The White Fleet (Blood on the Stars Book 7) by Jay Allan

Author:Jay Allan [Allan, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2018-03-16T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Planet Zero

Zed-11 System

Year 315 AC

“I need more samples. I don’t care if you have to chase the locals through the woods and hold them down, but it has to be now.” Stu Weldon was Dauntless’s chief medical officer, a position he’d held since the day Tyler Barron had taken command of the old Dauntless, and one he’d refused to give up, even when it had moved to a new ship bearing the name. Even when Barron had bumped him up in rank and gave him the added post of top sawbones of the entire fleet.

“Yes, Doctor Weldon.” The assistant turned and raced off, away from the medpod Weldon was leaning over and out the small doorway of the hut. The shacks were filthy and dark, extremely poor raw material for a makeshift hospital, but they were all Weldon had, at least until the Marines finished putting up the prefab structures Barron had sent down from the fleet.

Weldon didn’t like the readings on the pod…he didn’t like them at all. Whatever was afflicting the landing party—and the number of victims had grown to over seventy now—nothing he’d tried had been even partially effective in slowing the progression of the disease. He’d started reviewing readings and data transmitted up to the fleet, until he’d thrown his hands in the air at the difficulty of long-range analysis and stated unequivocally that he was going to the surface, and that no one was going to stop him. Barron tried, at least, but the admiral’s legendary stubbornness had once more met its match in that of his chief surgeon. In the end, Barron had relented. Mostly, Weldon suspected, because Barron knew it was the best chance of getting somewhere on addressing the growing epidemic.

He hadn’t lost any of the patients yet, but that was just because he’d put the worst of them in partial cryo-stasis. That number had risen to more than two dozen, and it had challenged the Marines and fleet support personnel hastily building infrastructure to keep up with his needs. The medpods used a fair amount of energy under normal circumstances, but activating the cryo systems really turned them into electricity hogs. The landing party was still on battery power, and it was going through fresh units as quickly as Barron could get more down to the surface.

The admiral had finally sent a portable fusion reactor, but moving something like that with shuttles required massive disassembly, and the corresponding need to put the thing back together. That was a complex job, especially when it was mostly a bunch of Marines working on it, following directions sent down from the engineering team on Dauntless. Weldon suspected many of the fleet’s experts had volunteered to come to the surface, but he was just as certain Barron wasn’t going to let anyone else down, not unless it was absolutely vital.

Weldon had managed to come to a few conclusions. First, whatever was afflicting the landing party, it was highly contagious, far more than any disease he’d ever seen.

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