“I want names, Lieutenant.”
“Those kinds of people don’t have names,” the lieutenant said sharply. “They just give orders—and nobody asks questions.”
Nathan stepped into the fray. “You’re talking about the Assembly.”
“Or someone close to them,” Kellean taunted. She seemed to enjoy having Nathan on a string. “My case officer looked plenty scared the one time I saw him. Now I’m starting to understand why. The whole thing has the smell of a real palace coup. I’m just sorry I got caught in the middle of it.”
Nathan turned livid. “Yeah,” he seethed, “that’s just too fucking bad.”
Kellean returned a caustic glare. “I needed the money,” she admitted, “and CSS dropped some serious jack to get me on this mission—but I never thought it would go down like this, Commander.”
“Neither did Masir.”
“I feel bad about the doc, okay? But I didn’t have a choice. The people I work for—if I fail, I might as well stick a gun to my head and pull the trigger.” She looked away, strained at having to justify herself. “It was either him or me.”
“Sounds like you did have a choice,” Nathan said, “and you made it.”
Kellean didn’t argue. Farina, meanwhile, kept the pressure on.
“Why did you kill him?”
The lieutenant’s eyes darted around, as if searching for a way out.
“WHY?”
“I caught him in the lab!” Kellean blurted, startled into a quick answer. “He was snooping around, okay? Asking too many weird questions, checking on my lab results.” After a tense breath, she added, “He must have figured out what I was doing.”
The fire of Nathan’s anger became a frozen block of dread. It dropped straight down into the pit of his stomach, immobilizing him for one endless second—after which it demanded action. In a whiplash motion, he pounced on Kellean and grabbed her by the shoulders.
“What did you do?”
She tried to wriggle away from him, but Nathan held fast.
“I had to protect them!” Kellean shouted. “Don’t you understand? Special Services wants all of them intact. I’m a dead woman if I don’t bring them back alive!”
“What did you do?”
“I falsified the scans so nobody would know!”
Nathan wanted desperately to avoid this, because part of him had always known. From the very first time he saw those bodies down in Olympus, he had known. From the death and misery that surrounded them in life, he had known. And from all the nightmares that plagued him since his return from Mars, he had known.
Looking back at Farina, he saw his own fear reflected in her face.
He whirled back toward Kellean.
“The Mons virus,” he said. “They’re infected, aren’t they?”
The lieutenant nodded.
“And the quarantine?”
“Intact,” Kellean said. “As far as I know, nothing got loose—but it doesn’t matter anymore. The process has already begun. It’s been going for some time.”
“What process?” Farina snapped. “What are you talking about?”
“The big thaw,” Kellean explained, with the hint of a twisted smile. “They’re all emerging from stasis.”
Outside the wardroom, Nathan closed the hatch and locked Kellean inside. Farina, meanwhile, launched herself at the nearest intercom and mashed the transmit button.
“Bridge, Captain,” she said. “Sound general quarters.”
Within seconds, alarm Klaxons blared throughout the ship. Crewmen spilled out into the corridor, pulling on uniforms and shouting as they scrambled for their duty stations, a stop-action frenzy underneath swirling emergency lights. Only the captain’s voice, steady and assured, reminded him of his own duty to remain calm—especially in front of the crew as they sped past.
“General quarters, aye,” came the reply from the tinny speaker, nervous and distant. “All decks reporting in, Skipper.”
“Acknowledged,” Farina said. “Clear all routes to sickbay and have engineering prepare to seal off those sections for decompression. I’ll also need teams to dismantle the quarantine and transport those cryotubes back to the hangar deck.”
“Aye, sir. Flight ops standing by.”
“That won’t be necessary,” the captain replied, emphasizing the point to Nathan. “We’re just taking out the trash. Alert the flight boss and have him ready to jettison.”
The watch officer on the other end couldn’t have sounded happier.
“Roger that, Skipper.”
“I’ll be up in a few minutes. Captain out.”
Nathan smiled grimly, but it was a smile nonetheless.
“So that’s it, then?”
“Good riddance,” Farina affirmed. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not stick around either. How soon can you have the crawler ready to take us out of orbit?”
“I’ve already got NavCon programmed on a high-consumption trajectory back home—if you don’t mind pushing the reactors a little.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“If I didn’t know better, Nathan, I’d swear you were hoping for this.”
“Absolutely not, Skipper. But it never hurts to be prepared.”
“You’d make a hell of a Boy Scout,” the captain said, a glint of admiration in her voice. “What’s our nearest launch window?”
“Six hours.”
Farina nodded. “Make it happen, Commander.”
“Aye, sir.”
“And take care of those sons of bitches in sickbay,” Farina ordered, joining the swell of traffic heading to the bridge. “I want them off my ship.”
Nathan saluted and ran in the other direction.
“Make a hole!” he shouted, slicing through the crowd until he reached the amidships deck ladder. He slid down two levels onto C-Deck, where he met with the engineering team that Farina had requested. Nathan motioned for them to follow, all of them marching into sickbay together. It looked different to him this time—less ominous, more of an enemy to be vanquished. Passing by the spot where Masir had met his end, he paused just long enough to remember—and to promise the doctor justice.
“Let’s go,” he told the men.
They stormed the lab. Each person knew exactly where to go, fanning out in different directions and working the support systems that kept the containment sphere operational. One pair of techs cracked open the heavy relays that supplied power to the force field, while another hacked into the crippled monitoring console. Nathan helped him unbolt the main interface, which he pulled back to expose a bundle of optic cables and thin-gauge wires. Most of them were blackened by fire, stray pulses of light escaping between thick clumps of melted plastic and soot.
“You gonna be able to take it off-line?” Nathan asked.
“I may be a genius, Commander, but I’m no miracle worker,” the tech replied. “There ain’t a hell of a lot to work with here.”
“Looks like we’ll have to get our hands dirty,” Nathan decided, heading over to the equipment locker. He yanked out a biohazard suit and started putting it on, strapping an oxygen bottle to his belt. “I’ll take manual control of life support from inside the sphere while you do what you can from here. Once engineering gives the word, I’ll start shutting it down.”
“Sounds good to me, sir.”
“Just make sure you’re ready to get out of here.”
“Way ahead of you, Commander.”
Nathan gave the man a reassuring nod, placing the helmet over his head. Breath fogging his faceplate, he flashed a thumbs-up when oxygen began to flow. Cool air evaporated the sweat against his skin, but it didn’t help much. Nathan’s heart pounded too hard, turning his blood into a cocktail of latent stims and adrenaline. Standing in front of the steel door that sealed off the containment sphere, he was all but jumping right out of his suit.
“Crack her open,” he said.
And pain shattered his synapses.
Nathan hit the floor, hands dig
ging at the sides of his head. Rolling across the deck, he smacked against the containment sphere, shaking loose his memories of the last time it had happened: the same agony, the same consuming need to make it stop—even if death was the only way out.
The fire inside his head abated an eternity of a second later, just enough to permit a semblance of rational thought. Nathan remembered the biometric implant in his neck, and the betaflex injections that kept it from paralyzing him completely. In spite of that, in the dismal recesses of his afflicted mind, Nathan realized it wouldn’t be long before the pain overwhelmed him completely.
He blinked the stinging water out of his eyes, his breaths a monotone encased in plastic. With only a tentative connection to his surroundings, he searched through that fog for the engineering crew. Grabbing hold of the containment sphere, he picked himself up and stumbled forward—each step bringing him closer to the monitoring console, the one place he could still remember.
And there Nathan found the crew, writhing on the deck like snakes.
Their pain a tangible entity, it contorted their faces into unrecognizable masks of suffering. Limbs kicking and pounding, their bodies jerked as if on live wires, their shrieks penetrating Nathan’s helmet in a cacophony of torture. The engineering crew was beyond reach—in the same throes of agony he had experienced in the computer core, but monstrously worse. And if it was happening here…
It’s happening all over the ship.
Nathan flung himself at the sphere window. Inside the cryotubes, the bodies sprang into full consciousness, their thought patterns lighting up the vital monitors. All the levels, running near flatline the last time he looked, now spiked in perfect synchronicity—the demon revealing itself because it no longer had any reason to hide.
Nathan staggered backward, fresh pain cleaving his skull. It metastasized throughout his body, shooting down the lengths of his extremities and flooding his torso. He tripped over the engineering tech and hit the floor, kicking wildly to push himself away. He somehow managed to roll over, regaining enough control over his arms to drag himself across the deck—though to where he had no idea. Nathan only knew he needed to get out of there, away from the sphere, up to the bridge, where he could warn the captain—
A hand clamped down on his leg.
Nathan screamed and flailed, stealing glimpses over his shoulder in between spasms, the lab a mass of confusion beyond the steam on his faceplate.
Until he saw the tech, and the face of terror.
He lunged at Nathan, his mouth gnashing open and shut, shredding his lips. Somewhere behind the man’s eyes lay a desperate plea, but Nathan could only summon disgust—enough to clear his head of pain and replace it with panic. He put a boot into the tech’s face, which imploded in a crunch of blood and cartilage. The man’s grip slackened, perhaps forever, but Nathan felt no remorse. His reasoning was vestigial. Only the imperative of survival remained.
On hands and knees, he crawled into sickbay.
Somewhere along the way, Nathan stood up. Legs wobbling beneath him, he lurched against one of the beds, then into the wall, then over a steel tray that crashed to the floor and scattered dozens of surgical instruments. The room spun. Nathan had no idea where he was going—or if there was even any point in escape. No matter where he went, he couldn’t outrun the implant that juiced his nervous system from within.
The implant…
He reached around his neck, clawing at his helmet with gloved hands. The catch finally snapped open and Nathan yanked the thing off, leaving it to dangle off the back of his suit as he fell to the floor and grabbed a scalpel.
Do it.
Nathan placed the blade against the vertebrae just below his skull. It nicked his skin, drawing a trickle of blood—and hesitation.
Go on. Pluck it out.
“It’s suicide,” he said to himself.
So what?
The blade sank deeper, seemingly guided by some unseen hand.
It’s the only way.
The voice in his head was not his own. Nathan felt it crawling around inside—an artificial thing forced on him, like the agony that racked his body. Spending the last of his free will, he made himself drop the scalpel.
“No it’s not.”
Now unable to walk, Nathan heaved forward. He smashed into the deck repeatedly, flopping around but barely cognizant of it. In that fugue, his thoughts drifted toward the dispensary—the rows and rows of vials and liquids, the medicines Masir administered, right next to the doctor’s office. Nathan held on to that memory, using it as a guide and a beacon, the promise of salvation if he could just keep moving a little longer.
Not far now…
He repeated the mantra, drawing a pittance of strength from it. The door to the dispensary finally loomed above him, its handle just out of reach. Nathan clambered for it, slipping every time he tried, while sweet unconsciousness tugged at him from below.
Please…not yet…
He grabbed hold.
Nathan hauled himself up, a load of deadweight. He tried the handle but it wouldn’t budge. Drawing back a fist, he smashed right through the thin layer of glass that separated him from the drugs. Pawing his way through the pharmaceuticals, he checked each label frantically—until he finally came across a black box filled with ampoules, which Masir had set aside. Nathan ignored the toxic warnings on the label. He only saw the one word, stamped in bold across the top.
BETAFLEX
Nathan ripped the box open. He didn’t know the dosage and didn’t care.
Plunging it into his neck, he drained the first ampoule.
A wave of nausea overcame him, making him double over. Where it retreated, numbness followed—an icy sensation that started at Nathan’s fingers and surged inward, wrapping him in an anesthetic cocoon. He slid to the floor again, clutching the box against his chest, not daring to let it go—because seconds later, when the paralysis passed, his implant started firing again.
Nathan grabbed another ampoule.
With each injection, the agony grew more distant. Nathan emptied more betaflex into his bloodstream, acid slowly eating away at his nerve endings until he felt next to nothing. Only then did he stop, in a profoundly disconnected state, the last ampoule goading him into one final injection.
But the implant was dead. His pain was gone.
And seeping in to replace it came the screams of the entire crew.
Nathan stumbled out of sickbay.
He climbed the ladder up to A-Deck, horror opening up above him. With each rung it grew louder—bestial howls, animal sounds, a frenzy of madness that assaulted Nathan’s senses as he tried to shake off the betaflex crash. Almacantar had come alive in her death throes, bleeding rage from every corner and projecting it onto her crew, the overflow raining down on him in sheets so thick that it felt like he was drowning. Nathan kept going, even as momentum and fear beat him back down, finally reaching the command level. There, he eased his head up through the hole, checking the corridor that led to the bridge.
Under a cascade of emergency lights, Nathan only saw hints of movement. Guttural cries echoed through the steel tunnel, the helter-skelter of footsteps cutting off with an abrupt shriek. Nathan took another tentative step into the open, dizziness clouding his perceptions, chemicals racking him with the shakes. Blinking into a hard focus, he peered into the shadows, trying to make substance out of suggestion.
Until his crew appeared, straight out of paranoid delusion.
They tore at each other and themselves, running back and forth without direction, smashing into bulkheads over and over again in some mad dance of the damned. Smeared with blood, they ripped at their uniforms—as if something inside wanted to burst out, to get release, a murderous extrusion that left them broken and rattling on the deck. One man wandered away from the rest, clumps of vitreous humor streaming from empty eye sockets, his hands covered in the gore of a self-inflicted wound. Moaning incoherently, he lurched straight toward Nathan—as if he could see, as if he had
purpose.
He clutched at Nathan before collapsing with a quiver.
Nathan kicked the man away, overcome with revulsion. When he looked back up, he saw that the others had seen him as well. They came like a horde of jackals, almost in unison, tripping over one another as they tried to get at him—forming a wall of bodies that stood between Nathan and the bridge.
And amid a chorus of screams, they called out to him.
“…help…please help…PLEASE—”
They fell on him.
Nathan struggled to keep his balance, knowing that if he went down, he wouldn’t get up again. He thrashed against their groping fingers, punching at anything that moved, suffocating under the heat of their bodies as he pushed his way through. They piled on, one after the other, threatening to overwhelm him with their numbers—but they weren’t human anymore, just automatons responding to the stimulus of panic and pain. They couldn’t coordinate their assault, much less defend themselves, which allowed Nathan to fight them off one at a time.
“GET OFF ME!” he roared.
Already depleted, they crumpled against his blows. Nathan pummeled them mercilessly, trying not to see their faces as he trudged past, grabbing one man by the collar and ramming his head into a nearby service pipe. The impact broke a steam vent loose, spraying the crowd behind Nathan with plumes of hot vapor and choking the narrow corridor with the smell of roasting meat. Nathan ducked to get out of the way, singeing one side of his face as he rolled away from the boiling white cloud, a collective wail rising from the tangle of arms and legs he left behind. As he looked back, Nathan watched his shipmates flail aimlessly through the mist—unable to muster the strength and reason to retreat, cooking themselves until they crumpled into twitching heaps on the deck.
Nathan ran.
As fast as he could go, past the point of exhaustion, he raced down the length of the corridor. He jumped over the dead and dying, knocking over the few shuffling apparitions that stepped into his path, letting nobody stand in his way. When he finally reached the bridge, he threw himself against the sealed hatch—constantly looking back as he fumbled with the lock, expecting an army of corpses to be following. His hands were practically useless, quaking so badly that they slipped off the wheel countless times as he attempted to turn it. Pounding against the hatch, he shouted until his throat was cracked and raw.
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