A Ray of Hope

Autumn Belfontaine was sitting in the newsroom, sorting through one after another report of disaster on a level not seen since the 1918 Spanish Flu. If anything, the current situation was worse for the simple reason that the world of 1918 had not been nearly so connected, so that many places were spared for the simple reason that they were too far away for people to get to them during the incubation of the disease.

Today, only the Martian settlements were that far away. Even the Moon was a mere three days’ flight from Earth, if one were to take a direct flight. There’d been a close call with the Indian space program’s pre-flight quarantine procedures already, but it had been caught because the person had a layover on Harmony Station just long enough for them to become ill on the Sakura rather than after they’d gotten down. However, it had put a big chunk of Japan’s space infrastructure out of operation while everyone aboard both station and ferry had to quarantine.

And there’s some speculation that the next person to turn up sick on the way to the Moon will simply “fall out of an airlock.”

Autumn didn’t like the idea that someone could be so careless with everyone’s safety, but she could understand the motivations behind it. Schedules were tight enough in ordinary times, and with a big chunk of the cislunar spacelift capacity out of action, there’d be a feeling that they couldn’t afford to lose more on “just in case” precautions.

But now, with some kind of illness at Schirrasburg which might be the diablovirus, it became even more urgent. Lunans lived in far tighter quarters than Earthlings anywhere but Tokyo or Hong Kong. Even the various scientific outposts and mining bases, while isolated from each other, still had very little pressurized volume per person, which meant that everyone was in constant contact.

And then she noticed something on one of the Russian wire services. An anonymous source in the Imperial Household was reporting that Tsar Constantine had met via teleconference with Academician Nikolai Voronsky, head of the Russian genetic engineering program. Apparently Voronsky was reporting success in sequencing the genome of the diablovirus in its three major variants.

Which raised a serious conundrum for her. On one hand, people really needed some hope right now, with the news of disaster being moderated only by the fact that whole regions on Earth were no longer reporting at all. On the other, this was not exactly a reliable source. Heck, it was hardly above the level of “gossip sheet.” Was it a responsible thing to actually report it?

She retrieved her phone. Time to pass this to the people in Medlab, see if anyone down there had a good idea of its veracity.