Reggie Waite didn’t usually go down to IT to talk with his wife. As commandant of the settlement, he needed to avoid any appearances of favoritism. However, given the tenor of Steffi’s text, he’d decided that it wasn’t worth the stress to have her come up to his office.
Shepardsport’s IT department was located in the lowest levels of the settlement’s habitats, where they could use the Moon itself as a heatsink for cooling their fastest and most powerful number-crunchers. Here and then he passed doors opening onto rooms filled with racks of servers — but even these were run of the mill machines, busy with routine data applications, ranging from render farms to e-mail store and forward for the local Internet nodes. The real heavy iron was kept in secure rooms, well past the help-desk offices and data-center equipment.
Reggie found Steffi in her office, her face a mask of calm he knew at once to be false. When she greeted him at the door, her professional face stayed firmly in place, division head to commandant. Only when she closed the door did she let it slip.
“Thanks for coming down here, Reggie.” Her voice had that breathless sound of someone under severe emotional strain.
“What’s wrong, Steffi?”
“I just got an e-mail from an old friend at JPL. Things are getting really bad down in the LA Basin. Apparently that sickness that’s going around showed up in several different nursing homes all at once. They think it was a doctor who’d just flown back from some kind of professional conference and visited patients at all of them. But there are two nursing homes that he never visited, so there’s some speculation that some part-time workers carried it back and forth.”
Reggie recalled a recent e-mail from his father, mentioning having to reschedule an appointment because of illness at the client’s facility. “That’s not good.”
“No, it’s not.” Steffi moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “Right now they’re especially worried because a couple people at the Lab have family that work at those nursing homes. Siblings for the most part, a couple of parents who were looking for part-time work after they retired. Not someone they see every day, but close enough to visit on the weekends. Although one of the senior scientists had a daughter in high school who’d been volunteering at the one that got hit worst.”
Reggie considered what to say. It had been over two decades since he was working with JPL on the Dis Pater project, and he had no idea who some of these people were. However, it was possible that Steffi knew them, so he didn’t want to come across as overly clinical and insensitive. “Do they think she’s caught whatever this thing is?”
“Not yet, although with JPL’s flexibility about telecommuting, they’re apparently telling him he’s free to work from home if there’s any question of putting the girl under quarantine. And they’ve told all the janitors and support staff that they are not to try to be heroes and drag themselves in if they feel sick. They’re to call in sick, and the Lab will make sure that they’re covered if they run out of sick days.”
She looked Reggie straight in the eyes. “This thing is serious. Which makes me wonder why we’re not hearing a lot more of it from the Earthside news media. Some blogs here and there, but none of the major networks, not in the US, and not abroad.”
“I think the two of us need to have a serious talk with Autumn Belfontaine. I’d been counseling caution, but I’m starting to wonder if we’re looking at a coverup.”