Spruance Del Curtin had just signed off, getting everything ready for the Tea Time crew to come in, when the door opened and in walked Autumn Belfontaine, a very strange look on her face. He recalled having seen her in her office earlier, hunched over her laptop with that same fixed expression.
No, better not even bother with normal polite greetings. Just hand her the headphones and get out of the way.
The “On Air” light was already illuminated by the time he got out the door. He could only hope that the mic hadn’t picked up the click of the latch.
From the front office he could already hear Autumn’s voice over the stereo behind the receptionist’s desk. Cindy had already taken off for the evening, so Sprue decided to sit down and listen. He had plenty of time to get to the dining commons for supper and still get some studying done before he needed to be to bed. Especially with Dr. Doorne annoyed with him, he’d better be able to put in a good showing next session.
But now he was listening to Autumn reading off the URLs of one after another television station’s local news website, detailing reports of illnesses and deaths that should’ve been making the national news, even world news — but weren’t. Then she told everyone how to get to the Shepardsport Pirate Radio website to post their own accounts of what was going on in their communities.
It was a risk — if someone in the Flannigan Administration was determined to silence this outbreak, they could flood their comments page with so much spam there wouldn’t be time for the whole news team to wade through it. Maybe Lou’s sister-in-law over at Grissom City who was such a hotshot programmer might be able to write an intelligent agent to sift through it, but Sprue wasn’t going to count on it.
And then Autumn was reading a set of announcements. Not just the usual things about washing hands and covering coughs that they’d been doing for the last several days. This stuff was serious, particularly the restrictions on the pilots. All deliveries to outlying settlements were to be dropped off at the pad, and the inhabitants were to retrieve everything by loaderbot. No one was to visit the shirtsleeve habitats, and no one was to stay overnight, not at the outlying habitats, and not at any of the big settlements or Luna Station.
And he knew several women around this place who were not going to be happy about the next restriction: all pilots flying in from other settlements were to remain in the port facilities, and as much as possible should avoid interacting with local staff. And here Drew Reinholt had just managed to snag assignments flying here again. Working with Brenda was not going to be fun a-tall.