“Don’t make me come over there,” Delight said, and they all swiveled their heads towards her, flattening their ears against their skulls.
I decided on a different approach. After all, dogs, wolves, guys... you just had to feed them, right?
“I’ll stay long enough to fix another tray of steak,” I said, and their ears flicked forward.
Steak-Boy looked at the quiet one, and nudged him, indicating he should go ahead. Boss-Boy nodded, too, so the quiet one licked his chops, and tried.
“Wurroof.” He stopped and frowned, and I watched his form ripple, the furred outline of his shoulders get less shaggy, and his snout melt back into his face.
He looked down at his, now, very human hands and his face lit up, just a little.
“Virus stuff,” he said, and then caught us all staring at him. “What?”
“I guess you shredded your clothes when you changed.” Delight pointed out, and we watched him blush.
A short, sharp bark from Boss Boy, made us look towards him, but the head werewolf wasn’t interested in us, just his quiet and very nude assistant. The man looked at him, and then back at himself, and then over at Delight and me.
“Back in a moment,” he said, and scurried over to a corner of the lab where a pile of clothes was draped over a chair.
He dressed fast, his face growing redder by the minute, until he had some clothing to put between his bare skin and the rest of us.
“A lot of the labs do virus stuff,” he said. “It’s not our specialty, so we kind of ignore them—and then there was a shipment to 24B, and suddenly the management went into top gear, and not just with the viral testing, but with what they wanted us to do here, too.”
Two warning growls made him go wide-eyed as he looked at us, and then he shrugged, and glared at his colleagues.
“Well, they know, now,” he said, “and we’re going to need them to get ourselves out of this corner, so what does it matter?”
Boss Boy gave a grunting, whining huff, and sighed, and Quiet Guy continued.
“Two days ago, we were feeling a bit off, but we came in, anyway. We had timelines we had to meet, and the clan isn’t very understanding, if you fall behind. It was mid-afternoon when we noticed the lesions. We’d had a fever from about mid-morning, but we weren’t saying anything, in case we vanished.”
He paused, swallowed hard, and shook his head—and neither Delight nor I pushed him; vanishing scientists we could look into later. Right now, there were more important things to do. The scientist obviously thought the same, because he continued.
“Anyhow, the lesions really tipped us off that something wasn’t right, so we looked up the symptoms, and then narrowed down the diseases by where the latest packages had come from. The only weird one was the one that came from on-world, and by then we knew that only two diseases on record came anywhere close to the symptoms, and neither of them originated on Costral. We didn’t want to die, so we figured we’d take on the werewolf DNA, and hope we survived.”
“And you just happened to have a werewolf handy...” Delight let her tone of voice tell them just how unhappy she was with them having a werewolf in stasis. “I don’t suppose he volunteered.”
The scientist blushed even redder than before, and the two wolves at the table hung their heads.
“We were never told,” the man admitted, “but, given what we were doing...”
He sighed, looking hunted.
“We tried really hard not to think about it, because of what would happen to our families if we did.”
“Someone’s going to talk to you about that,” Delight said, “but, right now, you need to wake him up, and get him to help you with what you need to know about being a were. For instance, how to change between forms.”
I watched them process that piece of information, and look uncertainly towards the stasis pod. The scientist who’d lucked his way into human form gave Delight a pleading look.
“He might be mad,” he said, his voice a little over a whisper, and Delight bared her teeth at him.
“Then you’d better hurry,” she said, her tone like iron, her aim with the Glazer unwavering.
I watched the man’s Adam’s apple bob up and down as he looked back towards the pod, and then his shoulders sagged, and he moved over to set the process in reverse and open the box. Delight and I waited while the wolf inside went through the process of waking up, but we didn’t waste any time while we did.
I ran a keyword search through the pharma’s record’s systems using: ‘Blaedergil’, ‘Hazerna’ and ‘Melari’. None of those brought me any joy, so I tried ‘Skymander’ and hit gold.
“He’s calling it Operation Skymander,” I said, and Delight rolled her eyes.
“Sooo original,” she snarked. “Why am I not surprised?”
“Send that over,” Tens demanded, then added, “Delight, your people will be here in another six standard hours. They say to tell you they’re fast-jumping a quarantine boat in, and two cruisers.”
“Confirmed. Tell them we need Wolf Pack Liaison. There’s been an—”
A thunderous growl ripped through the lab, accompanied by two sets of yelps and a very human scream.
“—incident. Gotcha. Out,” and Tens was gone.
Delight and I looked over at where the fully awakened werewolf was raising a bloodied muzzle from the human-shaped scientist before him. It read the horror on our faces and smiled.
“Pack discipline,” it said, having mastered the art of making human sounds from a wolf-shaped mouth. “I will let him live.”
He narrowed his eyes, and studied Delight.
“Odyssey?” he asked, and I wanted to know where they had met before.
“Never you mind,” Delight snapped, inside my head. Out loud, she said, “Odyssey, but this was not our mission.”
The wolf nodded.
“I will see you in the debrief,” he said, and his lip curled when we continued to stare. “You will see us all in the debrief, although in what shape, will depend on how fast they learn.”
Delight bowed her head, and nodded towards the store-room. She hesitated as she reached for the door.
“Don’t leave this lab,” she said, “and stay away from the door; it’s electrified.”
The wolf dipped his chin in an abrupt nod, and then turned back to the man under his paw.
“Change,” he snarled.
25—Infection
With the wolf’s demand echoing in our ears, Delight and I hurried into the storeroom. I wondered how she’d made it through the door without being zapped, and she answered the question before I could ask it.
“I accessed the system,” she said. “You and Tens aren’t the only ones who can hack it.”
Well, that made sense. We both ran a scan to make sure the ducts were clear, and then crawled through. Neither of us bothered to pull the vent cover back into place; we were no longer trying to go in undetected. That ship had well and truly flown.
Instead, we were aiming for speed. We had to reach the lab where the serum for Melari’s virus had been stored—and we had to hope they hadn’t released the fucking thing, before they’d developed the cure. In all the stars, surely no one would have been that stupid.
But I remembered Andreus Corovan shooting me in the gut to prove a point he’d already made, scientists taking on werewolf DNA out of sheer desperation... and I couldn’t be sure.
“I need your head in this world, Cutter. We can deal with Corovan, later.”
“Just stay the fuck out of my head, and we’ll get along fine.”
Delight snorted.
“Kiddo, you don’t get along fine with anyone,” she said, “and that includes Mack, which makes the way he looks at you an utter fucking mystery.”
The way Mack looked at me? Man, if the guy ever looked at me as more than a serious case of the shits, I’d be surprised. For some reason that thought made Delight laugh, and I decided I didn’t want to know why.
“What do y
ou need to know?” I asked, changing the subject.
“How about you map me a path to the lowest lab?”
I mapped, and we crawled, and occasionally we stopped so I could log into the security feeds and see exactly what was prowling the corridors ahead.
“We shoulda asked them what other experiments Corovan was funding,” I said, watching as something that might have been a woman skittered along the ceiling below the duct. That it could sense us was obvious, and I was worried about what it would do when it came to the next vent, until it dropped into the center of a small group of plague carriers.
The ensuing fight was not pretty.
“How much of her humanity do you think she had left?” Delight asked, as we watched her rip through the plaguers, sinking six-inch fangs into necks and shoulders, as they stopped moaning long enough to scream.
We also watched them tumble, like puppets with their strings cut, seconds after each bite.
“Point to note,” Delight said, and I nodded, my mouth suddenly dry.
“Second outlet to the right,” I said, forcing my mind to focus on where we needed to be going, “and we’d better hurry, another one of those security bots is heading our way.”
It was only fair. The bots were automated, doubling as cleaning and security, and tasked with clearing any large blockages out of the ventilation shafts. I guess we registered as a pretty huge blockage, so it was only logical they were coming after us.
It still felt personal, though.
“Will you stop your bitching and move your ass?”
I moved. I wanted to keep bitching, too, but I had to move fast, and I couldn’t do both at once. I figured I’d save the bitching until I hit the lab floor. That was the plan, anyway.
First, we had to deal with the half dozen mutated plaguers waiting in the middle of the lab proper.
“Guessing this is the wrong lab,” I said, to which Delight replied, “You’re not helping,” as she fired her Glazer to take out the first two coming towards us.
I rapid-fired in her wake, glad these things were conforming to human norms, and not getting up after a shot to the head.
“What gave it away?” Delight asked, and I spotlighted the diagrams on the wall, each one detailing a different path of the mutation.
Spider-woman in the corridor hadn’t been alone, and I wondered what had happened to not only set her free, but to see the men and women working her transformation infected with the same mutagenic process.
“You know this can’t have happened overnight,” I said, thinking of the scenes I’d managed to hack while preparing for the mission. “Why didn’t I see any signs of this?”
“That’s the million-credit question, isn’t it?” Delight quipped back. “You need to go back through the feed and find out when this happened... or maybe find whatever loop was inserted to make you see a normal lab when you last checked. It was either one or the other.”
We watched a door open across the lab from us, and waited. If there was even one scientist left in any state to explain what the fuck was going on, we didn’t want to shoot him before he got a chance to tell us what in all the stars had gone wrong, and when.
I wanted to know the when. The when was very important.
Our hopes that the newest arrival was going to be in any way helpful were dashed, as he swung his head towards us, and sprinted in our direction, two extra sets of arms and an extra set of legs bursting out from under his coat. I watched his face contort, his jaw-line altering to accommodate fangs, and his eyes stretching wider than any human eye socket would allow as they became an inky-black, multi-faceted mass. He didn’t look like he was coming over to say ‘hi’.
I started firing and I didn’t stop until the shape had stopped moving, and I couldn’t work out where its head should have been. That, and Delight wrapped her hand over mine, and her touch jolted me out of the nightmare fear that had engulfed me.
“It’s dead,” she said. “You’ve killed it. Geez, remind me never to take you to an arach negotiation.”
“Arach?”
“Never you mind.” She glanced at the fallen mass that had been a living, breathing beast only seconds before. “I need to know where to go next—and Tens needs you to give him access to these computers so he can strip-mine the data in here, while we keep looking. The more my people know coming in, the better.”
I couldn’t take my eyes of the critter on the floor, the way its ten limbs sprawled awkwardly in death, and the way its flesh had turned a dull, light-eating black. I was breathing hard, like I’d run for miles, and my hands were shaking. I was still pointing the Glazer at the fallen heap, for the stars’ sake.
“Hey!” Delight said, her whisper sharp and clear, as she clipped me upside the head with the flat of her hand. “Get your head in the game! Computer. Tens. Access. Now!”
I looked for a terminal, stepping gingerly around the monsters on the floor, wading through the sticky strands that formed a loose layer over the tiles, and wondering how far the vibrations carried, and to who. Delight moved with me, her gun hand following the movement of her eyes, as she searched the cobwebs and the shadowed corners for any sign of movement.
Knowing she was as deadly as anyone else I’d worked with, I checked under the desk of the nearest terminal. It was clear, so I sat, and tapped the machine to life. Getting in was easier than I could have hoped. Whatever had happened to the scientists hadn’t given them time to log out of the system, which meant it was wide open for access.
Tens was hunting through the databases in seconds.
“I’m only seeing titles, and I already want to burn this place to the ground,” he said. “Now, get moving. Mack’s keeping things calm on station, but I don’t know for how much longer.”
“No one leaves!” Delight’s voice cut through our communications like a knife, and I could imagine Tens rolling his eyes.
“Already done, sweetheart,” he said. “We’ve locked down the ships in dock, and broadcast the idents of any who tried to leave early. They’re already on their way back to the station. Still, I’ll be glad when those cruisers arrive. I’m not sure we’ve convinced everyone that standing by while you come up with a cure is a good idea.”
“Yeah. Thanks for that.” Delight cut the comms, and tracked across the lab.
I followed, jumping at every shift in the webs, or change in lighting. We stopped beside the door leading out into another corridor.
“Still think it’s the fastest way to the next lab?” she asked, and I went back into my head to check the security footage. For a miracle, the corridor outside the lab was empty. I tracked it up through the cameras, surprised when it was empty right up to the elevators. It was on the next floor that we were going to have a problem.
I sent Delight the relevant footage, and let her mull it over. I had sent her the alternative, before she’d had time to ask.
“Are you sure?”
“Unless you got any more of these”—I waved my hand at the corpses behind us—“I think it would be safest.”
...which was how we ended up riding to the next level on top of the elevator, and scrambling into the ducts above the corridor filled with vacant-eyed plaguers, when it stopped.
“Are you sure this is safe?” Delight wanted to know, but she was already leading the way forward, as though just asking the question was enough to make it so.
And don’t I just wish that was the case.
We met the first security drone five feet in, where there wasn’t any space to turn around, and just as the plaguers below us started to stir. They might not have been able to see us, but they could sure as shit sense where we were. I took a peek at them through the nearest camera, as Delight fired six fast shots into the drone and stopped it before it could reach us.
“Tell me it’s clear down there,” she said, “because we’re going to have company very damn soon.”
“Not clear,” I said, and started searching for the nearest safest exit. “Here.”
&nb
sp; No sooner than she had received the directions than she was crawling, high speed, through the ventilation shaft, with me scrambling to catch up. Of course, that meant I had to stop looking at the footage, which meant I couldn’t keep her updated real time, but it was better than staying behind to be turned to ash, while my head was somewhere else.
We hit the vent I’d indicated, and I grabbed her by the ankle.
“Let me check,” I said, and she waited, her leg tense under my hand.
I took a quick look, and noted movement to the left of the lab. It looked white-coated and purposeful, and not the usual shamble of the plagued.
“Two to the left,” I said.
“Plagued or spider?” she asked, picking the terms out of my skull.
“Unknown.”
“Right?”
“Unknown.”
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” she said, and shot the vent cover clear, following it out of the shaft without hesitating.
There was a shout of surprise, and I scrambled to get myself out, so I could cover the right. I hit the ground behind her, Glazer drawn as I looked for targets. All I could see were benches full of scientific equipment, and walls covered with charts. Behind me, someone was babbling frantically at Delight.
“Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot. Help us, please. Please please please help us.”
“Tell me why,” Delight snarled, and I wondered exactly why she was so pissed.
She sent a visual of what she was seeing to my implant, and I saw the system that had been attached to the ventilation shaft on the other side of the room. The station schematics showed this led directly to one of the central air vents connected to the rest of the station.
“Is that virus?” I asked, turning to face the same way as Delight, and the man who’d been babbling at Delight, started babbling at me.
“They’re going to kill our families, if we don’t.”
“You disconnect that, and we’ll send a team down before they know you’ve done it.”
“But he said... he said they’d be watching us.”
I didn’t wait to be told; I followed the connections from the camera to where the feed was being streamed to the planet below. Right now, they were showing the set-up on the wall, and the scientists turned away from it. I wondered if the guy had an implant I could hack, so what I wanted to say next wasn’t broadcast live to whoever was watching.
Blaedergil's Host Page 18