‘Fall back!’ Qayin yelled as he stuffed a bottle of wine down his fatigues and retreated.
He lifted his rifle and fired at Tyrone even as every Marine behind him did the same. A dozen plasma rounds hit Tyrone’s collapsing body and it vanished in a bright burst of flame and a shower of burning Hunters.
‘Evacuate the hold, now!’ Djimon bellowed.
The Marines whirled and sprinted for the exit as Qayin fired at the glistening black masses that seemed to emerge from nowhere aft of the hold, surging for’ard in pursuit of the humans.
‘Hold the line!’ Qayin shouted behind him. ‘Maintain your fire and let the civilians out first!’
Djimon and his men did not respond as they plunged among the civilians into an exit corridor. Qayin cursed as he turned and followed them into the long corridor away from the hold, civilians ahead of him carrying boxes and crates as they fled toward the landing bays. Qayin turned and slammed the pressure hatch shut, spinning the locking wheel before resuming his retreat.
Qayin had only seen the Word’s Legion twice: once from the safety of a Raython fighter’s cockpit when he and many other former convicts had earned their colours amid the battle against Tyraeus Forge and the Avenger, and once when he had seen his brother Hevel controlled and consumed by them, a seething mass of tiny devices mimicking the structure of a man like some grotesque parody. He recalled all too clearly the dense clouds of glossy black machines that had reached out from the Avenger’s hull and snatched Raythons in mid–flight, consuming them in seconds in fiery bursts of rabid destruction.
It would not take long for the temperature in the ship to drop again once the heating vents had been deactivated, but that might not be fast enough for them to avoid being chewed into atoms by the Legion.
‘Aft hold is breached, one man down,’ he called into his microphone. ‘Moving for’ard now.’
Bra’hiv’s reply was brusque.
‘Move faster!’
Behind him Qayin heard a strange, dull thump against the hatch that they had just sealed. He stopped and looked back down the corridor at the pressure hatch. For a moment nothing seemed to happen and he felt a glimmer of hope that the bots were too few in number to consume the door.
Then, as the Marines’ drumming boots faded away for’ard down the corridor, he heard a rustling sound. It rattled and tinkled, like somebody opening a hundred cans of food at once, and then the surface of the pressure hatch began to ripple as though it were made of water or were being melted down.
The hatch began to change colour, darkening as though a shadow were being cast upon it, and in an instant Qayin realised that it was not just being consumed, but that it was being converted into more new bots before his very eyes. The raw steel of the door was being torn apart, broken down and then rebuilt into new members of the Legion a million atoms at a time, the process generating heat so that faint whorls of blue smoke coiled from the surface of the door.
‘Damn.’
Qayin reached into his webbing and pulled out a full plasma magazine, then hurled it at the distant hatch. The magazine hit the hatch surface and promptly stuck in place. Qayin blinked in surprise as he realised that what looked like a solid surface no longer was solid at all. The magazine began to sink into the rippling hatch as a mass of Infector bots seethed through the surface and poured like oil onto the deck.
Qayin aimed his rifle at the magazine and fired. His first shot went high into the Legion, a billowing cloud of them vaporised into glowing red embers as though spat from a fire. He adjusted his aim and fired again.
The plasma round zipped down the corridor and hit the magazine and in an instant thirty plasma rounds ignited as one in a fearsome blaze of energy. The blast expanded outward and Qayin glimpsed the mass of bots surging through the hatch engulfed and turn red as they were incinerated by the tremendous heat. He ducked down and shielded his eyes as the dense cloud of bots was blasted apart and splattered in molten metal globules against the walls of the corridor around the hatch.
A cloud of blue smoke billowed toward Qayin and then dispersed, swirling in a thick miasma that blocked his view. He took a pace toward it and then he heard the sound of countless millions of bots swarming toward him, turning the corridor dark as they advanced.
Qayin turned and began sprinting down the corridor, his heavy boots slamming the deck with each stride. The fifty per cent weighted fatigues he wore meant that he could move faster, and with less effort, than he could ever have done under normal gravity.
He risked a glance over his shoulder and saw that he was outpacing the bots, their number still too few to pursue him for long. He keyed his microphone as he ran.
‘They’re coming forward,’ he snapped. ‘Ain’t gonna be long before they run us down. Time to abandon ship.’
Bra’hiv’s voice replied to him from the bridge.
‘We haven’t unloaded enough supplies yet. We need to find a way to hold them off.’
Qayin cursed under his breath as he burst through a pressure hatch.
‘Stand by! Vent decks C and D on my call!’
‘Roger that!’
Qayin turned and aimed his rifle down the corridor. Through the dim shadows he could see the seething mass of Infector bots advancing like a wave of oil along the deck, slick and glistening black, reaching out toward him. Slowly, the oily mass lifted off the surface of the deck, writhing toward him in like an inky, rippling arm.
Qayin stood his ground, his rifle held steady and pointed at the tip of the Legion’s reach as it closed in on him.
‘Stand by,’ Qayin murmured into his microphone, glancing at the open hatch beside him, his boot hooked behind it.
The tip of the Legion’s reach made it to the bulkhead, scant cubits from where Qayin stood.
He fired once, the blast searing through the Legion in a blaze of melted bots that fell like waterfalls of flame to the deck.
‘Now!’
A screeching sound echoed down the corridor from somewhere back in the holds as the decks were vented, ducts opening to allow the atmosphere within be vacuumed out into deep space. Almost immediately the writhing coil of the Legion was snatched away from Qayin and hauled toward the bitter cold of space. The bots closest to him dropped toward the deck as they were torn apart from each other and sucked away from him as a brutal, howling wind suddenly burst upon Qayin and wrenched him toward the open hatch. He yanked his boot and the hatch door slammed but he was too close and it pinned him in the bulkhead, the heavy metal crashing against his chest.
Brutal cold touched Qayin’s skin, and he looked down to see the Legion’s surviving bots clinging to the deck scant inches from his boot.
Qayin aimed down at the pool of bots and fired, the plasma blast smashing into them in a blaze of fiery light that was whipped away by the screaming gale. The fried bots fluttered away in glowing red streaks of light as Qayin squeezed his rifle through the hatch over his head and tossed it into the corridor behind him.
With a heave of effort he pushed the heavy hatch open an inch or two and hauled his body through the narrow gap before he jumped clear. The hatch slammed shut with a deafening crash behind him as he stumbled and collapsed to his knees, his chest heaving and his skin sheened with sweat.
His voice was laboured as he called into his microphone.
‘They’re cut off at the main stairwell. Hatches are sealed, evacuate the atmosphere from all aft decks now!’
***
‘Do it,’ Bra’hiv snapped at Lieutenant C’rairn.
Evelyn watched as the Marine manipulated the ship’s environmental controls, and alarms blasted warnings as he opened vents on the Sylph’s hull, allowing the oxygen to escape into the bitter vacuum of space.
Evelyn saw a schematic of the ship up on one wall of the bridge, its aft bulkheads flashing red as they were emptied of air, the temperature plunging to near absolute zero in a matter of seconds.
‘The masses are contracting,’
Lael’s voice sounded over the tannoy from the Atlantia.
‘They’re holding position wherever they can, only a few have been evacuated from the ship.’
‘What about Qayin?’ Evelyn pressed.
There was a long silence and then another voice replied over the tannoy.
‘The Great Qayin lives,’
the former convict rumbled.
‘Hatches are sealed, no thanks to Alpha Company. I’m making my way back to the landing bay.’
Evelyn saw Bra’hiv’s iron features crease as a smile fractured his thin lips.
‘Good work, I’ll meet you there.’
The general snapped off the communications link and looked across at Andaim. ‘It’ll hold them off for a while, but now they know we’re here the Legion will likely seek a way to get to us.’
Andaim nodded but did not say anything.
‘We need to get off this ship,’ Lieutenant C’rairn insisted. ‘Maybe we can find a way to dump the supplies in the hold and pick them up externally?’
‘Not a bad idea,’ Andaim admitted, ‘but the Legion could be tucked away anywhere, could have split off into smaller groups and hidden away in food supplies, anything. We have to assume that anyplace astern of the bridge deck is contaminated.’
‘It’s worse than that,’ Evelyn said as she turned to Bra’hiv. ‘Kyarl, the Marine. Was he showing any signs of insubordination before we came aboard?’
‘None that I noticed,’ the general replied. ‘He’s pretty much the model soldier, a good man.’
‘Then he must have been infected recently, either immediately before or after we boarded this ship. We need to find out how or by whom, because right now we all could be carriers.’
‘You’re saying that we can’t get back aboard the Atlantia?’ C’rairn asked.
‘Absolutely,’ she replied. ‘Right now the biggest risk to the Atlantia is probably us. If we’re carrying and we go back aboard, that’s the end of everything. The Legion will see its chance and multiply.’
‘But wouldn’t it have done that already?’ Andaim challenged. ‘You’ve always said that somebody else aboard the Atlantia is carrying the Word. How come they haven’t infected everybody already?’
‘Because it takes time for one person’s body to provide enough materials for the Legion to replicate,’ Evelyn replied. ‘They use the iron in human blood to build new bots, then the carrier infects somebody else. But with only one infected person aboard the Atlantia, infecting large numbers of the crew is impossible. They would have to pick their targets when they’re ready and infect slowly enough so that they don’t become anaemic and expose themselves.’
‘How come you know all of this?’ Andaim pressed.
‘Meyanna told me,’ Evelyn replied. ‘She’s learned a lot from the bots we captured on the Atlantia’s bridge all those months ago.’
Andaim thought for a moment.
‘We’ll need to scan every one of us again for infection,’ he said finally. ‘No exceptions, and then we need to talk to Kyarl and the Veng’en and find out who infected Kyarl and how the hell the Veng’en avoided being infected himself.’
‘It was the cold, wasn’t it?’ C’rairn asked. ‘Not enough bots to advance far without running out of power or freezing themselves. That’s why he shut down the ship’s systems?’
‘Maybe,’ Bra’hiv said as he prepared to leave for the landing bay. ‘But it doesn’t explain what happened to the crew and it doesn’t explain how the bots survived the cold until now. Somehow, they’ve evolved to hibernate or something until things warm up and then, bang! They’re back to life and attacking boarders.’ The general activated his plasma rifle and strode for the bridge exit. ‘Either way, nobody’s leaving this ship until we get some answers.’
As Bra’hiv left the bridge, Evelyn looked at Andaim. ‘So, what now?’
‘We’re stranded here,’ Andaim said, ‘until we can figure out what happened and get ourselves cleared of infection and back aboard the Atlantia. The Sylph is a plague ship and a ghost ship all rolled into one.’
‘We don’t have any X–Ray scanners,’ Evelyn said. ‘They’re all back aboard the Atlantia.’
‘We could have them sent over aboard a capsule,’ C’rairn suggested.
‘No time,’ Andaim pointed out. ‘We don’t know who else heard that distress signal, and this ship could potentially be over–run by the legion at any time. I say we use the microwave scanners the civilians brought aboard with them.’
Evelyn saw the faces of the Marines fall. All of them knew that, if infected, the microwave method would detect the infection by virtue of frying in situ any Infectors inside the body, causing excruciating pain and most likely death.
‘We won’t learn who infected us if we’re fried,’ Evelyn pointed out.
‘We don’t have time for niceties,’ Andaim snapped. ‘We amplify the microwave transmitter signal to match the Infector’s internal resonance. Meyanna has the frequencies, right? Then we zap everybody, same with the supplies in the for’ard holds if there’s anything of use there, and then get the hell off the ship.’
‘Why don’t we just zap the Infector’s too?’ C’rairn asked. ‘Build a microwave gun and blast them away?’
‘Hard to get close,’ Andaim replied. ‘The Legion is not stupid. They’ll scatter on detection of microwave beams.’
‘True,’ C’rairn said, ‘but they can’t escape from Kyarl’s body, can they?’
Evelyn stared at the lieutenant as she realised what he was suggesting.
‘You want to torture him?’ she gasped.
‘He’s already dead, technically,’ C’rairn said. ‘The Legion is inside him and it knows who infected him. I say let’s find out.’
‘That could kill Kyarl!’ Evelyn protested.
‘And he could have killed us!’
Andaim turned as Dhalere appeared in the bridge doorway. ‘The Veng’en is stable,’ she reported. ‘The doctors say it will make a full recovery.’
‘What about Kyarl?’ Evelyn asked.
Dhalere appeared confused.
‘I’m not sure,’ she replied. ‘He has fallen into some kind of coma and is not responding to the drugs administered by the doctors.’
‘The Word,’ Evelyn replied instinctively, ‘it’s anticipated what we’re thinking and is trying to prevent Kyarl from being able to speak.’