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With the wolf’s demand echoing in our ears, Delight and I hurried into the storeroom. I wondered how she’d made it through the door without being zapped, and she answered the question before I could ask it.
“I accessed the system,” she said. “You and Tens aren’t the only ones who can hack it.”
Well, that made sense. We both ran a scan to make sure the ducts were clear, and then crawled through. Neither of us bothered to pull the vent cover back into place; we were no longer trying to go in undetected. That ship had well and truly flown.
Instead, we were aiming for speed. We had to reach the lab where the serum for Melari’s virus had been stored—and we had to hope they hadn’t released the fucking thing, before they’d developed the cure. In all the stars, surely no one would have been that stupid.
But I remembered Andreus Corovan shooting me in the gut to prove a point he’d already made, scientists taking on werewolf DNA out of sheer desperation... and I couldn’t be sure.
“I need your head in this world, Cutter. We can deal with Corovan, later.”
“Just stay the fuck out of my head, and we’ll get along fine.”
Delight snorted.
“Kiddo, you don’t get along fine with anyone,” she said, “and that includes Mack, which makes the way he looks at you an utter fucking mystery.”
The way Mack looked at me? Man, if the guy ever looked at me as more than a serious case of the shits, I’d be surprised. For some reason that thought made Delight laugh, and I decided I didn’t want to know why.
“What do you need to know?” I asked, changing the subject.
“How about you map me a path to the lowest lab?”
I mapped, and we crawled, and occasionally we stopped so I could log into the security feeds and see exactly what was prowling the corridors ahead.
“We shoulda asked them what other experiments Corovan was funding,” I said, watching as something that might have been a woman skittered along the ceiling below the duct. That it could sense us was obvious, and I was worried about what it would do when it came to the next vent, until it dropped into the center of a small group of plague carriers.
The ensuing fight was not pretty.
“How much of her humanity do you think she had left?” Delight asked, as we watched her rip through the plaguers, sinking six-inch fangs into necks and shoulders, as they stopped moaning long enough to scream.
We also watched them tumble, like puppets with their strings cut, seconds after each bite.
“Point to note,” Delight said, and I nodded, my mouth suddenly dry.
“Second outlet to the right,” I said, forcing my mind to focus on where we needed to be going, “and we’d better hurry, another one of those security bots is heading our way.”
It was only fair. The bots were automated, doubling as cleaning and security, and tasked with clearing any large blockages out of the ventilation shafts. I guess we registered as a pretty huge blockage, so it was only logical they were coming after us.
It still felt personal, though.
“Will you stop your bitching and move your ass?”
I moved. I wanted to keep bitching, too, but I had to move fast, and I couldn’t do both at once. I figured I’d save the bitching until I hit the lab floor. That was the plan, anyway.
First, we had to deal with the half dozen mutated plaguers waiting in the middle of the lab proper.
“Guessing this is the wrong lab,” I said, to which Delight replied, “You’re not helping,” as she fired her Glazer to take out the first two coming towards us.
I rapid-fired in her wake, glad these things were conforming to human norms, and not getting up after a shot to the head.
“What gave it away?” Delight asked, and I spotlighted the diagrams on the wall, each one detailing a different path of the mutation.
Spider-woman in the corridor hadn’t been alone, and I wondered what had happened to not only set her free, but to see the men and women working her transformation infected with the same mutagenic process.
“You know this can’t have happened overnight,” I said, thinking of the scenes I’d managed to hack while preparing for the mission. “Why didn’t I see any signs of this?”
“That’s the million-credit question, isn’t it?” Delight quipped back. “You need to go back through the feed and find out when this happened... or maybe find whatever loop was inserted to make you see a normal lab when you last checked. It was either one or the other.”
We watched a door open across the lab from us, and waited. If there was even one scientist left in any state to explain what the fuck was going on, we didn’t want to shoot him before he got a chance to tell us what in all the stars had gone wrong, and when.
I wanted to know the when. The when was very important.
Our hopes that the newest arrival was going to be in any way helpful were dashed, as he swung his head towards us, and sprinted in our direction, two extra sets of arms and an extra set of legs bursting out from under his coat. I watched his face contort, his jaw-line altering to accommodate fangs, and his eyes stretching wider than any human eye socket would allow as they became an inky-black, multi-faceted mass. He didn’t look like he was coming over to say ‘hi’.
I started firing and I didn’t stop until the shape had stopped moving, and I couldn’t work out where its head should have been. That, and Delight wrapped her hand over mine, and her touch jolted me out of the nightmare fear that had engulfed me.
“It’s dead,” she said. “You’ve killed it. Geez, remind me never to take you to an arach negotiation.”
“Arach?”
“Never you mind.” She glanced at the fallen mass that had been a living, breathing beast only seconds before. “I need to know where to go next—and Tens needs you to give him access to these computers so he can strip-mine the data in here, while we keep looking. The more my people know coming in, the better.”
I couldn’t take my eyes of the critter on the floor, the way its ten limbs sprawled awkwardly in death, and the way its flesh had turned a dull, light-eating black. I was breathing hard, like I’d run for miles, and my hands were shaking. I was still pointing the Glazer at the fallen heap, for the stars’ sake.
“Hey!” Delight said, her whisper sharp and clear, as she clipped me upside the head with the flat of her hand. “Get your head in the game! Computer. Tens. Access. Now!”
I looked for a terminal, stepping gingerly around the monsters on the floor, wading through the sticky strands that formed a loose layer over the tiles, and wondering how far the vibrations carried, and to who. Delight moved with me, her gun hand following the movement of her eyes, as she searched the cobwebs and the shadowed corners for any sign of movement.
Knowing she was as deadly as anyone else I’d worked with, I checked under the desk of the nearest terminal. It was clear, so I sat, and tapped the machine to life. Getting in was easier than I could have hoped. Whatever had happened to the scientists hadn’t given them time to log out of the system, which meant it was wide open for access.
Tens was hunting through the databases in seconds.
“I’m only seeing titles, and I already want to burn this place to the ground,” he said. “Now, get moving. Mack’s keeping things calm on station, but I don’t know for how much longer.”
“No one leaves!” Delight’s voice cut through our communications like a knife, and I could imagine Tens rolling his eyes.
“Already done, sweetheart,” he said. “We’ve locked down the ships in dock, and broadcast the idents of any who tried to leave early. They’re already on their way back to the station. Still, I’ll be glad when those cruisers arrive. I’m not sure we’ve convinced everyone that standing by while you come up with a cure is a good idea.”
“Yeah. Thanks for that.” Delight cut the comms, and tracked across the lab.
I followed, jumping at every shift in the webs, or change in lighting. We stopped beside the door leading out into another corridor.
“Still think it’s the fastest way to the next lab?” she asked, and I went back into my head to check the security footage. For a miracle, the corridor outside the lab was empty. I tracked it up through the cameras, surprised when it was empty right up to the elevators. It was on the next floor that we were going to have a problem.
I sent Delight the relevant footage, and let her mull it over. I had sent her the alternative, before she’d had time to ask.
“Are you sure?”
“Unless you got any more of these”—I waved my hand at the corpses behind us—“I think it would be safest.”
...which was how we ended up riding to the next level on top of the elevator, and scrambling into the ducts above the corridor filled with vacant-eyed plaguers, when it stopped.
“Are you sure this is safe?” Delight wanted to know, but she was already leading the way forward, as though just asking the question was enough to make it so.
And don’t I just wish that was the case.
We met the first security drone five feet in, where there wasn’t any space to turn around, and just as the plaguers below us started to stir. They might not have been able to see us, but they could sure as shit sense where we were. I took a peek at them through the nearest camera, as Delight fired six fast shots into the drone and stopped it before it could reach us.
“Tell me it’s clear down there,” she said, “because we’re going to have company very damn soon.”
“Not clear,” I said, and started searching for the nearest safest exit. “Here.”
No sooner than she had received the directions than she was crawling, high speed, through the ventilation shaft, with me scrambling to catch up. Of course, that meant I had to stop looking at the footage, which meant I couldn’t keep her updated real time, but it was better than staying behind to be turned to ash, while my head was somewhere else.
We hit the vent I’d indicated, and I grabbed her by the ankle.
“Let me check,” I said, and she waited, her leg tense under my hand.
I took a quick look, and noted movement to the left of the lab. It looked white-coated and purposeful, and not the usual shamble of the plagued.
“Two to the left,” I said.
“Plagued or spider?” she asked, picking the terms out of my skull.
“Unknown.”
“Right?”
“Unknown.”
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” she said, and shot the vent cover clear, following it out of the shaft without hesitating.
There was a shout of surprise, and I scrambled to get myself out, so I could cover the right. I hit the ground behind her, Glazer drawn as I looked for targets. All I could see were benches full of scientific equipment, and walls covered with charts. Behind me, someone was babbling frantically at Delight.
“Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot. Help us, please. Please please please help us.”
“Tell me why,” Delight snarled, and I wondered exactly why she was so pissed.
She sent a visual of what she was seeing to my implant, and I saw the system that had been attached to the ventilation shaft on the other side of the room. The station schematics showed this led directly to one of the central air vents connected to the rest of the station.
“Is that virus?” I asked, turning to face the same way as Delight, and the man who’d been babbling at Delight, started babbling at me.
“They’re going to kill our families, if we don’t.”
“You disconnect that, and we’ll send a team down before they know you’ve done it.”
“But he said... he said they’d be watching us.”
I didn’t wait to be told; I followed the connections from the camera to where the feed was being streamed to the planet below. Right now, they were showing the set-up on the wall, and the scientists turned away from it. I wondered if the guy had an implant I could hack, so what I wanted to say next wasn’t broadcast live to whoever was watching.
“Tens?” I sent, not making a sound.
“I got you,” Tens replied, confining his voice to my head, and I watched as he sent my instructions to the man in charge, felt Delight tense, as the man’s voice changed.
“Oh, right. Sorry to have bothered you,” and then, as he turned to the woman working with him. “Right. You heard me. Get back to work. There’s no point staring at shadows. They can’t get through the wall.”
He must have turned, and I saw him come back into view of the feed, watched as he began making the repetitive moves we needed to film of him keeping the viral feed even. His assistant came and went in three or four different ways, and I had to admire Tens’ choreography. Between the two of them, there was enough movement, and just enough variation for the looping pattern to be difficult to detect.
Delight sat quietly through the entire procedure, and I understood that Tens must have let her in on the plan, even though I hadn’t been privy to that communication. I was grateful, nonetheless. The minute we could move, we were going to deal with that motherfucking infection machine.
“And...done,” Tens said, and everyone in the lab stopped what they were doing.
The man who had been babbling, turned, anxiety written large upon his face.
“Can you really save them?” he asked, and Delight fixed him with a firm gaze.
“We are the only hope they have,” she said, “and we will do our best. Where are they?”
I listened in, as the scientists gave Delight and Tens the location of the families of the pharma researchers, and was surprised when the relay was answered by a new voice.
“Mariner Lead Scorvy. On way. Out.”
“Wh... Who was that?” the scientist wanted to know.
“The man who’s going to get your families back,” Delight replied, and I didn’t have to see her face to know the look of dark satisfaction masking it. “Now, tell me you have a cure.”
“Yes, but...”
“Can it be made airborne?”
“That wasn’t the delivery method we were told to design for.”
“Can it be made so, or not?” and Delight’s voice now held iron.
I waited, watching the scientist’s face.
“I... I don’t know,” he said, but his assistant was already sitting herself down behind the nearest computer.
She didn’t look at Delight, didn’t say a word, and I became suspicious, breaching her terminal in time to see her running through some hasty calculations, with nothing being sent anywhere.
“She’s clean,” Tens confirmed, a moment later. “Nothing hostile out, or in.”
“Anything non-hostile?” I asked.
I’d intended it to be sarcastic, but Tens vanished from the implant to check.
“Nothing,” he said, when he returned, “but good point. A warning might not have appeared hostile.”
“I have family, too,” the technician whispered, “and I want to see my baby, again.”
I felt chastened, but Tens was unrepentant.
“Can you aerosolize it?”
She continued working for a few more moments, and then her senior colleague joined her.
“Nice job,” he said, when he saw her calculations. “Yes. I think we can do this. We’re just going to need more serum.”
“Can you manufacture it?” I asked, but he shook his head.
“Not enough in time,” he said. “People are going to die.”
His face clouded, and his breath caught.
“My friends are going to die.”
“What about the replicator?” I asked. “Can it be...”
I caught the looks being shot in my direction, and let the words trail off, feeling my face heat with embarrassment.
“Sorry. Not my field. I’ll just go wait over here.”
“But it might work,” said the researcher. “It just might work. The cure’s just a formula. If we...” and he was off, travelling into a whole bunch of scientific terms for making the components of a cure using a machine designed to produce edibles, clothing, and alcohol.
“You catch that, Mack?” Delight asked. “We might be able to infect you all with a cure.”
I wondered if I was the only one who thought she could have put that better.
