In the Driving Snow

[Alexei Juno 0]

The soft gentle snow that was falling as his transport left the hospital zone had turned to a torrid flurry of giant white snowflakes blistering down from the skies around the grayish hull of the Challenger transport shuttle. The cool, blue jets of her thruster manifolds seemed lost as the pilot throttled up to maneuver lower in the atmosphere.

 

Alexei peered out the porthole window of the transport from his copilot seat. He could just barely make out the tops of snow-covered trees as the pilot throttled back and began a landing pattern near the supposed impact sight that contained large amounts of the substance he’d found in trace elements on the man he believed to be the first victim of the plague.

 

Somewhere below him was supposedly an impact crater of a small asteroid that potentially carried one of the most lethal viruses he’d ever encountered. It was a rather sobering thought, really, that something as small as couple dozen rocks that carried a dormant virus could cause so much destruction and death.

 

He sighed and looked back over to the pilot, who was wearing a standard issue hazmat body gear. It was almost impossible for him not to think about the Lieutenant who’d lost his life. The medical examiner was still working when he left, and he knew there was an investigation into how Mister .t had been infected, but up to this point it had been furthest from his mind. There was a chance, of course, that the Lieutenant had been infected via faulty seals on his hazmat suit, but it was far more likely, and more convenient, that the Lieutenant had simply failed to properly secure or maintain the proper seal of his helmet. In either case, how the Lieutenant had contracted the deadly Plasma Plague, as it was being called now, was irrelevant to solving the mystery of where the disease had came from in the first place.

 

That statement sounded as cold in his head as it really was, and it stung at Alexei for a moment. Was he really that mission focused that he couldn’t be bothered to be moved by the plight of a fellow officer, even if it was more than likely the officer’s own fault he was dead?

 

Apparently so. He pushed the thought out of his head and looked to his console before looking back to the pilot. “The highest concentration looks to be right over there,” he said pointing with a gloved finger. “Bring us in nice and easy.”

 

“Yes, sir.”