A Terrible Itch

It was a terrible itch. He had scratched himself raw and bloody, and each new scratch brought on such pain as he had never experienced before. In point of fact, the only thing more intolerable than the pain when he scratched was the itch when he didn’t.

The itch was merciless. The itch was incessant. The itch was everything.

Five days ago, when it had started, he had gone to the ship’s doctor. The old man had told him it was probably an allergy and given him a cream for it. Fool that he was he had actually used it. On that first day it had quelled his suffering. On the second day it had soothed his misery. It had even helped cool the pain on the third day, though he had been forced to spread it on in globs so thick that his coworkers had spent the day snickering at the grease stains on his clothing.

It wasn’t until the end of the third day that he realized that it was the cream that was making it worse. That was the only possible explanation. The doctor had given him something that would ease his torment for a little while, then make it a thousand times more unbearable.

He knew why, too: the doctor hated him. He should have anticipated that. He should have known. The doctor was an old man. He was an old, fat, bald man. An ugly man. There was no doubt he envied the ensign. The old bastard envied and hated him.

The ensign had tried to get help. He had tried to explain the situation to the captain and the first officer, but they both brushed him off. Inconceivable, but it was true. They had waved away his accusations as unfounded, insisted that he was having some allergic reaction and that he should see the doctor again. That he should see the very man that had done this to him. It was so bizarre, so unreasonable.

Then, in a flash, it had come to him. It was so obvious. They were all in on it together!

The captain’s involvement made sense; he was an old man as well. A jealous old man just like the doctor. But the first officer was a young woman; surely she could see that he was being made to suffer, that he was being tormented by vicious old men.

But somehow she didn’t.

Or maybe she did. She was unusually young for her post. She had to be smart enough to see it. Of course! She was protecting her position. That had to be it; that was the only explanation: she knew, but she was protecting herself. Protecting herself at his expense. Well, he’d take care of that; they wouldn’t treat him like an animal. He was no dog to be kicked on whim. No, he’d strike back. They would respect him. They would have to. He knew just how to hurt them. He had been working ships all his life, and he knew where they were weak. He knew where to hit so they’d all feel it.

The June Skipper, a freighter carrying equipment and supplies to the colony of Illean 4 was a full three weeks into its six week trip when all of its secondary systems shut down.

The systems failure was the first major problem on the freighter in eight runs, and when the lights suddenly dimmed and the humming faded down to a soft, low throbbing of the ships hardwired functions, Captain Bennat found himself surprisingly excited. Things had been running so smoothly for so long that he was beginning to feel a bit obsolete, like old hardware that hadn’t been scrapped just yet, but was on the list.

He had been a military captain for most of his career, and had served with distinction. He would still be serving with distinction had he not had the misfortune to be serving under the wrong man at the wrong time. Not that he had anything to do with the scandal, but his commander had done his damnedest to see that the blame was spread as wide and as far as possible.

After his strongly encouraged resignation Captain Bennat had found himself suddenly immersed in a job market where most of his skills were meaningless. His tactical brilliance and resolve were important when facing down a fleet, but when all you had to do was fly from point A to point B, they were somewhat less necessary. Thankfully he had friends who had left the military before him, though it was strange to find himself suddenly working for a man he used to give orders to.

It had been hard to adjust. For years he had been a leader of men with things to do and people who needed him; these days he could go months without making a decision more pressing than what color to paint the hull. But now, at long last, something was happening. The excitement faded quickly, and he kicked into problem solving mode. He jogged through the halls, making his way to the main bridge, located at the center of the ship.

“What happened?”

The ensign at the engineering console looked up, flustered. “Still working on it, sir. My screen was fine, then all the sudden . . .” he shrugged, at a loss for an explanation. “Well, it just sort of all went off line. I mean, it must be a problem in the regulator room, that’s the only place all secondary systems are connected, but even there . . . All I can think is that the problem is hardware. I’ll have to check it out.”

“Go.”

The man scurried off. The first officer, hair still wet, and pulling on the jacket of her uniform passed the petty officer on her way in.

“Commander.” He nodded to his first officer, Jeya Shoan, as he made his way to the engineering console. She had been an officer under his command during his military days, and while her resignation was not in any way officially linked to his own, the timing was strangely convenient, as was the fact that she was hired as first officer of this ship days after it was assigned to him.

“Captain.” She nodded back. “What’s going on?”

“Don’t know, I just got in myself. Been working out?”

“Swimming.”

The captain nodded and turned back to the console looking for working systems. He winced. The communications systems were down, both the onboard systems, and the long range comm. Hell, even the lighting systems weren’t responding, leaving them with the luminescence of the plastics used in walling material of the ship. The emergency life support systems were working, but nobody had ever really expected them to be used, and the equipment was poorly designed and barely maintained. It only just kept the air breathable. He could very nearly taste it growing stale. Even the primary heating system was down. In the cold of space that would become an issue very quickly. The only onboard computers still working were the ones with independent power supplies. Whatever had happened, it was bad, and it would take some doing to fix.

“Dammit.”

“I concur.” His first officer had been reading over his shoulder, normally a habit he found annoying, but there were more important things weighing on his mind.

“Shoan, go down to engineering, grab everyone you can, and I mean anyone who isn’t holding the ship together with their teeth, and get them down to the regulator room. I want to know what’s going on, and I want it fixed, and I mean yesterday.”

“Sir.” She saluted sharply and headed for the door.

“Jenson,” the over-tall man at the helm turned slightly. Born on a low gee world, he was considered by his people to be short, at a mere nine feet. On board the one gee ship he was forced to wear an exo-skeletal bracing system over most of his body, lest he collapse into a heap of broken bones on the floor.

“Yes sir?”

“Check out any nearby planets, in case we need to make an emergency landing. Oh, and get me an ETA for the nearest populated systems, in case it turns out we need professional repairs.”

“Sir.”

“Laea.”

The elderly woman inclined her head in his direction in acknowledgement.

“I want some numbers on how long we can last with diminished systems. I also want to know exactly what systems we have lost. Full assessment as soon as possible.”

Laea nodded assent and turned back to her console. She was the only officer who had lived onboard longer than the captain. They’d been working together for the past three years and to date she had spoken less than a dozen words in his presence. Some of her previous commanders had reprimanded her for it, but her work was consistently above par. Captain Bennat had decided to leave well enough alone.

The captain began to go over the console readouts himself. They just didn’t add up. The systems were designed to interact and react to one another, but they were specifically not integrated in any way that would allow a program glitch to shut down all the systems like this. In theory each system was supposed to be protected from whatever flaws might show up in the others. The ensign had been right, the only logical reason for this sort of problem would be hardware related. But the room was heavily protected against explosions, which mean that sabotage was the most likely cause. Sabotage had been a serious concern in the Captain’s military days, but the ship he now flew simply wasn’t important enough to be attacked.

“Sir!” The ensign he had sent out moments before was at was at the door panting, and looking slightly more than a little upset.

“What? Have you located the problem?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, out with it, what happened?”

“It’s Ensign Lainer, Sir! He’s gone crazy!”

“What? Who?”

***
“Eh, it’s not pretty, but you should heal up okay.”

The captain waited impatiently while the doctor gave the injured security officer the necessary antibiotics and instructions for taking them. She was the last of the personnel to be treated. The jagged cut along her arm was among the least severe of the many injuries.

“So? What is it? What’s wrong with him?”

The doctor hushed the captain quietly, watching as the security officer exited the room. “Sorry, sir. I just don’t think this is the sort of thing you want getting out.”

“What? What is it?”

The doctor waved for the captain to follow and headed to the back room. The ensign responsible for the damage was in one of the isolation wards looking to be somewhere between extremely psychotic, and positively rabid.

“Can’t you give him something to calm him down?”

“I did. Three times the standard dosage. Half again as much as I’m supposed to legally.”

The captain let that sink in for a moment. “So what is it? What’s wrong with him?”

The doctor shook his head and tapped on the thick, clear metal separating them from the clearly deranged ensign, who was, at that moment, pacing from one side of the emergency isolation ward to the other, seething and foaming at the mouth, still scratching at patches of tattered, bleeding flesh through his even more tattered uniform.

“I’ll tell you, captain, it wasn’t an easy diagnosis to make. Especially with my database and all of the scanners down. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had to make a diagnosis from the books? Some of those things are so old the pages broke in my hands.”

“Well, I’ll be sure to put in a request for new books at our next stop. Now, what did you find? What happened to him? He was never a model crewman, but this is completely outside his character.”

The doctor raised an eyebrow, “So you knew him well?”

“Well . . . it’s completely outside of his character as described by the personnel file Shoan gave me on him.”

“Ah. Well, you’re right, of course. The company tends to avoid hiring folks who foam at the mouth and bash computer consoles with heavy metal poles.”

“Doctor, get to the point if you please?”

“I checked my records, and apparently he came in complaining about an itchy rash just under a week ago. I assumed it was just an allergic reaction. In retrospect I should have ran a few tests, but at the time I had other things on my mind. Anyhow, I gave him a topical cream that probably just numbed the skin for a day or two. Long enough for the dementia to set in.”

“So do you or don’t you know what he has?”

“Well, I think I do. As it turns out, the ensign came on board after a brief vacation, visiting his parents on Balla 2. He made it off the planet fifteen days before it became an officially quarantined planet.”

“The whole planet?”

“The whole planet. Apparently they had an outbreak of Pharrat.”

The captain furrowed his brow. The word was familiar but it took him a moment to place it. His pupils dilated notably as the memory hit him suddenly, “Pharrat? The plague? I thought they wiped that out decades ago.”

“They did. But, as I understand it, a few facilities kept the virus on hand; working on a cure just in case it popped up somewhere else. That’s the official story anyhow, more likely they wanted to see if it could be mutated into a more effective, controllable, biological weapon. Balla 2 had several hazardous material medical stockpiles and research facilities on the planet. There must have been an accident. We are a little bit lucky, though. His symptoms are consistent with type three Pharrat. The downside to type three is that it causes paranoia and violent outbursts, the upside, however, is that it usually does not become contagious until the very last stage. The stage wherein the infected person goes into convulsions, then a coma, then dies. So there’s a good chance that nobody else has been infected.”

“Well that’s good. What about him, what can we do for him?”

The doctor grimaced. “Your history books didn’t explain how they wiped out Pharrat, did they? Nobody was ever able to find a cure; in the end the government simply quarantined every planet with known or suspected cases, and let the planetary governments handle the details until they were convinced everyone with the disease was dead. Most planetary governments simply locked all their doors, covered their ears, and waited for the situation to handle itself. It was a pretty nasty affair.”

The captain paled a little at the thought. He shook his head forcing himself to focus on the problem at hand. “So, how certain are we that nobody else was infected?”

The doctor bit his lip, thinking it over. “Well, this does have all the signs of being type three, but there were a few instances where researchers suspect a victim became contagious early. There’s also a chance that somebody was playing with the genetic structure and we’re dealing with a new strand. I’d say I’m seventy to eighty percent sure we’re safe.”

The captain raised an eyebrow. He was not especially knowledgeable about Pharrat. All he knew was what he had learned in school. It was one of the six great plagues that mankind had encountered in its exploration of the stars. The effects had been devastating. Millions upon millions had died. He had not been aware that there was no cure for it, but now that he was . . . .

“That isn’t good enough. Is there any way we can test the crew for it, any preventative vaccine we can give?”

“There is no vaccine. There are tests, but none we can give with the computers down. Really the only thing we can do is wait and see if anyone starts to develop symptoms.” He watched the captain for a moment. “A nasty situation. How do you plan to handle it?”

Captain Bennat shook his head. “I don’t want to be the man responsible for starting another epidemic. We’re going to set down somewhere uninhabited to make repairs. I want to be a hundred percent sure nobody is infected before we finish this trip.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Also, we don’t want a panic on board. Nobody outside of you and me is to hear a word about this. And I mean not a word.”

“That is something of a given, Captain.”

***
“Do you want the good news or the bad news first, sir?” Jenson looked like a grown man in a three year old’s chair. The Captain had considered special ordering a seat for him, but it was the sort of thing that was rather easy to move to the bottom of the shopping list when the budget got tight, as it always did. Fortunately the giant was accustomed to living in an inconveniently small world.

“Let’s start with the bad.”

“The regulator room may as well have been ejected into space. Almost nothing in there is even salvageable. The company is going to be very, very angry about this. We’re looking on spending two trips worth of profits on the repairs when we reach our next port.”

The captain grimaced. “And the good news?”

“We do have the supplies on board to rig up makeshift regulating units for the two most important systems: the heating and the air recyclers. And we’re less than two days away from a habitable, type 1 planet.”

“What do we know about the planet?”

“Not a lot. Currently it’s uncolonized. So far only a prelim team has visited it, they had very encouraging remarks. The word paradise came up more than once. A secondary research group is supposed to be starting a more intensive examination prior to colonization. The atmosphere and gravity are both near earth’s, and flora and simple fauna are already flourishing, the microorganisms have no discernable effect on humans, and the water supply appears to be drinkable. Ideal.”

“Well then. It sounds like the perfect place to make repairs.”

The Captain dismissed his command crew with a nod, quietly tucking away the report Laea, had given him just before the meeting. According to her, they would be able to make it to their destination quite easily, though not in perfect comfort, without the assistance of any of the secondary systems, except of course heating, which could be rigged in about a day. Bennat was confident that the quiet woman was not planning on sharing that little tidbit with anyone else. Shoan had her own copy of the report, but she had been working with him long enough to know when not to ask questions.

The medical facility, like all of the other systems, had been shorted out. The substantial database had been lost, and all of the equipment had been rendered useless. Thankfully, Captain Bennat was able to find a handheld library he had brought on board years before. He spent the duration of the trip locked in his office studying everything he could about Pharrat. He was, after all, a military man, and military men like to know their enemy. The more he knew, the less he wanted to know.

They made landfall in the middle of a flat, and beautiful field. The area was in full bloom with low lying, white flowers stretching as far as the eye could see. It was as close to heaven as the captain could ever remember being. He had half a mind to arrange for another mechanical problem on the way back, just to visit the place again. Actually, he might want to do more than visit.

“It is lovely. But somehow I don’t think you can afford enough of it to retire on.”

The Captain turned around, “You know, Shoan, you’ve really got to stop doing that.”

“Sneaking up on you, or reading your mind?”

“Both, either, whatever.”

She smiled. Shoan was no psychic, but as much time as she had spent under her captain, she didn’t have to be to figure him out. Some of the crew joked that they were like an old married couple.

“Repairs are under way. They think they’ll be able to get most of the systems up an running, but permanent repairs will have to wait till we put into port.”

The captain nodded, “Well, it’s not that important. Just make sure that everyone stays busy till the doctor can confirm no symptoms.”

In point of fact he had not informed her of the details of their situation. But he was confident she had a good idea. Besides being intuitive she was one of the most intelligent officers who had ever served under him.

“How long will that be?”

“As best as the doctor has been able to calculate it out, it took right about at fifteen days for the ensign’s symptoms to show up. We’ve had him in quarantine for the last three days, so just to be on the safe side, we should probably give it, say, two and a half weeks.”

The first officer nodded, “I’m sure our buyer will be upset, but there are worse things. Are you going to want to oversee the repairs?”

“No. I trust you; besides, it’s been years since I stopped to smell the flowers, and there are a lot of flowers here to smell.”

The first officer smiled. She was planning to spend some time out in the fields herself. They were just too lovely to pass up. The fields themselves would actually help with protracting the work until the deadline. As much as there was to be done, she knew quite well that it wouldn’t take more than a week to finish it at the usual work rates. But nobody would complain or question a more relaxed schedule when there was such rare beauty to be enjoyed.

***
The captain winced at the sudden realization that he was scratching his arm again. His skin was not quite so red or raw as that of most of the crew, but he was still in pain. Everyone was; even the stoic Laea’s face was a constant grimace of discomfort these days.

“Well, I guess there’s no question now.”

The doctor was gnawing on his lower lip, though whether it was simple aggravation, or an attempt to alleviate an itch there while his arms were busy clawing at each other was questionable.

“No, not really.”

“About how long until the dementia begins to set in, doctor?”

“I don’t know . . . days, I suppose. I wish there was something we could do. Anything. I destroyed the ensigns body as soon as he died, so there’s no chance the infection occurred after . . . I’m afraid we must be dealing with a new strain.”

“Communications are still down. They tell me there’s something broken that we can’t fix, so we can’t warn anyone off.” The captain forced himself, through sheer force of will, to put his hands at his sides and leave them there.

“And we can assume that a crew was sent after us as soon as they realized we’d changed our course. That gives us, what? Four days until another ship shows up?”

“More like five or six. Still . . .”

“By then whoever is left will be completely demented, and by the time they figure out what’s going on they’ll be infected. And depending on how long they take to head back to main port . . .”

An old resolve found foothold and stood up inside the captain. “We can’t let that happen.”

The doctor nodded a depressed consensus. “Does the crew know?”

The captain shook his head; “No, they know something’s going on, but they have no idea what. It’s not like Pharrat comes up in casual conversations these days. According to Shoan, more than a few think we’ve picked up some sort of virus here. They’re not aware of the physiological incompatibility of our bodies to the native microorganisms. Well, Laea is, but . . . she hasn’t brought it up.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Well . . .” the captain contemplated. “The most important thing is that we need to handle the situation now. We’re already dead, we just need to make sure we don’t take anyone else with us. I will not be responsible for an epidemic.”

They sat in silence for a few moments, both coming to grips with the realization of their inescapable doom.

The doctor nodded sadly. “I guess there’s no other way.”

“No. Any ideas how?”

The doctor considered. “Actually yes, I know just the thing. We’ve got a stockpile of chemicals in the medical supplies. I can mix a few together into an odorless gas; a few drops in the ventilation system and we’ll all drift off to sleep and never wake up again.”

The captain sighed. “That’s probably our best option.”

The stood in awkward silence for a few moments. “It’s been a privilege serving with you doctor.”

“You too, sir.”

***
To: Fleet Commander Micca Callus

From: Investigative Team Coordinator Rella Victor
Re: Fate of June Skipper

Sir, after a month long, intensive investigation we are still not completely certain as to the reason for the loss of the June Skipper. It does appear that the captain was involved in the death of the crew, however the fire that resulted when the combustible gas used to kill the crew was ignited destroyed most of his diary.

The senior members of the team petition five members to two to close and file this case, as we do not believe any further progress can be made.

Post Script:

Re: The colonizing potential of the planet

The planet is gorgeous and quite livable, as determined by preliminary teams, however please attach an addendum to the file that while the planet is mostly a paradise, the pollen of a particularly abundant flower here has a slight toxicity to it which results in a terrible itch.