“We can try,” she said. She looked at the other door. “Through there?”
“Yes,” Adamson said. “Go through the door, get undressed, put your clothes in the cupboard and walk through the final door. You’ll find an earpiece in the cabinet, one you can slot into your ear. Follow the instructions as you go.”
Alice nodded, tersely. “Understood,” she said. “I’m on my way.”
She opened the door and walked into a small changing room. The walls were bare, save for a handful of cabinets, but she was sure there would be microscopic cameras everywhere. It wasn’t the first time she’d been on a black-ops base. She would have been surprised if there weren’t cameras in the toilets as well as the bedrooms. There were prisoners who were kept under less tight security. She scowled at the thought, then started to undress. She’d lost any sense of modesty when she’d joined the marines. It was hard to care about the watching eyes.
Time to move on, she thought, when she was naked. Now ...
She stepped through the door, closing it firmly behind her. A recorded voice ordered her to keep moving, even as warm liquid splashed down from high above. Alice closed her eyes as she tasted something sharp and unpleasant in the water, something designed to cleanse her body of germs and pheromones. She wondered, grimly, if the water would kill her scent. It would be hard to issue any commands to the infected humans if they couldn’t smell her. She kept walking, passing through a torrent of hot air. Her skin itched uncomfortably as it dried. It looked as though they didn’t dare give her a towel.
The final door opened, revealing the confinement chamber. A gust of warm air brushed against her, bringing with it the indefinable scent of the infected. Alice braced herself as she stepped inside, half-expecting to be attacked on sight. The infected humans stopped their constant walking and turned to face her, their unblinking eyes staring at her ... Alice couldn’t keep from shuddering. She’d met Tadpoles and Vesy, both of whom were very alien, but the infected humans were utterly inhuman. It was hard to understand alien mentalities sometimes - she’d once heard that the Tadpoles cared nothing for their own children, something that bothered her more than she cared to admit - yet ... the virus was just too different to be easily understood. It was alien ...
It wants to survive, she thought. It wasn’t a comforting thought. The virus was too dangerous to let live. How could it be trusted? How could anyone talk to it, let alone dictate terms? And its survival comes at the cost of our survival.
A flicker of ... something ran through the air. The infected were moving closer. Alice tensed, readying herself to fight. Her mind raced, considering tactics. It would be easy to hit the male infected in their groins, but would they even notice? She didn’t know. She’d have to aim to cripple or kill and hope for the best. She stood straighter, bracing herself. What would happen if they managed to infect her?
“Stop,” she ordered.
Another ripple ran through the warm air. The infected stopped, as if they’d run into a brick wall. Alice stared, suddenly realising that she hadn’t expected the idea to work at all. The infected stared back at her, waiting for orders. She opened her mouth, her mind racing as she tried to figure out what was going on. Perhaps, just perhaps, the virus had never realised that someone could subvert its infection. It was like a mother leaving the house unlocked because she believed a child couldn’t work the handle and open the door.
She closed her eyes, gathering herself. What should she tell them to do? What orders should she issue? What orders would they understand? Logically, she was encoding the orders within her altered pheromones ... she shuddered, cursing the virus once again. She didn’t understand what she was doing and that, she knew from bitter experience, could lead to something blowing up in her face. The virus presumably understood precisely how to issue orders. She was making it up as she went along.
“Turn your backs,” she ordered. “And walk away.”
The infected obeyed, turning slowly and walking until they hit the far bulkhead. They kept moving, as if they were trying to push their way through the bulkhead. Alice walked after them, feeling ... something moving through the warm air. She stopped and closed her eyes again, trying to concentrate on the sensation. There was something there, alright; something warm and welcoming, something calling to her ... she jerked back, hard. The virus was calling to her. It would have been easy, so easy, to just let go.
Adamson’s voice echoed through the earpiece. “Alice? Are you alright?”
That’s Captain to you, Alice thought, snidely. Captain Campbell, not Alice.
She felt a flicker of resentment. There were probably dozens, if not hundreds, of sensors turned on the confinement chamber. The watchers could probably monitor her emotional state from a distance, if they wished ... she pushed the resentment down, hard. It was their bloody duty to monitor her emotional state and she knew it. Besides, she was probably the only person in the chamber with an emotional state. The infected were little more than robots. Or zombies.
“Alice?” Adamson sounded alarmed. “Should I send the team into the chamber?”
“No,” Alice said. “I’m sorry. I think I was taken a little by surprise.”
“I can send someone in if you want,” Adamson said. “Or suit up myself ...”
“I can handle it,” Alice said, a little sharper than she’d intended. “Just give me a moment to consider.”
She closed her eyes again, concentrating on a single command. Come here. The air seemed to shift around her - she felt, just for a second, as if she was in a swimming pool - as the infected stopped trying to walk through the bulkhead and turned towards her. She opened her eyes and shuddered. Their faces showed no trace of individuality. She thought she recognised a couple of them, but ... she pushed that thought aside too. The men and women she’d known from the mission to the alien ship were dead. Their bodies were no longer theirs.
“The pheromone levels are rising,” Adamson warned. “Are you coping?”
“I think so,” Alice managed.
She bit her lip, tasting blood in her mouth. It was hard, harder than she’d realised, to send out silent commands. She’d always been good at multitasking, but the virus was clearly far superior ... or, perhaps, not limited by being trapped in a human body. She wondered, idly, how such an entity could think. It had to be spread across thousands - no, billions - of bodies. How could such a mentality even exist? She thought she understood, now, why the virus was so unconcerned about spending its bodies so casually. It had no reason to be concerned. It wasn’t likely to run out of bodies in a hurry.
“It feels as though they’re part of me, I think,” she said. The infected started to walk around her. “But ... I don’t think this is an active group.”
Adamson sounded worried. “How do you mean?”
“I mean there isn’t enough of the virus to take control.” Alice remembered the blobs she’d seen on the alien starship and scowled. “They’re capable of following basic instructions, the commands encoded in the viral particles, but not of rising to sentience. My guess is that they were never intended to operate independently. They can spread themselves, and replicate, but not come up with their own plans.”
“It might be harder to give orders to an active group.” Adamson paused. “You’d better come out, if you don’t mind.”
Alice nodded, although part of her wanted to stay in the chamber. She wasn’t sure why. The virus had abandoned its attempt to suck her into the groupmind ... she had no reason to stay in the chamber. And yet ... she had to fight to turn and walk through the airlock. Her legs felt stiff, as if she’d been in bed for weeks. There was a bit of her that really didn’t want to leave.
It was trying to tempt me, she thought. It couldn’t absorb me by force, so it tried to convince me to surrender instead.
She wasn’t sure if it was deliberate or not - the virus hadn’t shown any inclination to try to tempt anyone to allow themselves to be absorbed - but it hardly mattered. It had been tempting, for
all the wrong reasons. She could have surrendered her individuality and found peace within the groupmind ... she shook her head, sharply. It wouldn’t have been peace. It would have been a living death. And yet, she’d found it tempting. She wondered, sourly, just how many people would have accepted if the virus had come in peace.
“If someone bioengineered you,” she muttered as she passed through a shower of detergent, “they didn’t miss a trick.”
Adamson was waiting for her outside the changing room. “That was amazing,” he said, as she emerged. “You gave us more raw data in two hours than we collected in months!”
“Great,” Alice said. Had it really been two hours? She’d thought it had only been half an hour at most. “Are you sure I haven’t been infected again?”
“Your blood chemistry hasn’t changed,” Adamson said. “And you won’t be leaving here for another few hours, at the very least.”
“Good, I suppose,” Alice said. “What did you learn?”
“A little more about how the virus communicates,” Adamson said. “And how we can use UV lights to disrupt it.”
Alice felt a hot flash of anger. “We already knew that!”
“And how we might be able to mess it up by inserting pheromones of our own into the mix,” Adamson said. “And how we might be able to get you into the mix ...”
“Really?” Alice stopped and glared at him. “Do you realise just how limited I am, compared to the virus? How limited any of us are? These” - she held up her fingers - “are where my awareness stops. The virus is more aware of its surroundings than any of us. I can no more issue detailed commands than ... than I can control someone with the force of my mind.”
“But you can issue orders,” Adamson said. “And the person who took the orders would know what to do, wouldn’t they?”
“Yes,” Alice said. It wasn’t as if officers provided detailed orders when commanding their troops to attack. She’d met a handful of micromanagers in high office, but none of them had been quite that bad. “What good does that do?”
“Perhaps more than you might think,” Adamson said. “For one thing, the viral pheromones must be universal. The virus has absorbed members of at least four alien species into its gestalt and it has been able to issue orders across the differing species’ lines. I think the pheromones themselves must act as a form of universal translator, linked into the viral cells ...”
“You think,” Alice said.
“If it couldn’t understand the hosts, it couldn’t use their knowledge.” Adamson let out a heavy sigh. “We haven’t been able to design a neural link that allows ... well, mind-reading, for want of a better term. Even what we have done - and we intend to use some of them to assist you - is not suitable for Tadpole use. What works for us would fry their brains. But the virus has somehow devised an organic solution to the problem. It has built an organic computer network. And we should be able to hack the network and tear it apart.”
“If we can get inside,” Alice said. She jerked a finger at the sealed airlock as her temper began to rise. “That isn’t easy, mate. Those poor bastards back there? They’re running on automatic, cut off from the mainstream and prevented from forming a groupmind of their own. We can do anything to them, if we want. But the main body of the virus? That’s on starships and heavily defended worlds and ... it’s practically untouchable.”
“I know,” Adamson said. He sounded earnest. “But we believe it can be done. What you did today has opened up a whole series of possible approaches ... it can be done. Given time, we can do anything.”
“Hah,” Alice said. She wasn’t convinced. Every time she thought she’d beaten the virus, it managed to sneak its way back into her life. “We will see.”
Chapter Five
“You’d better get out of bed,” a female voice said. “You’ve got a priority message.”
Wing Commander Richard Redbird opened his eyes, unsure - just for a moment - where he was. It wasn’t his cabin, and it wasn’t the tiny little hotel room they’d found before being unceremoniously summoned back to the ship, it was ... it was his new cabin, the one he’d been given when the former CAG had been hastily reassigned to another ship. He’d barely had a moment to move his carryall from his former cabin to the new one before he’d been plunged back into the maelstrom of rebuilding Invincible’s squadrons - again.
“Fuck,” he grumbled, as he pushed himself upright. Monica sat in his bed, her bare breasts bobbling invitingly. There was barely enough room for both of them. She looked on the verge of falling out and landing on the cold metal deck. “Who is it?”
“I don’t know,” Monica said, a little waspishly. “I don’t have your fingerprints, do I?”
Richard scowled, then reached for the terminal. It was probably a good thing she hadn’t tried to open the message. Her fingerprints might not have triggered alarms - depending on the message priority - but they would have been noticed. Some jobsworth who didn’t have something better to do would realise that she’d been in his cabin and wonder why. It wouldn’t take much imagination to draw the right conclusion. People made allowances for starfighter pilots, but he doubted they’d make one for Monica and himself. They were senior officers. They were meant to set a good example.
The message unlocked itself as soon as his fingers touched the terminal. It was short, straight and to the point. There would be a staff meeting at 1000 and he was invited. Richard let out a sigh as he glanced at the chronometer. Invited to attend? More like ordered to attend. Life had been a great deal simpler when he’d been a lowly starfighter pilot, rather than a squadron commander and CAG. He wished, sometimes, that he’d had the wit to decline the promotion when it had been offered. It wasn’t as if starfighter pilots often climbed to the top of the ladder.
But the First Space Lord started his career as a fighter pilot, he reminded himself, as he sent a quick acknowledgement. And now he’s the master of the Royal Navy.
Monica rubbed her eyes. “Good news?”
“A staff meeting,” Richard grumbled. He was a CAG without starfighters or pilots to fly them. Most of Invincible’s surviving pilots had been hastily reassigned when the carrier had limped back to Earth. Richard understood the need to share their experience as widely as possible, but it still galled him. He’d been lucky to keep Monica. “Perhaps they’ll have something important to say.”
“Perhaps,” Monica agreed. “It might be good news.”
Richard shrugged, watching as she stood and hurried towards the washroom. He couldn’t believe it would be good news. There hadn’t been any good news since they’d left Earth and that had been months ago. In theory, he was due to receive new starfighters and pilots at any time; in practice, every announcement of a new starfighter wing had been cancelled within the day. He understood the problem facing the Royal Navy - and the sudden need for experienced starfighter pilots to be deployed to the front lines - but it was still irritating as hell. How was he supposed to plan for their next deployment if they kept changing the rules?
And I might be reassigned at any moment, too, he thought. Truthfully, he was surprised he hadn’t already been reassigned. He was a starfighter pilot first and foremost, a flyer with a string of kills to his credit. He wouldn’t have minded if he’d been slotted into some junior flying officer’s slot. The demotion wouldn’t have bothered him in the slightest. He would have been more annoyed by the cut in pay. Maybe they’re just trying to decide where to send me.
He stood, resisting the urge to walk to the washroom and join her under the shower. Whoever had designed the starship had given the CAG a private cabin, rather than forcing him to bed down with his pilots, but the washroom was barely large enough for a grown adult. There was no way they could share it, not without getting stuck in the tiny cubicle. His lips twitched at the thought - that would be hard to explain - before he felt a bitter pang of regret. No one, not even Monica, knew how tempted he’d been to simply walk off instead of returning to the ship. He knew he would be called
a deserter, he knew he might well spend the rest of his life in prison, but ... it might have been better than deploying once again. He’d watched helplessly as two separate wings of starfighters were blown away by the aliens. He didn’t want to go through that again.
Then request reassignment somewhere else, he told himself. You could push paper for a living instead.
Monica emerged, wrapping a towel around herself. Richard felt another pang, a mixture of guilt and ... and something he didn’t care to look at too closely. They’d fallen into bed together six days ago, when they’d been on Earth. He still wasn’t quite sure why he’d done it. Monica was pretty - she was striking, certainly - but she was his subordinate. They shouldn’t have been anything more than friends, if that. People might make allowances for starfighter pilots on leave, but not pilots on duty. He knew he should have ended the affair as soon as they returned to the ship. But he hadn’t. He’d needed her too much.
The Right of the Line Page 5