Gaby pressed, Accept.
Not much later, the face of a man came to the screen. He was still wearing a surgical gown and his mask dangled down his front. In the background, Jonathan could see shelves full of the plastic boxes that hospitals tended to use for their supplies.
"Hi, Gaby," he said.
"Hi, Morgan. This is Jonathan Bartell, he's my colleague. Jonathan, this is Doctor Morgan Finke.”
"Nice to meet you," the man said. "You're lucky to be working with Gaby."
Jonathan glanced sideways at Gaby, who was laughing, out of view of the camera. “I presume Gaby has explained to you that we like to talk to you about a patient at your facility, a woman who came from Astoria Station.”
The doctor’s face sobered.
“It’s a difficult situation. You will be aware that Gaby and I are restricted by privacy laws. I’m not at liberty to discuss medical details of my patients.”
“I’m not terribly interested in the medical details, but I would like to talk to her about the situation at Astoria Station before she left. It’s probably not related to her medical condition at all.”
He hesitated. “I think you may be wrong about that.”
“Why is that?”
“I can’t discuss that, because it may involve reputations of people on the station.”
“Those people are all dead.”
He did a double-take. “What do you mean?”
A horrible feeling settled in Jonathan’s stomach. “You haven’t heard it yet?” He’d expected the news to have travelled wide by now.
“Heard what?”
“Astoria Station stopped responding to all non-automated messages a week ago. Gaby and I went in, and we found all the inhabitants dead.”
“What? Every resident of the station?”
“Everyone we could trace.”
He wiped his face, his eyes wide. “Jesus. Why haven’t we heard about this yet?”
That was a very good question. Because the captain of the Renae Stellaris hadn’t released the information?
“We’re trying to established what happened. Your patient is the only known survivor.”
“Jesus,” he said again.
“This is why I’d hoped to get a picture of was happening at the station when she left. I have some questions for her. I’m happy to send them along and you can vet them before she replies. Anything she can say is better than what we have now, which is nothing at all.”
Morgan sighed, and said nothing for a while. Then he said, “I… I’m not sure the patient will be happy to answer those questions. She has indicated she wants our assistance to avoid being sent back to Astoria at all cost. She has… some personal issues, but certain things she has told me about the work environment at the station, I believe to be true, at least from her point of view. I really can’t go into too much detail. I’m already outside the boundaries of what I’m allowed to say, but my conclusion is that the work circumstances at Astoria Station were not conducive to a healthy community. If you’re there, you may be able to download message logs that support this. I really can’t go into the specifics, I’m sorry.”
“I understand. It’s still quite helpful. Thank you for your time.”
Jonathan signed off, and Gaby closed the connection. The screen went dark and then came up with a directory of “Video Records”, including a new one that showed today’s time and date.
Wow, just as well the doctor had been very reluctant to share too much.
“What did you think of that?“ Gaby asked. “I was hoping he’d be a little bit more helpful and less diplomatic, but I guess he’s afraid that someone might listen in.”
“Hell, yes. Do you see all this?” Jonathan gestured at the list of directories. “Everything is recorded.”
Further down the list of similar records with dates and times, there was also a list of codes. Most of them started with letters, like FJ or GR, followed by numbers and then sometimes another letter at the end. That was suspiciously like that code on that box that had been carefully strapped into the shuttle seat by those men from “the data team”—according to Lance.
He said, “I thought he was helpful. I’ve seen small signs that there was tension in the station between the board and the workers. We need to check the internal messages again and check the bios of the board to see if we can find out more information about them. One thing I haven’t been able to find out is why all these people were in the auditorium together. You were talking, before Morgan’s call, about identification of the remaining victims to see who’s missing and who is the extra woman.”
“Oh, yes. I checked the passenger logs. The woman is Yolanda Chee. She’s a corporate person, not a scientist.”
“Was she one of the victims?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
“Do we know anything about her?”
“Not yet. Too busy. As for the missing man, we identified a few more people based on their possessions and photos and security footage. So we haven’t identified him, but ruled out a number of people. We have a shorter list of people unidentified. These are the male names of the station’s residents still unidentified.”
She showed Jonathan the list. Richard Shelton was on it.
“That’s the station director. Do you have photos of him?”
Gaby snorted. “Where do you think I’d find to time to dig those up? I’m sure you can find some.”
“I’m still wondering if he’s the same Richard Shelton as the one I knew. The age appears about right.”
Gaby sighed. “I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry and I haven’t even changed yet. I’m going to my room.”
“Yeah, let’s have dinner.”
As Jonathan got up, he again looked over the list of directories. In his mind, he saw the guys who Lance said had been from the Data Team sitting on the shuttle with them. And that box they had with them. What was the code on it again? EX-473C?
So they had gone into the station to collect something that contained video files?
After a quick dinner, Jonathan went back to work. He felt a bit guilty, because Gaby had done a lot of work that day that he would never like to do.
First, he looked up Yolanda Chee. He couldn’t find that much information on her at first, but then he found some news articles that had been published outside the Asteroid Belt that mentioned she had been a headkicker for several companies and organisations. The Mars Water Authority for example, hired her when problems arose with microbial contamination. She came in after the wave of scientists had identified issues and swept a broom through the administration.
Then she was employed by the Lunar Base Cooperative to sort out the rivalries between bases that made it impossible to make resource sharing effective.
Interesting.
A search for Richard Shelton brought up the impressive records of the professor Jonathan knew. Results for “Richard Shelton, Director of Astoria Station” remained stubbornly elusive, so he went into the personnel database to find that it didn’t contain a photo of him, nor an extensive biography. But it did contain his place and date of birth, which matched the professor’s.
Even more interesting.
Either this was the same person or someone who was doing an impressive impersonation.
As Gaby had said, the route from esteemed professor to station director was a pretty long way to fall.
When Jonathan was at university, he used to correspond with a few people who were in Shelton’s department. Jonathan studied on Earth of course. Those off-Earth contacts were considered really valuable. He’d kept in contact with Helen Sakira. Maybe she knew what had happened to Richard Shelton the professor, and whether this was really the same person.
He sent her a message.
Then he again went through the station’s internal correspondence. He didn’t find any further evidence of tension between employees other than the small remark about whether someone would be replaced. He did find a record of Yolanda Chee’s arrival at the station, three weeks before the station stopped responding to messages.
He also found a document that she put up for all residents about work practices and accountability.
That went up a week before the fateful meeting. He skimmed the document, which was all boring standard stuff.
He scoured the internal messages sent after the publication of that document, but found nothing unusual. So he released an analysis program onto two groups of messages: one set from before Yolanda arrived and those sent after the publication of her document.
The statistical parameters were rubbish. The groups were uneven and the samples were skewed. There were far more messages from before, and the after messages were very likely coloured by the fact that a lot of anxious discussion would have been going on between the residents, as always happened with announcements of this type. But it was all he had.
The analysis showed that after Yolanda’s document was published—and downloaded more than five hundred times, more than there were residents on the station—there was a decided upswing in people’s positive language. The effect was so strong that he wondered if it negated the poor quality of his data.
Jonathan found his results pleasing. Something had been wrong with the culture at the station, and Yolanda Chee’s arrival had made people feel positive.
With all that done, he went to brief Gaby. Together, they went to the dining room, where at this time of the evening, a number of the ship’s passengers would have a drink before going to bed.
They were usually the same people, and most of them looked tired and bored. The transport operator discouraged the consumption of alcohol, but these people seemed to have a limitless supply of it.
While walking through the room, Jonathan caught a few snatches of conversation. They were still wondering how much longer the ship would hang around here, since the captain had promised they’d be moving soon. They were tired of waiting.
Jonathan found Gaby at the usual table at the far end. He went to get his own tea first, and then sat opposite her.
She had changed out of her uniform, but looked no less tired.
He told her about what he had found.
“I’ve heard about that woman,” Gaby said when he mentioned the tasks Yolanda Chee had performed in other places for other companies. “Do you think they hired her to sort out a toxic work culture?”
“Well, let’s put it this way, you don’t hire someone like that if you don’t have problems.”
“We don’t really have proof that there were problems.”
“No, that’s why I would like to speak to that patient. Only she can tell us what the atmosphere in the station was like.”
“If you want me to contact Morgan again, I don’t think we’ll get any more out of him. He seems too guarded about what he says. Then there is the issue of medical confidentiality.”
“I was thinking we might visit him when we get to Ceres Station.”
“We could do that. But I’m not sure that it’s our—”
Gaby suddenly fell quiet.
Jonathan looked over his shoulder.
The ship’s captain had come into the room.
There was a certain art to the confident swagger that people of these highly coveted positions often displayed. Jonathan knew it from the military, but it turned out civilians were just as good at it.
The man walked to the table, poured himself a glass of carbonated juice, and then appeared to “notice” that everyone in the room was looking at him.
"I have some good news for you," he said in a too-casual way. “The way things are looking, we will be on the move again by tomorrow evening.”
The passengers on the other tables broke into applause.
“Can we go earlier?” a man said.
His female companion said, “Shhh.”
The captain continued, “We would go earlier, but the emergency crews have let us know that they’ll need until then to stabilise the station so that we can pass the research into the hands of capable investigators.”
“I’m just glad to get moving,” a woman said. “We’re two days behind schedule. Can we make up for it?”
“We will do our best.”
“I don’t think we can go yet,” Jonathan said.
The group of passengers turned around, expressions of shock and horror on their faces.
The captain frowned at him. “Is that your decision to make?”
“No, but there is someone still alive in the station.”
“That’s the first I’ve heard of this.”
“We haven’t had time to explain. No one has asked us for our opinion.”
“Let me have your opinion now.”
He was definitely irritated.
The captain took Jonathan and Gaby to his office, where they explained what they had found.
He listened with an unemotional expression on his face.
“I think you have some very strange theories that don’t add up,” he said after they had finished.
“They don’t, yet, but I’m reasonably confident that we’re missing someone.”
“I don’t see any evidence in what you’ve just told me. And indeed if someone is hiding in the station—which is a preposterous proposition, because why would anyone hide from a ship that comes to the station’s rescue?—then they can stay wherever they are. The authorities can deal with it. We’re not law enforcement. I refuse to endanger my crew for the sake of a criminal—or a crackpot theory.”