Normally Spruance Del Curtin looked forward to his air shifts. He’d even warned more than one instructor that he was not to be held over if it were going to interfere with making his air shift.
However, the last few days had been getting annoying. How many times could you keep repeating announcements about standard sanitation protocols after every set before it started sounding ridiculous? Not to mention how people were really starting to wonder what was going on. It was getting annoying to go down to the dining commons, or any public area for that matter, and get peppered with the same damn questions, especially since he didn’t have any answers for them.
At least the messages were pre-recorded, so it wasn’t like he had to read a card off a monitor. Or worse, a hand-written note, like Ken Redmond had given him for a couple of emergencies.
The current set was coming to an end, so he’d better check which one was lined up for this commercial break and station identification.
As he did, the door opened and in walked Autumn Belfontaine. She was cutting it fine — two minutes more and he would’ve been on the air.
She didn’t even say hello, just sat down in the second chair. Whatever was going on, asking her would not be a good idea.
The moment the last song ended, Autumn began to speak. “This is Autumn Belfontaine, news director at Shepardsport Pirate Radio. We have important breaking news, just in from the South Pacific. The United States Navy reports they have responded to a distress call from the cruise ship Glorianna, off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Initial reports indicate that crew and passengers were stricken with illness several days after completing a visit to Bangkok.”
Even as Sprue admired her calm delivery, his mind reeled at what he was hearing. He’d heard stories about illness spreading on those giant floating cities, but it was usually an intestinal bug that meant a few days of utter misery, but no great danger to any but the frail elderly or people with prior health conditions. Usually because someone was careless about what they ate and drank at some Third World port of call, and got sick just in time to infect everybody.
This sounded like something far worse. Which made him really wonder about all those public service announcements he’d been having to run for the past several days. How much had the higher-ups known, and for how long?