Statistical Anomalies

Maria

"This is disturbing, Del. Most disturbing." Maria glanced over the report a second time, frowning slightly at the numbers displayed there.

The younger woman nodded her red head and gazed at the Ops ceiling, as if expecting it to come crashing down on her at any moment. "Yeah. You could say that."

"Have you showed this report to any of the other Ghosts?"

"No..." Showed them? They'd think her mad-- well, more than they already did-- if they were to consider the conclusions she made from the data.

"Good. Don't. They have enough on their minds."

"And what of you?"

Maria shook her head. "That doesn't matter. Have you compiled the figures on our combat effectiveness?" She tapped a control and the first report disappeared from the small screen.

"As you are well aware, we are at full combat effectiveness. I think there are more pressing concerns--"

"Such as?" Maria's expression was bland, but the piercing eyes made Del hesitate. "Do you think there is anything that can be done about this matter, even assuming it isn't just a statistical anomaly?"

"Now you sound like Xeno," Del muttered. "No, I guess not..."

"Let me worry about the things that cannot be solved. You worry about what you can change."

"Yeah."

"Now, I think it should be a priority to get some lighter vehicles active. There are several Cybrid bases to the west, out of convenient range for our heavies, and we must have a scouting force. I see from your report here that you have managed to get two medium-agility engines nearly operational, and you list components you still are lacking. You request permission to cannibalize a level-six inertial shunt cable from one of the spare Minotaurs--"

Del responded automatically but her mind was on the report, and the distressing conclusion she had come to.

Something was terribly wrong in the Colony.

-----

Later that day she met up with Xenogears as she was crossing the garden level to her quarters. "Del," the blue-eyed woman said softly, disturbing the peaceful quiet of the garden level just enough to get her attention.

"Yeah?"

"I have been running some analyses of some statistics in colony demographics this past year."

Del met Xeno's eyes. "Indeed."

"It is an alarming trend."

"Trend?"

Xeno walked over to a nearby tree and leaned against it. "Obviously. Did you pay attention to the numbers other than the fact they were increasing?"

Damnit. "No," she admitted.

"In the past six months, there have been forty deaths not related to combat within this colony. Half of these were in the past month. Of those nineteen, sixteen were of natural causes and three were construction accidents." The normally emotionless woman's eyes were hooded. "I daresay I need not remind you of the circumstances of the one in the end tunnel on three."

Del shuddered. The young woman's body had been found near the door of a new tunnel,. with a suit breached to the vacuum. Del could still close her eyes and see the final expression on the unfortunate worker's face.

The woman had suffered from most of the obvious effects of sudden vacuum exposure: blood seepage from capillary damage, trauma to the lungs, burnlike inflammation of the eyes and mucous membranes from sudden evaporation of moisture. But what had struck Del most was the damage to the hands: bloody, broken, clawlike. And the worst damage had been dealt quite a few minutes before there was any indication of vacuum exposure.

That, combined with the elevated levels of neurotransmitters and epinephrine, had indicated that the woman had been terrified-- before there was any damage to her suit. The air whistling out of her suit had not caused it; it had happened before that.

But there had been something, perhaps something that caused her to make her fatal mistake and breach her suit.

Del's nurse had commented softly when they wheeled the woman in, obviously too late to save her: "She looks like she saw a ghost."

That was as plausible a theory as any, Del thought.

"Of the nineteen deaths this month," Xeno continued. "Fifteen of them presented... anomalies during autopsy. Of those fifteen, two occurred four weeks ago, four three weeks ago, six two weeks ago, and three have occurred this week. This week, for purposes of this analysis, began yesterday. If things go according to the pattern they have been, there will be five more deaths in this colony over the next five days."

Del's blood turned to ice despite the heat of the chamber. "Two, four, six..."

"It will be interesting to see if the pattern continues."

"INTERESTING!" Del shouted, outraged.

"From a scientific perspective, at least," Xeno inclined her head. "Of course, what would be more interesting would be to determine the cause of this progression."

"And end it!"

"Naturally. Despite my captivity by the Cybrids, I am no less human than you are," Xeno said, her voice carrying the faintest hint of dangerous anger. Del, familiar enough with the acerbic woman to catch the minute shift.

"Well, what do we do?" Del said.

"Logically, we can do nothing until our hypothesis-- that forces, circumstances, or conditions in this colony are causing a slow increase in the number of unexplained deaths, is confirmed or disproved. Any attempt to alter the current conditions would skew the result of the experiment, as it were, leading us to false conclusions and thus faulty methods of dealing with said conclusions."

"So," Del said, her voice barely above a whisper. "We wait and see who dies."

-----


A middle-aged man who lived in one of the tunnels leading from the three-four shaft died the next day, the result of a lift malfunction that dropped the man and the other two occupants of the car a hundred meters to slam into the hard rock bottom of the lift. While the extraction of the other injured was completed successfully and the others survived with no more than broken bones, the unlucky man had been wedged in between several of the broken beams and died of shock before the team could free him.

Maria was in charge of the autopsy. How she stood such a task was beyond Del, who could barely remain in the same room with a body no matter how many she had seen before. Afterward the man had been examined and returned to the morgue, Maria stood and watched the screen on the infirmary wall, her hands clasped behind her back, her eyes narrowed in thought. Del walked in behind her, glanced at the screen, which displayed an analysis of various hormonal levels detected in the cadaver.

"Some of those levels are strange," Del noted after studying the readouts for a moment.

"Yes. The man's epinephrine levels are abnormally high, and the various endorphins are lower than I've ever seen in someone who was not seriously ill to begin with."

"Perhaps a result of the Cybrid tampering? I mean, they replaced their brains with computers, surely--"

"No. Most of the survivors never had any kind of endocrine system alterations, and I have checked the chemical balances of many residents here. They are normal, more or less. You will also note this man's insanely high levels of potassium and chloride ions. His nervous system was going wild just before his death."

"This isn't a surprise. He was dropping down a lift shaft at--"

"You forget. One's ionic balance does not change immediately upon reaction to any stimuli. Rarely, indeed, is it the result of an external stimulus at all; and even if somehow it is, it takes several minutes to take effect. Several minutes he did not have, even assuming the first sign of trouble with the lift triggered such a powerful reaction. Doubtful, considering how well the lifts around here usually work, or don't, as the case may be."

"Okay, then, what can cause such a reaction, then?"

Maria shook her head. "Nothing I know of."

-----

"Fuego to Ghost Wolfe!" The worker's voice was frantic. "Need auth to bring out the big lifter!"

Maria raised an eyebrow, slapping the comm panel to open the channel. "Granted." Anything bad enough to risk activating the power-hungry construction vehicle was probably sufficiently dire to make the chance of detection by the Cybrids a secondary concern. "Status report."

"One of the main cranes collapsed, dropped a slab of rock on the bay control tower-- they're trapped in there!"

Standard procedure for the vehicle bay's control tower was for three operators to be on duty during the main shifts. "Can you raise any of them?"

"Haven't tried, trying to get them the hell out of there!"

"Try. I'm on my way." She got to her feet and approached the Ops door. She glanced back at Xeno. "Have Del meet me there."

Xeno acknowledged without a word.

-----

Delithita slammed her fist into the punching bag, leaving an imprint of her hand several centimeters deep in the bag of basalt sand. She let fly a curse, then fired a vicious kick into the bag. Her blow left a slight rip in the thick sack, and a trickle of basalt sand flowed out to hiss on the floor.

"You did what you could even as I did," Maria said softly, watching from the side of the gym. "If there was anything you could have done to save them you would have done so."

"I--" SLAM "did everything I could--" SLAM "but it wasn't--" SLAM " enough!"

The small woman then unleashed a right hook that would have dislocated most peoples' shoulders on impact, ripping into the edge of the bag, cutting a large gash in it and spraying a puff of sand across the gym. Maria raised an eyebrow.

"You saved Johnson--"

"Small consolation to Rebek's wife, or Daniels's son!" Del cried, and attacked the punching bag again, venting her fury.

Maria stepped forward in a lightning-swift motion and grabbed Del's arm in a grip of steel. "I will not allow you to beat yourself up over this. Nor, indeed, to destroy my punching bag. You are a doctor like any other: human, and not capable of saving every patient. The same as I. Are you not aware that Hippocrates lost sixty percent of his patients?"

Del cursed. "I should have been able to save them!" She tried to wrench loose, but Maria's hand would not budge. "They were not--"

"They had internal injuries our facility is not capable of healing. It is amazing that you were able to even save Johnson."

"Damnit," Del said softly. "You don't understand--"

Maria reached her free hand into her pocket and withdrew a scarp deck. She flipped over the bottom card and revealed it to Del: the Rose, the essence card of the Life suit. "I understand you better than you think. You saved the rose, and you proved that life could survive, even conquer, in the face of death. In this deck you are this card. But you do not realize that sometimes--" and she flipped over the next card, the Knife-- "sometimes Death wins. And only by fighting Death, and acknowledging the magnitude of the loss when Death defeats Life, do you make the struggle for Life worthwhile at all."

Del took the Rose card and turned it over in her hand, tears in her eyes. "There has been too much death here."

All too true, Maria thought, her eyes resting on the silver Knife.

-----

"I think your hypothesis has been adequately demonstrated," Del said bitterly to Xeno the next day. The other woman merely inclined her head. "So what do we do about it?"

"Considering that the deaths appear to be the result of accidents, and not any preventable occurrence... I don't know."

"Damnit, that's not good enough!"

"Agreed. It is not acceptable for people to die." Whether the trace of emotion in Xeno's voice was bitterness, irony, or disgust at Del's naiveté, Del could not tell.

"Increase safety awareness? Perform safety checks of the more frequently-used areas?"

"You may assume that the colony residents are aware of basic safety protocols, or else the population of this place would be rather lower than it is. You may also assume that the more frequently traveled areas have already been inspected repeatedly. And, indeed, the latest incident-- and, indeed, most of the incidents-- were not in frequently-traveled areas anyway."

Del growled something Xeno chose not to hear. "I'll bet that damned glitch has something to do with it..."

"Altas? Are you ever going to get over your prejudice against him?"

"It is not prejudice to hate those who killed thousands of--"

"But it is prejudice to classify Altas among that group solely on the basis of his origins. He is no more a Cybrid than you or I, except for an accident of birth. or have you forgotten his attempted peace offering?"

Del looked away.

"But that is beside the point. The point is--"

"Warning!" The central computer system said, overriding Xeno's next words. "Pressure loss: main entrance tunnel. Locking westside level two. All residents are requested to evacuate level two."

Del pulled her commlink from around her neck. "Who's in Ops at this hour? Del to Ko'ah, what's up?"

"It seems your main airlock just decided to open spontaneously," came the reply.

"WHAT?"

"Hard of hearing, m' lady? The main entrance to the colony has just opened. Monitors show nothing out there."

"Those doors cannot open unless the lock plate is triggered."

Xeno nodded; she had designed the system herself. A hidden panel along the right side controlled the majority of the doors in the colony. The only way the doors would open is if a human manually opened the door. The lock plates were set to respond to the distinctive five-finger pattern of an outstretched human hand... and respond very badly to anything else. One Cybrid had tried to enter the colony through the main gate: the pieces of that Cybrid were still displayed out by the exterior vehicle bay as a warning to any other glitch who wanted to try something foolish.

"Looks like something triggered the lock plate," Ko'ah said a moment later. "A human hand... damned thing must be on the fritz again... you folks really gotta wire things together better,"

"I'd like to see you do it, you stuck-up aristocratic puffball," Del snapped, her ire (never far below the surface) rising. "What's it saying?":

"Looks like the thing was activated from the outside by a child's hand. Thing must have had a hiccup and coughed up a stored log file or something."

A child's hand? "You got the fingerprints on that?"

A pause. "Yeah... no match in the colony though... strange... no match with anything in our records. The door is closed and we have air in that tunnel again, just so your know."

"No one is to enter that tunnel unsuited," Del snapped.

"Anyone stupid enough to enter a tunnel you built without a suit deserves to get sucked screaming into space," Ko'ah retorted.

"I can't find anything wrong with the damned thing," Del said, dropping her scanner on the stone floor and glaring at the panel. Ko'ah and Maria were behind her, with their black suits on, their helmets fastened though (for the moment at least) the corridor was pressurized.

"Run the buffer again."

Del shrugged, plugged the leads from the scanner into the ports on the side of the panel. Gibberish splashed the small screen, slowly resolved from Cybrid code into a recognizable display of a human hand.

Maria took the scanner and gazed at the image for a moment. She placed her hand over the image, comparing the sizes.

After a moment, she withdrew her hand, with an unreadable expression. "Keep a guard on in this corridor. Not knowing the cause we cannot very well fix it." She turned to leave.

"Maria...?" Del turned toward her. "Something wrong?" Though she phrased it as a question, she knew quite well something was wrong.

Maria hesitated for a fraction of a second. Her voice was level, though her eyes were haunted. "Nothing. Return to Ops."

Del sighed, knowing trying to get the older woman to talk would be like squeezing water from the stone. She looked around at the dark basalt surrounding her and smiled slightly at the thought.

Maria walked away down the corridor. Del shook her head, and turned back to the panel.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw something. A small handprint? She focused her eyes on the spot where she thought she had seen it, but there was of course nothing there.

To be certain she walked over to it and looked closely. There was, indeed, nothing there.

"Hallucinating again?" Ko'ah said with a poorly concealed smirk.

"Shut up or I'll space you in your underwear." Into the brief, silent pause, she snapped, "Check the damned thing again, then get back to Ops." She turned and stalked off down the corridor.

-----

The garden level was in artificial night, or, perhaps, it was more that the artificial day was turned off. Night and day did not matter very much underground. Indeed, on Mercury it didn't matter very much even on the surface: it was two months between sunrise and sunrise. The planet's double-sunrise would come to the Antipode area in several days, but for now the surface was lit only by starlight and the gleam of the sun's corona peeking over the horizon.

Del was nestled between a pair of trees, nearly asleep. She had put in too much time in the vehicle bay working on her Executioner to bother walking the other two hundred meters to her quarters.

"Ko'ah to Ghosts, we have incoming."

Del opened one eye and glared malevolently at the ceiling's speaker. "Del acknowledges," she said as she slammed her hand on the communicator control. "Get me IDs," she said.

"Radar return of five, seems to be a couple heavies. Four or five chickens maybe."

Chickens? "What the hell is a chicken?"

"The tall, scrawny 60-tonners. Adjudi

"Here we call them Adjus or Adjudicators. Please use proper battle language and don't make up words."

"Xenogears would call it inefficient," Ko'ah said with a snicker. "I'd like to show her something effi

"Refer to all Ghosts with proper respect or I shall gut you," Del stated, as she reached the lift shaft.

"Snappish, aren't we?"

"Look here. You drop in and expect us to disrupt the way we work to fit you in. Not going to happen. We are a team, and if you expect to be part of it you work with what we already have established. Or I'll have Maria fuel up the damned Banshee and you can take it and go do whatever with yourself." In whatever mode of thinking you want to consider that, she thought viciously.

The lift squeaked into uneven motion and Del held onto the rail to steady herself as it climbed the two levels. "Del to Maria, what're we doing?"

Silence. Del tapped the buttons on the communicator. "Maria?"

"I can't raise her either," Xenogears said as she met Del coming out of the lift. Her blue eyes were filled with concern: it was not like their leader to ignore a call. Indeed, neither could remember a time when she had ignored an emergency of any nature.

"Del to Razorback and Altas. Meet me in the bottom vehicle bay." She took off at a run across the mess that was Level Two, Xenogears close behind her, without waiting for the reply. "Think I'll take the bug, you take you Eman, Razor in his Apoc, Altas in his Shep."

"Understood."

"Damnit, we need Maria in this one. She eats Adjus for breakfast."

"Indeed."

They reached the opposite end of the level, took the tunnel to the main entrance to the colony, walked across the starlit rock to the shielded vehicle bay under the ledge fifty meters distant. The scarp into which the colony was built towered over them, shielding them from the x-rays of the solar corona that would be peeking over the horizon by now.

They got to their vehicles, climbed up and strapped in with the ease of years of practice. A few seconds later Razorback, with the short Cybrid behind him, ran into the bay and got into their own vehicles. Del grimaced as the sensors came online and picked up the enemy vehicles.

-----

Delithita, her short, red hair flying around her face, which was nearly as red, lifted Ko'ah bodily off the floor and slammed him backward into the Ops wall. "You absolute IDIOT!" she raged, shaking him. "What were you thinking?" She glared up at him (he was a good thirty centimeters taller than she), her fist bunching his shirt up. "We almost lost both Razor and Xeno because of that goddamned foolishness!"

"How was I--"

Del, if possible, got even more furious, pressed harder. Ko'ah wheezed. "You do NOT use battle comm from the colony to our force-- EVER! The Cybrids triangulated your damned comm beams' reflections off our hulls! We were counting on ambushing them, instead, we got the ambush!"

Ko'ah had the grace to look apologetic.

"Damnit, we got stuck fighting five Adjus head-to-head, and three of them had radiation guns! Razor's hair's fallen out and Xeno is in the infirmary puking her guts out. We didn't even have Maria's Shrikes to back us up!"

"You should have called me--"

"What, and have you one the field with us? You don't seem to have the brains to know how we work things here; do you think I want you fighting next to me if I have to fear you fouling something up?"

"One of these days you'll see I can have a good idea or two."

Del snarled an oath, let Ko'ah fall to the floor, stalked off. "Whatever."

"I can't raise Maria," he said a moment later when she threw herself into her chair and began stabbing at the controls.

"What the hell do you mean you can't raise her? Del to Maria: respond NOW damnit!"

Ten seconds later no response came and Del leapt to her feet. "She must be in the sanctum. Damnit."

"Must be nice to be able to--" Del cut him off with a dagger-sharp glare. "Never mind."

Del left Ops, took the slash corridor across level one, took the lift down to four, crossed it. She entered the Deep End, nodded to the bartender, and entered the small room in back.

A moment later she had climbed down the tunnel to the sanctum and entered. "Maria?"

She stopped dead as she looked inside.

The normally neat room was a shambles. The chessboard and pieces were scattered all over the floor. The cards of the scarp deck were strewn across the table as though the deck had been thrown there carelessly. One of the chairs was overturned.

The door to the other room of the chamber was open. Del went to it, stood in the doorway, and stared into the room in pure horror.

Maria sat in the chair facing the door, her eyes wide open in terror, frozen. Her face was bone-white in the dim lighting. Her fingers were spread apart and her hands were pressed to the table, as though she had been trying to clutch the stone surface.

Del stepped forward and touched Maria's neck.

No pulse. And judging by the stiffness she had probably been dead for at least three hours.

Del did not know whether to kick the table over or fall onto it crying. She settled for just standing there, tears slowly slipping down her cheeks--

Then she remembered.

-----

"Dead?" Xeno cried, the first time Del had ever heard strong emotion in her voice since they had rescued her from her enslavement. "How?" She looked at the stretcher, her eyes wide with horror.

"To be determined. What matters is that she has an organomech brain--"

"What good is that? We have no facilities to clone her a new body! And what would we do with her brain in the meantime even if we did? Put her in storage?"

"No need. Her current body--"

"Has been dead for hours! Cellular death is already well underway."

"Funny thing to say, since you just got most of your cells offed yourself from radiation burns. I think she can be resuscitated and recover..."

Xeno was silent for a moment. "You are the closest she has to next-of-kin right now. You have known her longer than anyone else present. Would she prefer the attempt or to just remain dead?"

Del shook her head. "I don't know! Damnit... She'll certainly be sick for weeks if she does recover... don't think there will be any lasting effects though..."

"It is your decision."

And only by fighting Death, and acknowledging the magnitude of the loss when Death defeats Life, do you make the struggle for Life worthwhile at all.

Del looked at the still form on the stretcher, and her eyes narrowed. "Death will not have you, my friend," she said softly.

She went to the closet to get the drugs that would restart Maria's heart, lungs, neurons, and various other processes, praying that her body was still intact enough for them to do any good.

-----

"Nerve function is limited, especially sensory neurons," Del said wearily a few hours later, putting her instruments away. Maria still comatose, was at least breathing and circulating properly. "Though that'll probably be a blessing if-- when-- she wakes up..."

Xeno nodded. "Yeah, she'll probably be paralyzed until the stem cell culture finishes, too."

It had been an hour since Maria had last gone into cardiac arrest. It was a good sign: the remaining brainstem that Immortals had attached to the base of their mechanical brains was functioning properly. If there had been any problems with the higher brain functioning her heart would have gone into spasms rather than beats.

"Let her rest... I'll keep watch."

Xeno shook her head. "I will remain until she awakens," she said in a tone that allowed no argument.

"That could be days."

"So be it."

-----

Fortunately, it was only about ten hours. Del had given up pacing as energy wasting. Xenogears could have been a statue. It was she who first noticed Maria's ragged breath, her eyes squeezing even more tightly shut with pain. Maria coughed, and that got Del's attention instantly. Both were at her side immediately.

"What happened?" Maria asked, her voice, though weak, was as precise and controlled as ever.

"We were hoping you could tell us," Xenogears said.

Maria tried to sit up. Del grabbed her shoulders and forced her back down. "Get up and I'll mess you up even worse than you are now."

There was no need: the effort had left her gasping for breath and she made no further attempts. "The last thing I remember I was in the sanctum, moving the black queen to queen's rook four..."

"We found you in there staring at the door... dead..."

Maria blinked. "How were you able to revive me?"

"With difficulty."

Maria met Del's eyes, read her expression in a glance, nodded in understanding. "Thank you," she said softly. She slipped back into unconsciousness.

Xeno gazed at her still form for a moment, then turned away. "What is it?" Del asked.

"Something quite literally scared her to death. And not even she knows what it was."

Del looked at her. "There was nothing in that room out of place besides some scattered chess pieces. Her last antipoker hand was still next to her chessboard."

"Yes, four aces, the Knife, and a ten of Death."

"I don't think an ill-balanced antipoker hand killed her..."

"Of course not. She saw something. The same thing the worker in that tunnel saw. The same thing the man in the lift saw. And it has proven that none of us are immune..."

/ < / << /