The Madness Engine

by Paul B Spence

  "Drake?" Tom called from ahead.

  He shook off his dark mood and jogged ahead to where Tom and Mary waited.

  "What's the problem?"

  Tom shrugged. "We can't get the door open."

  "The electronic locks are supposed to disengage in case of electrical failure, but these didn't," Mary said. "I don't know why."

  "What happens if there is a containment breach?" said Drake.

  Mary paled. "The doors seal. If it's a Level 4 breach, failsafe protocols fuse the doors with thermite."

  "What is this Level 4?" Drake asked.

  "Highly contagious and non-curable."

  "Would it still be a problem after so many months?"

  "I don't know," Mary replied. "I worked on Level 3. Maybe."

  "Then how do you know they found a cure?"

  "My husband –" She glanced at Tom. "My first husband worked on Level 4. He told me right before he died that they had made a major breakthrough, but there was a problem in the lab."

  "Why do I now suspect you haven't been honest with me? You aren't here about the hemorrhagic fever, are you?"

  Tom and Mary exchanged glances, and then Tom shrugged. "We're here about the feral virus. Our son has that."

  "And you think they found a cure here?"

  "One of the other doctors had become infected with the virus," Mary said. "They locked the facility down after that. They didn't have a chance to disseminate the cure."

  "You'd be exposing yourself to the virus if you go down there."

  Tom laughed bitterly. "We're already exposed. You, too. I told you our son is sick with it. Our whole camp has been exposed. You have been, too, after getting their blood all over you."

  Drake looked away from the pain in the man's eyes. "So your problem is that you need to get through that door?"

  "This one and a couple of others," Tom said. "We're running out of time. We need to go out and try to find a plasma torch before it gets dark."

  "That wouldn't be a good idea," said Drake. "The snow is still falling, and there are a lot of ferals out there."

  "Do you have a better idea? We have to find the cure now, or we all die."

  Drake checked his medical suite, but he was not infected – as he had expected. If it was the same virus he remembered, his body had its own ways of dealing with it.

  "There's no other way down?"

  "The elevator used to go down, but we don't have any power."

  "Could we climb down the shaft?"

  Tom looked at him as if he was crazy. "In our shape? Besides, the doors would still be fused."

  "So they would." Drake though about it for a minute. "Take Mary and wait for me in the lobby."

  "Why?"

  "Because I told you to," Drake said, eyes flashing green in the darkness.

  They left without a word.

  Drake inspected the door. It was thick steel, but nothing exotic. The reality-destructive properties of his blade allowed it to slip easily through the door. Then it was the matter of only a few minutes to carefully cut away the whole door.

  It fell with a resounding clank that echoed through the empty halls.

  "What was that?" Tom called.

  "Come on, and bring Mary."

  "How?" Tom asked, gesturing at the doorway.

  "You don't need to know that," Drake replied. "Now, Mary? Lead the way."

  "Right."

  The lower levels were fetid from the rotting corpses of the animals and personnel who had been trapped when the quarantine went into effect. Mary set up in a lab with large glass boxes; it was the only one intact. Some of the doctors and technicians had gone feral before death and smashed much of the equipment.

  "Do you have what you need?" Drake asked.

  "I need power," said Mary. "Tom, there's an emergency generator down the hall."

  "I'm on it."

  "Where is this cure supposed to be? Downstairs?"

  "No, those'll be ruined by now. If Tom can get the power back on, I can access the computer and synthesize a new antigen."

  "You had clearance for that?"

  "No, but Brad, my first husband, did. I have his code."

  Drake nodded.

  A stropping noise came from down the hall, and the lights flickered on in the lab.

  Tom came back in, grinning. "Piece of cake, but you'll want to hurry. There isn't much gasoline left in the tank. We'll have a few hours before the generator dies."

  Mary was already booting up the computer and a complicated machine that had many blinking lights on it. Drake wasn't sure what it was, or why it needed so many lights. Just then, his sentinel by the front door notified him that a small band of ferals had taken shelter in the lobby from the storm outside. They were unlikely to venture down into the facility, but it made him uncomfortable.

  Mary drew a sample of blood from Tom, explaining that he had been exposed before her and therefore would have more signs of the virus in his blood. She placed the tubes in the rack in front of her and used a small pipette to place a small amount of blood on a slide, muttering about not having enough time to do things right.

  "Well?" asked Tom after she had looked through the microscope for a few minutes.

  "You're infected," Mary said simply. "We knew you would be." She turned and entered passwords at prompts on the computer screen. The machine with lights buzzed into life. "I've started the production of the antigen; we'll know in an hour or so."

  "You can see the feral virus with that?" Drake asked, gesturing at the microscope.

  "Yes."

  "Show me."

  Mary shrugged and flipped a switch on the microscope. The large screen across the room lit up with an enlarged view of Tom's blood, cells the size of a person's head. The virus could be seen as a biomechanical spider-like object with a bulbous back end. Under the microscope, the virus closed in on a red blood cell and injected its load of DNA. The blood cell was immediately subverted to produce more viruses.

  "Can you sequence the DNA of the virus?"

  "Not with this equipment. Why?"

  "This virus looks familiar. I want to be sure."

  "Sure of what?" Mary asked.

  Drake just shook his head and turned away. It could be a coincidence, but he didn't think so. The virus looked too much like what he remembered from his youth. Memories from his previous life were difficult to access – death had that effect – but there in the depths of his mind was a fragment of a memory. A memory of a terror and plague and death. A weapon unleased tens of thousands of years ago on a world that had little in common with this one.

  The memory made him ill, because he knew that no antigen these people could devise would ever work. The feral virus was the work of the Enemy – the Ancient Enemy of his people. The ones he had given his life fighting.

  And now they were here.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Rachael and Harris sat down at Rachael's desk terminal, but Tonya hesitated before placing the datacube in the reader.

  "What?"

  "Are you sure you want to view this with me?" Harris asked. "If there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that some things cannot be forgotten, no matter how hard you try. There could be some very disturbing images on this cube."

  "I want to know what it is that Girscha wanted me to transport," Rachael said steadily. She was worried about what might be on that datacube, but she needed to know if it was worth anything. She had a crew to pay, after all.

  "Don't say I didn't warn you," Harris said as she settled the cube into position.

  The screen activated and began with several messages that were obviously warnings of some kind, but they were in an odd script. The screens transitioned to a military officer talking about something; Rachael couldn't understand him.

  "What language is that?" she asked.

  "Swedislavic. He's talking about a special project of some kind. Hush."

  "Can you understand him?"

  Harris sighed and paused the recording. "Yes
, I understand him. But I can't listen to him and you both. Okay? It's been a few years since I used the knowledge. I'm a little rusty."

  "How many languages do you speak?"

  "Seven," said Harris. "Do you want to know about this or not?"

  "Go on, I'll be quiet."

  As the video resumed, it changed from the military officer to a pair of scientists. A device like the one in the crate sat on a lab workstation in a test cradle of some kind. The scientists seemed to be arguing about a set of equations.

  "Okay, there seems to be some disagreement over the mathematics," Harris said. "One of the scientists is saying something about not trusting the source, or something like that. It is a sub-dialect of the main language and hard to make out."

  In the video, the scientists set up the device and activated it. The target, a block of ice, vanished instantly. The scientists seemed excited about that. The video progressed through a series of experiments with various targets of seemingly random materials.

  "So it's a weapon of some type?" Rachael asked.

  "Hmm. I don't think so. Not directly, anyway. They keep calling it a Molekynejfazenzanord – I have no idea what that means. Something to do with molecules, but I don't know what."

  "Easy for you to say. You can't sort it out by root words?"

  "I don't have a good enough foundation in the language. It was a rush induction learning implant for a mission a few years ago. My vocabulary just isn't large enough."

  On the screen, the scientists were arguing again, then the video cut to a different team of scientists preparing a new test-rig. This time the target was a man.

  "I don't know if I want to watch this," said Rachael, covering her eyes with her hand. She felt a little queasy just thinking about what might happen.

  "There's something strange going on here."

  "What do you mean?"

  "He seems to be a volunteer."

  Rachael looked back at the screen. The man was smiling and obviously joking with the scientists. Something about his smile seemed familiar. He was dressed in an odd-looking spacesuit with coils of what looked like copper on the outer surface. He put on his helmet and gave the scientists a thumbs-up gesture.

  "Why would he be happy about being disintegrated?" Rachael asked. "It's crazy."

  "I don't know. Wait... Oh, crap." Harris paused the playback again.

  "What is it?'

  "One of the scientists just said something about hyperspace."

  "No, that isn't possible. You can't open a hyperspace window at the bottom of a gravity well. Besides, that thing looks nothing like a hyperdrive. Where are the negative energy nodes? And why would they be testing it like that?"

  "I don't know. I guess we watch and see what happens, yes?"

  The video resumed with a countdown. Rachael didn't need to understand the language to get that. As the count got close to zero, the man's suit began to glow with the characteristic deep purple of a negative energy field.

  Harris was nodding to herself. "He'd need that to survive a transit," she murmured.

  The count reached zero, and the machine activated, but the man didn't disappear. Instead, he began screaming. It was the most soul-wrenching scream Rachael had ever heard. Sparks of energy arced from his suit, and the man convulsed rapidly. Obviously the test wasn't going as planned. The scientists shut off the device, but whatever reaction they had started didn't stop. The man's screams grew weaker as the last of the energy dissipated. Then he collapsed like a puppet with cut strings.

  The scientists rushed to him with a medical kit, but they were having trouble getting his helmet off. The energy had melted many of the coils. To everyone's surprise, he sat up as they were finally getting the suit open.

  Then the scientists were screaming and running. The suit lay empty on the floor, but Rachael couldn't see the man who had been in it. Nor could she tell had frightened the scientists so much.

  Harris froze the image as one of the scientists fell. Behind him was something in the shape of a man, but it wasn't a man. Not anymore, at least. The dark man-shaped cloud of oily-looking smoke was reaching for the scientist who'd fallen. Rachael could see through it to the scientists on the other side. Two brightly glowing red embers burned where the eyes would be.

  "What the hell is that?" Rachael whispered.

  Harris didn't answer. She was staring at the screen and shaking. That scared Rachael more than the image, but then, she didn't recognize it the way Harris obviously did.

  Θ

  "To be perfectly frank, Admiral, the reports don't look good at all," Commander Amanda Jennings said. "Our taskforces were met with superior firepower in almost every case. If we could have gotten more of our new ships out there, it would have been a different story. The corvettes seem to have performed above expectations. At least all of the squadrons managed to complete their objectives, and none of them were completely destroyed. In fact, only two of them suffered significant losses. Unfortunately, we lost ships in both of those cases."

  Admiral Macklin sipped his coffee. With the general collapse of communication across the Earth Federation, the local commanders in the Federation Fleet had taken it upon themselves to maintain order as best they could. A few of those commanders had taken things even further, effectively going rogue. It had been bad enough thinking that portions of the Federation Fleet might be being influenced by Theta entities. The thought of petty warlords with that kind of firepower was truly frightening. Admiral Macklin had been forced to assign the newest Concord ships to defensive roles. To further complicate things, the plans to refit some of the older cruisers and destroyers with the new Marcos drive had failed miserably. The ships needed the larger, more sophisticated machine intelligences that only the newer ships could carry. Their quantum-shell processing cores and dedicated power plants took up too much space in the older ships to be practical. There was also some kind of problem with calculating the jump for a smaller mass. All Macklin knew was that the Fleet was being forced to keep their older ships in service indefinitely. They might even have to begin producing ships with the older-style hyperdrive, even though it rankled to do so.

  So far, operations against the Federation Fleet had been mostly limited to hunting down the war criminals who had fought in the Battle of Dawn. The Federation ships had fired nukes against civilian targets and killed billions of innocent people. Macklin's hands were tied, though, as to how far he could retaliate against the Federation. The Rhyrhans abhorred the wholesale slaughter of civilians. They didn't understand how humans could be so callous. Macklin's advisors were sure the Rhyrhans would back out of the union with the Concord if he were to order the Fleet to take reprisals against the genocide the Federation had committed. The cold, hard truth of it was that the Concord needed the Rhyrhans very badly. They brought a lot of resources and manpower to the war. It wasn't that Macklin wanted to bomb Federation worlds; he just didn't know what else to do. The humans in the Concord Fleet demanded revenge for the billions of civilians who had been killed by the Federation. It was a no-win situation for everyone involved.

  "You said that all of the squadrons achieved their mission goals. How did Admiral Shadovsky's team fare?" asked Admiral Gnarr. The massive Rhyrhan seemed uncomfortable at the table. He'd only been recently been promoted to admiral, as part of the unification with the Concord.

  "We haven't yet received a report from the admiral, sir," Lieutenant Commander Gunter Williams said quietly.

  "I see," Macklin replied. "That probably means they failed again. Any thoughts on the viability of keeping the team in action?" Macklin had discussed this with his personnel at the last briefing. He'd asked each of them to think about whether or not it was worth diverting resources from other projects to continue to humor Admiral Mandor Shadovsky.

  You're being unfair, Macklin thought to himself. Shadovsky is only doing what he thinks is best for the Concord.

  "Well, Admiral, currently the funds used for the special training and equipping of the Archangel
taskforce would train and equip ten times that number of regular marines. Of course, the taskforce's R&D division has come up with some intriguing ideas, notably the idea of equipping our ships with shields to keep the Thetas at bay. The cost is prohibitive for that kind of specialized equipment, however," John French replied. French wasn't military; he had been a finance minister before the Battle of Dawn. Since the Concord was operating under martial law, French didn't really have a job anymore. The admiral had asked him to continue his work under the military government until the regular government had been restored.

  "Is it worth paying the cost in lives not to?" asked Macklin.

  "Of course not, Admiral," French said. "But you have to consider if the resources would be better allocated to other projects, such as better weapons for the rest of the Fleet."

  "Sorry, John, I didn't mean that to sound like an attack."

  "Not a problem, Admiral."

  "Sir? If I may?" Commander Maria Gonzales was also Doctor Gonzales, a psychologist. She continued at a nod from Macklin. "Whatever the cost in resources, I think you should consider the morale effects of the taskforce."

  "Such as?"

  "Most of the Fleet has heard about what happened here at Steinway after the Battle of Dawn, sir. Our personnel know that it is virtually impossible for them to fight one of those things. They know that if their ship is attacked, they are likely going to die horrible deaths if the marines on board can't stop the things. They also know that Admiral Shadovsky and Commander Tebrey have killed several of the Thetas personally. The commander has become something of a folk hero to the Fleet, sir."

  "That's part of what bothers me, Commander."

  "Frankly, Admiral, I think it would be a huge mistake to disband the taskforce, no matter what kind of results they have. The mere fact that the taskforce exists gives hope to the Fleet. It is bad enough that they have to fight uneven battles against the Federation. They understand those battles. They accept that they may die fighting. But to die in a fight that you cannot win? To have that looming over you all the time? It isn't good now, sir. It would be far worse if the taskforce wasn't there to give them hope."