> Could we see what happened after the CRC docked? Did pilot rush back to Plover to see what was going on? I'm guessing Pilot's a drone machine? How did the CRC react to the menacing looking bots and Plover's protectiveness? More please?
> [https://peakd.com/fiction/@internutter/challenge-03377-i089-priority-one](https://peakd.com/fiction/@internutter/challenge-03377-i089-priority-one) -- Anon Guest
Of all the survivors of the Plover Incident, the most heartbreaking were the tiniest children. They had no understanding of death. They kept asking when their parents or guardians were "coming back." Or, if they were shown the bodies, when they were "going to wake up."
One said their mother was like Sleeping Beauty, and they had to wait a hundred years for a prince.
Time, and lots of therapy, would heal their traumas. As for the incident itself... The recordings called it The Plague. It spread no matter what they did. Those who were exposed quarantined themselves. Those who weren't exposed _yet_ did their utmost to protect the children.
These things sometimes happened on Cruise Liners. This was the first incidence of it happening _that_ thoroughly. Every cogniscent being over a certain maturity threshold, Havenworlder and Deathworlder alike, was effected. They didn't want to chance it mutating and spreading to the kids.
In that, at least, they won.
According to the records, the last adult left alive set up all the precautions that the _Plover_ and her Pilot drone followed. It was a hack job, sideways engineering, but it would work and that was the important bit. Pilot was just a docking drone of little intelligence. Made to seek a safe port. Or the next safe port. The program it followed had a daisy chain of safe ports at maximum navigation distance, that would lead it to a Medik station that was equipped for the fallout.
Then - calmly and rationally - the last adult aboard the _Plover_ made their painful way to the last table on the Ship's Morgue. They laid a sheet over themself, and waited to die.
It didn't take long.
Bots all over the _Plover_ sterilised every object, every surface, every _thing_ on board. They sterilised it until there was no more sterlisation material left. And even _then_, the whole ship was sprayed over with omnilethal levels of salt before _that_ was cleaned up. Then the programs waited for thrice the extended quarantine time before the kids were allowed back.
_Plover_, obeying her programming, never let the children near the no-no zones. Which included the morgue.
Good parents will do _anything_ to make sure their kids are safe, and will be cared for. Including the mess that happened aboard the _Plover_.
The _Plover_ and her Pilot drone were re-united. Some programming was reset. Some other aspects were improved. Protocols changed, of course, to make sure such a disaster would not happen twice.
They call Spacers paranoid, and Spacers would agree. Given what happened aboard the _Plover_? Would you go into space and _not_ be paranoid?
[Image <a href="https://www.canstockphoto.com">(c) Can Stock Photo / In8Finity</a>]
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