Present Day
Sampson Ventura
He pressed his back up against the warped section of metal wall behind him, locked his hands on his gun, and focused. Not just with his body, not just with his mind, but with the force of his thoughts embodied.
As he heard another scream echo through the ship, he clenched his teeth together.
“You trained for this,” he whispered under his breath as he walked his shoulders to the side, inching his body out from behind cover to check on the rest of the corridor. Far off down toward the lifts, 50 meters away, he caught sight of movement, quick and deadly but staggered and uncoordinated.
A single bead of sweat slid down the side of his face, trailed over his square chin, trickled over his neck, and dribbled past his torn collar. He felt it slide right over the raised tattoo imprinted a hand-width below his collarbone.
It meant nothing to the uninitiated. To the initiated, it signaled that Sampson was part of one of the most select groups in all of the Coalition.
He was a psychic soldier, and he was one of the best. Unlike the other men and women in his select team, he didn’t come from one of the psychic races – he was human, through and through. But he was a human who’d had an accident. At the age of 12, his father – one of the greatest scientists the Coalition had ever seen – had lost his mind. All it had taken was the death of his other son.
The memory still burned at the edges of Sampson’s mind, and as he focused, he forced it aside with all the strength of his disciplined psyche.
The last thing he wanted now was a distraction. And if he pushed his mind into the memory of his father breaking down and injecting him with an experimental psychometric drug, it wouldn’t just distract Sampson – it would open a door he had to keep closed. Some people dealt with trauma. Some people locked it away. Sampson had no option but to do the latter. His wound was more than blood deep. It had literally been seared into his mind as the drug his father had administered to him had awakened Sampson’s latent psychic powers.
If Sampson chose to, he could step inside that memory. He could make it unfurl around him like a waking dream. He could explore every second of that torture, over and over again.
But not now. Not ever. Some people wash away their pasts. Some have to force themselves to move on, step by step, shot by shot.
Sensing his chance, Sampson ducked out from behind cover, kept low, and yanked his gun up. His fingers squeezed the trigger, and a slice of white-hot energy pulsed down the corridor. It slammed into the movement he saw by the lifts, and even from here, he heard a tight, gurgling gasp. It sent the hair on the back of his neck standing on end as if someone had concreted it upright.
Sensing his opportunity, he pulsed forward. He’d been pinned down in this section of the corridor for the past five minutes. He had to get to the bridge. He had to get to the transporter station right in the middle of it. And he had to transport every single member of this ship’s crew out into space. Living or dead, he had no option but to push them out into the merciless vacuum beyond this small cruiser’s thick walls. For living or dead, every man and woman on this ship now had no hope.
Sampson rolled past a broken neuro pack, his specialized holographic armor protecting him and only becoming visible in a shimmer as his back and shoulders rolled right over the lethal black gel.
By the time he snapped to his feet, the armor had become invisible again. The energetic barrier had completely burned up every last trace of the neuro gel until there was nothing to stop Sampson from sprinting forward.
The armor, developed only in the last months, had drawn heavily on the Circle Trader incident that had befallen the Academy three years previously. Remarkable stuff, when operating at 100 percent efficiency, it could divert even the most lethal blow, all while leaving Sampson apparently unprotected. It was the kind of armor you gave your most important espionage agents. Which is precisely what Sampson was.
He wasn’t just a spy, though. When called for, he was a soldier too. He reminded his body of that fact as he yanked his gun up and fired just as something crawled out of the broken lift doors in front of him.
He didn’t allow his mind long to lock on the sight of a woman’s upturned, deathly pale face. He didn’t let his gaze lock on the blood that pumped from a fatal gash in her throat. He didn’t even note her glassy, deadened eyes. All that mattered to him was the black, pulsing energy that writhed from a point in the center of her chest and seemingly tied her body like smoke curling around a fire.
Dread pulsed through Sampson. Despite all his skills and all his training, it always did whenever he faced a zero infection.
Deadly, there was no cure for it. It wasn’t a virus. It wasn’t bacteria. It wasn’t protozoa. It was no known biological entity. Instead, the root of Infection Zero was a twisted form of energy itself. Whoever it infected, it killed, and it claimed their body, controlling them like marionettes. Gruesome, terrifying, and unstoppable – it was one of the greatest secrets the Coalition Army had. Few admirals knew of its existence, let alone your average grunt or budding cadet. News of Infection Zero was clinically controlled, even if the infection itself resisted all attempts to be cured. Only select admirals throughout the Coalition Academy and the leaders of the Galactic Senate knew about it. Oh, and the psy corps. It was soldiers like Sampson, after all, who were the ones tasked with dealing with zero infections.
Any ordinary soldier who faced a patient infected with zero would have seconds if minutes. Even the greatest heroes of the Coalition Army wouldn’t stand a chance.
Infection Zero infiltrated your mind first, then your body. It snatched hold of your personality like a picture painted on glass and smashed it into a trillion pieces. Once it was done with the patient’s mind, it would control their body until their muscles wasted away and their bones crumbled. Even as a psy soldier, Sampson wasn’t immune. No one was immune. If you were unlucky enough to get touched by an infected patient – even through armor – you would succumb.
But at least Sampson could detect them. Long before an infected patient reached him, he could sense a disruption in their psyches. Call it a wave – a chaotic, destructive wave that pulsed through space – but whenever he felt an infected patient near him, it was as if the air itself became poisoned. It would buffet against him like an oncoming storm.
Right now as he skidded to a stop, rammed his hand onto the base of his gun, and flicked the modified rifle to its most intense setting, he felt the woman’s mind crumpling. The last of her psyche gave way, his psychic senses blaring like a klaxon.
She jerked toward him, the infection controlling her body completely. Just before she reached him and just before he fired, he looked right into her eyes. He wasn’t stupid enough to think that she could see back. There was nothing left of this woman’s hollowed-out, horror-filled form. That wasn’t the point. Before Sampson’s dad had cracked, the brilliant man had imparted one crucial lesson on his son. You treat life like life. It didn’t matter what form it came in, it didn’t matter how much more sophisticated and intelligent you thought you were – you treated everything as sacrosanct creation.
Sampson had done a lot of seemingly brutal things in his life, yet he’d always held onto that. And now that lesson rose through him and saw him stare into that woman’s eyes as he ended her suffering with two quick shots.
The blasts from his gun lanced out, slamming into the center of her chest and between her eyes.
He glanced away as the high-yield shots tore through her body. He didn’t look back until there were two soft thumps and she fell – or what was left of her fell – onto the crumpled floor in front of the lift.
He stood there, stock still, his gun raised and locked on the mangled lift. He watched it, his psychic senses shifting through the ship as he struggled to detect any other crew members.
He was in a section of corridor above life-support. His psychic abilities told him that there was still crew in engineering, the mess hall, the bridge, and the accommodation deck, but no one close by.
So he watched, never moving as that black light flickered violently over the woman’s body. It writhed like a flame, a flame that was desperately trying to keep itself lit in a roaring wind.
Sampson considered it with cold hatred. His father might have told him that all life is sacrosanct, but that black infection wasn’t goddamn alive. It was anathema to all existence. So he didn’t bat a single eyelid as the infection started to fade. Without a host to jump to, it had nothing to sustain its insatiable hunger.
One second, two seconds, three, four, five – finally it started to flicker out like a firefly that had been crushed underfoot.
Sampson didn’t move until it had extinguished itself completely. Without turning from it, he locked his rifle against his back holster, grabbed up a handgun from his hip unit, and took a step back.
Finally, he turned and continued through the ship. He located other crew members, all of them infected. He killed anyone who got in his way, concentrating on heading to the bridge rather than hunting them down.
The closer he got to the bridge, the more the infection forced the crew to fight him, but Sampson was lethal.
He had to be. If Infection Zero got out into the rest of the Milky Way, it would be catastrophic on a level never before seen. Small infections could be dealt with. Planets? Sectors? If large numbers of people succumbed to Zero, it would leave the Coalition with no other option but to turn on its own. Even then, he doubted the infection could be contained. For wherever there was life, Zero could sustain itself. Whether it be people or trees or plants or damn moss – it could infect anything classed as biological. And given a chance, it would.
So men like Sampson didn’t goddamn give it a chance. He didn’t say a word, didn’t even let out a guttural scream as he reached the bridge. He shot the reinforced doors that led to it, bringing up his foot and giving them one solid kick as his holographic armor gave him the last pulse of force he needed to open them.
The bridge doors parted, falling from him like dead petals from a dried rose.
He swung his handgun around, firing two shots right through the head of a Berkani female to his left. Her infection surged, the black light trying to accommodate for her injuries but failing as her body crumpled and struck the floor plating.
He noted her demise out of the corner of his eye as he locked his attention on a figure sitting in the captain’s seat. It would be the captain himself, and the man was so infected, he looked as if he was wearing a black, twisting cloak.
Sampson tightened his finger over his trigger. Before he could fire on the man from behind, the captain lurched forward and fell to his hands.
Sampson ducked to the side, clearing the reinforced back of the captain’s chair to line up a shot. Just as he aimed right at the captain’s head, the man turned.
And Sampson stopped. Because right there in the middle of the man’s eyes, he saw intelligence, fear, and most importantly, the desire to be saved.
Some people could fight Infection Zero. For a time, at least. As that black energy wrapped around their body from the inside out, controlling every cell, every muscle, and every fiber, some people could still hold on to a scrap of their psyches.
Maybe for seconds, maybe for minutes – but for no more than that.
Sampson had only ever faced three other people who’d managed what the captain was managing now.
He paused. He stared at the man’s wide, expressive, and soulfully pleading eyes. The captain’s jaw dropped open, several licks of saliva dripping off his lips and splashing onto his tensed hands. The man tried to move his lips.
He was human, so Sampson didn’t need much help to figure out what the man’s trembling lips were trying to mouth.
Help me. Help.
“I will help you. That’s what I’m here to do.” As those bitter words pushed from Sampson’s lips, he raised his gun higher. He didn’t fire yet. He stared right into the man’s eyes, and Sampson Ventura tried to acknowledge the humanity this man must have once had.
“Help,” the man mouthed one last time.
Sampson half closed his eyes, and he helped.
He shot the captain twice in his head and once in his heart.
As blood and fragments of burned uniform splattered over the once clean bridge floor, Sampson forced his eyes all the way open. He slowly stared around the bridge, and he breathed. Through the death. Through the destruction. Through the chaos of the infection.
Before he could take another moment’s reprieve, he heard screams out in the corridor. The rest of the infected were coming.
Sampson surged forward like a tsunami as he reached the transport panel. His fingers flew over it, and any rudimentary security system designed to lock him out was immediately overcome by his holographic armor. “Computer, lock onto all crew biosignatures, alive or dead, and transport them into space.”
He spun around, lifting his gun just as a man plowed into the room, his neck snapped and lolling to one side but that not stopping his speed in the least as the infection swarmed him.
Sampson had a chance to raise his gun, but he didn’t need to fire. The transporter did as it was told, and it locked onto the man, spiriting him away right before Sampson’s eyes.
It was only when Sampson turned and confirmed with the computer that every crewmember was gone that he closed his eyes. He allowed himself five whole seconds to absorb the horror that had gone on here. Then he drove a breath deep into his chest, letting it push through his mind like a wind designed to strip dead leaves from a tree.
As he opened his eyes, he accessed his neural implant. “Connect to the computer’s communications system,” he ordered it.
There was a beep, and to his left, he watched the communications panel light up with a yellow glow.
“Contact Admiral Forest.” He didn’t shift from his position as he turned his gaze toward the view screen. It was broken, patches sparking like wildfire along its edges. That didn’t stop it from blinking into life as the computer managed to contact the admiral.
Her drawn, pale face came into view. “Is it finished?”
He nodded. He didn’t snap a salute, even though a soldier in his position should. Well, an ordinary soldier should. There was a different set of rules when it came to the psy corps. Because there was different everything when it came to the psy corps.
The admiral let out a relieved breath that was so long and stuttered, it sounded as if she’d been holding onto it for days. “Have you removed every case from the ship?”
He nodded. “I’ve spaced them.”
“… Are there survivors?”
She always asked that question. He understood why, even though he knew she already knew the answer.
He shook his head.
She looked down briefly. Though she might think she was good at hiding it, he could see her gut-wrenching disappointment, even if it took all his psychic skills and emotional understanding to recognize it. She might be able to hide her mind from the ordinary officers under her command, but not from him. It took her several seconds to compose herself, then she looked up sharply. “Scuttle the ship and return. Send it into the closest star.”
He nodded. Then finally Sampson Ventura snapped a salute. “What next, Admiral?”
She didn’t hesitate. The admiral might have genuine feelings under her apparently cold exterior, but Forest’s reputation for always striving on, no matter what, came to the fore. “You return to the Academy, to Earth.”
He frowned. Before terror could grip him and tell him an infection had broken out in the very heartland of the Coalition, he read something else in her expression. “Another mission? Where?”
“In the Academy.”
“Sorry?”
“I need you as a spy this time, Sampson,” she admitted. She always used his first name. He, like the other soldiers in his team, had earned that level of familiarity.
“And who do I spy on?”
“The students. It’s time for you to become one. Appropriate, considering you never went through standard training. I want you to make it back to Earth and assume your position before classes start in a week.”
He snapped one last salute and nodded. Then he ended the call, turned, and set the ship on a course to hurtle into the sun. For Sampson Ventura always did what was required of him.