The last Zombie was in the hold; the hold was sealed, and Tia had brought the temperature up to skin-heat. The ventilators were at full-strength. Alex had just entered the main cabin.
And he was reaching for his helmet-release.
"Don't crack your suit," she snapped. How could she have forgotten to tell him? Had she? Or had she told him, and he had forgotten?
"What?" he said. Then, "Oh, decom it. I forgot!"
She restrained herself from saying what she wanted to. "Doctor Kenny said you have to stay in the suit. Remember? He thinks that the chance we might have missed something in decontamination is too much to discount. He doesn't want you to crack your suit until you're at the base. All right?"
"What if something goes wrong for the Zombies?" he asked, quietly. "Tia, there isn't enough room in that hold for me to climb around in the suit."
"We'll worry about that if it happens," she replied firmly. "Right now, the important thing is for you to get strapped down, because their best chance is to get to Base as quickly as possible, and I'm going to leave scorch-marks on the ozone layer getting there."
He took the unsubtle hint and strapped himself in; Tia was better than her word, making a tail-standing takeoff and squirting out of the atmosphere with a blithe disregard for fuel consumption. The Zombies were going to have to deal with the constant acceleration to hyper as best they could. At least she knew that they were all sitting or lying down, because the crates simply weren't big enough for them to stand.
She had been relaying symptoms, observed and recorded, back to Doctor Kenny and the med staff at Kleinman Base all along. She had known that they weren't going to get a lot of answers, but every bit of data was valuable, and getting it there ahead of the victims was a plus.
But now that they were on the way, they were on their own, without the resources of the abandoned dig or the base they were en route to. The med staff might have answers, but they likely would not have the equipment to implement them.
Alex couldn't move while she was accelerating, but once they made the jump to FTL, he unsnapped his restraints and headed for the stairs.
"Where are you going?" she asked, nervously.
"The hold. I'm in my suit. There's nothing down there that can get me through the suit."
Tia listened to the moans and cries through her hold pickups; thought about the contact-buttons that showed fluttering hearts and unsteady breathing. She knew what would happen if he got down there. "You can't do anything for them in the crates," she said. "You know that."
He turned toward her column. "What are you hiding from me?"
"N-nothing," she said. But she didn't say it firmly enough.
He turned around and flung himself back in his chair, hands speeding across the keyboard with agility caused by days of living in the suit. Within seconds he had called up every contact-button and had them displayed in rows across the screen.
"Tia, what's going on down there?" he demanded. "They weren't like this before we took off, were they?"
"I think..." She hesitated. "Alex, I'm not a doctor!"
"You've got a medical library. You've been talking to the doctors. What do you think?"
"I think, they aren't taking hyper well. Some of the data the base sent me on brain-damaged simians suggested that some kinds of damage did something to the parts of the brain that make you compensate for, for things that you know should be there, but aren't. Where you can see a whole letter out of just parts of it, identify things from split-second glimpses. Kind of like maintaining a mental balance. Anyway, when that's out of commission," She felt horribly helpless. "I think for them it's like being in Singularity."
"For four days?" he shouted, hurting her sensors. "I'm going down there."
"And do what?" she snapped back. "What are you going to do for them? They're afraid of you in that suit!"
"Then I'll,"
"You do, and I'll gas the ship," she said instantly. "I mean that, Alex! You put one finger on a release and I'll gas the whole ship!"