Commander Carlson carefully dried and scanned every page of the documents they’d plucked from the sea. Almost all of it was readable, although that didn’t mean it was understandable. Much of it she’d read while holding the damp sheets in front of a hand dryer in the crew’s head.
It was medical research, she could tell that much. Something about the flu, which made sense given the history of the island. She knew about the flu, they all did, they’d been getting increasingly serious messages about hygiene and hand washing, and they’d all been required to get flu vaccines during their last port call, vaccines that clearly no one expected to be effective. That was confirmed in the captured documents—the scientists wrote about the futility of the present vaccines, and the virulence of the new strain. There were frightening classified briefs from the Alliance about the spread of the disease, the death rates, the unrest in the cities where it was doing the most harm.
She concluded that the crate of paper she’d grabbed represented some of their earlier work. Some of it contained dates. The earliest date was three years before, the most recent about a year earlier. But she could tell, even without any medical training, that they were getting close to a cure. There was an excitement in the more recent documents, a certainty that an answer was at hand.
She wrote a brief, one-page memo that summarized their findings, the dates that the paperwork spanned, the paragraphs and charts that seemed the most important to her untrained eyes. She consolidated these into about a five-page message, with the relevant scans attached, and sent it to squadron headquarters. It was as large a message as she dared send; she didn’t want to stay at PD any longer than necessary in the zone so close to the island where she chose to linger. They came to PD and sent the message to their satellite in a sixty-second, encrypted burst. They submerged the instant they received confirmation that the message had been received by the satellite.
Then she went to the wardroom, shared a microwave pizza with Banach, and waited for two hours, the amount of time she thought it might take for her bureaucracy to partially digest the information.
At sunset, they rose again, and a message was waiting for her. The OOD held the scope while she went to radio, reading it one line at a time as it came out of the printer.
Jennifer Carlson was a woman who had seen much during the war. But what she read on the message made her jaw drop. She walked back down to the wardroom, where Banach was enjoying a post-pizza cigarette.
“Sorry,” he said, starting to snuff it out on his plate. He knew his commander didn’t like smoking, and he did it only when she wasn’t around.
She waved her hand dismissively. “I have word from our illustrious leaders.”
“Did they congratulate us on shooting down the plane? Or chastise us for deviating from doctrine?”
“They express their congratulations,” she said, reading the message. “And they confirm that it was a high-value kill.”
“Oh?”
“The Alliance is sending out another rescue mission to the island, this time by submarine.”
“Smart.”
“The boat they are sending is the Polaris,” she said. “She’s on her way.”
Banach raised an eyebrow at this. “They know exactly which boat is coming? They know the name? How could they know that?”
“Because,” said Carlson, holding the message in front of her. “We have a man onboard.”