Reunion: Chapter 12

  Emerging from the forest into the meadow, Kathryn’s team found their way to a river which was flowing down from the mountains at their back.  They remembered from the topological maps and imagery of the colony site that this river would eventually lead them right into the middle of the town they were looking to investigate.

  An hour and a half after the last communication, Jaren had contacted them again to give them an update on the progress the Orbital One team was making.   “They’ve successfully powered up the central processor and comm system,” he reported, “but they’ve only just begun to feed the data sheets in to restore the operating system.   Shouldn’t be long now, they should be finished by the time they orbit beneath us again.”

  “Good to hear,” Kathryn affirmed.  “Keep us posted.  Surface team out.”

  “I’m most interested in knowing if there is indeed enough rotational control fuel left to stabilize the gravity,” Irvina commented.  “One would think that automated systems would have used up the last drop maintaining orbital altitude, but if there is still some left, we should eventually be able to restart the reactors and fully restore the station.  That would be nice.”

  Kathryn shook her head a little with a grin towards the ground.

  “What,” Irvina asked, seeming almost offended.

  “Oh nothing,” Kathryn answered, “it’s just… I wish the rest of your people could get into this the way you are.  Was Orbital One and the other facilities in the system not a big enough lure for them, even if they’re only interested in technology?”

  “It’s enough of a curiosity for us to have gotten around to it eventually,” Irvina suggested with a shrug and a thoughtful wrinkle above her narrow nose, “but other things like establishing rifts around more stars has so far taken priority.   It’s more a question of… allocation of finite resources than a total and complete lack of curiosity.  As an engineer, getting the station up and running is just a problem I’m enjoying trying to solve.”

  “Right.   Well, no one would be happier than me if we can salvage that station and get it operational.  The possibilities if we can are endless.”

  Deirdre grabbed at Kathryn’s shirt from behind, and when she looked back at her the woman had a finger to her lips, signaling for her to be quiet.  She then motioned towards the ground for her to get low and hide.   The four of them got as low as they could in the impression the river had cut into the valley; belly down on the riverbank and peeking over the top.  They saw a group of six humans off in the distance walking in their direction along the bank of the river beyond its bend off to one side.

  Mangy was the only word which came to Kathryn’s mind to describe them.  Their hair was either cut very short and very roughly, or was past their shoulders in thick clumps.  From a distance one might think they were rough braids, but upon more careful inspection the hair was just incredibly dirty and great clumps of it clung together.  Their clothing appeared to consist of animal skins and furs, but Kathryn was struck by how well tailored the primitive clothing nevertheless appeared to be.

  “Well, there they are,” Elim quietly observed.  “What’s the play?” she asked Kathryn.

  “I think I’m just going to go say hi,” she casually mused.  “Alone,” she clarified.

  “Captain?” Irvina asked with clear concern.

  “All of us emerging at once could scare them off.  They could run back to their camp in panic and create all kinds of problems for us here.  Minimal impact is what’s called for here.”

  “Very well,” Irvina begrudgingly accepted, “but we should inform Jaren.”

  “As you wish,” Kathryn acceded; it was after all prudent to do so.  “Jaren?” she asked after pressing a small button on the side of her PANEs.

  “Here,” he answered.

  “We’ve spotted some… Earthlings?” she said in a questioning tone with raised shoulders as she looked to the others for their opinion on her use of the term.  The rest shrugged their lack of ability to come up with a better one to use.  “Some local humans in any case.  I’m going to attempt to contact them alone.”

  “Alone?”  Kathryn could hear his eyebrow raising from hundreds of kilometers away.  “Are you sure that’s wise?” he asked as casually as he could, which was probably less casually than he would have liked.

  “Wise or not it’s what I’m doing.” she answered flatly.

  “Very well,” Jaren answered with unspoken reservation, “we’ll monitor your progress from here on the ship’s telescopes.”

  Kathryn gave a single nod to herself in confirmation that the conversation was over and closed the channel.  “Alright.   Wish me luck then,” she offered as nonchalantly as she could to the other three before cautiously raising her head and climbing over the ridge.  The group was about half a kilometer away and when she emerged, she put her hands above her head in what she hoped would be a gesture universally understood to mean ‘I come in peace, please don’t attack me.’

  The earthlings squawked and scrambled in a bit of a frenzy before settling down and cautiously advancing on her as she did the same.  The experience was so surreal.  Until very recently it was unknown to her people if Earth itself still even existed, and now here she was encountering humans here just like herself.  The last couple of months of her life had turned into one continuous string of ever greater peak experiences and here she was, her newly peaked all over again.

  A couple hundred meters from each other she began calling out greetings, the standard ‘hello’ and ‘I come in peace’.  She could see them smiling and nodding as if they understood her.  They were making no attempts to directly communicate with her though, and this increasingly began to signal danger to her.  She increasingly got the impression that they were placating her, trying not to scare her off the way the same way she was them.  But from them she began to get more of a sense that they were trying to avoid her running away so they could catch her instead of meeting her.  Closing to less than a hundred meters she began to feel increasingly like she was walking grinning like an idiot into an obvious trap.  As they closed to less than fifty meters from each other, they had yet to make any attempt to communicate with her and at the point where she was on the edge of turning around to run for her life, one of them pulled a long straight tube out of his belt, put it to his lips, and blew a dart at her.

  The dart hit her in the chest, and her first reaction was one of dumbstruck simple curiosity, wondering what this meant and why they had done this.  When she began to feel drowsy a couple of seconds later, she came to understand fully what was happening.  She pulled the dart out and turned to try and run, but she could only trip over her increasingly leaden feet as she found herself ever more impaired by whatever had been in the dart.  She hit the ground.  The last thing she remembered before losing consciousness was the feeling of many foreign hands touching her body, then being lifted up into the air and over somebody’s shoulder.

  

 

  

 

  “KATHRYN!!!”  Jaren cried out on the bridge of the ship as he watched this all happen from a bird’s eye view on his monitors.  He frantically opened a channel to the rest of the surface team who were still hiding in the gulley of the river.  “You have to go after her!” he exclaimed.

  “I don’t think that’s wise.” Irvina harshly snapped back at him.  Herself, Elim, and Deirdre had seen the entire event as well between peeping up over the ridge and watching the same telescope view Jaren had been observing on their scrolls.

  “But you have to!  She’s, she’ll, they…”

  “Jaren!” Irvina said with a harsh tone nobody had heard her take with her superior officer before.  “We are unarmed, and they have a poison dart which is merely incapacitating at best.  If we go after her, now, like this, we are likely only to suffer the same fate as her whatever that is.  You will continue to monitor her from orbit while we return to the New Horizon.  We plan our next move from there.  If we want to mount a rescue assault we can do so very quickly and I’m more than happy to lead it myself, but I’m hoping a better option will present itself.  It’ll be dangerous regardless but rushing in would be reckless.  Are we clear?”

  “Yes Irvina…” Jaren did everything he could to steel himself.  “Yes of course you’re right.  Please return to orbit as soon as you can so we can discuss our options.”

  “I thought Jaren was your superior,” Elim questioned Irvina.  

  “He is.   Technically.  We… have a history.”

  Elim raised a questioning eyebrow.  “History?”

  Irvina sighed.   “It’s a long story.  We used to be married.  A long time ago.”

  “Ah, got it.” she nodded.

  “You don’t seem as panicked about losing Kathryn as I’d expect.” Irvina observed.   “Neither of you do.”

  “Good training,” Elim shrugged.  “And we haven’t lost her, I have every intention of getting her back safe and sound.   Losing our heads certainly won’t help us do that.

  “Good training indeed,” Deirdre observed.  She looked at the scroll showing the telescope imaging.  “For now, they seem to just be carrying her back to their town.   We obviously have to do something, but we can’t do anything right now and there’s no indication she’s in increasing danger.  Let’s get back to the ship as quick as we can.”

  “Agreed,” Irvina nodded.  “Try to keep up.”

   

  Back on the ship, Irvina, Elim, and Deirdre met Jaren on the bridge.  He was alone, so the rest of his New Horizon team must have been assigned to various tasks elsewhere on the ship.

  “Status?” Irvina asked.

  “They’ve taken her into their town and put her in a small single room structure.  The infra-red imager shows her alone and still unconscious on some kind of bed.  She seems alright for the moment.”

  Irvina looked at the monitors Jaren was so intently observing and saw the false colour blue, yellow, and red infra-red image on the monitor beside a true image of the roof of the structure on an adjacent monitor.  “And Orbital One?” she asked.

  “Up and running,” Francis reported as he entered the bridge and came over to Deirdre gave his daughter a long lingering hug.  “The parts we need immediately anyway.”  Pulling away and turning to Elim.  “I’m so sorry to hear about Kathryn.  We’ll get her back, don’t worry.”

  “Damn right we will,” Jaren stated definitively.  

  “Loading the operating system worked like a charm,” Francis continued, “we can now relay comms through the station and set up an orbital triangle whenever we want to, but we would need to take New Horizon out of geostationary over Kathryn to do so.”

  “We’re not doing that.” Jaren said with a determined tone.  

  Irvina stared at him for a moment with unrestrained contempt in her eyes.  “Nadelle is back onboard?” she asked Francis.

  “Affirmative.   Everyone besides Kathryn is back on board,” she answered.

  “Good.   Please take Elim and Deirdre and have Nadelle meet you in the medical bay.  I want her to run a complete medical examination of them with Koboli equipment, right down to the molecular level.  You never know what we might have picked up down there.  I’ll meet you there for my own exam shortly.”

  “Understood, prudent precaution,” Nadelle nodded.  “Come along you two, poke and prod time.”

  She stood in silence behind Jaren, waiting for him to notice her looking at him expectantly.   She finally gave up and came around to stand between him and the monitors at which he was staring.

  “We need to talk,” she stated severely.

  “Of course,” he said as he shifted his gaze to another set of monitors she wasn’t blocking.

  “Jaren!” she yelled sharply.  “I know what’s going on here, but you need to focus.”

  He finally looked at her.

  “We are all worried about Barnes and we are all going to do whatever can be done to get her back, understand?”

  “I love her.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sakes…” Irvina exclaimed in exasperation.  She rubbed both eyes with her thumb and forefinger.  “I know,” she said with a single roll of her hand.  “We all know.” she clarified, this time waving back at all of the crewmembers who had just left.  “You two probably thought you were being subtle, but you failed miserably.  It’s like, the worst kept secret in the galaxy, Jaren.”

  She saw him suddenly appear wounded in a different way, perhaps embarrassment.   She slowly pulled a rolling chair towards him and sat down.  “I know you love her Jaren, but you don’t have a monopoly on being worried about her, understand?  We all are.   We’re all desperate to get her back but if we’re going to do that, we all need to keep our collective heads out of our asses, right?”

  Jaren shook his head as if knocking cobwebs loose.  “Right, of course.  I’m sorry Irvina.  I, we… we really thought we were being discrete.”

  “We all knew that was your intent, so we indulged you.  I’m your second in command though, it’s my job to snap you out of it if you get lost.”

  “Right,” he nodded.

  “I’m also somebody who cares about you, remember?”

  Jaren smiled.   “Yes, thank you.  I cherish your continued presence in my life Irvina, even after everything.”

  “I know.   With all of that out of the way though, now we need a plan to get her back.”

   

  Leaving Xion on the bridge to keep an eye on things, the rest of the crew convened in the conference room.  Nadelle had discovered something curious while conducting medical examinations of Elim and Deirdre and wanted to share it with everyone at once.

  “We’ve found something in examining the surface team which might answer a lot of our questions.”

  “Go on,” Jaren said, leaning forward and resting his chin on his clasped hands over the desk.

  “Well actually,” Elim said, taking a cognitive step back, “we may have solved the mystery of why Earth went dark in the first place!” she exclaimed.

  “Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Nadelle nervously cautioned.

  “I don’t know how you could see it any other way!” Elim countered, seeming to panic a little at the challenge.

  “Hey!” Irvina exclaimed, taking on more of a leadership role in Kathryn’s physical absence and Jaren’s relative cognitive absence.  She lay a hand flat on the table to focus them.  “Slow down.  Start from the beginning.  Explain.”

  “It was a virus,” Elim explained.  “A virus which… which we’ve all presumably been infected with by now.”

  “So, are we… all going to die then?” Felix asked, attempting to blunt his mortal fear with nonchalant humour.

  “No,” Nadelle replied.  “Well ultimately yes of course but no, not from this virus.”

  “The advanced medical technologies of the Koboli are capable of handling it and has already cured some of us of it, but the New Horizon’s medical chambers can’t even detect its presence.” 

  “How does this solve the mystery of Earth?” Teresa asked.

  “If Earth technology from the era when this ship launched doesn’t even recognize it, then it certainly couldn’t cure it,” Ana explained.  “We suspect that the entire global population suffered a catastrophic die off as a result of this virus in the environment.”

  The room was silent for a few moments as everyone absorbed the immensity of what she’d said.

  “That’s… horrific,” Keri finally observed distantly.

  “Well,” Felix continued, “based on the limited population down there now, we knew that something like this must have happened at some point.  If this thing is so fatal though, why are there any people left down there at all?”

  Nadelle shrugged.  “Could be a couple factors.  Could be natural immunity.  Could be that the virus evolved to be less lethal.  A virus that kills faster than it transmits isn’t particularly good at being a virus.  It’s probably taken on an endemic form that is today far less lethal than the version Earth originally succumbed to.  And then even if point-oh-one percent had some sort of natural immunity, from a population of ten billion…”

  “Right, that’d still be a million people,” Felix observed.

  “Which sounds like a lot,” Deirdre commented, “but for a global population that’s nowhere near enough to sustain a complicated high technology culture like Earth had had beforehand.  Especially when you consider that this includes young and old, and a completely randomized selection of skills, knowledge, and training among those who are left.”

  “Exactly,” Nadelle agreed.

  “What more can you tell us about the virus?” Jaren asked her.

  “Well for one thing…” she looked around, seemingly nervous to finish her thought aloud.   “It was synthetic.”

  “Meaning?” he asked.

  “Meaning it was engineered, like deliberately.  Either it was something experimental being worked on in a laboratory which just happened to be released accidentally, or…” she was clearly reluctant to present the alternative.

  “-or for some reason it was developed and released maliciously,” Ana finished for her.

  “Right,” Nadelle confirmed, lowering her head in disbelief.

  “I don’t… I don’t know what to make of that right now,” Jaren admitted.

  “It doesn’t matter much at all right now,” Elim offered somewhat distantly.   “However, it did happen.   We can say for sure now that this is how and why Earth fell.

  A somber moment of reflection hung in the air for a while before anyone spoke up again.

  “By chance can I refer us back to ‘are we going to die’?” Felix asked again.

  “No no,” Nadelle answered, shaking her head.  “I’ve already cured myself, Elim, Deirdre…  Although it wasn’t recognized by New Horizon’s medical facilities, the medical equipment we brought with us from Kobol made rather quick work of it.   When we’re done here, I can cure the rest of you.”

  “I didn’t realize Koboli medical technology was so advanced,” Keri commented.

  “That’s the funny thing,” Nadelle observed.  “It’s not actually, not really.  I mean it certainly is more advanced, but not by that much.  This virus seems to have been specifically engineered to not be detectable by contemporary Earth medical technology.”

  “So it was developed maliciously…” Jaren noted, seemingly lost in concerned thought.

  “I still couldn’t state that definitively,” Nadelle clarified.  “Researchers could easily have developed something like this just to learn about it, to learn how they might counter it if someone else developed something like it.  Biotech can be as much of an arms race as anything else unfortunately… there’s really no way to know.  Don’t get me wrong, it has all the appearances of being a weaponized virus, but such a thing could also just be developed to figure out how to counter it if developed by someone else.”

  “Can you tell me what the disease progression would be without treatment?” Jaren asked.

  “Simulations suggest that there would be no apparent symptoms for up to a week, during which time it is highly virulent and contagious.  This would be followed by a rapid decline over only a few hours from multiple organ system failure.”

  “Wow,” Teresa uttered.  She and several others seemed quite disturbed by the description.

  “Like I said,” Nadelle reiterated, “it’s weaponized.  It’s designed to kill as many people as possible.  If I wanted to design a global killer, that’s exactly the progression I’d be looking for.  With how interconnected Earth civilization would have been at the time, I’d bet most people on the planet were infected before the first person even go sick from it.”

  “Those poor people…” Deirdre uttered.  “What about the colonies elsewhere in the system?  What about all the ship in space while this was going on?”

  “It ultimately wouldn’t matter if they were infected or not,” Elim explained.   “Certainly many were, but even if they weren’t it could have meant an even worse fate.  There were no places elsewhere in the system which had the capacity to be truly self-sustaining, that’s why our colony ships were launched; they all relied on Earth one way or another.  If they didn’t get infected and die right away, they’d just… die when their supplies finally ran out instead.”

  “Even worse…” Keri commented, and Elim nodded in somber agreement.

  “Kathryn.” Jaren stated in a muted voice through a tight face.

  “Yes,” Nadelle confirmed.  “There can be no doubt that she was immediately infected as well.  If we can’t get to her before the rapid decline phase of the disease…”

  “I understand,” Jaren stated icily.

  “But one way or another, we’re not going to let that happen.” Felix stated firmly.

  “No.” Jaren affirmed.  “We are not.” Jaren confirmed.