| |
––––––––
After what seemed like several hours, but what I knew in reality had been only one—because that’s all the implant said it had been—the technician and her senior colleague, looked up from their work.
“We’ve got it,” they said.
Delight and I gave them blank stares, and they went on. I’m sure what they were saying made perfect, scientific sense, but I didn’t understand any of it... except the part where they were ready to go back out into the lab proper, and we had to try a two-pronged attack.
Firstly, they’d solved the aerosol problem, and could get stuff they needed into, and then out through, the vents, but they needed me to tweak the humidity, the air temperature, and the rate of flow. Fine. I hacked them a path from the desk top, so they could see the interface, and then used the implant to dive into the code and change what needed changing.
While the scientist and I did that, the technician swapped out the equipment they’d been using to contaminate the air with virus, and placed the new set-up on a table beneath it. Delight helped her, but kept her Glazer to hand at all times. By the time we were done, the locking mechanism on the door to the lab had given way to the pressure of the plagued outside. The table still held.
I felt the difference in the air, almost as soon as I’d put the last adjustment in place.
“How long before this goes station-wide?” Delight asked.
“Forty minutes,” the scientist said, and I looked at the Odyssey agent.
We were both thinking the same thing—it was too long.
“What if one of the ships were to push the same stuff into the station from the concourse?” I asked.
“It would help, but I don’t know how much it would reduce the time by. You’ll need the masks. We’re adding the gas.”
I don’t get how they’d managed to combine the gas, and the anti-virus, but they had, and that was the mixture they pushed into the ventilation system. I contacted Tens over the comms.
“You need to seal the ship,” I said, but he disagreed.
“It’s a cure?”
“Sure,” and I wondered why he sounded so fatigued.
“Can you send the formulae to Doc?”
“Sure,” I said, and grabbed the scientist.
“They need to know the formulae,” I said, and he rattled off the settings for the replicator.
“You catch that?”
“Gotcha,” but Tens didn’t answer alone, and it puzzled me as to why Doc was in the command center.
“Tell the Odyssey ship to stay buttoned tight,” Tens said, and I got half an idea of what had gone down.
Oh. Well, fuck. Suddenly, I was really glad Tens had managed to lock the other ships into their moorings, and get the runaways to return. I was going to go Corovan-hunting, if I survived when this was done.
“Staying sealed is standard procedure,” Delight said, “but give me the formulae and I’ll pass that on.”
She pulled out a new charge for her Glazer, and handed another one over to me.
“We don’t know when they’ll fall over. Best to start out fresh.”
While I changed clips, the technician finished her set-up, and hurried over to a cabinet set beside the refrigeration units. She returned with four rebreathers, and masks.
“Sam and I will keep this going for as long as we can,” she said. “Just try and keep us safe.”
I wondered what else she thought we’d be doing, while they sent the cure... or, at least, a reprieve, to the rest of the station. It wasn’t exactly like Delight or I could leave the lab. We couldn’t even go into the vents. Firstly, because I’d reprogrammed the drones into a much more aggressive defensive pattern around the lab, and secondly, because the scientists who’d been infected by the spider mutation seemed to be at home up there, and we didn’t know how many of those there were.
Nope, we were going out via the corridors—just as soon as the plagued were comatose... or once the Odyssey team got here, whichever came first.
“Agents, hold your positions.” That voice was new. I wondered if she had a party line to my head, or if she’d just chosen that moment to get her ass into gear.
Delight shot me a sideways look, as I thought it.
“Coincidence,” she said, “but I’m sending them our location, anyway. I don’t want to be mistaken as hostile.”
That almost made me laugh. Hostile pretty much summed her up—and that was on a good day.
“Thanks a lot,” she muttered. “Make sure that thing’s set on stun.”
I checked the Glazer, and reduced the setting. We’d been killing the plagued out of necessity. With both sedative and cure in the air system, that wasn’t justifiable, any more. I sure as shit hoped they stunned like any other person, because the table across the door was starting to shift.
I looked at Delight, and she looked at me.
“Good luck,” I said to the scientists, and Delight and I moved forward to place our boots on the legs of the upturned table.
It wasn’t much of a brace, but all it had to do was slow them down long enough for us to plug the hole with their comatose bodies. And we only had to do that, until the sedative and cure had taken effect. Only. Now why did I get the impression that that was going to be a lot harder than it sounded?
I shifted so I had an angle through the wedge of light the plagued had forced between the door and the door-frame.
“Hold,” Delight said. “Don’t shoot, unless they’re going to make it through.”
Delight counselling restraint? I’d never thought to see the day.
Smart ass. Delight wasn’t impressed, but I could hear Mack and Tens laughing somewhere in the distance of my mind. Well, at least someone was entertained—even if they sounded on the edge of hysteria.
I watched as the plagued massed and shifted in the corridor, outside, not quite able to fathom why they’d come to the opening, stare at me, and then shift away, yielding their place to one of those behind them. Across from me, Delight watched the shift of their shadows, and frowned.
“What are you doing to them?” she asked, and I shrugged.
“Nothing. Just looking.”
“And you called me hostile,” she muttered. “You’re scaring them with just a look.”
“Maybe it’s my perfume.”
“I doubt it.”
“Hey.”
“We’ve got them.” Mariner Lead Scorvy said, his message crashing into my implant. “Tell your people their families are safe.”
I wanted to tell him that they weren’t my people, but he was gone before I could form a response, turfed off the line by same voice that had ordered Delight and I to stay put.
“We’re sending a team in via the maintenance hatch to the lab. Patch us into the feeds.”
She could only mean one set of feeds, so I gave her access to the path I’d hacked into the station’s systems, and then sent her the blueprints and highlighted the nearest hatch. I also sent her brief clips of the spider mutants, and the plagued, and heard muffled curses in the back of her transmission.
Couldn’t be helped. At least they wouldn’t be coming in blind.
And then I remembered the werewolves.
“Is there a wolf contingent?” I asked.
“They’ll be docking shortly. Seems they received a signal for help. Something about a rogue comms signal a wolf ship was being blamed for sending.”
I ignored that, and got straight down to business. The less anyone looked into that signal, the better.
“They have one of their own, and some new additions, here,” I told her, highlighting the laboratory where I’d found the newly turned scientists. “They didn’t think they had a choice.”
“That’s a story, I’ve been hearing a lot lately,” and didn’t she sound impressed. “If the ones in charge weren’t native to the world, we’d indict the lot of them. As it is, I can only appeal to the High Council of Clans, and hope they see things our way.”
Privately, I thought that the clans might be convinced if she could show them an economic advantage, but given the Corovan’s place in the pecking order, that was unlikely. Of course, Mack hadn’t picked up Melari, yet.
“Mack’s still on station,” I said, and Delight looked at me.
I waited for her to catch on. When she didn’t, I nudged her along.
“As in, he hasn’t retrieved Melari.”
“Fuck.”
Delight’s summary of the situation didn’t seem to faze the operations leader.
“Give me the coordinates.”
I didn’t know them, so I patched her through to Mack.
“Got it, and done—and hang on, captain. We are coming.”
They were coming.
My relief was short-lived, because the latest plagued to look in through the door took a deep breath, and gave a sudden guttural roar, its face contorting, and its mouth growing out of all proportion with the rest of its features. I had the Glazer up and firing before I realized what I was doing.
The first three shots didn’t stop it, but, by then, it was most of the way through the gap in the door, and Delight was firing, too. I watched as another set of arms ripped their way through the lab coat it had been wearing, and I kept shooting, hoping it was the only one, that there weren’t any more behind it.
I caught a flash of fangs and ichor, and then its head exploded.
“I thought you said non-lethal.”
“That thing was beyond help,” Delight told me, but she was already thumbing the settings’ switch back to stun.
“Can we hold them if I switch off the drones?”
“Why would you do a stupid thing like that?”
“Your people are going into the ducts.”
“Well, fuck. We can try.”
It was like hearing a mirror of myself, and I wondered if Pritchard might not be right.
Delight gave another of her eloquent snorts, mocking the idea we could be in any way similar... or maybe the idea that Pritchard could ever be right about anything. It made me smile, even as I fired at the next attempted entry.
“I’ve got this. You switch the drones,” Delight said, and I realized I’d lost focus.
Actually, I realized I was having trouble focusing at all, and I couldn’t work out why.
“Drones,” Delight said. “Tell me when you’re done. I’ll get them to tell us when they’re in the vents.”
I nodded, not caring that she couldn’t hear me. The coding for the drones was easy to find. After all, I’d been there before. Even so, I was glad I didn’t have to do more than tell the drones to stop.
“It won’t fix the other counter-measures,” I said.
“So. Fix it!” and I wondered why Delight was being so short-tempered—and I mean more so than usual.
That task was a little harder to do. There were so many, and I felt... unwell. Light-headed. Shivery.
“How far away are they?” I asked, and the commander replied.
“We’re in the ducts. Good job.”
“You cover the door and the wall to the left,” Delight said. “I’ve got the alcove, and the duct the cure’s going through.”
It sounded weird, but that pretty much matched the world I was in, right now. Weird... and definitely not quite all there.
“What’s wrong with us?” I asked, and Delight gave a jerky laugh.
“We’re infected,” she said.
“I thought we were immunized,” and I had.
“Oh, crap,” the technician said, and scientist echoed her with an “Oops, we forgot.”
Well, fuck. You’da thought we’d have been the first on their list of priorities... okay, maybe first after working out how to deliver the cure station-wide. Oh. Yeah. Well, that would explain it. They’d kinda been busy saving the rest of the world, and we’d slipped through the cracks.
“Let me fix that,” the scientist said, but I’d caught a flash of movement at the edge of the duct I was watching, and it coincided with yet another plaguer trying to claw their way through the door. Of course, it did.
“Oh. Shortly. Let me fix that shortly!” the scientist corrected, but I was no longer listening.
I stunned the one at the door, and hoped its body would be the one body too many that meant nothing else would think about trying to get to us. As I did, another spider mutant dropped out of the vent, and rolled slowly to its feet. It hissed as it raised its head, and I centered my next shot between its eyes.
When the shot seemed to do nothing, I fired again, and then again, and once more. It was still coming, when its head exploded and another dark form slipped out of the ducts. I was firing before I knew exactly what I was firing at, but whatever it was, it moved fast, and took cover behind one of the lab tables.
It took me half a minute to register the voice screaming in both my ears and my head.
“Cease fire! Cease fire! Cease fire!”
In the end, it was Mack’s voice that broke through, tired, but forceful enough for me to register.
“Stand down, Cutter. Stand the fuck down.”
“Mack?” but I stopped firing, lowering the Glazer, to look for him.
More forms dropped from the ventilation shaft, and I snapped my head towards them, bringing the Glazer up, even though I was going to be way too slow.
“Don’t make me come. Down. There.”
Not that it sounded like he could—and, even if he did, he’d be way too late. The first human-shaped intruder raced out from behind the bench and launched themselves towards me in a low tackle that took them under the Glazer’s arc of fire.
Behind me, I heard Delight’s soft ‘oof’, as the impact carried me into her, and took us both down. I kept hold of the Glazer, right up until someone caught my face in an open-handed slap, and someone else plucked the pistol from my hand. The fall and the slap left me stunned, and I lay there, trying to make the world come back into focus.
“Mack?” I asked, but the face above me belonged to no-one I knew.
“You!” the commander snapped, looking past me and towards where the scientists were working. “Vaccines. Now.”
Vaccines? Normally that would have worried me, but I couldn’t work out why.
“And you,” the commander added, looking down at me. “Time to sleep.”
Sleep? I tried to argue with her about that, but she snapped her fingers, and I saw the business end of a Glazer aimed at my head.
“Hey...”
