Michael swallowed hard against the smell and found his voice. “What happened?”
“It looks like food poisoning.” Antonio came back to the present, jerked his chin toward the doctor’s station, and walked Michael away from the sight. “Hey, can we get those two taken care of please?” he called to Jimmy Coombs, one of the nurse practitioners, who was passing by with a pile of screen rolls in his hands. Jimmy nodded and Antonio continued gently herding Michael away from the unpleasantness, something doctors got a lot of practice at, Michael was sure.
“Looks like?” said Michael, keeping his voice pitched low. He had no idea who was in the infirmary right now.
“They both came in about three o’clock complaining of fever and stomach cramps.”
“I was notified.”
Antonio nodded. “Symptoms got treated, and they got worse. Workup got done and by then we had a massive systemic infection.” Antonio motioned him into the monitoring station. The place had so many different monitors and command boards, it looked like mission control for a major spaceport, and all the numbers and plots made about as much sense to Michael.
“The infection all but ate the broad-spectrum stabilizer we gave them while we were trying to isolate the bacteria and tailor an antibiotic to hit it,” said Antonio. “There’s only so much we can keep on ice around here.” He frowned at the cabinets across the hall as if he wanted to blame them for what happened. “We did find the bug and get the antibiotics into them, but it was too late.”
“But it wasn’t food poisoning?” pressed Michael. He was still reeling. They were dead. Dead of a simple bug, something that should have been treatable in five minutes but wasn’t. They had been good men, they had been idiots, they had been friends, they had been criminals.
They were dead.
“If it was food poisoning, where are the other patients?” Antonio swept his hand out. “We’ve shut down the galley level, of course, and we’re going through and doing a sanitary inspection. You got the call on that too?”
Michael nodded.
“But nothing’s turning up. We haven’t got the autopsy yet, so I can’t say for sure what they’ve been eating, but from what your people say, it wouldn’t be anything that another couple hundred people hadn’t swallowed.” Antonio looked up at him. “Do you want me to say it?”
No, and I don’t want to say it either. “You think they were poisoned.”
Now Antonio nodded. His pockets bunched and wrinkled as he clenched his fists. “By someone who was very smart and very stupid.”
Michael waited. Poisoned? Murdered? Who…but he knew who. It was the other person who had helped create the Discovery. They didn’t want to be implicated, so they’d killed the men. God! This was not something that could happen. Not on Venera, not now. This was something out of the twentieth century.
“Smart because they were able to successfully cultivate a strain of bacteria we couldn’t neutralize immediately. Stupid because in conditions like Venera’s, where the food comes from limited production sources, there’s never just two victims of a poisoning outbreak.”
“How hard would it be to cook up this…bug?”
Antonio shrugged. “With access to a lab and a decent chemistry and medical database and a strong stomach, not very.”
“Strong stomach?”
Antonio’s smile was watery. “Even the unprepared food the galley sells has been sterilized eight ways to Sunday. The easiest place to get bacteria from around here would be your own waste products.”
Michael hung his head, torn between disgust and black humor. “I should have thought.”
“No you shouldn’t,” Antonio assured him. “Holy God knows I didn’t want to.”
“Yeah.” Michael lifted his gaze again. “Look, I’ll need the autopsy as soon as you can get it to me, okay?”
“Okay.” Antonio glanced around at his monitors. “All this and we still haven’t got the immortality programs up and running. Grandma Helen know yet?”
“Not yet.” She knew about the galley quarantine, of course, but not about the deaths. Mother Creation, she was already walking on the edge with the C.A.C. meeting coming up. What was this going to do to her? “I’ll tell her.” I don’t want to, but I will.
“Okay,” said Antonio gratefully. “Thanks.”
Michael left to the soft sound of Antonio’s voice readying his autopsy team to find out what exactly killed Derek and Kevin. He walked down the corridors without really seeing them. The main lights were dimming toward twilight. The base was on a twenty-four-hour Greenwich time cycle, and now it was late in the summer evening.