“Very likely.” Anise started to turn back as Tamryn let the video continue to play again, but a jolt went through her whole body. “Freeze that,” she ordered.
The video was showing the pirates gathering the artifacts off the table. One had jerked toward the doorway, hearing something perhaps, and fumbled the amphora. It dropped, breaking, and the contents spilled out onto the floor. Tamryn froze it right after a man jumped out of the way, nearly knocking over a stool. The sludge appeared in the frame, much as it did now, except there seemed to be more of it now.
“Shit,” Anise said, then repeated the word several more times.
“What?” Tamryn knew they had trouble already, but couldn’t tell what Anise had seen to escalate their trouble to a higher level.
“What’s the time stamp on that?”
“This all happened... three hours and five minutes ago.” Tamryn tried to guess if that had been before or after she and Makkon had cut through the floor, but she hadn’t taken note of the time then. The three combat suits from the armory had come online about then, and she guessed these men might have been the ones to steal them, but at the beginning of the feed, they were wearing their own suits.
“Look at the size of the spill.” Anise’s gaze was still locked to that frozen frame.
Abruptly, Tamryn understood. “It got bigger.”
“By roughly four times, I would estimate.” Anise approached the spill with a piece of equipment and took more pictures, or maybe she was running an analysis, something she could do from a distance.
“It is biological in nature, then,” Tamryn said. “And it’s doubling in size every hour and a half.”
“Exponential growth. I don’t have to tell you what that means.” Anise turned back to the counter, her shoulders hunched as she enlarged holo displays of the pictures of the sludge, as well as of the markings on the lid.
“No.” When they had first walked in, Tamryn had imagined them having plenty of time before those drips ate through the various levels of the station to find the hull, but that wasn’t going to be true at all.
Makkon’s head had turned back toward the lab, and he met her eyes, his face grave. Yes, he knew what it meant too.
“You could tell me what it means,” Cox said.
“That the entire station is going to be screwed if we don’t find a way to contain it again.” Tamryn looked toward Anise. “But we can do that, right? We just need another ceramic pot, or something else that it can’t eat through. And a way to transfer it into the pot without touching it.” That would be tricky. They might have to sacrifice a lab robot; there ought to be some around.
“Just let me get an analysis as to what we’re working with first,” Anise said. “We have a few more doublings before it will get too large to manage. It’s probably safest to try and kill it. Though I am concerned it might eat through the floor soon.” She cursed, then added, “Let me work.”
“Did she not say that the pot and its contents were as old as the alien artifacts?” Makkon asked. “How would a biological specimen have survived for that long?”
“They found thirty-thousand-year-old viable seeds back on Old Earth a few decades before our ancestors left,” Anise said, her eyes toward her displays—she had more than a dozen language examples up now, along with the original pictures. “Life finds a way. You’re here, aren’t you?”
Makkon grunted and returned to watching the corridor.
“It’s unfortunate that the inorganic material it encounters seems to work as food for it,” Anise muttered, talking to herself now. “If that could be harnessed, it would make for a useful tool. Imagine the mining implications. I wonder if it can survive in an anaerobic environment? It could be used on asteroids with little risk of spreading into civilized areas. Maybe that was why the aliens were keeping it. That’ll have to be the first test. Does it go dormant when denied oxygen?” Anise continued to work as she talked, scribbling notes on a list her tablet displayed above the counter.
Tamryn turned back to the security feed, instructing it to continue playing. She didn’t know what she hoped to find, but she had no idea what else she could do. It seemed as good a use of her time as anything else. One of the pirates had taken out a tablet and was recording everything. He tapped at the very console Tamryn was now using, then laid a small black box atop it. Some sort of hacking device?
“Can we take all of the oxygen out of the lab?” Cox asked.
“Yes,” Anise said. “I’m making a list of things we can try to do to it. Obviously the gas we used earlier didn’t affect it. Well, no, I shouldn’t assume that. It didn’t kill the organism, but perhaps it slowed down or sped up its growth. Can it consume gas from the atmosphere and use it as raw fuel, the way it’s consuming inorganic material?”
“Uh, was that question for me to answer?” Cox asked.
“Sorry, Cox,” Tamryn said when Anise did not respond. “I don’t think any of these questions are for you to answer. Or for me, either. That’s why I’m looking at pictures. I—” Tamryn paused, her gaze transfixed by the video display.
The pirate with the hacking device had joined the others, and the trio had been on their way out, but someone must have been coming down the corridor, because they had hurried back in and shut the door. They made shushing motions to each other. Maybe they’d heard some of the scientists out looking for the last of Makkon’s people? The pirates could have overpowered civilians, but maybe they had been worried about running into the Glacians. They must have been in contact with the pirates on the Fleet ship and learned what had happened to them.
One of the men backed up to the table, slipped, and almost toppled backward. Eyes widening, Tamryn saw right away what he had slipped on. Some of the sludge. He put his hand on the table for balance, then jerked it away, looking down at his glove. Tamryn thought of the pits in the surface near the table’s edge. Before, some of the goo must have still remained on the top. The pirate dropped the hacking device on the table and tried to wipe off his glove. It didn’t work. He ran to the sink, washed with soap and water, and scrubbed hard with a towel. Judging from his reaction, the sludge still had not come off. From the glimpse the camera showed, it might even have been spreading. And was it starting to eat through his suit? Tamryn couldn’t quite tell, since he was waving his hand around in agitation now.
His two comrades were trying to shush him, and he angrily shoved one, as if demanding them to listen. He’d done the shove with the hand that had touched the table. Tamryn couldn’t tell if that contact was enough to spread the organism. Then the man yelped and shook his hand. He tore off his glove, dropped it on the floor, and gaped at his hand. It was smoldering. Shaking his head, he sprinted for the door.
The ex-sergeant tried to stop him, but the wounded man nearly bowled him over as he raced out of the lab. The sound of the alarm started up in the video. The other two men cursed, grabbed the artifacts and other booty they could carry, and jogged out after their comrade.
“Anise,” Tamryn said. “Somewhere on the station, there’s a combat suit that’s being eaten by that stuff. And maybe a pirate too.”
Anise, engrossed in her work, did not look up, but she muttered a, “Wonderful.”
Tamryn frowned at the thought of a suit somewhere leaking sludge all over the place, of a pirate curled up in a corner being eaten alive by some unstoppable, voracious organism. She couldn’t help but shudder.
So far, she had managed to keep her unease to a minimum, believing Anise would have a way of dealing with this problem. But she was starting to feel daunted. She lifted a hand to rub her forehead and push away strands of hair that had fallen into her eyes, but her fingers clunked on the faceplate. She snorted at herself. A face rub would have to wait. There was no way she was going to remove any part of her suit until that stuff had been dealt with.
“What happened to his glove?” Cox looked around the room. Thanks to the mess the pirates had made, it wasn’t easy to pick things out on the floor or counter
tops.
Tamryn played the video again, this time to take note of where the glove had fallen. It had been between the table and the door. They shouldn’t have missed it. She walked over to the spot and bent over the floor. It definitely was not there, but— “Crap.”
She pointed down to a dark smear on a pitted section of the floor and a few small black lumps—all that remained of the glove. “It must have eaten right through it. All of it.”
She swallowed. If they hadn’t been careful to follow the walls when entering the room, they might have stepped right on this spot without noticing. She grabbed some debris and made a ring around the smear to cordon it off.
“Does anyone else think we should get out of here?” Cox asked. “It doesn’t look like the suits do anything to help. Captain, can you do the research from a remote location? And can we nuke, irradiate, or otherwise utterly destroy everything in this lab?”
“One minute,” Anise murmured.
Tamryn was tempted to voice a similar suggestion. If Anise didn’t finish up in a few minutes, she would.
She headed back toward the video display, checking the floor carefully before each step. As she passed the corner of the table, she remembered the black device from the feed, the one she thought might be for hacking into computers. To her surprise, it was still on the table, nestled beside a stack of books.
Had the pirates acquired any information? She didn’t know how quickly the device worked. The man wielding it had not been at the console for long. If the device was full of important information, would he have left it? Granted, he had been distracted. She debated whether to pick it up. The fact that it remained intact probably meant that none of the sludge had been in contact with it, but she was hesitant to touch anything, especially anything on the table. She eyed the other side, where the dark substance had eaten through the metal.
Makkon stepped away from the door, glanced at the hacking device, and lifted a hand. “Someone’s coming.” He spoke quickly—the door had not shut again, not since he forced it open. “The captain expecting anyone?”
Tamryn looked to Anise. She hadn’t heard the captain call for backup, but maybe she had done it on her tablet. Maybe she’d felt she needed help.
“Anise?” she whispered.
“Eh?”
“You call anyone to come help?”
Anise turned, frowning at them. “No, not yet.”
“Could the pirates be coming back for this?” Tamryn pointed at the device. They might have gone all the way back to their ship before realizing they didn’t have it. If they’d actually managed to get Anise’s notes out of the computer, it could hold the very information they meant to sell.
Makkon returned to the doorway. He leaned out, the rifle ready to fire. Tamryn crept closer, but stopped a few feet behind him. She wanted to see into the corridor so she could help, but she didn’t want to get in his way. He could handle some pirates by himself.
An unexpected clink-clink-clank came from the corridor. Makkon hesitated, then fired. Metal screeched, and small bits of something clattered against the walls.
“Robot,” he said quietly, using the comm inside his armor to communicate. “It’s launching—” He fired again.
Something whistled through the corridor. He fired several more times, but whatever he hit exploded. Splinters of something hard enough to pierce metal flew from the explosion. Arm up, Makkon backed into the lab. Some of those slender pin-like splinters stuck out of his armor.
“Fragmentation grenades,” he finished.
“Watch out for the goo,” Tamryn barked, watching his boots come perilously close to the spot she had cordoned off.
She stepped forward, intending to stop him from backing into it physically if she had to, but a second explosion went off in the corridor. Smoke flowed through the doorway, the haze so thick that Tamryn could scarcely see three feet. Makkon became a vague shape in front of her. But he must have seen better than her, or maybe his other senses kicked in, telling him something over the dwindling roar of the bomb, because he fired at the doorway.
Lasers squealed, and someone yelled. It wasn’t a yell of pain; it was more of a battle roar. Four men charged in, but they did not charge far, and Tamryn immediately suspected they were the same pirates from the video. These men knew about the dangers of the room and did not blindly rush in. Yes, they had been here before, at least two of them. They had gained a friend—or perhaps two friends, if the one who had picked up the sludge hadn’t found a way to get it off. Three of them were wearing the station’s combat suits. Did that mean that contaminated, smoldering ones were now lying on the floor in the armory? A question for later.
Makkon’s laser fire bounced off their armor, so he threw the weapon aside and lunged to meet them, like knights on a jousting field. Tamryn had few illusions about coming out ahead in such a confrontation, so she stepped to the side, hugging the wall by the door and hoping not to be noticed. She fired, trying to find the weak spots in the suits. The smoke made it difficult to see. She managed a few hits to the back of one man’s helmet, but the laser beams did no damage. Cox, who had moved to stand in front of Anise’s back, was having similar difficulty.
Remembering that these were station suits, Tamryn mumbled commands to access the overrides.
Makkon had already downed the lead pirate, ripping the man’s helmet from his head with his great strength. Tamryn’s command injected drugs into the man closest to her, as she had done to Makkon. She trusted that a less genetically enhanced human would be affected more. Then she popped the helmets on the other two men’s suits.
“Get out of here,” one of them cried as Makkon heaved the first pirate, heavy armor and all, over the table to smash into the wall next to the vault.
Cox pulled off one of the helmets Tamryn had unlocked, starting a wrestling match with the pirate. Another one turned toward the door, but Makkon leaped onto his back, taking him to the ground. Tamryn fired three bursts at the final pirate, her aim precise. Since she had unlocked the helmet, a millimeter-wide crack lay between it and the rest of the suit. It was enough. The laser blasts found the opening and bored into his neck. The man toppled halfway through the doorway.
Makkon helped Cox finish the last pirate. With his helmet now off, Tamryn recognized the face from the video, the ex-sergeant. She almost cried out to spare him, more for questioning than for any other reason, since Fleet would only execute him for this treasonous act. But Makkon was too quick. He grabbed the sergeant’s head between both hands and twisted so hard that the man’s neck broke.
“Everyone all right?” Tamryn asked.
“Yes,” Cox said, lowering his rifle and glancing back at Anise—she had barely stopped working. “What were they after? Why would they come back?”
“For the hacking device?” Tamryn suggested.
“Perhaps not.” Makkon pointed into the smoky corridor.
The grenades had made a mess, gouging holes in the wall and leaving char marks all over the floor and ceiling. But beyond that point lay the robot he had mentioned, its metal frame warped and melted. Shards of a pot or some other ceramic container had smashed to the floor at its wheels.
“They came back to get a sample?” Tamryn wondered.
“This could be turned into a weapon, as well as a tool,” Anise said with a sigh. “Step outside. I’m going to make some attempts to eradicate it based on what was written on the amphora, but I’m a linguist not a biologist. I’ll probably have to call down...” She trailed off, her mouth dropping open. She was staring at Makkon, who had started walking out. “Stop,” she ordered and pointed at his heel.
He looked down at the same time as Tamryn did. Dread curdled in her stomach before she spotted the small smudge near the sole of the boot.
“What do we do?” Tamryn asked, trying to sound calm. “Take off the boot?”
Makkon was already bending down to do so, but Anise said, “Stop,” again. “We can’t be positive that there aren’t airborne spores—my
suit’s alarm went off because of more than goop on the deck. You’ll break the seal of your suit if you remove anything.”
“What then?” Tamryn squinted at Anise, suspicious that she might want Makkon to be infected with the organism and die. But she had thought him a fine specimen when she had been drugged. Would she truly want him dead now?
“My suit may already be compromised.” Makkon pointed at the slivers that stuck out, thanks to that fragmentation grenade. He didn’t sound as scared as Tamryn would be. The thought of being eaten alive—or watching someone being eaten alive—made her tremble.
“Then all the more reason to wash you from head to toe,” Anise said. “There’s a decontamination shower next door. The amphora mentioned radiation, so we’ll clean you, and I’ll program in a radiation burst.”
Makkon’s eyebrows rose. “Does that kill me, as well as the organism?”
Anise hesitated. “We’ll try low doses. That suit is rated for space walks, so it’s designed to protect its wearer against some radiation.”
“That suit that’s been compromised?” Tamryn did not like the sound of this at all.
“The quicker we get him into the shower, the less compromised it will be.” Anise pointed at the sludge on his heel, then jerked her thumb toward the doorway. “If you can, keep that from touching the deck. We don’t need to spread this thing all over the station.”
Makkon gave her a sour look, but walked on one foot and one set of tiptoes in the direction she had indicated.
“Cox,” Anise said. “Figure out how to shut and lock that door, will you? I’ll have to run a decontamination cycle in here too. If this works, I’ll know what to try.”
“You’re not using him as a lab rat, are you?” Tamryn asked quietly, walking beside Anise to the lab next door.
“Better him than us.”
“He’s been helping us. Those pirates—”
“Do not forget who and how many or our men he and his people killed when they invaded our station,” Anise said sharply, then raised her voice. “On the left. The shower is to the side.”
Frost Station Alpha 1-6: The Complete Series Page 24