by Various
“Ancilla, will the winter make the storm easier or harder to—”
Klaxons sounded all around. He heard an agitated voice in his helmet. “This is Capital-Enforcer! Come in, hub officer!”
“Hub here,” Adequate said.
“Alert, everyone! I have a missing officer—and hostile movement here at the end of Vane One. It’s the Flood!”
It had happened. Something had finally happened.
Adequate’s circulatory system went into overdrive, prompting his ancilla to apply calming agents. The injections didn’t work. How else was he supposed to react? For fifteen years, his only foes were boredom and ridicule. Yet now, here at the end of the galaxy, the great enemy had come.
The Flood.
He had remained on hub detail watching the command center’s monitors while one guard from each of the other spokes emerged from the tunnels and headed into Vane One to assist Capital-Enforcer. That effectively doubled the number of warriors on the scene, he thought—until his ancilla reminded him that the wretched two-legged monster stalking the halls was a former teammate.
He saw it in flashes and glimpses. Sickly green in color with a blotchy hide, the creature’s long limbs flailed against the bulkheads as it clumsily lumbered through the halls of the vane. A combat form, he knew from his studies: scraps of Forerunner armor remained lodged in its hide, artifacts of the individual that once had been.
He only then wondered who that person was. Dutiful-Marcher, he learned when his ancilla checked the roster to see who was missing. How horrific must it have been, Adequate wondered, for the warrior to find his body erupting into that dreadful form? What would his last thoughts have been?
And was he in there, somewhere, thinking now? Adequate hoped not—especially when he saw blazes of light. Gunfire struck the combat form, ripping into its body. Adequate moved from monitor to monitor to get a better view. For a moment, it seemed the threat was ended—
—until the sick, glowing bulge on the back of what had once been Dutiful’s body burst open, spraying steaming ichor and releasing—what? He could not tell, for they were moving so quickly.
His ancilla, however, had already figured it out. “Infection forms.”
Capital-Enforcer and his companions had turned, falling back as garish pods propelled themselves across the floor and walls of the vane’s hallways on twisted appendages. Adequate switched from scene to scene, seeing in one moment the frantic warriors, turning to shoot—and in the next, virulent carriers rushing toward them, seeking new hosts.
The defenders’ boltshots spoke again and again, shredding some attackers, missing others. Adequate longed for something to do—and then got his chance.
“Hub officer,” Capital called out. “Close bulkhead one-stroke-four!”
Adequate quickly sought out the control. It would sever part of one part of the vane from another, and help prevent the Flood from accessing the spoke that led to the hub. He activated it, and watched with satisfaction on a monitor as the bulkhead slammed down, squashing a gruesome infection form.
He was unaccountably happy. His first strike against the Flood, against anything, had been delivered. But his reverie was cut short when his ancilla, tied in with the core computer, reported. “Sprightly-Runner is in danger.”
“She’s working Vane Two.” Adequate hurried to another set of monitors and beheld the female Forerunner fleeing for her life up the long tunnel, not even stopping to fire. Behind her, Adequate saw on the reverse angles, was a raging mass of pursuing infection forms—as well as one of the combat forms, even more energetic than the one he’d seen earlier. Its limbs thrashed against the walls and ceiling, propelling it forward.
It wasn’t just one vane infected, Adequate realized. There were two sources for the Flood, unconnected. The only place they met was in the hub—where he was.
He watched helplessly as Sprightly outraced the horde. “She must reach the next cutoff!” he said. Emergency bulkheads existed every eighty meters, ready to close off the tunnel behind her. He called out to the screens. “Run!”
“We should quickly drop the temperature in the spokes,” Adequate’s ancilla said. “It may retard their speed and growth.”
“Show me!” he replied.
The AI directed him to the appropriate console, where he made the command. Adequate knew it would have been much easier had his ancilla been given the power to operate, rather than simply monitor, Seclusion Spiral’s systems—but then, a Flood-infected guardian might well inherit control of the station. It was to be avoided.
Adequate moved back to the monitors dedicated to the spoke leading to Vane Two. If Sprightly was fending off the Flood, he could no longer tell. “The surveillance imagery’s gone!” he cried.
“I do not know if it can be reestablished,” his ancilla said. “The Flood may have compromised one of the trunk lines, cutting power to the—”
Adequate didn’t hear the rest. Gripping the boltshot that had been in his hand since the crisis started, he dashed into the entrance to tunnel two, racing to save an individual who had never treated him with respect. “Crew, I am going to aid Sprightly,” he called into his helmet mic.
“Do not leave the hub!” someone yelled back. He couldn’t hear who had said it; there was too much gunfire in the background. Not to mention his own ancilla, which had never stopped urging him to turn around.
“This is unwise,” it said again after he had gone another fifty meters. “Sprightly is not answering hails. You cannot know what her condition is.”
“She is alone. That is her condition.” Adequate knew simple math. They had pulled one sentry each from the other four vanes to assist Capital-Enforcer: that left three in Vane Two. He speculated that both her companions had been infected: one was the combat form, while the unfortunate other’s body must have given rise to the infection forms. Sprightly would surely be next.
His ancilla would not be silent. “The hub must be saved, Adequate. This is the wrong course of action.”
“You said yourself the power is fluctuating. I may have to cycle the emergency bulkheads shut by hand. The hub must be saved.”
“Yes, but you should have tried to do it from the hub first.”
Adequate wasn’t going to do that. It might have meant closing Sprightly off, trapping her with the nightmare. Darkness lay ahead, but he knew where he was. Observation windows lined the tunnel to the right, where a few flashes of lightning could be counted on for illumination. It was one of his favorite sections to patrol, and the place where he had first seen the—
Something slammed wetly against the viewport. The jarring impact knocked the Forerunner off his feet. Rolling, he drew his weapon and pointed it at the window, wondering how the Flood could be outside in that environment.
But what he saw was nothing like any of the Flood forms he had ever seen in lectures. Instead, a thing with colossal transparent wings hovered in front of the observation port. The avian—for that is all he knew to call it—was more than twice his size, with a tailfin that darted madly around as the creature bobbed in the storm. At the being’s center was a crystalline carapace, within which he could clearly make out three natural lights: two blue and one red.
Forgetting completely about the Flood, Adequate stood and edged closer to the window. The lights in the avian’s gut seemed to pulsate as he did so. Were they eyes, he wondered, and were they watching him?
And had they been watching him all along?
“Ancilla—”
“Unknown entity.”
“Agreed,” he said, watching the beast fighting against the wind. Seclusion Spiral was spinning, yet somehow this thing was keeping pace with the spoke of the giant propeller without being swept away. It backed off and zoomed down into the blackness. Adequate ran further along the tunnel, hoping to see more—but it was gone.
“No avian species has ever been reported on Seclusion,” his ancilla said. “The planet is lifeless.”
“Evidently not. Unless it is with t
he—” Suddenly remembering, he turned back up the hall and started to run. He had since forgotten all about Sprightly.
“Stop!”
He didn’t ignore the ancilla’s warning this time, which brought up a magnified infrared view of the hall before his eyes. “That mass up ahead is Sprightly. Her body is exhibiting evidence of transmogrification.”
“It has her then,” he said. Reluctantly, he lifted his weapon. “You’re certain?”
“Yes.”
He started firing down the hall. He could hear screeching noises as his shots found targets. Sprightly, perhaps? Or more of the infection forms? He did not want to know. He just understood that he would have run straight into danger had the thing in the window not slowed his progress.
He stopped firing long enough to make a dash for a set of levers protruding from the wall. He started throwing them, intending to cycle the emergency door shut, leaving Sprightly—or whatever she was now—beyond it.
But he was only halfway completed when the station took over, with the door cycling automatically. Stymied, he said, “Someone must have accomplished that from the hub. I imagine someone else fell back to it.”
“We have another problem,” his ancilla said as Adequate turned to walk back down the hallway.
“I see it.” The light at the end of the passageway was gone. “They’ve closed all the bulkheads!”
He tried for several minutes to reach someone on his communicator—to no avail. Behind him, he heard something pounding against the door that had just shut.
“That would be Sprightly—as something else now,” Adequate said. “Can she—can it get in?”
“Eventually.”
“Can we get out?” He already knew the answer. It wasn’t possible to cycle open the emergency door ahead from his side.
“I may have a way,” his ancilla replied. “Check the inside wall, thirty-one meters ahead. Quickly—time is now of the essence.”
Adequate had walked the five identical tunnels to the vanes daily for fifteen solar years, but had never thought too greatly about the mechanisms behind the inside wall. Certainly, he understood there to be apparatuses bringing particles back from the collectors in the vanes—but he had never dreamed of opening one of the access panels. That was expressly forbidden—both in his training, and in the stark, stern verbiage just beside the latch. It was never intended to be opened under any circumstances.
That the latch did not work was not surprising in the least. Hearing the station suffering behind him as the Flood tested the emergency bulkhead, Adequate applied his boltshot to the latch, silently apologized to his administrators, and fired.
The handle finally moved—and the panel started to unseal.
“Be careful,” his ancilla said. “The area inside is under extreme pressure.”
Adequate stood off to the side of the door and forced the panel open.
He was startled when the expected breeze went the other way, blowing from the hallway into the opening. Once the mini-gale subsided, he stepped before the aperture and shined his built-in helmet light inside.
“There’s—” Adequate stopped in mid-statement. He couldn’t understand what he was looking at. “Shouldn’t this be filled with harvested particles?”
“Correct,” his ancilla said, “if it were in operation. Materials collected by the vanes are conveyed to the holding tanks at the hub by gases under pressure.”
“Perhaps the Flood attack deactivated the collectors?”
“No. The fact that you were able to open the service hatchway at all indicates that the tube was never pressurized. Your armor’s sensors also do not indicate the presence of many remnant particles. Adequate . . .”
“What is it?”
“Based on my calculations, this vane of the station has not been used in more than ten solar years.”
“Ten years . . . ?” Adequate couldn’t quite believe it. He climbed inside and looked to and fro. “How could a vane have been out of service this long without the station’s systems knowing about it?”
“Unable to form a conclusion at this time. It also seems unlikely that this one section alone could have been out of service. I now believe that none of the vanes could have been in operation.”
This admission stunned Adequate. “That . . . that is impossible.”
The ancilla projected a cascade of physics equations onto the inside of his faceplate. “Unless all the transfer tubes are pressurized, Seclusion Spiral’s rotation would go out of balance. Its precession would be noticeable, and would have to be corrected for. The only possible conclusion is that, in the last decade, this station has not collected a single particle.”
“Are you damaged? They send a tanker here every year. They spend six days filling it, while the service crew inspects the station. They just did it a few weeks ago!”
“I do not have enough information to speculate further. But you must seal the panel quickly, before the Flood arrives. Simply reenter the hub from the central storage tank hatch.”
The ancilla was correct about how to get back into the hub, but wrong about how easy a task it would be. The entire journey was in the dark, with Adequate looking behind him in panic at every sound, fearful the Flood had entered the chamber. Several times, he had attempted to contact others aboard the station—but they either could not hear his calls, or were too busy to answer.
He hoped it was one or the other.
The main collection tank was hardest to navigate, narrowing and splitting into seven smaller hexagonal passageways. It took precious time for Adequate to figure out that six went to filtration systems, while the seventh headed for the tank—and he’d been forced to crawl on his stomach to get into it, then make an acrobatic leap for the handle of the exit hatch.
He’d found the hub abandoned, with bulkheads shut on all but two tunnels. The monitors dedicated to watching the spokes and vanes showed nothing. “Someone’s been here,” Adequate observed. “They must have closed these other bulkheads.”
His ancilla established a new connection with the central computer. “There is a message here from Capital-Enforcer’s ancilla on the hub’s core computer,” his ancilla said. “Power has been lost to the transponders that relay messages between personnel.”
That was both bad news and a relief. “Capital’s alive.” He looked to the two open tunnels, leading to Vanes Three and Five. “Where is he?”
“Capital’s ancilla reports that they sealed the spokes leading to Vanes One, Two, and Four—there must have been an outbreak on Four—and that our surviving personnel have entered the tunnels for Vanes Three and Five, expecting that the hub here will be overtaken soon. Capital’s ancilla says here that they intend a last stand.”
Adequate looked from one open tunnel to the other. “Should I follow? And if so, which way?”
“I lack sufficient information to advise.” A pause. “But I do not agree with my fellow ancilla. There is no reason to believe the spokes are any more defensible than the hub—especially when the vanes at the far end were the sources of the Flood infestation to begin with.”
How did it get there in the first place? Adequate wondered. It was highly improbable that the Flood could have arrived here independently. Yes, Flood spores could spread on meteors and comets, as well as derelict space equipment hurtling around the stars. But Seclusion was exactly that—secluded, far from other systems and slipspace corridors alike.
It made no sense that the Flood could have arisen from below: nothing should be able to survive beneath the furious clouds.
But he had just seen otherwise.
“Could the avian have brought the infestation?”
“It is unlikely. If the Flood were already present down in the storm, it logically should have found the station before now. You have said you have seen the avian before.”
“I’m pleased you believe me now.”
“The timing makes me suspect something else.” It took milliseconds for the ancilla, in concert with the hub’
s command computer, to examine its theory. “Yes. The infestation likely began in the replacement digester units just installed by the service team.”
“The apparatus that breaks down waste. That’s why the outbreak started on the tips of the vanes.”
“Correct. They bring in fresh pods of microorganisms annually. Flood spores must have been mixed in with them and been awakened. The malleable seals would have given them a means of escape. They must have infected several of our sentries, taking them directly to combat forms—and their bodies gave rise to the infection forms we now see. I also suspect the Flood is drawing on the biomass in the digester pods to create an environment that might exponentially increase the rate and severity of infestation.”
“The tanker brought the digester pods,” Adequate said. “Did they report any problems?”
“Checking.” After a beat, the ancilla spoke again. “There has been no report of the supply ship reaching any waypoint following its departure here. It has not kept to its schedule.”
“No emergency call?”
“Negative. I conjecture that any Flood outbreak carried aboard the vessel could have debilitated it in slipspace.”
That meant an unspeakably horrible end for those aboard—his colleagues for the past solar year and longer. He could imagine them, all happily headed off to their new assignments and away from the purgatory of Seclusion and Barely-Adequate—only to find their flight and their lives cut off. He had not been particularly friendly with any of them, but his ambitions were joined to theirs. And now all were snuffed out.
Only afterward did he consider another implication. No one can come back to help us.
And then another thought, just as dark, struck him. “They did service on every vane,” Adequate said, looking from side to side in alarm. “That means Vanes Three and Five are no longer safe, after all.”
He did not wait for the ancilla to confirm his theory. Adequate chose the nearest tunnel and ran.
Vane Five was it, the last stand.
Adequate had only gotten partway down Vane Three when he had seen the Flood rampaging toward him—including, to his horror, the transformed figures of two more of his companions. He had retreated and sealed the tunnel, leaving only one option left. There, down the spoke leading to Vane Five, he had found Capital-Enforcer blazing away.