Idris looked at Meyanna and then at the dishes beneath the microscope.
‘How did she know though?’ he asked the doctor. ‘How did she figure it out?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’re a damned doctor!’ Idris roared at him.
‘Yes,’ the doctor replied. ‘But I am not a detective. Your wife was clearly overcome before she could share whatever she had discovered, and we cannot go in there without ourselves being infected. There is only one way to resolve this. We will have to cleanse the entire laboratory with microwaves.’
The captain’s jaw tightened but he remained silent.
‘Your wife will not survive that process, if the Infectors have infiltrated her brain stem.’
‘I’m aware of that, doctor.’
A tannoy clicked and Mikhain’s voice echoed through the sick bay.
‘Captain to the bridge, immediately. The Veng’en are charging their weapons and hailing us. Our time’s up.’
Idris looked at the tannoy vacantly as though hoping that somebody else would answer for him.
‘We have no time left, captain,’ the doctor said. ‘We must act now.’
***
Evelyn stared in horror at Dhalere’s trembling form. Her arms were outstretched by her sides, but that was the only thing that was visibly human about her. From her feet to her head was a roiling mass of black Infectors shimmering in the red light, only her eyes and lips visible.
The Marines held defensive positions around the hatch as Bra’hiv snapped at Kordaz.
‘Call them off, now!’
The Veng’en soldier sneered at the general, his weapon pointed at Dhalere.
‘It is your councillor who is infected,’ he shot back. ‘She followed me down here and now she’s controlling the Infectors.’
Qayin looked from one to the other and then shrugged. ‘Let’s just kill ‘em both and be done with it.’
‘How come they haven’t infected you, Kordaz?’ Evelyn challenged the Veng’en.
‘Because I am immune to them,’ Kordaz replied. ‘Veng’en saliva and blood destroys the Infectors before they can reach major organs.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Evelyn asked.
‘Veng’en do not bow to threats,’ Kordaz snarled back. ‘Like you, the Infectors cannot harm me.’
‘I can,’ Bra’hiv growled, the Marines’ weapons now all pointed at Kordaz. ‘Either you lower the weapon or we’ll blow you to hell.’
‘She is armed!’ Kordaz roared.
Evelyn looked at Dhalere but her hands were empty and crawling with Infectors, the councillor’s eyes welling with tears.
‘Get… them… off… me..!’ she pleaded.
Evelyn glanced at Kordaz one more time and then she turned to Bra’hiv. ‘Cover me.’
‘What the hell are you going to do?’ Bra’hiv uttered.
Evelyn lowered her pistol and holstered it as she turned to Dhalere. Loathing swelled in a nauseous ball inside her stomach as she looked at the seething mass of Infectors swarming across the councillor’s trembling body.
Then, slowly, she paced toward Dhalere.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Qayin hissed.
Evelyn kept her eyes fixed upon Dhalere’s as she walked one slow pace after another toward the mass of Infectors, their little metallic bodies whispering as though alive as they swarmed. Like grains of black sand running both up and down like a fluid, the Infectors writhed and coiled as Evelyn approached, seething back and forth as though blown by turbulent winds.
As the Marines watched in fascinated awe Evelyn approached to within arms’ reach of Dhalere’s petrified body. Evelyn, her heart racing in her chest, mastered her revulsion and reached out a hand, pushed it toward the black sea of nanobots, and with a rush of motion the black morass parted and swarmed away from her.
Evelyn heard gasps of disbelief as the Infectors flooded away from Evelyn’s touch, her hands running across Dhalere’s clothes and forcing the Infectors away like a light sweeping through the darkness and banishing it.
‘What the hell?’ Bra’hiv uttered in amazement.
Dhalere gasped, her eyes wide as the Infectors swarmed away from Evelyn and slunk back into the darkened shadows of the generator room. Evelyn watched them flee and then she looked at Dhalere. The councillor stared wide–eyed at Evelyn and then pointed over her shoulder at Kordaz.
‘He killed the crew of the Sylph,’ she wailed. ‘He has them locked down here.’
Bra’hiv looked around him at the bodies littering the deck.
‘They’re all infected,’ Kordaz snapped back, and then looked at Evelyn. ‘Ask yourself, how could I have infected your friend Andaim while I was strapped to a gurney?’
Evelyn looked from Kordaz to Dhalere, but none of the Marines were paying any attention to the two captives. Instead, they were looking at her.
‘How the hell did you do that?’ Djimon asked.
Several of the Marines were looking at her with some suspicion, as though it were her they needed to fear.
‘I’m immune to the Infectors,’ she replied. ‘I don’t know why. The captain’s wife is studying my blood to try to figure out how it works, so that we can all be vaccinated against them.’
Qayin blinked, his bioluminescent tattoos rippling with light. ‘You’ve been immune all this time and you didn’t think to tell anybody?’
‘I knew that there was a carrier aboard,’ Evelyn replied. ‘I knew that if everybody was aware that I was immune then I would become a target for that carrier, a threat to the existence of the Legion inside their body. I couldn’t afford to lose the opportunity to pass on my immunity.’
Qayin looked at Evelyn and then at Dhalere, and his shrewd mind put the last pieces of the puzzle together.
‘Kordaz hasn’t been aboard the Atlantia yet,’ he growled.
Qayin switched his aim to Dhalere.
Evelyn whirled and shouted. ‘Don’t shoot!’
Kordaz dropped onto one knee as he aimed at Dhalere, but the councillor hurled herself across the generator room as she pulled her pistol from where she had concealed it beneath her clothes and aimed at Kordaz.
The two weapons fired simultaneously and the plasma blasts zipped past each other in the dull red light. Kordaz rolled to one side as the Councillor’s plasma shot burst at his feet and showered him with molten plasma. Evelyn saw Dhalere slam into the metal wall of a nearby generator as Kordaz’s shot burst against the wall behind where she had been stood only moments before. The Councillor vanished into the shadows.
‘Don’t shoot!’ Evelyn yelled again.
Djimon’s Marines tracked Kordaz with their rifles.
Kordaz scrambled for cover as Evelyn ran to shield him with her body, just as the first shot caught the Veng’en high on his thigh in a burst of fiery white light. The Veng’en roared in agony as Evelyn hurled herself down alongside him.
‘Don’t shoot, damn it!’ she screamed. ‘He’s not infected!’
‘He shot the Sylph’s crew!’ Djimon roared back at her.
Bra’hiv raised his clenched fist and the Marines held their positions and fell silent as the general called out.
‘Councillor, come out with your hands up! We can help you!’
A chuckle erupted from the darkness and Dhalere’s voice called back.
‘It’s already too late for you and your people, general,’ she said. ‘You’ll never make it back now.’
‘Evelyn will clear us a path,’ Bra’hiv replied.
More chuckles, cruel this time. ‘Evelyn and Kordaz are immune only to the Infectors. There are others here. Many others.’
‘Damn it,’ Qayin growled from where he crouched near the hatch, ‘somebody scan for other heat sources down here!’
‘We don’t want to leave you Dhalere,’ Evelyn tried again. ‘This isn’t what you want!’
‘How would you know, Evelyn?’ came the response. ‘Maybe you’d enjoy life among the Legion. Why don’t you ask some of your friends?’
Evelyn looked up from where she was shielding Kordaz and saw figures shuffling into view. The crew of the Sylph groaned, wept and whimpered in unspeakable pain and suffering as they limped in a tight knot out of the shadows toward the Marines. Dhalere was concealed among them, the Sylph’s crew a grotesque human shield.
‘Do you like what it’s done to them?’ Dhalere shouted.
The councillor fired at the Marines from behind the miserably shuffling bodies, the shot from her pistol hitting a Marine straight in the face and blasting his skull into a billion flaming fragments.
‘Take her down!’ Bra’hiv yelled.
The Marines did not have time to fire before C’rairn’s panicked voice called out. ‘Don’t fire!’
‘What?’ Qayin shouted.
‘We’re surrounded!’ C’rairn shouted, his gaze fixed to a scanner in his hands.
Evelyn looked up and saw the ceiling above them filled with a swarm of hunters rushing forth in a silent morass of black. The Marines scattered as the hunters plunged down like a waterfall upon one of the troops.
The young Marine screamed and dropped his rifle as his hands reached up to protect his face, but they never reached it as his scream was silenced in an instant. The torrent of Hunters splashed across his skin and devoured it upon contact, his youthful face collapsing and his skull folding in upon itself as it was consumed as though by toxic acid. His hair fell in a cloud as his legs collapsed beneath him and he sank to his knees, his hands vanishing and his arms dropping off at the shoulders as they were chewed through. His crumpled legs vanished into a sea of hunters flooding onto the deck and even his plasma rifle sank into the churning flood of bots.
Evelyn drew her pistol and fired at the plasma rifle’s magazine.
The second shot blasted the magazine, which exploded in a fearsome blaze of light that shattered the swarm of hunters and melted them in their thousands even as more came tumbling through the generator room from behind Dhalere. The flood swamped the blazing pool of plasma and enveloped it.
‘Fall back! Flame throwers!’ Bra’hiv yelled.
The Marines opened fire with flames of liquid fire that drenched the onrushing hunters in writhing coils of burning fuel, melting them in their thousands.
‘Watch your backs!’
A Marine screamed as one of the Sylph’s infected crewmen grasped him with bony arms and bit deeply into his neck, Infectors swarming like black blood into the wound. Qayin fired and blasted the Marine and his infected assailant, their heads fusing in a mass of cauterised flesh and bone as they collapsed into a heap.
Evelyn aimed at Dhalere and fired twice.
The first shot killed a young female Sylph crew member, setting fire to her hair as she collapsed and sending her wildly thrashing corpse flying sideways into another infected crewman. The second shot hit Dhalere high in the chest beneath her arms as she fired indiscriminately into the Marines.
The blast spun her and the pistol fell from her grasp as she collapsed onto the deck, her scream of agony piercing even above the din of gunfire as the Marines finally regained the offensive and blasted the last members of the Sylph’s crew and relieved them of their suffering.
The generator room fell silent, only the hiss and stench of cooked flesh filling the air as Evelyn looked across at Dhalere. The councillor’s beautiful features were twisted with horror and her dark eyes welled with tears as she screeched at Evelyn, for a few moments back in control of her own voice.
‘Please, kill me!’
Dhalere’s face folded in upon itself in pain as she doubled over and then suddenly her screams were silenced. The councillor sat upright again, her chest smouldering but rapidly filling up with Infectors that plugged the hideous wound. Dhalere’s tortured face relaxed as the Infectors stimulated her brain to block the pain from her wound, and she climbed to her feet, her eyes glowing a faint red through the hazy smoke as she raised her arms to her side and screeched with hellish joy.
‘Kill them! Kill them all!’
Above the hiss of burning corpses a rush of what sounded like water echoed through the generator room, and Evelyn felt terror crawl like lice on her skin as she saw patches of light emerge from the shadows like newborn stars. Her brain recalibrated itself to the motion as she realised that the depths of the generator room were not in darkness at all: the ceiling lights were merely obscured by countless millions of Hunters. As they moved, so shafts of light pierced the gloom and illuminated them rushing forth like black rivers.
‘Hunters!’ Bra’hiv yelled. ‘Fall back!’
***
Evelyn grabbed Kordaz as the entire rear of the generator room shifted toward them as though a tsunami of black gravel was plunging into motion. The Veng’en staggered to his feet with a tight growl, one clawed hand grasping his injured thigh as he tried to make it to the hatchway.
‘Covering fire!’ Lieutenant C’rairn bellowed. ‘Get those flamethrowers running now!’
The Marines plunged in retreat through the hatchway as Evelyn dragged Kordaz forward, the shifting morass of hunters flooding toward them. The Marines with the flamethrowers stepped forward, blasting the sea of black bots with fluid that burned with bright blue and yellow flames. Evelyn saw the flood brought up short before the searing heat as though by magic.
‘Take Dhalere down!’ Bra’hiv yelled.
A hail of plasma fire erupted into the hunters from the Marines holding their position around the hatch, the blasts blazing past Evelyn and Kordaz and smashing into the hunters to explode in bright fireballs of orange embers.
Evelyn, one arm around Kordaz’s waist, aimed at Dhalere and fired.
In the last moments before the muzzle flash from her pistol, Evelyn saw Dhalere’s face contort and a flood of Infectors pour from her mouth and nose in a black stream like rats fleeing a sinking ship. The Councillor’s eyes were filled once again with horror, her features strained with disgust and confusion as her faculties returned to her once more in that last, terrifying instant.
The shot hit the councillor dead in the face, smashing her skull into fragments even as the hunters flooded past her. Her head flicked to one side, her lustrous black hair flailing, and then the Infectors flooded in and filled in her features. Her beautiful face became a hideous distortion, a charicature of the human being that had once belonged there, eyes red and teeth steel–grey.