The Pond was an immense place. At any given time, the base under the stadium barely had any occupants: The six of them, and occasional visitors. The size was a necessity. It accommodated the fusion generator and its redundancies. It was required for a proper shield lattice. It had allowances for proximity to fault lines. There was no way to miniaturize the construction, not with the technology they had available. It was large because the alternative was any number of unpleasant ways to die.

While the Pond itself huge in totality, and certain parts of it were cavernous, most of the space inside was taken up by the shield generator apparatus, with connection between the nodes of machinery and living space. They had not planned for more than a handful of people to occupy the space, and anything that could have been considered welcoming or cozy was in short supply. There was no way home, and no one there that would have known where to look for them. Expecting an influx of newcomers had seemed foolishly optimistic.

Among all the other things she would have to worry about, Tanya made herself a reminder, set for weeks in the future, that she was going to have to figure out where to house an extra four people. There was theoretically plenty of space, but logistically any inclusion inside it was going to be a nightmare. It would at least be the sort of nightmare that could be worked out with a little bit of ingenuity, rather than the an existential threat.

Duke was an ever present shadow. He hovered in the anxious, annoying way of a person that had little ability to help, but an unwillingness to leave. She was not particularly concerned about their roster of guests, but she fought the urge to send him away, just in case. He at least had the sense to remain quiet and out of her way, with a watchful eye on the room while she worked.

Two of her patients milled about uneasily, talking with each other about things that were irrelevant but harmless enough that she did not request they cease. They talked inane topics that skirted around health, and war, and capture, and anything else that would have reminded them of where they were. The third, Emily, the one that Wildwing told her to keep special attention on, was asleep on one of the scanning beds, and could not be awoken for more than a few minutes at a time.

Tanya had been lucky, at least, that the Aerowing had an extensive medical treatment database, and it had survived both the invasion and the journey to Earth. She could set the simple things right. Broken bones were a matter of an unpleasant hour. Blaster burns, slight lacerations, and more than a few concussions were reduced to routines that the machine could handle on its own. Even a slightly comical day where a spoon had been lodged in someone’s thigh had passed with socially awkward ease. All no problem.

Because they hadn’t come across a complete and utter emergency before.

At first, Tanya thought there was a ghosting problem in the medicom systems, which then duplicated across all the beds. She tried to scan all three of her patients, and the error persisted. Tanya could not find a mechanical or digital explanation for it. Duke was eventually forced to oblige to a scan of his own, and then, for the purposes of the data collection, herself.

The ghosting vanished in the latter two scans.

Then back to the three former, and it appeared again. The only conclusion she could come to, short of finding a scalpel to do some unpleasant exploratory digging herself, was that the medicom was trying to show her something that was actually there. It had no idea what to do when asked for analysis, and it chirped back a warped mess of body that was like a neglected plant in its pot, overstuffed with twisted knots of roots.

The ghosting was something that mimicked the circulatory system, but did not have the exact same growth pattern. A center mass that sat at about the level of the heart, though more centrally placed under the sternum, and a secondary, much smaller mass that appeared at the base of the skull, where brain-stem met spinal cord.

The growth did not exist in any medical text that she could find, recovered or translated. It mattered little. Anything else following the same general growth pattern of blood vessels, especially if it did not belong there, generally was there to systemically feed. She was sure, now, that she had found the literal core of what Dragaunus had been after.

She told herself that she wasn’t sure, but it happened more than once that from the corner of her eye as she read her texts, she saw the alien vines move internal position in the real time scan. She looked through her screens, paged through the manual she had extracted from the Aerowing, and had to pretend that she was not terrified.

She realized it wasn’t just a matter of medical knowledge. No one had ever taught her—and she was not aware of any guidance that told her—how to explain to someone what was happening inside them, with the right combination of confidence and empathy to keep everyone in the room from panicking.

“I think it’s parasitic,” Tanya had to conclude when she could no longer stall inquiry, and while her new patients were not as tightly gathered as the teammates, she tried her best to speak loudly enough for all in the room to hear. “It’s massive, and distributed through everything, I imagine that it’s been causing discomfort in one way or another for some time.”

Wildwing stopped her, holding up a hand, and then standing in silence while he thought, and then, very carefully said: “Is it contagious?”

She stared at him. “I don’t-I mean I don’t even know what it is.”

“Of all the things Dragaunus has done.” Wildwing turned away, looking down the dark hallway instead of any of them. “What if he staged the whole thing so I’d bring it back here?”

No one seemed to have a response. They had no choice but to take their new patients in, regardless of whether or not they had known the conditions—no one else on the planet could have been trusted with the duty.

Mallory broke the uneasy silence: “So they’ve made a weapon.”

“I’m… not entirely sure,” Tanya said.

“It’s probably what killed the guy in the Raptor, right?” Mallory observed.

“Sure, that makes it f-fatal, but that doesn’t make it a very good weapon.”

“How so?” Wildwing asked.

“A bioweapon needs to be easy to deploy and spread. If you kill your host before it can spread, it is going to burn out rather than establish itself. It’s not airborne, it isn’t shedding. It seems closer to a cancer that divides in the host but dies with it.”

“Gotta say, this isn’t making me feel a whole lot better,” Duke murmured.

“I would recommend no one leaves until we’re sure we’ve gotten it contained. There’s enough resources down here that we can do that without too much trouble, for months if we need to.”

That sat heavy. The Pond was by no means close quarters—even with bumping their numbers up to ten, it would be easy enough to sequester every person in a place of privacy—but the lack of freedom had potential to be draining. If cutting all contact was what needed to be done, Tanya could be sure that the team would do it. Even if there were occasional abrasions between them, they would all know better than to try to leave. Too much was at stake. She could not account for the other four. That was going to be a much harder proposition to impose on a group of already terrorized strangers.

Hopefully months weren’t needed. Hopefully it would be a matter of a few days.

“Can you remove it?” Wildwing asked.

“I don’t-I wouldn't recommend trying,” Tanya winced, and faltered in her speech. “I think if you tried to remove it, maybe if you got it when it was small and localized you could physically take it out-” here she stopped and nervously looked to the rest of them “I’m, uh, going to suggest periodic scans for everyone, by the way.”

This was met with more than one stifled curse.

She recovered her thoughts. “I think here it would cause more harm than good to try surgical removal.”

“Then what’s your plan?” He asked.

“Not a plan, exactly,” she fumbled with her blue pads and data. “Find something chemical that will kill it faster than it kills the host, and let the body remove the debris over time so it can heal properly. Or, figure out how its suppressing the natural immune system, and triggering that so the body can fight it directly. Either is dangerous.”

“It is better than exploding,” Wildwing murmured.

“I would argue as much, yes,” she agreed.

“Do you have any idea why they kept one?” Wildwing asked, haltingly, gazing at the occupied medicom bed, in the self conscious way one does when talking about someone in front of them. It mattered little, Emily had slept through the entire conversation. “The others they discarded entirely, and kept them with me. For some reason she was the one picked.”

“She doesn’t seem worse off than the others,” Tanya shook her head. “Maybe I’ll find know after treatment and observation. It will take time but we have the benefit of computing and synthesis down here. I can also have the medicom start some basic anti-parasitic therapies it already has, maybe we’ll be lucky and find something already available.”

“That all sounds reasonable to me.”

“I’d also like to talk to the fourth one,” she said.

“What in the world for?”

“He knows the one you’re asking after. Maybe he can tell us more about what this thing is.”

“Do you think that anything he says will be actionable?”

“I think we’re no worse off if he lies, but maybe closer to your answer if he doesn’t.”