Steffi Roderick had just sat down at her desk and opened her work laptop when her phone chimed incoming text.
She pulled her phone out, saw it was from Toni Hargreaves, an old friend from her Jet Propulsion Laboratory days, now working in the IT department over in Grissom City. Can you talk?
Toni wasn’t the sort of person to waste time in idle chit-chat. Either she needed some help on a programming task, or something really bad had happened.
I can take a little time. What’s going on?
Cather just got a message from one of his old buddies in the San Bernardino Fire Department. Apparently one of the other guys got sick a couple days ago, and he went downhill really fast. By the time he realized it wasn’t just an ordinary stomachache, he was crashing.
Toni’s husband was now deputy head of safety and security over at Grissom City, but he’d worked in EMS for years before he came up here. That sort of work tended to forge tight bonds between the people doing the work, but it still seemed odd that they’d keep someone in the loop who’d been away for several years now.
How bad?
By the time they got him to the hospital, he was going into septic shock. According to what Cather said, it was like his organs were just shutting down. They’re thinking it’s connected with this thing that’s going around the nursing homes, but a lot of the crews have been on calls to nursing homes lately.
Steffi recalled her own aunt. She’d meant to write back to her dad and ask how Aunt Margaret was doing, but with everything going on up here, it had slipped her mind. Presumably nothing too terrible had happened, since he hadn’t sent any further messages about her condition. However, Steffi made a mental note to check up on the situation.
It’s been bad. Remember Sam Goldstein at JPL? I got an e-mail from him a few days ago about one of the senior researchers having to take time off because his daughter had been volunteering at one of those nursing homes. We both thought it was just an abundance of caution.
Which made her realize that she hadn’t followed up on that one either. Sam might be busy with his current projects, but she was sure he’d appreciate at least a little show of concern.
And then Toni’s response arrived. That’s apparently what a lot of people were thinking. Cather’s been talking with Medstaff a lot about the situation.
We’ve been doing a lot of talking with Medstaff here too. If you want, I can pass the information on to Dr. Thuc.
This time Toni took longer to respond, enough that Steffi thought the conversation was over and logged onto her work laptop, getting ready to go over some jobs in process for the Astronomy Department.
Go ahead and tell her, but I don’t know how much information Cather even has. Medical privacy and all that. I know he’s probably told me a lot more than he should’ve over the years. And I really need to get to work. I’ve got about a thousand lines of code to write for the robotics shop, and I’m behind because I was helping the guys down in Hydroponics with some issues with their pumps.
Steffi sent her old friend a quick good-bye, then opened a new e-mail window. First thing, pass the word to Dr. Thuc that it wasn’t just frail elders and homeless people dying of that bug going around. Then check up on Dad.