A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters - Martin Harry Greenberg [109]
I followed Smik back to crew country and up the lift to the purser’s office. Her name was Sellis, and she was small, wrinkled, and grumpy. She didn’t recognize Smik until he took his fake head off, and she was less than complimentary about my suit, which wasn’t fair; my Skikka taught me the suit is the most important thing I own, and I always maintain it, though maybe not cosmetically. She let me use one of her terminals to check genomes, though. I came up with a list of nine names. Two were crew, and seven were among the wealthiest passengers on board, according to the purser, who dropped her other duties and talked to me and Smik when she found out what I was doing.
“These people are doing what?” she asked.
“Munching on metal,” I said. “Maybe that’s the good news, though. With metal mites, you have a lot of decontamination where I need to shut down whole areas of the ship for several hours while the fumes do their work. These guys are easier to isolate. Gotta figure out what’s happening to them, and is it contagious.”
“I don’t think we can authorize isolation with these passengers,” said the purser. “They have too much clout.”
“Can we test the crew members?” I asked.
“With the captain’s authority.” She hailed the captain and talked to him about the situation, then quietly alerted security to round up the two crew members I’d fingered and quarantine them. One was a nurse and the other was a waiter.
While we were waiting to hear back from security, Smik and I camped out in the purser’s office, which she wasn’t too thrilled about. “Why didn’t anyone hear them?” I said. “Must be noisy, chomping on metal. Do you think they all did it at the same time, or were these just random visits to the same spot?”
“How can we know until you ask the beings involved?” Smik said. I didn’t know his body language, but I got the impression he was getting fed up with me.
“Good point.” I could talk to the gym staff, see if anybody had noticed anything. Although this wasn’t my usual method. I’m not a detective. Analyze and destroy! Then take the money and scamper. “Who spotted the damage?”
“Don’t know,” he said.
The purser’s comm beeped. She spoke to it, then to us. “They’ve got the two crew in sickbay, isolation room. Now could you get out of here and let me work?”
Smik put his fake head back on and led me down to sickbay, where I met Dr. Pradip and an armed guard. The doctor was friendly, which was a nice change, and the guard was quiet. The nurse and the waiter were inside a glass-sided room. They sat side by side on a med-bed. The nurse was dark-skinned, tall, and muscular. She wore a teal uniform with a medical insignia on the chest. The waiter was shrimpy and wore what all the other crew on the promenade deck had been wearing: black pants, white shirt with creases, gold bow tie. They both sat quietly, too calm for people who had just been rounded up.
“Preliminary scans indicate they are not quite human any more,” said the doctor. He was short and dark and had shiny black eyes. “It’s very interesting! They have new metallic structures inside—very slender and hard to detect, but I found them.”
I wished my Skikka was still around. He was not a people person, but he might have known how to handle this.
“Have you talked to the nurse? Is she someone who works with you?” I asked.
“Yes. She is my assistant. I thought she was a little strange lately, but I didn’t think—a marvel like this right under my nose!” He was all ready to dissect her on the spot. Which kind of put me off, but might be handy in the long run.
“Can we talk to them?”
“Sure, sure.” He led me over to a console and pressed a button. “Amara? The exterminator is here. She has some questions.”
I did? Again, not my area. “Uh,” I said. Both the nurse and the waiter had straightened when the doctor spoke. Their faces still looked blank. “When did y’all start eating metal?”
“Ten days ago,” they said together.
“Uh, why?”
“Our systems required it.” They were perfectly synchronized in their speech.
“What for?”
“To build—” the waiter began,