[CV 02] • The Observers

Everyone believed that the mysterious plague which surfaced on board the huge oceangoing habitat Sea Venture had been stopped dead in the middle of the ocean. Nobody reckoned with Julie Prescott’s unborn baby—nobody even thought about whether pregnant women could bring the parasite back to shore.

Julie herself didn’t reckon with what kind of man she’d fallen in love. John Stevens wasn’t your average guy, although that’s how he seemed. In fact, he was a highly-skilled, greatly sought after hired killer. McNulty’s disease (as the plague came to be called) changed his life and changed his values—but it didn’t take away any of his skills.

John and Julie settled down quietly to raise their daughter. Randy Geller and Yvonne Barlow, two of the very first McNulty’s survivors, married and set up a way to jointly pursue their careers. Wallace McNulty happily became an expert on the parasite that bore his name. But McNulty’s victims found that they sought out each other’s company, that they suffered fools less gladly than they had before, that they were less willing to settle for lives they didn’t enjoy.

When McNulty’s symptoms started showing up in the population on land, panic ensued. Despite the fact that McNulty’s was not fatal, and recovering patients seemed to show no ill effects, much scientific and popular opinion held that too little was known, and the disease must be curbed at all cost. Quarantine of all known McNulty’s survivors would be set up—and what better place to hold such a large group of people comfortably hostage than Sea Venture itself?

But John Stevens was not the kind of man to be quiet while his wife and daughter were imprisoned…