Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [5]
Siregar stared at her fellow security officer as if he had sprouted another pair of ears. “You’re kidding, right?”
Offenburger, a tall, blond man, pulled his head out from under a fire-damaged control panel. “Not at all. I’m telling you, his eyes were silver. And they were glowing.”
“You saw him?” asked Siregar, her skepticism echoing through the Valiant’s auxiliary control center.
“No,” her colleague had to admit. “Not personally, I mean. But O’Shaugnessy and Maciello were in engineering when Agnarsson lit up, and they both told me the same thing. Silver and glowing.”
Siregar grunted, then returned her attention to the exposed power coupling she had been working on. Normally, an engineer would have taken care of such repairs. However, with all the damage done by Big Red, the engineering staff couldn’t handle everything.
Especially when they were missing two of their best men.
“At least Agnarsson’s alive,” she said.
“For now,” Offenburger added cryptically.
Siregar looked at him. “What’s that supposed to mean? Do they think he’s going to die?”
“They don’t know what to think,” he told her. “They’ve never seen anyone with glowing eyes before.”
“But is he going downhill?”
Offenburger shook his head. “I don’t know…but I sure hope not. It’d be nice to see at least one of those guys pull through.”
Siregar nodded. She hadn’t been especially close to any of the victims, but she mourned their loss nonetheless. After she had spent years working alongside them, it would have been impossible not to.
“Yes,” she agreed, “it would be nice.”
Jack Gorvoy completed the last of his autopsy reports, sat back in his chair and heaved a sigh.
Six casualties, the doctor reflected, and each one showed the same characteristics. Severe damage to the victims’ nervous systems, synapses ravaged up and down the line, cerebral cortices burned out as if someone had plunged live wires into them.
Yet none of the victims had suffered external injuries. There were no burns, no surface wounds—nothing to indicate that their bodies had been subjected to electromagnetic shocks.
With that in mind, the open-console theory didn’t seem applicable. Besides, only Rashad and Davidoff had been in the vicinity of sparking control panels when they collapsed. Yoshii, Kolodny, Rivers, and Zosky had been in more secure sections of the ship.
It seemed the phenomenon had found a way to affect the victims’ brains without intruding on any cells along the way. A scientific impossibility, as far as Gorvoy could tell. And yet, he couldn’t think of another explanation for what had happened.
Which led to another question, perhaps bigger than the first. How was it that these six people had died when the majority of the crew had survived unscathed? What was different about them? the doctor asked himself. What was the common denominator?
He glanced in the direction of the intensive care unit, only a small slice of which was visible from his office. He could see Agnarsson, the only patient left to him now that Hollandsworth was well enough to return to his quarters. The engineer was sitting up in his bed, glancing at a printout of his DNA analysis.
Unlike the others who had burned with that strange light, Agnarsson didn’t appear to have suffered any ill effects. Though his eyes had changed color, his vision was still perfect. In fact, the man claimed he felt better than ever before.
Under normal circumstances, Gorvoy would probably have discharged him and pronounced him fit for duty. But he couldn’t—not when the engineer was their best shot at obtaining an understanding of their comrades’ deaths, and by extension, the forces that comprised the space phenomenon.
Abruptly, the medical officer realized that Agnarsson was returning his scrutiny. Like a voyeur caught in the act, Gorvoy pretended to be busy with something else for a moment. When he looked up, his patient was gazing at the analysis again.
No doubt, he told himself, Agnarsson would prefer a novel to an analytical printout. Swiveling his