Kordaz silenced his train of thought as he saw somebody approaching the sick bay entrance, the sentries posted there letting them through. The woman, Evelyn. She walked alone, her expression devoid of emotion in a manner not unlike his own. She did not look at him, did not look at the man named Andaim in the tent. She walked with purpose and stopped between the two beds, looked at each in turn before her eyes finally settled upon Kordaz’s.
She smiled.
For a Veng’en, the baring of teeth was a sign of hostility. Although Kordaz knew that for humans the expression meant almost entirely the opposite, the blankness in Evelyn’s eyes told him all that he needed to know. There was malice there, cold and brutal.
‘You’re going to talk to me,’ she said.
Her voice was even, not loud, calm and composed. Kordaz experienced a tremor of unease but he showed no sign of it, managed to control the fluctuating colour of his skin as he lay in silence. He waited for her to go on.
‘My friend is in that tent,’ she said. ‘He will die soon, either by being completely infected by the Word or because we’ll have to kill him before he can spread it any further. So if he dies, I will have no further use for you.’ She turned to face Kordaz directly. ‘You either help me now or I will force you to tell me what you know.’
‘If I am to die then I have no need to speak of anything to you,’ Kordaz replied.
‘Speak to me,’ Evelyn went on, ‘and you shall have no need to suffer or to die. But know this: you will want to die within a few minutes if you refuse to help me.’
Kordaz let his expression hide the fear that swelled cold inside him. He felt his skin ripple with colour as he stared not at the woman but at the ceiling.
‘Then I will not suffer for long.’
Evelyn’s expression did not change, as blank and as cold as the metal walls of the sick bay.
‘First,’ she informed him, ‘I will of course have to justify your death. It is not our way to kill in cold blood, but if you were to be found to be infected by the Word…’
Evelyn let the sentence hang in the air between them as she slipped from one pocket of her flight suit a syringe and examined it.
‘What is it?’ Kordaz asked without looking at her.
‘Kyarl’s blood plasma,’ Evelyn replied. ‘We extracted it from his core, where the bots would have flooded to avoid the flames that burned the rest of his body. It helps us to study them, you see, to figure out how they work.’ She took a pace closer to him. ‘To help my friend we need to study the infection as it progresses inside somebody else, so that we don’t harm one of our own.’
Kordaz managed not to flinch, but his eyes were now fixed upon the syringe.
‘You wouldn’t do it,’ he said. ‘I saw you, all of you. You didn’t want Kyarl to die. You want to protect, not to kill.’
‘You’re not one of us,’ Evelyn smiled without warmth. ‘Now, you have a choice. Either you help us and tell us how you avoided infection, alone aboard this ship for so long. Or, instead, I’ll infect you right here and now and find out myself. What’s it going to be?’
Kordaz stared at Evelyn for a long beat and then he gritted his fearsome teeth and stared up at the ceiling instead.
‘So be it,’ Evelyn murmured.
She slipped the needle from its sheath and reached out for Kordaz’s arm, which was strapped to the bed by its wrist. Evelyn lowered the syringe slowly toward his leathery flesh and Kordaz felt a tiny prick of pain against his skin.
‘Stop,’ he growled.
Evelyn looked at him. Kordaz sighed. He had called her bluff and he had failed. He would be of no use to his people if he were riddled with the Legion: they would kill him themselves without question. Better to fight another day, and reveal just enough of what he knew to keep the woman called Evelyn satisfied.
‘What is your name?’ Evelyn asked.
‘Kordaz.’
‘How did you avoid being caught and infected by the Legion?’
‘The Infectors get into the body through the nasal passages, or the mouth, or even the ears,’ he snapped. ‘They’re not strong enough to infect through Veng’en skin, it’s too tough.’
‘So is human skin,’ Evelyn acknowledged. ‘Only the swarms of Hunters are big enough to bite.’
‘As soon as we realised that the ship was infected we donned respirators with filters that protected us from breathing them in.’
Evelyn waited as Kordaz fell silent.
‘That’s not all, is it?’ she said. ‘Don’t test me.’ She shoved the needle a little further in and Kordaz stiffened. ‘How did you end up here alone? And who is “
we
”?’
Kordaz cursed his mistaken revelation that he had not been alone.
‘We were a Veng’en boarding party,’ he replied. ‘We were one of several dozen vessels posted out here, beyond the perimeter of human endeavour, waiting for the ships fleeing your system. Whenever we saw one, we attacked it.’
‘Looters,’ Evelyn said, keeping the needle where it was. ‘You attacked refugee ships.’
‘Several,’ Kordaz confirmed. ‘We saw the Sylph out here and we attacked. They fought back only briefly before surrendering.’ Kordaz tightened his fists. ‘They did not tell us that they were a plague ship.’
Evelyn smiled grimly.
‘You got what you deserved. You’re little more than pirates. What happened next?’
‘We shut down the temperature controls,’ Kordaz explained. ‘When the Legion, as you call it, reached our world it thrived due to the hot temperatures. The interior of a Veng’en cruiser is much like our home planet, dense foliage. It lives and breathes as we do. Our greatest threat is fire, so we could not use excess heat as a weapon against the Legion should it get aboard our ships. We decided that the best defence against it aboard the Sylph was cold. We started at the Sylph’s bridge and the bow, shut down the environmental systems and worked our way back down the ship toward the engine bays. We were almost there when two of my team showed signs of being infected: maybe they got unlucky, I don’t know.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘They were shot and killed by my superiors,’ Kordaz replied. ‘Who then assumed that my entire team were likewise infected and opened fire on us. I alone escaped, and they abandoned me here aboard the ship.’
‘What happened to the human crew of the Sylph?’
‘Most were taken prisoner,’ Kordaz replied, ‘and the ship abandoned.’
‘There are survivors?’ she gasped.
‘We are not all complete barbarians, no matter what you may have been taught,’ Kordaz snarled back. ‘They surrendered and were imprisoned.’
Evelyn, the needle still in Kordaz’s arm, leaned closer to him.
‘Why did your superiors not destroy the Sylph before they left?’
‘I don’t know,’ Kordaz replied.
‘How did you avoid infection?’ she demanded. ‘Your species needs warmth. You cannot have survived aboard an unheated vessel for long.’
Kordaz gritted his teeth.
‘The cold got them to flee aft to the engine bays,’ he explained. ‘But I noticed something else. They avoided microwave transmitters around the ship, flowed around them like water around rocks. I knew that if I set up a series of transmitters somewhere in the ship and created a small field of microwaves they would not be able to enter. I created the field in the holds, close to the food supplies, and then sent the distress signal in the hope that any passing Veng’en ship would investigate.’
Evelyn nodded.
‘In the hope that they’d pick you up, right?’
‘I wasn’t infected,’ Kordaz snapped, ‘and I had found a way to protect myself, so I would have useful information and evidence to save myself from extermination. It was worth it, right up to the moment when you arrived. We thought that the Atlantia had been destroyed.’
‘Not by a long shot,’ Evelyn replied.
Slowly, she withdrew the needle from Kordaz’s arm and re–sheathed it.
‘They could have infected me already,’ he hissed.
‘They could,’ Evelyn agreed, ‘if there were any Infectors in the fluid. But it’s sugar water with a dash of water–based black ink. Totally harmless.’
Kordaz hissed at her in fury.
‘My solution was only temporary. It cannot save you from the Word once the Infectors are inside you, and the Hunters are too large for microwaves to have a rapid effect. Your friend is already dead and you’ll all be caught by the Legion eventually.’
‘We’ll be the judge of that,’ Evelyn uttered. ‘As for you, you’ll be staying here until we can figure out what to do with you.’
A tannoy burst into life in the sick bay.
‘Battle stations!’
Evelyn looked up at the tannoy in surprise as Lieutenant C’rairn burst into the sick bay, his features flushed with concern.
‘The Veng’en,’ he called to her. ‘They’re here!’
Kordaz looked up at Evelyn and as much as he could he attempted to mimic a human smile.
‘Looks like it’s not just your friend who is about to die,’ he growled.
***
Meyanna worked fast.
The thought of Andaim trapped aboard the Sylph, his brain slowly being hijacked by Infectors as a Veng’en warship bore down upon the stricken vessel was too horrific for her to bear. With so many of the ship’s best officers trapped aboard the Sylph, a fleet action against a powerful and well armed Veng’en warship was no action at all: the Atlantia would be crushed.
She held in her hands a pair of vials, each containing blood taken that morning from crew members. Meyanna hurried across to her centrifuge and opened the first of the vials inside a sealed observation chamber. Placing all of her instruments needed to test blood inside the chamber ensured that there could be no cross–contamination.
As she opened the vial she saw the name she had written on the label stuck to one side.
Cllr Dhalere Met’illan
Meyanna drained the blood into the centrifuge, sealed it and then began spinning the device up, separating the plasma while at the same time sending any Infectors present in the blood to the outside of the petri dish.
The Councillor’s role aboard the Atlantia was virtually a ceremonial one, especially after her superior, Hevel, had become infected many months before and almost taken the Atlantia for himself. Hevel’s presence aboard the Atlantia had been ordered by the Word shortly before the apocalypse, for reasons that now seemed abundantly clear: until his assignment political officers had rarely been seen upon military vessels.
The Word had in effect replaced government on the planet Ethera some seventy orbits before the outbreak. Prior to its elevation to a species capable of travelling beyond its own planet, mankind had been in what had sometimes seemed like a permanent state of turmoil. Although mechanical and digital revolutions had seen mankind climb to dizzying heights of technological achievement, many of those advances had been the result of wars, the development of ever more advanced weaponry trickling down into everyday life. Ethera, populated by four billion humans in over ninety distinct territories of many differing cultures and histories, was in a constant state of flux. Mistrust between governments, military stand–offs, historical grievances and other conflicts both cultural and physical stained the world right up until new forms of life had been discovered on other planets using telescopes capable of directly imaging extra–terrestrial worlds in orbit around other suns.
The revelations had sent shockwaves around Ethera and for the first time mankind had begun to genuinely reconsider its place in the universe.
It had been shortly afterward that first contact had been made with the Icay, a species of intelligent life that communicated by light waves and was, to all intents and purposes, invisible to humans. Resident in the Ethera system for centuries and silently observing mankind’s birth pangs, the Icay were able to shield Ethera from the vast number of species communicating across the galaxy. However, there was little that the Icay could do to prevent direct observation of other planets, and as soon as mankind made that cognitive leap in understanding that theirs was not the only world on which life existed, that there was indeed a bigger universe waiting to be explored, so the Icay gradually intervened.
But by that time humanity had already made the next great revolution in technology and developed the concept of the Word. Realising that human foibles to blame for mankind’s many wars, territorial or religious, the Word was created to make decisions based on the continuous input of information regarding the world around it. Essentially nothing more than an especially large quantum computer, the Word was plugged in to communications across Ethera, and to questions input into it could provide answers based on cold logic, devoid of the contamination of human bias. Thus were truces brokered between nations, grievances aired and resolved, new technologies discovered, solutions to hitherto impossible equations found and new physics revealed, and mankind’s journey to the stars and to other species’ homeworlds began.
For seventy years mankind prospered despite conflicts with the Veng’en and other warlike species who opposed the Icay’s interference in galactic evolution. The Icays, for their part, ensured that new species evolved quickly enough not to be conquered and enslaved, or indeed crushed out of existence, by more dominant species such as the Veng’en.
And then, finally, the Word had revealed itself as self–aware. It had been so for years, quietly evolving new technologies to conquer first mankind and then all other species that it encountered. Mankind, so recently introduced to the greater universe, had unleashed a force that could destroy it. As a great philosopher of Caneeron had once put it:
“Mankind could be magnificent, were it not for mankind.”
The Word’s Infectors started life inside a street drug known as Devlamine, and from there spread in utter silence from drug abusers into hospitals. Patients carried them home into their communities and from there across cities, countries and entire regions until some ninety per cent of all humans were unwittingly carrying the Infectors in their bloodstream. Then the Word had signalled its Infectors to replicate and control their hosts and the apocalypse began, mankind’s fall as rapid and brutal as any natural pandemic or plague.