“Ben zona!” he cursed, and whacked one of them hard.
The visuals snapped back on, responding with a jolt of something new.
Curious, Masir leaned in toward the monitors. He reversed one of the video feeds, taking it back a few frames until he arrived at the beginning of the sequence that grabbed his attention.
“There you are,” he muttered, rubbing his hands together. “Let’s have a closer look, shall we?”
A remote biopsy report crowded the display—one of many Eve Kellean had volunteered to run on the six survivors. The biopsies were critical, as they screened virtual blood swatches for traces of the Mons virus. So far, all of them turned up negative—but Masir had only scrutinized the text portions of those reports. This was the first time he had examined one of the electron scans up close. The image was based on an interpolation of tissue masses based on high-density resonance imaging. Since collecting actual samples was impossible without breaking quarantine, this procedure was the next best thing—and remarkably accurate, given its limitations.
At first glance, the tissues appeared perfectly normal. It was only when Masir studied them more closely that he noticed a tiny deviation. Zooming in, he quickly discovered the reason. Several sections were blank—as if the sample had been assembled from a mosaic of pieces that didn’t quite fit.
Or redacted.
It was an old medical examiner’s trick: peel away layers from a clean section and paste them over another, concealing the evidence underneath. Masir had seen it before, in the autopsy reports the Zone Authority had altered to cover up their use of biological agents during the Pan-Arab war. The hard part was getting the cellular structures to line up properly—and in this case, they didn’t.
It wasn’t even close.
Has to be a mistake.
Masir slid out of his chair and headed toward the lab. He wasn’t terribly concerned—after all, any number of factors could have accounted for such a discrepancy. Most likely, Kellean hadn’t calibrated the equipment properly the last time she used it. God knew, the woman had spent every waking hour with those corpses from the moment they arrived on board. That much time among the living dead was bound to make anyone a bit punchy.
Including him.
The doctor had avoided the lab as much as possible, content to allow Kellean to work with her frozen friends while he remained in sickbay doing the post. As Masir drew closer, he received a potent reminder why. The atmosphere was so funereal and oppressive, his dread so palpable and crushing, it felt like marching toward the executioner’s block.
Stop that nonsense.
Taking a breath, he went inside.
Masir expected to find Kellean working inside the containment sphere or hunched over the monitoring station. But the lieutenant was nowhere to be seen—and neither was anyone else.
There was only the quarantine.
And the creatures interred within.
Masir stood transfixed, caught between fear and fascination. He took a step toward the sphere—and then another, and another still—until he reached the glass, his eyes peering inside. There, the six sarcophagi glowed with an almost divine brilliance—more alive than Masir cared to admit, their vital signs moving in faint but discernible synchronicity.
Must be a problem with the monitors. Have to speak to the lieutenant about that.
He moved over to the console, fumbling around with the unfamiliar interface for what seemed like forever, scrolling through one subsystem after another, trying to find the imaging program. To make things worse, his eyes constantly drifted back toward the window—a distraction that built upon itself, along with an unshakeable feeling that they were watching him.
God in heaven. How does Kellean stand it in here?
Wiping sweat from his forehead, Masir worked faster. Eventually, he stumbled across the imaging subsystem. His fingers slipped across the touch panels, taking him in several wrong directions before he finally settled into the calibration routine. Assuming that Kellean had knocked the settings out of alignment, he reached for the control to zero them out—but drew back in surprise when he saw that everything appeared nominal.
There had been no mistake.
What is this?
There was only one way for him to be certain. Switching over to a variable control interface, Masir engaged the imaging coils inside the sphere. A succession of loud thumps sounded off as they locked into place beneath each of the cryotubes, followed by a deep thrum of electromagnetic energy. Masir watched the console timer as the minutes ticked off, waiting just long enough to do a generalized scan—nowhere near the resolution Kellean had supposedly performed, but more than adequate for him to run a comparison.
He dumped the results into the memory buffer as soon as they were available, tapping his finger nervously as the image formed on the display. It started out as a blur, gradually emerging as layer upon layer filled in more detail—and a complete picture of a human body appeared.
Except it wasn’t human.
Masir’s jaw dropped open when he took in the magnitude of deformity. All the major organs seemed in place, but twisted into abnormal configurations—so much that the doctor doubted he would recognize anything if he had to open one of these people up. Even more shocking was the nervous system, which had developed far beyond any rational purpose or design. Thickened pathways spread like wild vines throughout the body—new growth entangled with the old, terminating at a brain that surged against the confines of its cranium.
Impossible, Masir thought, mouthing the word but unable to say it. Even in stasis, these people shouldn’t be alive.
Yet their vital signs defied his logic.
What are they?
Masir hurriedly clicked through each of the six survivors. Every one of them showed the same changes in physiology, to varying degrees. By far the most advanced state appeared in the one subject Kellean had identified—his name stamped in bold across the top of the display:
THANIS, MARTIN—COLONEL,
SOLAR EXPEDITIONARY FORCE
The Mons virus…
Mortal fear invaded Masir’s soul, even as he tried to deny it. There had been no record of the virus doing this kind of damage—but then no victim had been infected for this long, nor had any been dropped into stasis. If the disease had the ability to spread even at cryogenic temperatures, who could know what else it was capable of?
But the screens came back negative.
So did the biopsy reports. Taken together, there was only one possible explanation.
She must have altered the results.
“Hey, Doc.”
Masir jumped when he heard the voice behind him. Grabbing his chest, he swiveled around to find Eve Kellean standing behind him. Masir had no idea how long she had been there, but got the disturbing notion that it had been for some time.
“Lieutenant,” he blurted, heart pounding against his rib cage. “You have a singular talent for sneaking up on a man.”
“Sorry,” Kellean said. Her tone implied that she didn’t mean a word of it. “Can I help you with something?”
She cast a suspicious eye on the console behind him. Masir slid over to block her view.
She could not have missed that scan, he decided. She has to know.
“Just looking at a few things,” he stammered. “You weren’t here, so I decided to have a go for myself.”
Her eyes narrowed. “That’s probably not a good idea, Doc. The equipment can be tricky.”
“So I discovered.”
Kellean circled around Masir, suddenly anxious to get at the console. He quickly switched it back to standard mode and stepped aside. Kellean sat down at the console and blazed through a diagnostic, then looked in on the containment sphere—as if Masir might have damaged the cryotubes with his sheer ignorance.
“They’re fine,” he lied, “I assure you.”
Kellean turned a harsh glare on him. For one absurd moment, he believed that she might actually strike him.
“
If you don’t mind, I’d like to verify that.”
“Of course,” Masir replied, stepping aside. He stood by while Kellean pulled an envirosuit out of a nearby locker, observing her with veiled interest as she climbed into the bulky apparatus.
“I transferred my progress reports to sickbay,” she prodded. “You really should get on that. There’s a lot of information that needs your review.”
“Indeed there is,” the doctor said. “You’ve been busy, haven’t you?”
“There’s still a lot of work to do.” The lieutenant finished zipping up, then stood with hands on her hips—practically handling him toward the exit. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to get started.”
“Are you certain you wouldn’t want some help? I could assign some additional staff.”
“I can handle it.”
“I don’t mean to imply otherwise,” he told her, hardening a bit to see what might shake loose. “But you have logged a lot of hours here, Lieutenant. Sometimes when we work too hard, we make mistakes—do we not?”
Kellean shifted uncomfortably.
“Your reports,” he went on. “Are you certain you didn’t miss anything?”
“Positive.” She swallowed. “I verified everything.”
“That’s good,” Masir said, probing even further. “Because you know how vital our efforts are here. If there’s even the slightest chance that these things might contaminate our ship, the captain needs to know—and so do I.”
Kellean stayed mute, agitated.
“Is there nothing you would like to add, Lieutenant?”
Her breathing quickened. Masir had given her one last chance, and she refused to take it.
“Very well,” the doctor said, heading out of the lab. He maintained his composure only as long as it took to turn away. He was afraid to leave her alone in here, but more afraid to stay. Something about her was just wrong—and Masir needed help.
“Sir.”
He froze at her command, so close to making his escape. With one hand against the bulkhead, he gathered the scraps of his courage and looked back toward her.
“They’re not things. They’re better than that.”
Masir nodded, humoring her.
“I’ll return to see how you’re doing.”
Masir left. With nothing else to stop him, he darted across sickbay, past the empty beds and the flickering monitors and straight into his office. There, he closed the door and punched the intercom on the wall next to his desk. At first, he routed a call to the captain—but then hung up before Farina had a chance to answer. Are you really so sure? Masir thought, knowing that the full wrath of the ship’s master would probably land Kellean in serious trouble. She doesn’t deserve that—not until we know what really happened.
Instead, he called Nathan Straka.
He’ll know what to do. Nathan always does.
“Core,” came the answer.
Masir had never been so glad to hear another voice.
“Core, sickbay,” the doctor replied. “Commander, you had better get down here. We may have a situation.”
“What’s the matter, Doc?”
“Not over the ship’s comm. I’ll explain in person.”
“Can it wait? I really got my hands full right now.”
“It’s important.”
Straka sighed. “How soon?”
“Immediately.”
“All right,” the XO agreed. “Five minutes.”
Masir hung up. Grabbing a set of keys, he went back into sickbay and unlocked the dispensary cabinet. Methodically, he began to inventory each drug—if only to give himself something to do until Nathan arrived. After spending a lifetime in combat zones, patching up soldiers on the battlefield, waiting was still the hardest part.
Eve Kellean made sure he didn’t have to wait for long.
Masir caught her reflection in one of the diagnostic panels, her shape distorted into a wraithlike smear. He spun around, half-expecting her to remain that way—more ghost than human, like those abominations back in quarantine.
“Dammit, Lieutenant,” Masir blurted. “You must stop doing that.”
Eve Kellean leveled a hard stare at him, not saying a word. Still in the envirosuit, her helmet dangled loosely off the back of her neck. Devoid of emotion, she appeared more machine than human—like the jihadi warriors Masir had encountered during the war.
And every bit as dangerous.
“Eve?” the doctor asked. “What’s the matter?”
Kellean glanced around sickbay, apparently checking to make sure they were alone.
“I always liked you, Doc,” she said. “Too bad you couldn’t leave well enough alone.”
She stepped toward him. Masir took a step back.
“Eve,” he repeated, pleading this time. “What are you doing?”
A muffled scream tore through sickbay.
Nathan Straka stepped off the ladder into a deserted corridor, his own footsteps following him in echo as he made his way down to sickbay. Since the recovery operation, most of Almacantar’s crew—himself included, after his last visit—had assiduously avoided this section. Walking down that long, narrow tunnel was too much like the dreams that plagued him. It was the same each time he closed his eyes—a watcher in the darkness, invading the
abyssal spaces
throughout the ship, stealing her life and infusing its own. Even now, with walls and force fields dividing him from the quarantine, Nathan felt those things stirring him on some primal level: a memory of the Mons virus, spreading like particles of Martian dust.
Nathan had overheard the crew talking about it, in the wardroom and on the bridge—loud enough for the executive officer to hear, but quiet enough to escape the captain’s notice. Some of them had the dreams, like he did, while others didn’t remember what kept them awake nights. The whole crew seemed to be infected with a palpable dread, as if they waited on some unknown, inevitable arrival.
Nathan didn’t know how much longer they could go on like this before something really broke. The fear he had heard in Gregory Masir’s voice made him think they might be close to reaching that point, which made him pick up the pace as he approached sickbay.
When he reached the door, a strange anxiety overtook him. Nathan touched the wheel tentatively, an electric tingle guiding his hands as he opened it.
The door popped open with almost no effort at all.
Sickbay was completely silent. Nathan leaned in, but as far as he could tell the room was empty.
“Greg?” he called out.
Nobody answered him.
“Where are you?”
Again, nothing. Nathan stepped inside, his hand still on the door. Something definitely felt off—but then he hadn’t really felt right about this place since they hauled those bodies up from Olympus Mons.
“It’s Straka. Anybody home?”
This time, he heard a scuffle toward the back—disconnected words, a muffled cry, scraping sounds. The disturbance triggered his adrenaline, raising the flesh on the back of his neck.
“Doc!” he shouted, rushing into sickbay. With each step, the sounds he heard before grew louder—a single voice, now babbling, cries mounting into sobs. He still couldn’t track the source, overwhelmed by the insistent thrumming that leaked out of the lab, but kept tearing through until he neared Masir’s office.
Where he stopped dead, a broken vial lying at his feet.
Nathan crouched to pick it up. It was one of many vials scattered across the deck, forming a trail that led straight toward the dispensary. There, a thick red pool expanded around a pair of legs that jutted out from behind one of the beds.
Jesus Christ…
He stumbled backward, landing squarely on the floor. Instinct told him to get up and get the hell out of there—but Nathan didn’t budge. He simply couldn’t turn away, not before he knew. Rising to his feet, one step after another, he crossed the short distance between him and fate.
There, behind the bed, he found Gregory
Masir staring up at him. A ghastly smile had been carved into his cheeks, from a crescent slice that severed both sides of his mouth and splashed his entire face with blood. Crimson foam bubbled from the open orifice, hacked up with his last breath only moments ago. One arm lay draped across his chest, the sleeve and the skin beneath flayed from defensive wounds. Nathan couldn’t count the number of slashes. He could only gape at the result, which left gashes so deep across the doctor’s belly that his intestines poked out.
Nathan doubled over, choking on the eruption from his own stomach.
He forced it back down, bile burning the back of his throat. Panic squeezed his heart as each stroke of the knife played out in his imagination—Masir’s screams dying in a gurgle as he pleaded before the lights went out: For God’s sake, Nathan, where are you?
Forcing his eyes to stay open, Nathan intensified his focus—locking on any detail to occupy his mind, pounding his fists into the mattress. Blood on the deck kept leading him back to Masir, but also to a set of footprints—a gory trail that led away from the body and into the lab.
Where a murderer awaited.
He lurched after them.
Nathan slowed down at the entrance to the lab. He positioned himself just outside, inching closer to the entrance as his senses attuned themselves to every sound, every movement. A stranger to combat, he never knew how hyperkinetic reality could be—but for now, intellect overruled the urge to charge. Instead, he listened, trying to pick out the noises he had heard before and draw a line of attack.
Quiet prevailed, beneath the electric surge of the containment field.
Either he’s gone or he knows I’m here.
Nathan looked around for anything he could use as a weapon. In the end, he came back to his hands—clenched into fists that seemed worse than useless.
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