Chapter 48

2:15 p.m.

Jaron sent Yerke to watch over Rajesh. Perhaps it had been a mistake; he should have sent Robbie to safety, but he wanted her nearby. And it was good that Yerke was safe watching over the pilot’s actions.

He checked the readout above the R1 downshafts. Their signal was almost thirty minutes overdue. His jungle fighters and the other recruits were ranged along the core at the head of the various drop tubes. But they were losing their focus. And many of them were not used to zero gee and looked a shade green. Others were laughing and talking as if they weren’t doing anything more important than wandering into Bryce’s for a quick liter.

He was about to remind them that they were off to expose the heinous secret hidden aboard the Icarus, no more and no less. Then he spotted Robbie as she kicked off from one of the noisier teams and drifted toward him.

She’d obviously miscalculated her launch and was headed directly toward him. It was too late to move, so he held out a hand to buffer her landing. She out-massed him by half-again and slammed him back against the bulkhead. He slid his hand around her broad waist to keep her from rebounding while she reached for a handhold. But once she had her grip, she didn’t move to free him.

Her gaze searched his face. He’d never noticed but her breath had a freshness of a fine breeze in the highest cloudforest.

“We can’t keep them ready much longer. The fire of your speech is wearing thin.” Her voice was breathy and deep.

“They’ll just have to wait.” Jaron wished his voice was not so nearly a squeak.

Robbie nodded, but didn’t move away. Her skin, so light in the jungle was lustrous in the dim utility lighting of the core.

“They are overanxious. You must keep them in check.”

He was about to nod when his commpad sounded. The whole core fell quiet.

“Jaron here.”

“Yerke. You’re a go. We’ve got the hatch codes. Meet you there.” Her voice was clear but it took him a moment to make sense of her words. Robbie was so close and so warm.

“No, stay where…”

Robbie shook her head.

“What was that last?” Yerke sounded ready for a fight.

“We’re moving. See you there.”

Robbie smiled and then kissed him briefly but thoroughly. Her lips had a warmth and softness that were difficult to correlate with the powerful woman who could wield a machete tirelessly on the trail.

“Let’s do it,” someone called.

He nodded, but it was a disassociated feel. They were already moving down the shafts before he could give the command. The bulk were dropping down the Northeast and Northwest drops to bracket the Icarus. A small team of hydraulic specialists descended by the south drop.

He could feel the pressure as those beyond him moved up and he was soon pressed tightly between Robbie and a large, broad-shouldered man in front of him. When he reached the shaft he followed the moment the man was clear. He grabbed the pole and began the long slide down the ring’s spoke.

The returning gravity and lateral acceleration reminded him of a storm atop Cerro Ovana, nearly two thousand meters above sea level. He’d been taken by surprise on a Sepucaia without a descender line. He’d climbed down until the branches ran out thirty meters above the ground and ridden out the storm for two days. The twists of the mighty tree as it fought the winds had given him a new respect for the mighty plants.

He glanced up the trunk and almost lost his grip when a steel pole extended above him, and not wood and bark. Two meters above, a tiny platform supported someone’s feet. Not Robbie’s. He was lost in the wind and the twists of gravity as he dropped past the command decks and finally bottomed out at the base of Vator One.

He jumped aside as the man behind him landed. Kirgen. The small man from mechanical systems slid past him and out the hatch as the others arrived. Jaron wanted to wait for Robbie, but there were too many people. He was pushed out into the corridor with the Northeast team.

It was the middle of the dark watch and the corridor was empty. Kirgen was already at the airlock to the Icarus. The vanguard of the Northwest team jogged into view from the right. They had four people with them, their hands bound and dark gags below wide eyes and flaring nostrils. Yerke came in at the tail of the team.

“I left Rajesh in control. He has the watch and can’t leave though it was hard to convince him.”

His commpad, still grasped in his hand, flashed with a message. “South team. Vator One balance disabled. Icarus cannot withdraw.”

Robbie, who had arrived from somewhere, keyed the pad still in his hand.

“Roger. Bounce across the core and join the main. Out.” Robbie signaled for watch teams to move a little way down either corridor. Jaron was supposed to be doing something, but he couldn’t remember what.

Yerke took his commpad and keyed in the codes that she herself had transmitted. The lock opened silently. The instant it was fully open, Kirgen fired off a torch and welded it into place.

The crowd behind pushed him into the inner lock. Yerke keyed the next code and Jaron barely saw the flash of the torch locking it open as well before he was driven inward.

At least thirty people arrived simultaneously in the lounge through a hatch that was perhaps wide enough for four. An old man started from a chair, a commpad clutched in one hand. Someone’s machete, perhaps Kirgen’s, slashed through the pad releasing a shower of sparks as it flew from the man’s hands and fell in two pieces against the far wall.

Yerke and Robbie led a team toward the flight controls. Jaron let the main flow drag him toward the aft hold. They had surmised that one of the holds had been formed into a laboratory. He knew others were headed to port, he was supposed to be leading that squad but his path was no longer under his control as he was dragged to starboard. He struggled against the flow of humanity but was unable to maintain his footing and was forced to stumble with them.

He fell backwards down the stairs into the starboard hold, but somehow, in the press of humanity, landed on his feet without being hurt. He attempted to pull his machete, but his left wrist wasn’t working. He jerked the blade from its sheath with his right and looked around as bodies blundered into him from behind. Sparks flew about the room as equipment was raised and smashed against bulkheads and decking. A temporary airlock was at the left end of a wall. Several people were already pounding against it, but its keypad was bright red showing a lockout.

People in spacesuits moved around behind the large window. They were frantically transferring small vials into larger containers. These were in turn being stowed in tanks along the far wall that flowed with a steam Jaron knew to be the ice clouds of liquid nitrogen.

At his feet, several people lay on the decking, some trampled underfoot and a woman with a severed hand pumping red blood furiously across everyone who came near. He knew her, but couldn’t recall her name at the moment. Jaron became aware of their various screams keening loudly in the bedlam.

A whirling mass at the far end of the bay resolved itself into Ri Jeffers and about a dozen attackers. Many more lay about her feet. He saw that she was fighting with bare hands against men wielding machetes.

“Stop! Everyone stop!” His voice made no impact on the melee. A desk torn from the wall was heaved against the window. The spacesuited figures within scrambled to the back of the space as it was heaved once more. On the third try, the clear plas shattered into thick pieces the size of a man’s head.

A single figure, its gender hidden by the spacesuit, stood inside the shattered window. It guarded the lab bench, its hands raised palm out. The crowd heaved the desk through the remains of the window before Jaron could get there. The figure was smashed back double against the lab bench. Despite its size, it flopped like a rag doll over the desk.

Jaron managed to be first to the window and spread-eagled himself across the opening.

Two men went to heave him out of the way when Robbie grabbed them from behind, banged their heads together, and dropped them to the floor.

Jaron turned from the death before him and faced the lab. Two people were hunched over the prone figure. They’d removed his helmet, blood ran freely from his nose and mouth. He coughed several times before he managed to speak.

“Isolation.” It was barely a whisper as his impossibly red blood slowed to a pulsing trickle.

The two figures kneeling over him twitched as if a puppeteer had jerked their strings. One slammed a red button on the desk, but nothing seemed to happen.

Jaron dragged his eyes from the dying man and stepped over him into the lab. A small tray of tubes was upset on the bench the man had given his life to defend. The vial nearest Jaron was rolling toward the table edge. He reached to stop it, but his left hand dangled strangely at the end of his arm and his right still held the machete. He could only watch as it tumbled end over end toward the floor.

Someone yelled to shut the outer airlock and he recalled the bright light of Kirgen’s torch as he’d welded the hatches open. The actinic light shown from the heart of the liquid splashing thickly about in the tumbling vial.

The silence was so deep he could hear the tiny pop as the glass shattered on the decking. The crystalline liquid spattered the leg of the dead man in the spacesuit and his own shoes. When the glass had spun to a stop, he raised his eyes to look at the others. No one seemed to have noticed, they were all watching the man; slapping his cheeks and pointlessly ordering him not to die.

“What is ‘Test 1057’?”

A man stepped over the windowsill. His face was covered with blood from a scalp wound he seemed not to notice.

“What number?”

“1057.”

“No others?”

Jaron looked at the floor and then the table where someone was carefully lining them up in a small rack.

“No others.”

The man with the bloody face walked through the silence to the console that had been placed inside the lab. Jaron could see the fighting continued in the outer lab. He noted that three or four of the ag-workers had forced Ri back into a corner, but he could hear nothing despite seeing her yell as another of her assailants went down.

The man at the console kept wiping at the keyboard with his hands, not realizing a fresh supply of blood was falling onto the keys from his own face.

Slowly the man turned to him. “Psittacosis.”

Jaron suddenly felt an Arctic chill.

“A very pure strain. We were testing the mechanism of cross-species diseases. It’s an influenza humans catch from parrots. Thank god you broke 1057 and not 1056, we’d all be dying now.” The man began to slump forward.

Jaron hauled him back upright. “Wait. What do you mean? What is 1057?”

The man blinked his eyes back into focus and the checked the screen.

“1057? Oh, pure psittacosis, but only the non-human side. We were able to isolate the mechanism. The animals are at risk from this, but not the humans. It is a very pure strain, do not let it off the Icarus. Its transmission is airborne. It is quite lethal to the parrots. Those charming birds over in the jungle. Have you seen them?”

Jaron shook his arm to keep him focused. “Why was it even on board?” He wanted to scream at the man, but his eyes kept drooping.

“We brought many diseases with us, so that we could create an anti-serum if needed. We never built one for psittacosis. Didn’t have time. Wasn’t important.”

He fainted and Jaron rested him forward onto the console.

He stepped past the dead man still in his suit and over the window sill. He walked past Robbie’s back as she was lifting a body. Yerke’s head lolled over Robbie’s arm, her neck mostly severed by a machete stroke. Ri Jeffers still fought in the corner though they now had a hold of her arms and one of her legs.

Captain Turner came sprinting down the steps closely followed by a tall, half-dressed woman with a blond ponytail down to her waist.

Jaron climbed the stairs through the open hatch. He followed the flow of air out into the lounge. No one stopped him. No one appeared to stop him. He walked past the huddled crew of the Icarus grouped around the chair once again occupied by the old man, a crowbar now protruding from his chest. At the airlock, blood had flowed and pooled from a young woman he didn’t recognize.

He looked at the two open locks. Kirgen’s welds, fresh and dirty with carbon scoring, stared at him like the twin eyes of death. He stepped out of the lock and walked away down the corridor leaving a trail of red footprints.