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Narrative

Of Abandoned Vehicles and Empty Tents

Reggie arrived at the newsroom to find Autumn Belfontaine hunched over her laptop, watching a video. Although he couldn’t get a good view from his angle, it looked like it was playing on a local news station website. A female reporter in a windbreaker was talking to the camera in front of a tow truck hooking up to what looked like an old RV. Too bad Autumn was keeping the volume low enough that he couldn’t make out what the woman was saying.

However, it also meant that it was low enough that Autumn could hear his approach. She paused the video and stood up to face him. “Hi, Reggie. Is there something I need to go live with?”

“Not at the moment, but I think we’d better have a talk.” He glanced over to his wife, who’d paused to talk to one of the engineering staff. “Steffi, could you tell Autumn what you found out today?”

As Steffi explained about the e-mail, Autumn’s eyes widened. “So it’s not just the homeless population.” She gestured toward the frozen video on her laptop. “I’ve been visiting local TV and radio station websites from all over the country, and about half of them are reporting a sudden spike of illness in homeless camps. This one’s a human-interest story about a homeless vet, I think they said he fought in the Energy Wars, who’d been living in an old RV under an Interstate overpass in the Chicago area. They’re trying to locate next of kin to claim his remains and the possessions inside his vehicle, including his medals and citations.”

Reggie had his own memories of the Energy Wars, although he’d been a fighter pilot flying off aircraft carriers, not a ground-pounder. “Damn. Make it definite, someone is suppressing this news. I can still remember when I was fifteen and we had the big flu outbreak, the one they always blamed on the chaos after the fall of the Soviet Union. That was back when it was just the three networks, but they started running reports when the first big groups of cases showed up, and it wasn’t even all that deadly.”

“Then you want me to run this?”

“Write up a report and run it past me first. We may need to tweak the emphasis a little, but we definitely have to get it out that we’re looking at a very big picture. Big enough that I need to talk with Dr. Thuc about what precautions we need to start taking now.”

Autumn looked back to her laptop. “Then you think it could get up here?”

“We can’t discount the possibility. The Martian settlements should be safe, but it’s a three-day journey from Earth to the Moon. All it would take would be one person breaking the pre-flight quarantine.”

Yes, Autumn realized just what it would mean. Because pressurized volume was such a valuable commodity, people in lunar settlements lived in the sort of close quarters that were usually associated with extreme poverty on Earth, outside seagoing vessels and offshore drilling platforms. Worse, the life support systems would circulate a virus through the entire settlement, infecting everyone.

“I’ll get right on it.”