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He won’t even call you back.

And on and on.

She reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out her phone, hoping a quick email to Andy would silence the voice long enough to let her sleep. She wasn’t nauseous now and wanted to take advantage of it.

The message was short and sweet and straight to the point.

Let me know when we can talk.

USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76)

South China Sea

Andy opened his eyes, somewhat surprised to discover that he was back in his rack. He couldn’t remember if he had actually made it to the officer’s head down the passageway. The gut-twisting cramps seemed to have receded, but the debilitating headache and fever had not. He lifted his head from his pillow, and the room immediately began spinning.

What the heck is wrong with me?

He dropped his head back to the pillow just as he heard the door open. A brilliant beam of light intruded on the pitch-black darkness of his stateroom, and he leaned his head to one side to see who had entered. But even that subtle movement was enough to bring his nausea back, and he groaned.

“Andy?” The voice of Lieutenant Commander Tom Wilson, his detachment officer-in-charge, startled him.

“Yeah?”

“You okay?”

He closed his eyes to quell the nausea and swallowed hard against the lump in his throat. From the moment he first raised his right hand and swore an oath to the Constitution, Andy had prided himself in putting the mission first. He had flown sick. He had flown tired. He had even flown injured. But this…

“Not really,” he said, hating the words as they tumbled from his mouth.

Andy opened his eyes and noticed that the beam of light still shone into his room. Tom’s voice hadn’t come any closer and almost sounded as if he hadn’t even crossed the threshold and was still in the passageway outside his stateroom.

“We need to get you down to Sickbay.”

But Andy didn’t want to go anywhere, and he shook his head. “Doc just said I need to sleep it off.”

“You’ve been asleep almost a full day,” Tom said. “And a lot more people are getting sick.”

Andy swallowed again. “Food poisoning?”

Tom didn’t answer right away. “We don’t know. Doc wants to draw blood.”

Frustrated, Andy swung his feet out of his rack and lowered himself to the floor. He braced himself against the metal bunk and waited for the vertigo to subside, then took a hesitant step toward the door. “What do you mean, we don’t know?”

Tom retreated away from the door, as if the one step Andy had taken put him in mortal danger. “Hold it right there,” he said.

Andy stopped. “What’s going on, Tom?”

“Lots of people are getting sick.”

“Yeah, you said that.” A sudden stab of pain hit him square in the stomach, and he doubled over with a grunt. “What… the fuck… is going on?”

“Doc doesn’t think it’s food poisoning. But whatever it is, it’s spreading quickly throughout the ship.”

Andy took another step, but the spinning room’s dizzying pace quickened, and he dropped to a knee in the middle of the floor. He had experienced food poisoning before, and he agreed that this didn’t feel like that at all. This was worse.

“Are we in River City?” Andy asked.

“Probably.”

Like most aviators, Andy never understood the games ship-drivers liked to play. They made a big deal about remaining under clouds during long transits to hide from foreign satellite surveillance and routinely shut off all outside communications during periods known as “River City.” He assumed there was a strategic purpose, but it was mostly just a nuisance.

“I need to get a message to Jenn,” he muttered.

“We’ll get a message to her.” Tom hesitated for a moment. “We need to get you down to Sickbay.”

Andy closed his eyes and bit off a scathing reply. He knew it wasn’t Tom’s fault that he had eaten a bad Barney Clark or caught a virus. But the last thing he wanted to do was leave his stateroom and make his way down to the second deck and stand in line with a bunch of other sick people so Doc could jab him with a needle and suck blood from his veins.

“Do you need help?”

“No,” Andy replied, just as another wave of nausea caused him to double over.

“Andy?”

“I’m fine,” he groaned. “Let me get changed.”

Tom quietly closed the door and plunged Andy into the comforting darkness once again. He took several calming breaths before pushing himself to his feet and staggered the short distance to his locker to retrieve his flight suit. It was the easiest uniform to put on over the boxers and T-shirt he had been sleeping in.

With the flight suit zipped up, he sat down in the chair and slipped his feet into his boots. Another bout of vertigo threatened to topple him over, but he gripped the arms and steadied himself as he waited for it to pass. When it did, he bent over and began tying his laces.

His vision narrowed, and he closed his eyes.

This isn’t good.