Damage Control - ARC (5 page)

T
he dying stopped as
spontaneously as it had begun.

In the last week of October, five hospitals
in New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts admitted 32 patients
diagnosed with antibiotic-resistant strep throat. By the second
week of November, the number of admissions had swelled to 105. 50
of them eventually recovered, while the remaining 55 died suddenly
of brain aneurism or stroke within a week of their
hospitalization.

During the same two weeks, seven New
Hampshire residents died unexpectedly in their homes or workplaces
of brain aneurism or stroke. Only one had a history of heart
disease.

By the second week of November, hospitals all
over New England were on high alert and ready to deal with the
outbreak. Quarantined patient rooms were set aside. Centers for
Disease Control trainers refreshed staff on containment procedures.
Bacteriologists, epidemiologists and immunologists abandoned their
other projects to focus on what they'd started to call
streptococcoid syndrome.

But only 12 more patients were ever diagnosed
with the new infection, and eight of those diagnoses turned out to
be incorrect. Lab tests confirmed those infections to be regular
old strep throat, and they were all cured with a standard course of
erythromycin. And the remaining four patients recovered.

On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Elliot
Hospital in Manchester, New Hampshire, received its last
streptococcoid case. And no healthcare facility ever saw it
again.

The first time they told Chegg what Humans
were like, he put on his best curious face and pretended he hadn't
already been dealing with them for years.

It was an ordinary water-city conference
room, with lots of blank, white wall space for presentations and a
central oval enclosed by a waist-high railing. Chegg swam through
the round doorway and over the railing and chose a spot near the
back. About half the people had arrived so far, and he wondered how
many of them realized they'd been set up to fail.

Deet was there, and he caught her eye. He and
the Intelligence keev had worked together on several missions over
the years and become close friends. He had no doubt that she knew
the situation. She had probably even made a few very accurate
guesses about what Chegg was doing to correct the problem. But he
wasn't concerned about her. She had the good sense to see why these
measures were necessary, and he could count on her to keep her
mouth shut. It was some of the others who worried him.

The last five keevs swam in together, and
everyone but the Kirove stood in a semi-circle near the railing.
There were 11 other keevs there; that was to be expected. Deet's
surveillance zirode stood four spots to Chegg's left. He must have
been there to make a report.

The appointed time for the meeting arrived,
and everyone stopped talking and faced the Kirove, who stood just
outside the railing at the front of the oval.

"I understand two of you have staff recently
returned from Earth," he said, acknowledging Deet's zirode with a
nod, then looking at Chegg with raised eyebrows.

"Mine has not returned yet," Chegg said.

"Find out if he can come directly here and
give his report to all of us."

Chegg pulled out his Personal Device.

"Earth," said the Kirove, as a spinning blue
and green planet appeared on the wall behind him. "It's where
sandfruit comes from, but up until now, that's just about all we've
known about it."

The Medical keev
, Chegg thought.
She'll assume someone else from the Medical Command took
standard outbreak-control measures as soon as that kid exposed
Earth to our microbes. I'd better alter the records to match that
assumption.

"This planet is home to seven or eight
billion people," the Kirove continued. "They are extremely
disorganized and without interstellar travel. Contact will almost
certainly lead to war. Your job, if the Committee chooses, will be
to make contact with a culture group that calls itself Aberica.
Zirode Goke Dak of the Intelligence Command will brief us."

Zirode Goke tapped his Personal Device, and a
Supply Command messenger swam in, towing a string of drink
cylinders. She passed the string to Goke and left.

"This is coffee." Goke held up one of the
cylinders, leaving the rest to wave in the gentle currents of the
room. "I brought enough for all of us." He pulled the cylinder free
of the string and handed it to Keev Bekk, who stood beside him.
Then he swam around the semicircle, passing out the cylinders.

When Chegg got his, he tried it right away.
Drinking underwater was inconvenient, to say the least, but it was
considered a luxury among water people, since it was completely
unnecessary. This way of opening the briefing—the gift of an exotic
drink—was obviously a calculated effort to ingratiate the boss.

Chegg put his mouth on the cylinder's
built-in straw and gave it a hard drag to activate the one-way
valve. He liked the flavor immediately, but thought he would have
liked it better if it had been stronger.

He finished his coffee and tethered the empty
cylinder to the railing while Goke talked about Aberikekk
satellites and nuclear weapons. His Personal Device vibrated, and
he checked it and nodded to the Kirove: his own surveillance zirode
would be briefing them today, too.

Goke finished his report, and the Kirove
asked for strategy ideas for defeating the Aberikekks if war broke
out. This was essentially a discussion for the War Command, and
Chegg just stood there and listened, trying not to count all the
wrong assumptions the keevs were making about Human physiology and
culture. They were good at their jobs and would find these details
out in time.

Luak, Chegg's surveillance zirode, slipped
in, took a spot at the rail beside Goke, and turned to watch the
war plans.

They had a map on the wall, showing some
place in Arkansas. "We can lure the rest of the Aberikekks here,
here and here," said one of the keevs, and tapped a few keys on his
Personal Device to move the map before continuing. "Then you can
see how, despite their numbers, they will not be able to break
through to access their weapons stronghold."

About half the people present shook their
heads, and the Kirove said, "We can't keep an accurate fix on the
locations of the Aberikekks after the map moves. There are just too
many."

There was a rumble of agreement from the
group, and Luak grabbed a net bag he had tethered to the railing
and swam to the speaker. "These may help," he said. "They are toys
for Aberikekk children: models of Aberikekk warriors in fighting
poses."

The speaker gave a warrior to each person in
the room before attaching several to the wall. When Chegg got his,
he saw that it was a little plastic army man with a suction cup
tied to its feet. Chegg stuck his to the railing and wished he
hadn't finished his coffee.

Beside him, the Medical keev was still
drinking hers. "These Earth people are a very pleasant color," she
remarked. "I'm eager to meet them in person."

"So am I," said Deet. "Nuclear
weapons...impressive communications and targeting technologies...I
like a good challenge."

Luak's turn was next. He tapped his Personal
Device, replacing the map with a picture of a Human holding a bulky
projectile weapon. The army men were still stuck to the wall, and
Luak waited until Goke had pulled them all off before announcing,
“These are some of the portable weapons currently popular on
Earth.” The picture slid to the left and was followed by several
more in succession, each showing a Human posing with a different
weapon. Chegg wondered if the Medical keev had noticed that not one
of the warriors was green.

"I have with me a translation of the personal
testimony of an Aberikekk warrior,” Luak continued, “telling about
his experiences during a recent war. Preliminary investigation has
turned up an overwhelming amount of corroboration; so far, his
testimony appears to be accurate.

“He says that his own troops, and many
others, were sent to war without their standard supply of weapons
and armor, and with communications devices that didn’t have enough
range to function on the battlefield. This was not due to a lack of
resources to procure these items, nor a lack of time to transport
them. Here is a selected passage."

He tapped his Personal Device again, and a
block of text appeared. To the left and right of the text were two
columns of pictures. Each picture showed an Earth weapon and had a
faint line running from it to the first mention of that weapon in
the text. It read:

They sent us out to secure the city without
arming us for the task. The enemy had light machine guns, AK-47s,
rocket-propelled grenades, and even a few heavy machine guns, while
we had nothing but nine-millimeter pistols.

Fortunately, there were more than enough
confiscated AK-47s to go around, so we were able to get something
to defend ourselves with.

It was the perfect solution—until the Army
found out. They ordered us to put the AKs back in the locker. The
war was to be fought, they said, with Army-issued equipment or none
at all. That was what the regulations said, and the regulations,
apparently, were more important than either protecting our lives or
winning the war.

They wouldn’t send us our standard weapons
because they said the war was basically over now. So we tried to
fight with whatever we could find, until the Army found out and
took it away and we had to look for something else.

And so the war dragged on.

At first, no one spoke. People grabbed
tethers from the railing and ran them through their fingers, or
pretended to suck the last drops of coffee from empty cylinders.
Then the Zirode said, "If they're that disorganized and
incompetent, how did they manage to develop satellites?"

"Or nuclear weapons?" said the keev who had
proposed engaging the Aberikekks in Arkansas.

Deet looked at her empty drink cylinder. "Or
coffee?

W
hen the call finally came, Chegg Jaigg was on a ladder
pruning his kitchen ceiling.

Being a keev wasn’t always
as glamorous as it looked from the outside. Sure, there were a lot
of people who respecte
d and even admired
Chegg, but they relied on him as well. Their
lives
—
and
worse,
their careers
—
were in his
hands.

And now there was this
mess. Some wannabe spy from the Alien Command had blown his cover
and potentially ruined the whole Sandfruit Planet
project.

It wasn’t the spy’s fault,
probably. The Alien Command had a reputation for sloppy training of
their supposedly-covert data collectors. And to top it all off,
they had promoted the kid too soon.

But none of that could be
helped now. The damage was already set in motion. At this stage in
a civilization’s development, uncontrolled contact with aliens
could cause devastating panic.

And then there was the
question of microbes. Zuke wasn’t the only alien life form that had
been traipsing around in that Sandfruit woman’s kitchen.
Technically, the Medical Command should have already had a presence
on Earth by now. Every day they waited, the chances of an epidemic
increased.

But the medical issues were
not Chegg’s job to worry about. Chegg was the commander of the
Counter-Intelligence force responsible for preventing the loss of
sensitive information to the Aberikekk-speaking population of
Earth.

The question before the
Committee was whether to accelerate the Sandfruit mission or cancel
it. Delaying contact until everything was ready for a proper first
contact would almost certainly mean giant death tolls on Earth from
disease, as Chuzekk microbes spread around a planet where they
didn’t belong. But premature contact would probably cause panic,
and panic would cause war. It always did.

In the end, the question
came down to an economic one: whether the trade benefits of having
contact with Earth would likely outweigh the costs of military and
medical intervention.

When Chegg felt his
Personal Device vibrate on his hip, he slipped the pruning shears
into his pocket and opened it. “Yes!” he barked.

“They decided to accelerate
the project,” said the image of his boss on the tiny screen. “You
will depart in twelve days.”

It was a short
conversation. He waited until the Kirove had terminated the call
before closing his own Personal Device and hooking it back on his
uniform. “That was the Kirove,” he said to his daughter. “We’re
being deployed.”