‘So, you found them.’
The voice leaped out at Kordaz and he whirled, the rifle in his grasp aimed at the woman who stood now in front of the pressure hatch. Kordaz kept the rifle aimed at her as he spoke, a small pistol held in her hand pointed right back at him.
‘I knew that it was you,’ he growled.
Councillor Dhalere’s exotic eyes slanted in a smile as she looked Kordaz up and down. ‘And what would you know of it? You’re not even a
civilised
species.’
Kordaz activated the plasma rifle, the magazine humming into life.
‘Your body temperature,’ he replied. ‘The Infectors increase it slightly and we
uncivilised
Veng’en can detect it. We can taste your sickness on the air.’
Dhalere raised one perfectly curved eyebrow as she smiled again.
‘Perhaps we have underestimated you,’ she purred. ‘But then again, perhaps we know you better than you know yourself.’
The rustling sound suddenly filled the generator room and Kordaz glimpsed from the corners of his eyes the lake of black Infectors flow like a river toward Dhalere. They veered around Kordaz as they flooded toward her, and she stood with the smile still fixed to her features as the black flood rushed upon her and climbed up her legs.
Kordaz kept his gaze fixed upon Dhalere and her pistol as her body was entombed by the bots, swarming over her as though she were some kind of mother to them.
‘You cannot win,’ Dhalere said to him, her white teeth bright against the surging black skin of bots covering everything but her mouth and eyes. They even flowed through her hair, causing it to ripple as though it were a mane of oily black snakes. ‘It is inevitable that you and the humans will fall, Kordaz.’
Kordaz could not grin like a human but he gave it his best shot as he pulled the trigger.
‘Not without a fight.’
The plasma round blasted from his rifle in a blaze of bright light that rocketed across the distance between them in the blink of an eye. Kordaz saw the shot impact the dense cloud of bots around Dhalere and a bright blast of orange embers burst like an exploding star as they were vaporised in their thousands by the shot.
A dense cloud of blue smoke cleared and Kordaz felt something cold slither inside him as he saw Dhalere still smiling at him, the bots filling the void left by his shot and the woman herself entirely protected beneath them.
‘Now, it’s my turn,’ she replied.
Kordaz leaped to one side as the councillor fired her pistol. The smaller plasma round skimmed his side and he roared in pain as he hurled himself onto the deck and rolled, aiming his rifle as he did so. Dhalere’s cloak of bots shimmered as it changed shape, the bulk of the bots remaining between him and the councillor. Kordaz shifted his aim up to Dhalere’s unprotected eyes.
And then he heard the groaning, right behind him.
Kordaz flipped over as the horde of infected crewmen loomed over him, their decaying flesh stinking in his nostrils and their agonised cries of pain filling his ears. Their hands reached out for his body as they shuffled en masse out of the darkness, their uniforms bearing the Sylph’s name, and he fired on instinct.
The rifle’s plasma blasts hollowed out the nearest man’s stomach in a sizzling blaze of light and hurled him backward into his companions. Kordaz kicked out at another and knocked his legs from beneath him before blasting his head from his shoulders in a flare of plasma light.
Kordaz scrambled to his feet and fired again as the stench of burning flesh filled the generator room, smashing a young woman’s arm clean off and sending her screaming to her knees. The decimated crew shuffling from the shadows retreated in panic and pain, melting bots falling from their wounded bodies and their faces twisted in agony as they moved despite their appalling injuries, their bodies controlled by the Infectors.
‘Help me.’
Kordaz heard Dhalere’s voice from behind him and whirled to see her face stricken with fear, her body trembling beneath the blanket of Infectors. Behind her and tumbling through the hatch were dozens of Marines with Bra’hiv at their head, all of their weapons pointing at him as they saw the smouldering remains of the Sylph’s crew at his feet.
Dhalere’s voice whimpered out again, her eyes now quivering with fear as she looked at Bra’hiv in terror.
‘Help me, he’s gone insane. He’s killing everyone! He’s infected!’
***
‘Communications status?’
Captain Idris Sansin glanced at his HandStat and knew that there were scarce moments before the Veng’en commander’s deadline expired.
‘The Veng’en jamming is modulating through multiple frequencies,’ Lael replied, ‘switching periodically. The computer is trying to predict the next frequency in line and develop a pattern recognition sequence that will break the signal but it’s taking time sir.’
‘Time is the one thing that we do not have,’ Idris snapped.
‘Five minutes,’ Mikhain reported. ‘The Veng’en are not manoeuvring into an attack position yet, sir.’
Idris looked at the tactical display that dominated the main viewing panel, overlaid so as to provide battle information as well as revealing what the enemy vessel was doing.
‘It’s only a matter of time,’ the captain replied. ‘They’ll have repaired the damage by now and won’t be so easily caught out again. We won’t be able to withstand a full bombardment from their cannons if they manage to corner us.’
‘We’re more manoeuvrable,’ Mikhain pointed out, ‘and their hull relies more on ray–shielding against plasma fire than ours, which has a physically tougher plating. If we can prevent them from hitting us full on, we might prevail.’
‘Not long enough to finish them,’ Idris said. ‘We can’t risk the lives of our civilians over this.’
Mikhain looked at the captain. ‘Are you suggesting that we abandon the Sylph?’
Idris drew a deep breath. ‘We have to choose between protecting over a thousand souls or risking them all for the sake of less than a hundred. That’s no choice at all.’
Mikhain glanced at the screen. ‘We could appeal for their mercy.’
‘It will not make any difference,’ the captain said. ‘They will destroy the Sylph regardless of any casualties. It’s how they have chosen to fight this war and as we started it, however unwittingly, there’s not much more that we can say to stop them.’
Mikhain’s features looked strained as he replied.
‘Sir, you said it yourself that as soon as they’re done with the Sylph they’ll pursue us across the damned galaxy if they have to.’
Idris nodded.
‘I’m aware of that, XO,’ he replied. ‘What is our best time to return to coordinates Delta–Four–Seven?’
Mikhain blinked in surprise as he looked down at his instruments. ‘An hour or so, but why would you want to go back there?’
‘We need to even the odds,’ Idris replied. ‘If we can’t face that cruiser in open battle then we need to use our smaller size and greater manoeuvrability to gain an advantage.’
Mikhain exhaled noisily.
‘What do you want to do about the fighter screen? We’ll have to bring them in before we can make any jump.’
‘Bring them in closer to the ship,’ Idris replied, ‘as subtly as you can. They’ll have to recover aboard damned fast.’
Mikhain nodded and hurried to his station as Idris checked the time once again and hurried away.
‘XO, you have the bridge. I’m going to see if Meyanna has anything we can offer Ty’ek to hold him off.’
*
Meyanna Sansin hurried across her laboratory, a vial of blood in her hands as she sat down behind a scanning microscope.
The blood was some of the last of Evelyn’s samples that she had remaining. Beside it, sitting on her workbench, was a sealed vial of Dhalere’s infected blood.
Meyanna’s plan was simple enough. She intended to extract bots from Dhalere’s sample and inject them into Evelyn’s blood to see whether happened was any different from when she had taken Infectors from their tiny supply in the magnetic chamber and run the same experiment. She already knew that most likely Evelyn’s white blood cells, those that fought off infections, would swamp and attack the bots in much the same way that they would attack foreign bacteria. The small size of the Infectors meant that they could in theory be overcome by immune cells and prevented from attaching themselves to major organs, thus preventing infection.
Meyanna settled into her seat and activated the microscope, carefully manipulating the controls as she focused in on Dhalere’s blood sample. Meyanna had inserted a small electrode into the sample that would ensure the bots entrapped within the blood would have a source of power. Sure enough, as she looked into the sample she saw the Infectors moving about, their tiny claws and motors scrambling for purchase in the thick blood.
She inserted a syringe into the sample and withdrew a couple of dozen Infectors from the blood, and then moved them across to Evelyn’s blood sample. She focused in on the sample and then she froze.
The blood already contained several live Infectors.
Meyanna zoomed in on them, saw them suspended in the blood. Most were enshrouded in Evelyn’s white blood cells, the immune response destroying the bots. She could see them struggling to move as their tiny components were shut down as they were starved of the electrical impulses provided by the electrodes.
Meyanna looked up at a display screen that showed Evelyn’s blood responding to the intruders, and almost immediately she saw a pattern that both she and the computers recognised:
anaemia–immuno–reponse
. As a convict wrongly imprisoned by the Word in an attempt to erase her from history, Evelyn had no medical records aboard the Atlantia. But the response of her immune system to the Infectors meant that she must, at some point in her life, had contracted a serious illness that made her dangerously anaemic.
Meyanna recalled that Evelyn had spent much of her childhood on Caneeron, an icy world in orbit around the gas giant Titas. Low exposure to sunlight could, in conjunction with an illness, have made her suffer anaemia to the extent that her immune response to any iron–consuming infection would be far greater than usual.
Meyanna felt excitement course through her veins. Most illnesses that caused anaemia and the associated blood–cell distortions were easily treatable, and a vaccination plan could be put into place within hours.
She had it. If an enhanced immuno–response to anaemia could be cultured from Evelyn’s blood and tested in the laboratory, then in theory a vaccine for infection was at hand. She stood up, but then she looked down at Evelyn’s blood sample again. There should not have been any Infectors in it, for Evelyn had already been screened completely. Whereas Dhalere’s blood had been kept in secure containment, Evelyn’s had not because she was immune to infection and so her blood required no special conditions other than those to keep it fresh and viable for tests.
Meyanna felt a chill ripple down her spine as she glanced at the sphere of Infectors in their magnetic chamber nearby, but the chamber was sealed and the sphere still in place.
And then she remembered.
Dhalere’s coughing.
Infectors are so small that they could evolve just like a real bacteria or virus.
Meyanna suddenly felt dizzy, her thought processes hazy as though she were looking at the world through a dream. She staggered sideways and slumped against a desk, fought to right herself as she stumbled across to the laboratory door and sealed it with numb fingers. Her hand drifted across to an alarm and she slammed her palm against it, saw the heads of her medical team in the ward outside turn to look at her through the sealed doors of the laboratory as she slowly sank to her knees beside them, her hands pressed against the glass.
She reached up with one hand and fished a light pen from her pocket. She activated it and managed to scrawl a single word on the glass before her eyes rolled up into their sockets and she lost consciousness.
*
‘Let me through!’
Captain Idris Sansin had to be restrained by two Marines as he stormed into the sick bay and saw his wife slumped against the doors of her laboratory.
‘You can’t go in there! She’s sealed the laboratory and quarantined herself!’
Idris fought his way past the Marines and hurried across the sick bay to the door, then dropped down onto his knees as he looked at his wife’s serene face. The side of her head was resting against the glass, her long black hair snaking down her back and her eyes closed. Idris could see the skin of her slender neck pulsing softly to the rhythm of her heart and he could see that she was breathing normally.
Before her, written backwards on the glass in glowing ink, was a single word.
‘What happened?’ he asked as he saw the reflections of the medical team watching him in the glass.
‘She sealed the doors and hit the alarm,’ said the nearest man. ‘She was testing the blood of Councillor Dhalere, and I’m pretty sure she’s been running tests on somebody else too.’
The captain nodded. Evelyn.
He got to his feet and looked past Meyanna to where she had been working at her bench, the microscope still running and a series of sealed dishes containing what looked like blood arrayed beneath it.
Idris glanced across at the sphere of captive nanobots, and saw them still imprisoned in their magnetic gaol.
Think, man!
He looked again at his wife and he knew that the only thing that could have happened was that she had been infected somehow, even though the captive Infectors were securely housed.
Dhalere was the carrier aboard the Atlantia and was now aboard the Sylph.
Meyanna had taken Dhalere’s blood that morning.
Evolved.
‘It’s airborne,’ the captain uttered to himself in amazement. ‘The Legion, it’s out inside the laboratory.’
‘That can’t be possible,’ the doctor said. ‘The Infectors cannot survive for long outside of a human host, we’ve known that for months.’
‘Dhalere was their host for months and we knew nothing about it,’ the captain replied. ‘They had the time and the reason to adapt just as any normal living organism would do. They’ve evolved to survive outside of a host for longer and Dhalere must have used that ability to somehow infect my wife before she left. It’s the only reason that Meyanna would have isolated herself in this way despite knowing that without treatment she would be doomed.’