V.

It turned out Captain Dale did not mean all the passengers, just their leader, the Professor. Walking up to the man’s cryo-stasis tube, which was leaning against the wall in one of the wider corridors passing along the ship’s belly, Dale slapped the Emergency Wake-Up button on the tube three times in rapid succession, ignoring the mechanical voice that emanated from the tube’s monitoring system trying to warn him about the unpleasant side-effects the occupant of the tube could expect from an emergency wake-up.

“Emergency Wake-Up Protocol initiated,” the tinny voice announced after the third slap. The tube’s readout screen began listing off the steps it was taking to wake the occupant quickly—what stims and stabilizers it was injecting into him. After a few moments, the professor’s eyes began to flicker, groggily.

Dale went over to the small cabinet that had been installed next to the cryo-stasis tubes, stocked with snacks, hydration, and vomit bags for the cryogenically frozen passengers when they should awaken, and took a few things out. Then he leaned against the wall, ripped open a package of salted peanuts, and began munching on the contents. 

Seeing this, Franklyn went to get something from the cabinet for himself, but Dale stopped him, saying, “Those are for the passengers.”

After a few more minutes, the lid of the Professor’s cryo-tube slid open and the man stepped out on wobbly legs, his staring eyes blinking rapidly as a result of the stims which had just been pumped into him.

The Professor stared at the Captain, his head bobbing a bit. He was a large man with a patriarchal beard. In his tight-fitting cryo-costume, he looked a bit like a sausage. Dale stared back at him for a few moments then handed him a vomit bag. 

The Professor, who had the name MARLOWE printed on his cryo-costume, took the bag and stared at it without comprehension. His mind was evidently still foggy.

With an effort, Marlowe turned to look at the cryo-tubes of his comrades, and saw that they were still fast asleep. “What? What am I…” He began to speak, but then suddenly he caught himself, frantically opened the vomit bag, held it up to his face, and began dry-heaving. It went on for quite a while.

“Why’d you wake him up so quickly?” Franklyn asked. Marlowe had stumbled a few feet away and was bent nearly double with the effort of dry-heaving.

“I’m in a hurry,” Dale replied, pushing himself away from the wall and tipping the package he was eating from into the air to shake the last few crumbs into his mouth.

Marlowe tried speaking a few more times, but kept interrupting himself with a fresh round of heaves. He took to pacing up and down in front of the cryo-tubes of his companions, taking a look at each of them in turn and breathing deeply. Eventually he seemed to gain some measure of control over himself, and he walked back to the Captain with a much less wild look in his eyes.  Dale handed him a soft drink, which he took and began to sip.

“I need to know,” Dale began calmly, “exactly what you were doing on that ice planet. And I don’t mean whatever BS you put on the transport forms. I need to know exactly what you were doing.”

Marlowe swallowed painfully and ignored the Captain’s question. “I demand to know,” he said, “why I feel like running a marathon and why the rest of my team are still asleep.”

Dale ignored the professor’s demand. He remained calm and spoke slowly, articulating each word. “One of my people is dead. He died with some sort of biologically engineered monstrosity attached to his lower body. My hold is full of biological engineering equipment belonging to you. So I need to know what you did to him.”

Marlowe took another sip of his soft drink as he digested this information. “Did he touch any of our equipment?”

Dale squared up on the man. “So there is something!”

The professor straightened, not backing down. “No, that is not what I meant. We were testing exotic alien compounds. There was some genetic analysis involved, but we were certainly not engaged in genetic engineering down there.”

“I don’t believe you,” Dale responded, then began to explain why, pointing his finger close to Marlowe’s face to emphasize his point. “Your school is SNU, right?”

Marlowe shrugged. “Yes, of course.”

“SNU is sponsored by Lexbridge, the pharmaceutical company.”

“It’s one of our sponsors, yes. What about it?”

“Lexbridge has military contracts to develop biological weapons—weapons which they couldn’t really develop on Earth, now, could they? But a remote ice planet with a small human colony? That would be ideal.”

Marlowe lifted his head into the air and stared down at Captain Dale, studying him. “You’re insane,” he pronounced. 

“Am I? Tell me I’m wrong.”

Marlowe held his ground for a moment, then seemed to back down slightly. “Can I see the body?”

Dale hesitated, not expecting this response. Then he backed up. “Sure.”

Marlowe gestured. “Lead the way then, please.”

Captain Dale made the introductions when they reached the MQ. “Burnstyle, this is… Doctor? Doctor Marlowe, one of the passengers.”

The Professor came very close to pressing his face up against the glass of the window at the sight of the thing on the examination table, and asked Doctor Burnstyle to show him his findings. Burnstyle threw the report up onto the window, where it appeared in glowing letters on the glass. Marlowe skimmed it, or perhaps absorbed it immediately.

“Can I go in there?” he asked.

“Sure, but you won’t be coming out until we have this figured out,” Dale warned. “That’s a quarantine zone in there.”

“Sounds good to me,” Marlowe said. He looked at the Captain, waiting for him to instruct him on where to go to get suited up in HAZMAT gear.

Dale pointed to another door off to the left that led into a corridor leading to a side-entrance to the medical airlock. Then he locked eyes with Franklyn and gestured with his head, indicating that he wanted him to help the Professor. Franklyn used his security card to open the door for him, then opened a closet full of HAZMAT gear for him. Marlowe did not need his help with getting suited up however, being very familiar with biohazard protocols.

Marlowe entered the MQ wearing a black HAZMAT suit and hurried up to the examination table to take a look at Constantini’s body. He seemed excited and jittery, though this could probably be explained by the stims coursing through his veins. Using a scalpel, he lifted up some of the white, fibrous tissue that seemed to be woven into the mass of flesh and tested its tensile strength.

“Wow. Wow wow wow,” he exclaimed, quietly. He turned to Doctor Burnstyle. “Do you know what any of this is?” he said, indicating the entire alien mass.

The ship’s doctor shook his head. “No. My preliminary examination revealed nothing.”

“I think we should biopsy all this and run every test we can. I’ve been doing this sort of thing for months.”

The Captain’s voice came through the Intercom with a very suspicion-laden “What was that!?”

Marlowe looked over at Captain Dale and frowned at him. “I mean I’ve been performing biopsies on alien starfish for nearly a year. I’ve never seen anything like this though.”

The Captain sounded very stern. “You’d better be telling the truth, Marlowe, or I’ll shove my boot so far up your ___ you’ll be tasting leather for the rest of your life.”

“I assure you, Captain, nothing I brought onto this ship could have done this. Not that I’m aware of.”

Lovecraft, who had been watching from off to the side, commented, “I wish I felt reassured by that!” but no one paid any attention to him.

VI.

It proved next to impossible over the next twenty-four hours to keep the crew in the dark about what was going on—what little could be reliably ascertained, anyway. Before too long, nearly every member of the crew had shuffled up to the MQ’s windows to take a peek inside and ask questions. Lovecraft and Pullman took it upon themselves to answer their interminable inquiries, but eventually even they grew tired of it.

A considerable number of the crew convinced themselves that it must be some kind of space demon that had come out of the gas cloud and attached itself to the technician somehow. Others informed them condescendingly that this theory was stupid, and that the thing must be some sort of parasite that Constantini had picked up on shore leave somewhere.

When asked his opinion, Captain Dale responded that he almost wished it was a space demon, because the alternative was almost too horrible to think about. What he was thinking was that if it was some new sort of parasite or disease, they might be looking at the outbreak of a new plague, something more horrendous than any variety of flesh-eating disease that had ever before plagued the human race.

Dale questioned every member of the crew about Constantini’s behaviour  over the past few weeks, but it seemed no one had interacted with him much outside of work-related exchanges of information. There was nothing out-of-the-ordinary about this. Constantini had always kept to himself.

Albert’s search through the security camera footage also turned up nothing. Constantini was strangely absent from a good chunk of hours right near the end before he went out the airlock. The few video clips there were of him showed the technician shuffling about the ship wearing a pressure suit and avoiding the more frequented areas. 

Identifying or even classifying the thing that Constantini’s body had been transformed into continued to elude Dr. Burnstyle and Dr. Marlowe. Eventually the Professor began to crash due to the emergency wake-up stims wearing off, but upon request, Burnstyle gave him some more stimulants, of a less potent sort, to keep him going a little longer.

While the ship still had two more hours of calculated ballistic maneuvering, Captain Dale called Alberts and Franklyn down to the MQ again to discuss the situation with Burnstyle and Marlowe, and figure out what to do. Nothing new had really been established, despite all the new tests Burnstyle and Marlowe had performed.

“What do we know for certain?” Dale asked.

Burnstyle, who was beginning to look quite uncomfortable in his HAZMAT suit, spoke up. “We know that Constantini seemed perfectly fine up until a few hours before the end. Then he put on a pressure suit and started behaving strangely. This suggests he understood that something was wrong but was not completely in control of his faculties, otherwise he would have told someone. He then went outside the ship, attempted to fill a tank with explosive material (which he failed to do), distanced himself from the ship, and attempted to blow himself up. You know the rest.”

Marlowed had a contribution. “That means he probably did not want us examining his remains.”

There was an uncomfortable silence as everyone looked around at each other.

“Did he know what was happening to him?” Pullman asked. He had not really been invited to be part of the conversation, but that did not stop him. 

“He didn’t leave a note,” Dale said. “I checked his files. So we might never know.”

It occurred to Alberts that Constantini might have written a note somewhere in his cabin, but in that case it was now incinerated and unrecoverable.

Burnstyle continued summing-up the situation. “We have no idea what the vector is for this thing, or even if there is a vector. We can’t detect any bacteria, viruses, or spores. For all we know, Constantini was bitten by some alien crawly years ago on an alien world he visited, and whatever this is has been lying dormant in his system since then. Or one of his parents was bitten. Maybe it’s congenital—though I doubt it.”

Albert’s brows furrowed. That last theory sounded extremely unlikely. “In what universe could that be a congenital condition?” he asked, incredulously.

Burnstyle shrugged and frowned at the same time. “I’m just… at a complete loss about this.”

Dale looked at Dr. Marlowe. “What about the bioweapon possibility?”

Marlowe sighed. “Well, I’ve never been involved with that sort of thing, and I’ve never been asked to be involved in that sort of thing—but I’m sure it occurs somewhere. And it is possible they might have developed techniques that would prevent  their products from being sequenced—but it is also my understanding that any bioweapon this advanced would have to have molecular markers that could be used to identify the thing as a human-engineered product. Every technology I’m aware of that could engineer DNA like this leaves detectable markers. This doesn’t have any.”

Dale looked at Burnstyle for confirmation. The ship’s doctor shrugged again. “Not my field of expertise, but I think he’s right. This might be a natural organism.”

Pullman did not understand any of that, but he asked, “How could a natural life form possibly resist having its genes analyzed?”

Everyone nodded. It was a well-known point that all living, breathing alien life that had ever been discovered possessed regular old DNA. Analyzing the DNA of alien worlds was an important part of space colonization.

“It’s not impossible,” Burnstyle commented. “The animal’s cells could have some unusual properties that interfere with the machine’s operation—some slightly radioactive mineral perhaps.”

Marlowe contributed, “Or the animal could be some sort of chimera—different DNA in each cell.”

“Any indication of that?” Dale asked.

Burnstyle shook his head. “I can’t rule it out, but if it was a chimera, you’d expect a much higher rate of cell differentiation.” He pointed to a medical monitor that showed a slide of flesh taken from Constantini.

“Good news is it doesn’t look like it's infectious,” Marlowe said.

Dale looked at him incredulously. “How can you possibly know that!?”

Marlowe raised an eyebrow at him. “I mean, I wouldn’t recommend direct physical contact, but since we can’t detect any vector, I’d guess that the rest of us are in no immediate danger of being transformed like this.”

Burnstyle nodded in agreement.

“Yeah, OK.” Dale took a seat on the bench. “All right, I’ve got a couple of ethical dilemmas here. One is that we’ll be arriving at Skapstoti soon, but I have a responsibility to quarantine the entire ship until we’re reasonably certain no one else is infected. But if the thing was dormant in Constantini for years… There are limits on how long I can afford to quarantine and still pay everyone. Plus, everyone’s going to want to go ashore at Skapstoti.

“The other problem is that we have an ethical responsibility to report this and all our findings to the authorities, and release Constantini’s body over to someone for a more thorough examination. But if we do that, someone will try to weaponize this (that is, if it isn’t already a bioweapon).”

Burnstyle looked around at everyone, but they were all either staring at the floor or the ceiling. He spoke up. “Captain, I’ll suggest a compromise. We dump the body here, and all our samples, in a cryo-stasis pod. We’ll attach a beacon to it that will only activate if we transmit a secret code. That way, no one will ever be able to find it, not even us, unless we broadcast the activation signal. When we arrive at Skapstoti, we submit photographic evidence of the case to Sol Central Medical. We tell them the remains were destroyed for fear of infection. Um… When we get to Skapstoti, we quarantine for… a week? Then get back to business if nothing’s happened by then.”

Dale looked thoughtful. “That… sounds reasonable to me. All right, that’s what we’ll do.”

VII.

Dale and Franklyn retrieved an old cryo-stasis tube from storage and carried it into the medical airlock through the side-entrance. Then Lovecraft and Pullman brought the tube into the MQ and carefully transferred Constantini’s remains into it, along with all the samples which the Doctor and the Professor had collected, carefully packed and labelled by Marlowe. Alberts modified and programmed a beacon for the cryo-tube, with Maybelline’s help, and the Captain input a secret code that only he knew. They passed the beacon through the airlock, and Lovecraft and Pullman attached it to the cryo-tube.

“What should I do with his crucifix?” Marlowe asked, as they were preparing the body. Burnstyle had not mentioned it, but the Professor thought he should bring it up. Sometimes people wanted their jewelry or religious totems passed on.

“What?” Dale asked, through the window.

Marlowe pointed. “He’s got a crucifix around his neck. Should we leave it, or…”

“I’d say leave it,” Dale said. “It's the only headstone he’s ever likely to have.”

“Pretty pathetic headstone, if you ask me,” Lovecraft said.

“Nobody asked you, Lovecraft,” Dale informed him.

Pullman spoke up. “Aren’t Catholics supposed to be buried in holy ground or something?”

Dale had to think about that for a moment. “Dignity is the operative principle, I think. This body once contained a soul made in the image of God. We treat it with as much respect as we can—shield it from gawking eyes, preserve it as best we can.”

When they were ready, the Captain retrieved the Book of Common Prayer from his cabin and read the funeral ceremony as the men in the MQ stood around the cryo-tube. A few members of the crew joined the Captain in the hall outside. 

When the rite was completed, Pullman and Lovecraft carried the cryo-tube back into the airlock, cycled out most of  the air, and ejected it into space. 

After that, the crowd in the hall dispersed, and the men in the MQ set about sterilizing the place. When that was complete, they disposed of their HAZMAT suits. Burnstyle and Marlowe made no mention of it, but Lovecraft and Pullman complained loudly at the stink that assaulted them the moment they removed their headgear—the unpleasant combination of disinfectant ethers and each other’s body odour. Their eyes watering, they rushed for the showers in the adjacent room. Marlowe and Burnstyle waited their turn.

Shortly after that, the ship’s engines switched on, according to Franklyn and Feorn’s calculations, and they set out again for Skapstoti, leaving the gas cloud (and Constantini’s remains) behind.

Captain Dale rang up the Port Authority at Skapstoti and explained the situation to them. The Port Authority agreed to a one-week quarantine but asked to send over a health inspector. Dale agreed, and when they arrived within visible range of Skapstoti, a small skiff approached the Pater Noster with the insignia of the Port Authority. It docked with the freighter, and a man wearing a full encounter suit came aboard—not just a HAZMAT suit, a full-on hard-shelled encounter suit.

“Seems a bit excessive,” Franklyn said to the man, meeting him at the airlock.

“Can’t be too careful,” the inspector explained, cheerfully.

Dale had also come to meet the inspector, but after greeting him, he went back to the CIC, leaving Franklyn to show the visitor around.

“Thanks, but I’ll find my way,” the inspector insisted when Franklyn suggested an itinerary.

Franklyn followed as the man traipsed his way around the ship, nodding at the crew members they happened upon. Their route led them through various highly-frequented work areas and the galley. Franklyn suspected the health inspector probably had a schematic of the ship’s corridors pulled up on his HUD, which would explain how he seemed to know his way around.

The inspector seemed relieved when he came upon the four men sequestered in the MQ.

“You fellows handled the body?” he asked.

They nodded.

“What’s with the whole get-up there?” Lovecraft asked, referring to the inspector’s full encounter suit.

“Oh, you know,” the man responded. “They let just about anybody fly around these days. Some real dumb-dumbs out there. Sometimes you see an outbreak of flesh-eating disease on a ship…. You go aboard and they’re just living in filth—no quarantine, no special precautions, nothing. You guys look good though. Keep it up.”

“I presume you mean PAC-controlled ships?” Lovecraft asked.

The health inspector somehow shook his head and nodded at the same time. “Yeah, I don’t know why the Port Authority lets those guys trade here. It’s just asking for trouble, in my opinion.”

“Well they have to trade somewhere,” Franklyn observed.

The health inspector gave the navigator a look, but did not respond verbally.

Eventually the man returned to his skiff. Before departing, he handed some papers over to Franklyn, saying, “Everything looks good on my end. See you guys in a week!”

VIII.

Together, Burnstyle and Marlowe drew up a submission for the medical database at Sol Central Medical. They tentatively classified what had happened to Constantini as a ‘rapid onset full-body fungal infestation’ with a question mark at the end. They dubbed it Burnstyle-Marlowe Disease, filed it as just one more of the hundreds of known flesh-eating afflictions that afflicted space-faring humanity, and included enough information that if anyone ever encountered it again, it would be recognizeable—but couched in such a way that the database entry hopefully would not draw any attention to itself. For instance, they put down that gene sequencing the disease had been ‘unsuccessful’.

The crew were not happy about having to wait an extra week before offloading the ship and enjoying their shore leave, but they were smart enough to understand why it was being done.  Alberts kept them busy with some work in the hold, rearranging and sorting the cargo. He also ran every sort of drill imaginable to eat up time: fire drills, depressurization drills, inspection drills, piracy drills, etc. The Captain decided they should all have rudimentary checkups as well. They could not join Dr. Burnstyle in the MQ, obviously, due to the double-quarantine, but Alberts set up some privacy screens in the hall outside, and Dr. Burnstyle performed the checkups as best he could through the window. It was a horrendously inefficient process, and not very thorough, but it took up a lot of time that could otherwise have been spent complaining. Burnstyle had to walk each crewmember through how to take all their own readings.

Captain Dale also assigned a number of crew to cleaning up the sticky floors in the bowels of the ship. Consequently there was a pervasive smell of cleaning fluids assaulting everyone’s nose over the course of the week. He also asked them to check the steerage room (and the areas above it) for leaks, but they did not report finding anything. Dale himself spent some time in the steerage room with a flashlight examining the ceiling, but did not find anything out of the ordinary.

Dale might have spent much of the week playing his guitar, but instead  he spent the time going over the ship’s expenses, arguing with the insurance company, and trying to nail down a bunch of small contracts that normally would not be worth his time—but due to the disruption of the ship’s schedule, just might help make ends meet. He got Maybelline and Oliphant’s assistance with this task, since they really did not have anything else to do with the ship parked outside Skapstoti. This was actually the most work Maybelline had done in a long time, as her regular job position was entirely superfluous to begin with. Dale was required by outdated regulations to employ a 'rear pilot'—a requirement that did not apply to a ship of the Pater Noster’s design—but regulations were regulations. Maybelline was officially the Pater Noster’s ‘rear pilot’, and there was actually a small room at the rear of the ship that was her official post, but there were no control systems installed there. As a joke, someone had bolted a large wheel that vaguely resembled an antique boat wheel to the wall in there, but it was non-functional. In actuality, Maybelline was actually more of an apprentice to Oliphant. She was quite open about the fact that she was merely racking up hours until she could get a job as a regular pilot. Captain Dale had hired a number of people like her over the years. Whenever overly-officious inspectors came aboard, Dale sent Maybelline to her official post and told her to be prepared to 'look busy' whenever the inspector popped his head in. 'Looking busy' meant staring officiously out through the portholes over the back end of the ship and checking things off on a notepad.

Together, Dale, Oliphant, and Maybelline managed to lock down a few small shipping contracts over the course of the week. Dale also started contacting employment agencies on the space station, looking for someone to replace Constantini. He also patched Skapstoti’s main public radio channel in to the ship’s Intercom system so everyone could hear the local music and advertisements. Before too long the crew could recite from memory all the local jingles encouraging  visitors to check out the public park (only 1,000 yuan admittance!) and shop at Skapstoti’s various stores and outfitters, such as Anderson’s  and Mark’s.