It's not going to be the same without you to help me.

  Gaby didn’t reply. Likely she was already up to her elbows in guts and gore.

  The door opened.

  In the corridor going into the station, they met a couple of people in hazard suits coming the other way. They carried nothing except a small box.

  "What was that?” Jonathan asked when they had passed.

  "Those were the data team,” Lance said.

  "They should have let us know they were here. I don't want them to remove material that might help me find out what has happened. What were they here for?”

  "I don't know,” Lance said. “They’re the data team. That’s all I know. At the ship, they look after people’s bookings and tickets and stuff.”

  Yes, he really was an idiot.

  The station’s recycling plant was on the top floor, tucked away in the corner furthest from the control centre.

  It wasn’t the most modern Jonathan had ever seen, but also not the most old-fashioned. His first impression was of a well-maintained unit.

  He gave Lance a box of tubes with the order to fill them with samples from the various vats.

  Meanwhile, Jonathan set up his computer with the downloaded data from the recycling plant. He looked through the data while Lance stood in front of the large tank, with his hands in his pockets.

  “Urgh, that smells like shit.”

  “What do you expect? What do you think it is?”

  He gave Jonathan a sideways look.

  Then he had another thought. “Why can you smell anything anyway? Did you loosen your helmet?”

  “No.” And then after a while he continued, “It’s hot and uncomfortable.”

  “More uncomfortable than dying?”

  “The air quality meter says it’s OK.”

  Jonathan checked his. It was. Barely.

  “The air quality meter doesn’t measure bacteria. Three hundred people have died in this closed ecosystem. There’s going to be some nasty stuff floating around. That’s why I keep my helmet on. You should keep yours secured.” Then he thought of something else. “Did you also take it off yesterday?”

  Lance didn’t reply. Jonathan guessed that he did. Seriously, could they hire any more stupid people?

  “Does that mean we’re going to get sick?” Lance asked after a while. “I covered my nose and mouth.”

  “It could. I can’t tell.”

  “They said it was OK.”

  “Who is they? No one asked us. I would never have said it was OK.”

  “The air was safe. They showed us.”

  “Who showed you?”

  “My boss.”

  He sounded miserable.

  Jonathan already figured that he didn’t think much of Prosperity Mining’s safety procedures, but this hapless young man was probably not the right person to address.

  He stuck to his task: to look for catastrophic failure in the recycling plant. A burst of sulphur dioxide would kill a lot of people—but it also stank very badly and this wouldn’t have crept up on a few hundred people in an auditorium unnoticed.

  And although the recycling vats did emit sulphur dioxide, this was normal, and if the recycling process had stopped, that was to be expected. Unless you opened the vats, the filters dealt with it, and in any case, if it got out, there wasn’t enough of it to kill three hundred people in a room on the floor below without them first noticing the stench.

  There was barely enough refuse in the collection vat for Lance to take a sample. The station had simply run out of material to recycle when the people died. That’s why the balance in the plant was off.

  Lance complained about having to bend into the stinky vat, prompting Jonathan to mentally prepare a number of pithy replies.

  Get used to it, sunshine.

  You wouldn’t have smelled anything if you’d have kept your mask on.

  It’s not going to kill you.

  But he kept the snark to himself because he was a professional and because he couldn’t see anything in the recycling plant that was out of line.

  He unplugged his diagnostic computer. Lance was still stacking his samples in a container when a loud metallic clang reverberated through the hull.

  “What was that?” Jonathan asked, but at the same time he heard the thud-thud-thud of… footsteps?

  Lance snorted. “The station turns around. The sun hits a different part of it. That makes the metal crack.”

  Jonathan wasn’t sure.

  Of course he was familiar with the clicks and bangs made by metal structures when they expanded in blazing sunlight.

  But the sun wasn’t terribly strong this far out in the solar system, and he had never heard expansion cracks sound like footsteps.

  What if there was an extra person in the station?

  Gaby hadn’t positively identified everyone. It was possible that there might have been a visitor and that therefore, the total number of people still matched the number they had found.

  Jonathan then took some pictures of the recycling vats. He and Lance gathered samples.

  Gaby contacted him to say that the medical team was almost done.

  Jonathan had a vision of her standing in a gore-covered gown with guts on the floor.

  “I’m almost done here, too,” he said. “Nothing much to report. It’s all pretty much how I expected. We’ll have a quick look around the labs.”

  Jonathan took Lance out of the recycling labs to the adjacent research facility.

  The shuttle wouldn’t be due for another hour, so Jonathan figured they might as well have a look around. If there was someone still alive, they might find some clues.

  For the next hour, they peeked through every lab, every office and every room of the middle floor of the habitat.

  Jonathan found plenty of signs that people had walked away from their desks suddenly, because they had left all their things behind. Some of the computers were still on. Coffee stood abandoned on desks, with pictures of loved ones.

  The labs contained many samples of crushed rock, all hermetically sealed in little tubes. There was a cabinet of chemicals, mass spectrometers, and much more equipment. Geology wasn’t Jonathan’s strong point.

  He understood that this station fulfilled a particularly important role, because many of the smaller teams didn't have all the equipment themselves. He also understood that a station like this could be the forefront of an attack by alien bacteria. And those bacteria had already made their way to Mars and the moon.

  But as far as he could tell, all the necessary precautions had been taken, and he could see no evidence of growth that shouldn't be there. The samples were all sealed and wouldn’t be unpacked until the tube was put into the machine.

  Scientists had done a lot of work to make sure that this type of analysis was as risk-free to the lab workers as possible.

  Then they came to a fairly large room with benches along the sides. It looked like an area for storing large items.

  When he walked into the centre of the room, Jonathan stepped on something.

  A tray of samples had fallen to the ground. The tubes had rolled all over the floor. Seals on several had broken, and some samples had even lost their lids, spilling their contents.

  Some of the cupboard doors stood open, and one of them had sagged off its hinges.

  "Something has happened here," he told Lance, who was looking around. The reflection on the visor and didn't allow Jonathan to see his face.

  “You think so?” Lance asked. He sounded uninterested.

  A couple of protective gowns lay on the bench where they should have been hanging on hooks on the wall.

  In the corner of the room stood a recycling vat on a transport pallet, a sturdy thing with built-in wheels. The pallet was jammed up into the wall. Something had dislodged the vat from the trolley. One corner hung off the side.

  The lid was open. Jonathan peeked inside, but the vat was empty except for a bit of sand and fragments of rock.

  On the other side, there was a door which, upon investigation, turned out to lead to an airlock that led to an emergency exit.

  The airlock and doors were intact.

  Before coming to the station, he’d grabbed a vacuum-wrapped snack bar of dried fruit and had put it in his satchel. Against the side wall was a rack which contained air tanks and environment suits that maintenance workers used to clean out the tanks. He figured that if someone was hiding, this person would know where to find the essentials like air to breathe.

  He put the bar on the shelf next to the environment suits. One hook was empty, but that might not mean anything.

  Jonathan investigated the surface of the benches. Some bits of sand and rock lay there.

  It was very strange. He took a lot of photos of the room, he told Lance to sweep the sand off the table into a sample tube and packed it with the others.

  Then they had to return to the docks, because Kenzie sent a message that she was on her way to pick them up.

  Back at the ship, they delivered the samples to the store room. It was already full of material collected at the time when people had removed the bodies. Jonathan spotted a clear box containing personal items like pads, watches, belts, keys and jewellery all stored away in plastic bags.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8