Trouble in the Outer Colonies

Mother Heart: Chapter 33

This chapter provided the first information on what the Colony Virus was doing on the other colony worlds founded by the Outreach Expedition. It is presented here by way of deep background for any Earthforce Saga Readers who have not already read the Dharman Series books…

Chapter 33

DSC-108, Orbiting Dharma VI, Bridge.

Tico met with Harper and Shepherd in a secured conference room, and his mood was darkening as the story unfolded. His eyes played over the conference table, as if he were trying to read something there that would explain the trouble brewing on the container ship. He looked at Shepherd where she sat with a hurt expression on her face. The Med-Tech had applied a few bandages to cuts and scrapes, but beyond that the damage was more psychological than anything else.

“Who was responsible for this incident?” the Commodore asked.

“Personnel manifest lists him as a second class Maintenance Technician,” said Harper. “His name is Kepel, but we can’t get anything more out of him. The man just doesn’t make any sense. Runs at the mouth for ten minutes at a time, then goes dead quiet and won’t say a word. He’s clearly disturbed.”

“Seems that way.” Tico rubbed his chin. “You worked him over pretty good, Captain.”

“The man had it coming! He assaulted a Navy Ensign, then squared off against me and threw the first punch. I told him he had just made a big mistake, and now he knows why.”

“Hard to believe this sort of thing could happen on a Navy ship.” Tico shook his head.

Harper reached over and put his hand on the Shepherd’s shoulder. It was obvious that the experience had left his Science Officer quite shaken.

“First Genda, then Beckerman—now this! And three other incidents of violence during the last watch. This crew is coming apart at the seams, and we better find out why.” Tico was worried now, and he spoke his mind. “You want my opinion? I’d say this Bio-hazard is behind it. I know this isn’t exactly a crackerjack outfit here, but I’ve never seen a crew act like this.”

“To say they’re slack would not be half a word for it.”

“Particularly with a Commodore aboard,” said Harper. “Find anything out, Shepherd?” Harper looked at his Science Officer and she straightened in her chair as her mind went back to the long hours she spent with the briefing file.

“Definitely a virus,” she began, “but not like any I’ve ever heard of.”

 “Suppose you tell me what you think it’s doing, Ensign.” The Commodore shifted in his chair, eager to hear what Shepherd had to say.

“Well,” Shepherd began. “The file contains a lengthy report filed by Lieutenant Ryan and the CLEM unit. It explains the bio-hazard and supports his conclusion to enforce an E-1 quarantine on the planet. My major concentration was astrophysics, but I know enough biology to recognize trouble when I see it. The virus is very dangerous. There doesn’t seem to be any specific disease process that results in death, but the effect of infection could be very debilitating.”

“Well, what does the damn thing do?” Tico asked again.

“It causes mutations, sir. Very rapid mutation. But the mechanism isn’t exactly clear to me. I can see what it’s doing in the body, but I don’t understand how. The file conclusions don’t make sense to me from a scientific standpoint. It expresses itself within the body on a genetic level. Now every bug I’ve ever seen has but one thing going for it—a desire to replicate and pass on its genetic material to a successive generation. But this thing is different. It seems more interested in our DNA than in simply replicating itself. In fact, it doesn’t replicate at all in an infected person. And another thing… the report indicates that this virus is capable of thought in certain forms, and that’s enough to blow anybody’s circuits!”

“Capable of thought?” Harper had a hard time with the prospect. “Hell, I’m no genius but nothing as small as a virus could have a brain!”

“True, sir, but each strand of the virus seems to be a part of a unified whole. They link themselves together in a colony that is complex enough to allow for some kind of thought process. At least that’s what the files seems to conclude. If it’s true, we’re in for major trouble, because the virus seems to be making deliberate changes in the genetic structure of everything it infects—deliberate changes. There’s never been anything like this before. If the report is true then evolution is all washed up. You can kiss natural selection and random mutation goodbye. If this virus spreads into an environment it virtually owns it from that point on.” She paused, both excited and afraid at what she was saying. “I’m afraid it will take extensive research to tackle a bug like this. We’re in a lot more trouble here than we thought.”

“Not only here...” Tico let the statement hang, noting the confused expression on Harper’s face. He stood up, pacing to the view screen on the conference room wall.

“Now, what I’m about to tell you is strictly confidential. We aren’t sure of our facts yet, but COMCENT is assuming the worse possible case.” Harper waited, wondering if he really wanted to hear what the Commodore was going to say. Tico activated the screen and projected an astrogation map on the wall. He toggled a panel switch to enhance the imaging system.

“Dharma VI is right here,” he said, pointing to a speckling of stars on the screen. “You can see it’s at the extreme end of the Cyonid spiral. That’s the arm we’ve been hot in for the last thirty years. Didn’t find a damn thing out here, or here.” He ran his finger around the display screen, pointing to places Harper had seen duty in the past. “Not so much as a goddamned bacteria anywhere else until we pushed into the Cyonid Extension. But now we’ve been hot as hellfire with new colony prospects, and it seems like every other rock we land on is a cosmic zoo! This one here is a typical example.” He was pointing at the Dharman system. “And now look here...” Tico traced along the rim of the spiral arm to another bright point of light. “Draconis—You remember the trouble the Army had with that one?”

Harper nodded at him. “You mean the parasites?” It was hard to forget the video briefing he had seen. The victim’s skin was erupting with thousands of tiny worms that had germinated in his system after exposure. He remembered enough to know why he never volunteered for the Draco sector.

“Exactly,” said Tico. “Well, that’s the way it started. Looked like a parasite at first. Now they’re re-classifying the whole thing Bio-One.”

“Virus?”

“Looks that way.” Tico soured. “Creepy thing about it was the way it worked. This Cillia worm was supposed to be harmless. The Bio-Team had it labeled 3-Green, like a lot of other things we carry around in our gut. Then the damn thing mutated! It started migrating into muscle tissue and had one hell of a feast with the garrison. No one ever heard about the mutation sequence, but they will now. They slapped a Big Red E-1 on Draconis last month, and the people scheduled for drilling at Symo-Tech are going to be real pissed about it. They won the bid, but now nobody chews on the crystal until they dust the place again. And that’s just where it starts, Ray. Out here on Regia-7…” He gestured at the latest prospect on the Navy roster. “Well, they found a menagerie of abominations under the ice that would freeze your blood! The initial holding company was cut to pieces. Now they want a full brigade quartered on the planet just so they can hammer out a new Safe Zone. A full brigade! Regular Army. Christ, they’re going to need carrier support and three container ships for that, and things are spread real thin as it is.”

Harper noted the position of Regia on the chart. “Right on the arm, sir.”

“I thought you’d notice that. Well you might as well know the rest. We had a problem on the Borani Colony just like this last year, but they covered it up. That was the first incident. Then there was that so called ‘accident’ out near Sirenus? Well, it was no accident. I saw the file last week before they sent me out here. It went Bio-One like all the rest. Both of those systems are here in the Cyonid arm. The puzzle is starting to fall together, and it’s beginning to get a lot of people real scared. Everyone was counting on this Dharma colony to pull our chestnuts out of the fire. Now we get this news. The people at COMCENT can read the map same as you and me, Ray. We’ve pushed into something out here in this arm, and it doesn’t like us.”

“I don’t follow you, sir.”

“Believe me, I’m not quite sure I understand it myself, but the incidents all seem to follow a similar course. We find a world broiling over with life. Hell, it took them three years to catalog the stuff here on Dharma. And then these Asect things appear from nowhere and wipe out the Safe Zone. Well, they’ve got big trouble under the ice fields on Regia, and now they tell me they’re finding things on Draconis no one ever logged in the survey there! So they convened this secret conference a couple of months before Dharma went off comm-link. Come to find out, the biologists wanted epidemiological studies run on every person assigned to the colonies we’ve been discussing here. It’s these mutations, Ray. That’s all I could figure from the reports. Life form surveys are all washed up. They’ve got things on Draconis now that you wouldn’t believe—but they were never there before! That’s what scares the biologists. So, you can imagine how this news of an unknown alien life form emerging on Dharma VI went over. That’s why they sent this Lieutenant Ryan in. AFA is real skittish about this business, and they put SS men into every colony on the list. News is getting out. They don’t like it, but you can’t sit on something like this for long. An SS Cruiser will be arriving here soon too.”

“Wonder why the Bio-team didn’t report this earlier?” Harper raised his thick, gray brows.

“They missed it. Plain and simple. Shepherd says this thing doesn’t play by the rules.”

“Well, they’ll get a vaccine in month or two, won’t they?”

“This is different, Ray. We had the Mylanta Plague ten years ago, and that infection out on Polyarnny Rift, but nothing like this thing. How do you figure this? Draconis is 15 Light Years from the Borani Colony, and that’s via COMCENT and Ross. Go though Sirenus and Regia-7 and its near 20 Light Years. The time interval between that first outbreak on Borani-I and these other incidents is too short. Nothing short of a gate shift could cross that distance in that interval. So that’s how we figured it happened.”

“Somebody carried a sleeper back to COMCENT?” Shepherd had a surprised and frightened look on her face.

“Exactly. One hell of a devious bug, if you want my opinion. And if it got back on a ship to COMCENT then we’ve got contamination all over the quadrant by now. Hell, it might have even migrated to Sol. They aren’t sure when it happened, or how, but there it is. WHO is on a 24 hour watch for any sign of this infection on Terra.”

Shepherd was listening with a furrowed brow. “Maybe it originated here,” she said.

“What do you mean?” Tico waited for her to go on.

“This creature they found on the planet—the one that wounded you, Captain. Well, it’s got a very long life span, maybe 1200 years per generation. Professor Dover indicated that this life form was a product of deliberate mutations caused by the virus. There was no fossil record found on the creature at all. This was the first and only generation—but they’re over a thousand years old now. That means the virus had to be active in the biosphere at least that long ago, because they think it created the Lyrpa here by mutating another life form on Dharma VI.  In that case, it couldn’t have migrated in with the survey team. Maybe it migrated out when they left. Any trouble on Ross? That’s a hub site.”

“Good thinking, Ensign. No one has had much time to digest the news from Dharma, but that conclusion seems logical. As for Ross, it seems clean. If this virus is there, it’s behaving itself. ”

“I can only rely on the Lieutenant’s report,” said Shepherd, “but this was Professor Dover’s conclusion about the Lyrpa—and he was confirming data collected by the senior astrobiologist, Dr. Chandros.”

“So the virus originated here and spread elsewhere,” Harper was catching up. “Could be that someone on the initial survey team here for Dharma brought the bug back to COMCENT with him. Probably moved on routine supply runs.”

“It came from somewhere,” said Tico. “That’s the conventional wisdom now, I suppose. Now here’s the secret, people. It doesn’t leave this room. The AFA thinks they know where it may have originated. The details are long and complicated, but they’re discussing an outreach expedition aimed at the suspected system. And guess what. This system is being tagged as the jumping off point. They’ve been upgrading the Stargate here to series Seven for the last month. Too bad no one knew about this before the container ships were scheduled in here. Lucky for us the last two fell out of the shift. At least those people haven’t been exposed. That’s the scary part now. Who’s got it, and who’s clean? You can bet they’ll be starting to work on that one. That explains the big pow wow with all the PHDs a while back. They knew there was trouble in the Cyonid arm, but they couldn’t very well stop the Outreach program in its tracks. Maybe they thought they could get it under control before it spread too far.”

“That would be stupid!” Harper said bluntly.

“Yes, but the AFA has been known for pulling little darlings like that before.”

 Shepherd had another thought. “Maybe it did start here, but there’s no way for us to pinpoint its point of origin for sure. It may have come from a planet we haven’t even charted yet. Who knows how long it’s been spreading, or how it manages to escape one world and travel to another. There is evidence of viral spores that are able to survive interstellar migration.”

“Well, if this thing moves that way then it has to be ancient. If it’s the same bug on all four colonies we’ve discussed here today, then it would take thousands of years to travel from one to another by drifting through space—maybe millions of years! But there’s no denying the fact: something is out here raising hell in every biosphere we encounter. Anyone who has studied the Lieutenant’s file could come to that conclusion in time.”

“I don’t think this thing took a million years to get here Ray, and if that’s true, then you know what that means…” Tico let that dangle.

“Well, we’ve been around for millions of years as a life form. Perhaps the virus spread eons ago and has only recently mutated into this new form recently.” Harper was trying to put the situation into perspective.

“A possibility,” said Shepherd,” but it’s not likely that it would mutate the same way at all these different locations—” She caught herself. “There I go thinking this thing evolves like everything else. That’s the point, sir. It could cause a similar effect, in any of a hundred biospheres, just like the three of us could decide on something, split up and each carry out a part of the plan.”

Tico listened hard, and the more he heard the more he was worried. “What plan?” he said. “That’s what I’d like to know. If it starts out like this I’d hate to see the final act.”

“Hell, we’ll lick the damn thing.” Harper was confident.

“Nothing’s been able to beat us yet,” said Tico. “We’ve got one hell of an immune response. You probably know more about it than I do, Ensign Shepherd. But what if this bug finds a way to get at our DNA too?” He let that sink in, watching Harper closely for a response.

The Captain replayed Genda’s words in his mind with new found fear. “Genda?” The Army Sergeant’s name slipped from his lips.

“Genda—with something growing on his neck the medics can’t seem to figure out.”

Tico didn’t have to say any more. Harper had visions of the great plague. Billions of human beings on thirty worlds writhing like Genda in a frenzied nightmare. Then he remembered Gates. He could still see the delicate features of her face dotted with sweat as she twisted in the grip of some darkened dream on the planet below. He thought it was the poison from that barb at first, but now he wondered if the virus hadn’t infected her? Reports on Gates didn’t look good. Her behavior was erratic. She could breath the atmosphere without the aid of a filter mask or oxygen. Though Harper admired Ryan for going back after her, he wondered what the Lieutenant would find? The thought of Cilia worms ravaging the woman’s body shuddered him.

“So there you have it.” Tico switched off the viewing screen. “Simonsen sent this in on the last link out to the Waystation.” He handed Harper a list. “Medicine,” he explained. “They pumped me full of every anti-viral in the inventory before I came aboard here. Everyone gets the same treatment starting today at 04:00 hours. Schedule the early medi-check and make the inoculations look routine. No sense starting a panic.”

“Then they think this stuff will work?” Harper brightened.

“No, but they’re trying everything they can think of at this point. Who do you have on board that’s any good with medicine?”

“Just a Corpsman or two. People in the Decon-Units have been trained in Bio-Warfare.”

“That won’t be good enough, I’m afraid. We need people trained in research methods. We were hoping some of the brains with the initial survey party here could call the shots, but there’s nobody left.”

“Unless Ryan has someone else alive on the planet,” said Harper.

“There’s one more thing,” Tico continued. “If we’ve been exposed to this thing, then we’re no longer an asset. Quite the contrary, we’re a liability now, and a big one. There’s an SS cruiser on the way out here, Ray. Simonsen was worried about Beckerman making a run on the Stargate. They’re going to shift in the Riyadh. Word is that there will be medical people and supplies aboard, but hell, you don’t need a cruiser for that kind of duty.”

“I don’t get it?” Shepherd was confused.

“Well you can call me paranoid, or just plain stupid, but I can see more in those orders than I like right now. I think the AFA has written this colony off, and all of us along with it.” Then Tico fished out the worst of his misgivings. “They have some business to attend to here first, and when it’s over with they’ll have a cruiser on station to clean up the mess.”

There was silence in the room. Harper sat with his arms folded in disbelief. Shepherd was staring at the computer file on the table top. Her mind was a jumble of fears and new anxieties. Someone attacks her on a Navy ship, and now she was hearing this! Who could she trust?

“I know what you’re thinking,” Tico mirrored the concern on their faces. “We have to keep this information strictly confidential. If the crew gets wind of it we will have a panic. Now, I need that SS Lieutenant up here on the double—and I need you on the Achilles, Ray. Get her into fighting trim. We’ve got more than Beckerman to worry about now.”

Harper would later muse on one thing Tico had said. If the virus didn’t migrate here, then how did it get here? The answer was that someone brought it, just like the Federation carried a battery of Terran microbes to be used as bio-weapons on every planet they found. Someone brought it here, and I don’t think they drifted here through interstellar space either. That meant only one thing. Like our Stargates, we may have encountered evidence of another intelligent race that had some kind of FTL technology.

Well, I expect we’ll hear about it in time, he thought. He already had wind of some unusual fleet deployments. A lot of ships were being pulled off duty and sent through COMCENT for replenishing. Something was up…