Authors: Jasper Scott
Ferrel spent a moment adjusting his aim with a makeshift sight, and then there came a sound like a splash of water and breaking glass, accompanied by a blinding blue flash.
Kieran convulsed and colapsed to the ground.
“Kieran!” Jilly took up her med kit and ran. Ferrel wasn't far behind.
“I don't understand it!” he said. “EMP weapons don't affect living things!”
Jilly fell to the floor beside Kieran and ran a body scanner over him. “I told you there was a risk!”
Ferrel shot her a quick look. “It's not my fault! I had no idea
—
”
“Shut up! Just let me do my job.”
The scanner beeped and Jilly spent a moment studying the results.
“Well?” Ferrel asked.
Jilly shook her head. “Help me get him inside. I need to run some more tests.”
“Is he okay or not?!”
Jilly turned to him with a snarl. “He's in a coma you vacuous little shakra! So no, he's not okay!” Jilly grabbed Kieran's shoulders and jerked her chin to his feet. When Ferrel just blinked stupidly at her, she sighed and lifted Kieran by herself. “Grab my supplies,” she said and stormed past him, hefting Kieran in her arms like an overgrown child.
Chapter 41
H
alfway back to the ship, Kieran's eyelids fluttered open, and he looked up at Jilly.
His eyes were still red.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Kieran! You're okay!”
He shook his head. “My head's a little fuzzy, but yeah. I think so.”
“Can you stand?” Jilly set Kieran on his feet.
He swayed a little, then nodded. “Yes. What happened? I remember a bright blue flash, and then everything went black.”
“I don't know. I need to run some tests. You were unconscious for about a minute.”
“That's all?”
“Yes, but that could mean
—
”
“You're okay!” Ferrel came jogging up to them, with a medical bag slung over his shoulder, and a grin stretched accross his lips.
“We don't know that yet. I need to run some more tests to be sure,” Jilly said.
“Well, let's shivvy then,” Ferrel said, then ran past Kieran with a parting backslap.
As Kieran and Jilly set off toward the ship, they watched Ferrel leap onto the top of the hull, and Jilly looked askance at Kieran. “You think you still can?” she asked.
Kieran shrugged. “Only one way to find out.” He sprinted toward the ship, and leapt straight up
.
.
.
Landing easily on the topside of the hull. Jilly landed beside him a moment later, and he shook his head. “I don't think the EMP worked. If I can still do that
.
.
.
”
“Let's run the tests and see. It's possible that our abilities have less to do with the actual nanites than with what the nanites have done.”
As they jogged toward the dorsal hatch, the implications of that sank in and Kieran grimaced. In other words: whatever changes the virus had wrought might not be reversible, even if the virus were disabled.
* * *
Back in the cruiser's medbay Jilly took another blood sample from Kieran and loaded it into the holographic microscope. This time she brought up two side by side magnifications, one of the first sample, and one of the second, so they could observe any differences. The result was startling. The nanites in the new sample weren't moving, and in the old sample they were slowly shifting, their spindly arms waving in an unseen breeze. But more importantly, the nanites in the fresh sample were no longer being ignored by the white blood cells.
“Looks disabled to me,” Kieran said.
Jilly turned to him with a shadow of a smile. “Your immune system is responding.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means the virus will eventually be eliminated by your body. We won't have to remove the dead nanites. It also means that the nanites are at least partially organic themselves. It's some kind of bio or cybernetic technology.”
“So I'm cured,” Kieran said.
“Hopefully. We should wait and see how things progress. Ideally we should wait at least 24 hours before we make any assumptions.”
Ferrel frowned. “We can't wait 24 hours. Those things out there could find us by then. In fact, it's a miracle they haven't found us already.”
Jilly pursed her lips. “Well, obviously they've found this ship before. They couldn't get in then, why should they be able to now? I think we'll be safe in here for however long we need to stay.”
Ferrel considered that briefly, then nodded. “I guess so, but lets get the EMP inside at least, in case they find that and dismantle it.”
* * *
An hour later they had the EMP cannon inside the medbay, and Jilly ran a few more tests on Kieran just to be sure he was still okay. First she took another blood sample and compared it to the last. The number of nanites in his blood was steadily decreasing. But when Jilly tested his strength, eyesight, and telepathy, and they were all the same as before
—
his abilities weren't diminishing with the virus.
“I don't get it,” Kieran said. “The virus is disabled. It's being eliminated from my body as we speak. Why am I still the same freak of nature I was before?”
Jilly hesitated before answering. “I don't know. Maybe
.
.
.
maybe it takes time for your body to revert to its natural state.”
Kieran didn't respond to that. He could read the truth in Jilly's mind. Like him, she suspected the changes might be permanent.
“Well, so long as we're waiting to see if Kieran turns into a green monster,” Ferrel began, “how about we check the mess hall for some food? I haven't eaten in over a day, and I feel like I could eat my weight in masser steaks.”
“That sounds like a great idea, Ferrel,” Kieran replied.
The mess hall was a large, but also low-ceilinged room with row upon row of tables and chairs. The number of seats gave a clue to how many crew the ship could hold. Kieran estimated about 30 men and women, but that was if they all sat down to eat at the same time. More likely, the crew would take their meals in shifts.
Ferrel went straight to the nearest meal dispenser, while Jilly hopped over the counter between mess hall and kitchen to check out the food conservator. Ferrel had a plate stacked with three identical portions of chopped masser steak and mashed tubers with buttered flatbread by the time Jilly had finished scouring the conservator for ingredients. She was obviously planning to make something herself. Kieran felt his stomach growl with envy at the distant smell of Ferrel's oversized meal, and knew he wouldn't have the patience to follow Jilly's example. He walked over to the meal dispenser as Ferrel was leaving with his mountain of food and keyed in a selection of roast porkin with a syrupy awali fruit sauce on a thick bed of shangla noodles. When it came out of the dispenser, steaming with a fruity, meaty aroma, his mouth began to water, and his stomach growled again. On his way over to the table where Ferrel was shoveling food into his mouth, Kieran picked at his meal with his bare hands. He'd forgotten utensils, but as hungry as he was, he wasn't going to need them.
As Kieran was scraping the last of the noodles and awali fruit sauce from his plate and fisting it into his mouth, Jilly came and sat down beside him. Kieran spared a glance at her plate to see what she'd made for herself. Her plate was piled with sausages, strips of porkin, fried flatbread, and a mountain of yellow-orange gossik eggs.
Kieran arched an eyebrow at her. “You made that in the time it took us to eat?” Which was all of five minutes.
She shrugged as she stuffed a forkful of eggs into her mouth. Breathing steam, she fanned her mouth with one hand and replied, “I used the dispenser for the flatbread.”
Kieran nodded and pushed his chair out from the table. The roast porkin was a nice appetizer, but now it was time for the main course. He returned a few minutes later with another pile of food. This time, ground masser steak in a chunky vegetable sauce on a bed of chiskis rice. They ate in a protracted silence, until Ferrel finished his oversized meal and went back to the meal dispenser for more.
“Supposing we disable the virus,” Kieran began. “Where do we go from here? What's our next step?”
Jilly considered the question while she cut off a piece of sausage. “I don't know
.
.
.
.
Where can we go? You heard Ferrel's theory. The whole galaxy could be infected by now.”
Kieran shook his head. “I don't think so. With only twenty ships and a few weeks to spread the virus, I doubt they were able to hit all the outlying colonies in the outer systems. Those should still be safe. And if they are
.
.
.
”
“We have to warn them.”
“Yes. I'm sure they already know something, but we need to make sure they understand the magnitude of the threat. And if possible, to convince them to leave.”
Jilly turned to him. “Leave?”
Kieran nodded. “The colonies are all in charted space. We go there, and the creatures who spread this virus in the first place will eventually come to spread it there as well. We need to establish an uncharted colony. Somewhere far away and cut off, where the odds of finding it and infecting it are slim to none.”
Jilly's brow furrowed as she popped a forkful of sausage into her mouth. “You're talking about running away, but if we have a cure, we should stay to treat the infected people. Once we tell them how they can get better, they'll come to us by the thousands. We can teach others how to administer the EMP. We can still fix this.”
Kieran shook his head. “We can't. Not even if the cure works 100%. Because how do you then isolate those we've cured from those we haven't? They'll just become reinfected. And we have no way of knowing if the cure we've developed will work at all on the more advanced cases. There can't be many like us, still in the beginning stages of the virus.
“You saw the creature we encountered in the med center. It wasn't human anymore. Not even remotely. It dissolved right before our eyes, and later coalesced again. Just think about the changes in biology that must mean. They're a new species. And so far, the changes made to my own body haven't diminished. You and I both know what that means. We're stuck like this. The best we can hope for is to prevent further alterations to our physiology.”
Ferrel returned to the table, and Jilly sent him a quick look.
There was an awkward silence, and then Ferrel asked, “What?”
“What do you think?” Jilly asked.
“Hmmm? About what?”
“Do we stay here to treat the infected, or run and warn those whom the virus might not have reached yet?”
For a moment Ferrel was too absorbed in his food to give a reply. He picked up a wedge of fretalian flatbread with cheese oozing off it, took a giant, crunching bite, then said, “Let's sleep on it,” his voice muffled by the food.
* * *
That night they found individual rooms in the crew quarters, one beside the other. Kieran remembered the incident where he and Dimmi had awoken in the same room with neither of them able to remember what had happened, and promptly locked his door.
He took a few minutes to peel off his armor plates, then shuffled to the bunk bed that was pushed up against the far wall of his quarters and flopped down on the bottom bunk, still fully clothed. He just lay there, blinking up at the bottom of the top bunk, feeling his muscles aching with fatigue. Before long his eyeblinks became less regular, and his eyes opened less quickly. His breathing slowed, and soon he stopped blinking altogether.
His mind drifted off on lazy ripples of nonsense. He dreamed that he was a boy again, listening to his father tell bedtime stories. The stories became increasingly sinister, however, and his father began grinning stupidly in all the wrong places. Soon Kieran began to suspect the horrible truth: his father wasn't his father at all, but one of the gray-skinned monsters. He watched, frozen with fear, as he huddled on his bed, his father's features morphing before his eyes into a sunken-cheeked, wrinkled gray countenance with glowing red eyes, burning as bright as the coals in a fire.
Kieran looked over to his brother's bed, and saw that his brother had turned into a smaller version of the same. Both his father's and brother's mouths opened, revealing a gaping maws of glistening, needle-sharp teeth. They slowly crept toward him, and Kieran ducked beneath the covers with a terrified scream.