Aneka Jansen 3: Steel Heart (8 page)

‘Three showing symptoms. We’ve isolated everyone who was in or near to the culture room when the release occurred.’ Corazon was doing her best to look concerned, very concerned, but inside she was trying hard to contain her enthusiasm.

‘Do we know how it got out?’

‘Not yet. It seems to be able to mutate at an unpredictable rate. Maybe something evolved which could eat through the seals on the isolation cabinets.’

‘I hope not. Those seals are no different from any of the other seals in the facility. If it got out that way then it could have infected everyone here.’

‘A good point.’

Nayland considered for a second. ‘To be on the safe side, have Kottigan shut down all traffic between sites. Lock down the Beta site entirely. Anyone there stays there until we’re sure it’s contained. We’ll operate by remote from here where possible.’

Corazon had not considered that he would do that; she wanted to be over there, examining M960 at work. ‘But…’

‘That’s an order, Lisa. No one is to move between the sites.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Corazon said. ‘Of course. Safety first.’

New Earth, 20.12.525 FSC.

Winter’s eyes scanned rapidly over her console. Truelove watched her, still a little impressed at the woman’s speed of comprehension. Even after five years as Winter’s assistant, she still managed to be amazed at her boss’ ability to absorb information. The woman was a computer!

‘This business with Hayward concerns me, Elaine,’ Winter said, her eyes shifting up to look across the desk.

‘Yes, ma’am. The evidence that they are behind the attack on Miss Jansen is circumstantial…’

‘And I’d initiate further investigation and we would get nowhere… if it were not for the fact that Hayward has Ella Narrows on Eshebbon.’

Truelove nodded. ‘Orders, ma’am?’

Winter’s lips pursed for a second, one finger tapping on them. ‘Check for any outgoing flights to Eshebbon, have them blocked. Send the same orders out to any world with scheduled flights to Eshebbon. Get me a list of any in-flight vessels. I want a frigate in warp to Eshebbon today, orders to retrieve Miss Narrows.’

Truelove got to her feet and started for the door. Her cybernetics were already connecting to the local network to begin compiling the information Winter wanted. One thing popped up immediately. ‘The Delta Lantilla is in-system and ready for deployment after a crew training exercise.’

Winter nodded. ‘You deal with the rest of it. I’ll contact Captain DeMarco myself.’

Nodding, Truelove walked out. Maybe someday if she could remember the name of every ship captain in the fleet, she could be Winter.

Hayward Alpha Research Facility, 24.12.525 FSC.

Ella’s eyes flickered open and she saw blurred lights and quite clear diagnostic messages from her implants. There was nothing wrong with her eyes, it was her brain that was distorting the image. She let out a groan.

‘Get on your feet, girl.’ Male voice she felt she should recognise. Sitting up was hard. ‘Move it! Can you use one of these?’

A pistol was shoved into her hands. Up close she could focus on it. It was a laser and she knew how to use those. ‘If I can see anything, sure.’ She looked up again, seeing a man in combat armour. ‘Kottigan?’

‘Your memory’s coming back then? I’ve no idea what they dosed you with.’ He shook his head. ‘Never mind that, we have to go.’

Ella’s bare feet hit the cold floor and the shock seemed to straighten her brain out a little. ‘Tahmada! I’m naked! What the fuck happened to me?’

‘Never mind that, we need to get up top and get out of here.’

Well, he was not wearing a helmet. Stepping forward, Ella rammed the barrel of her gun under Kottigan’s chin. ‘What. Happened?’

‘Look, I do security. I don’t ask what they’re doing and they don’t tell me. They’ve had you on drugs for days. Sedatives, memory blockers. Something to do with your blood. You have something in your blood. Something happened. One of their experiments failed over in the Beta facility. They had me lock the place down, but they got out.
We need to leave.
’

Ella felt her blood go cold. She lowered her pistol. ‘I need to get my stuff from my room or I’ll freeze.’

‘Yeah, I guess. Most of the ones infected here are still… Come on.’ He started off at a fast pace, out the door and down a long, white corridor. Ella had to stretch her legs to keep up with him. There seemed to be miles of corridor, though that was probably just an exaggeration.

It was as they turned a corner that she saw the first cocoon. It was lying against a wall, part-bonded to floor and wall. Ella stopped in her tracks. ‘Gopi!’

‘What now?’ Kottigan snapped. ‘They all go like that, but they’re safe in that state. It’s what comes out that you have to worry about.’

‘This experiment that went wrong? Did anyone mention M-Nine-Sixty?’

‘Uh… I think I heard Corazon say that once. Nayland shushed her.’

It kills anyone exposed to it. We can’t stop them.

Ella swallowed and flicked the safety off on her pistol. Immediately her computer interfaced with the gun’s sighting system and projected data into her vision field. She took in a deep breath. ‘What comes out of the cocoons, Kottigan?’

~~~

‘The first couple were contained,’ Kottigan said. He was standing beside the door of Ella’s room while she pulled on her suit. ‘That’s what I was told anyway. I’m not sure. They’re not exactly bright, but they can think, and they’re strong. They look like the people who went into the cocoons, but…’

‘But what?’

‘There’s nothing behind their eyes. They’re strong, like I said, and they won’t fucking die. Or…’

‘Kottigan!’ Ella snapped. ‘Focus. Or what?’

‘I don’t think they survive the disease. I don’t think they die because they’re already dead. Anyone they touch, anyone they even get too close to, they drop in a matter of hours. There’s a fever and then they go down. Then that cocoon forms and then it’s about four days until whatever they are comes out.’

‘You’re saying this bug is resurrecting the dead?!’

‘Resurrects, no. They aren’t alive.’

‘Animates then?’

He nodded. ‘Yeah, they’re animated.’

‘That’s not possible, Kottigan. We don’t have that kind of technology. No one does. Not even the…’ She stopped, then sealed up her suit. ‘Where’s Nayland?’ she growled.

‘He went out to the landing pad with the survivors.’

Ella grabbed her helmet, pulling it on and sealing the neck to her suit. Grabbing her pistol she jumped to her feet and headed for the door. ‘Come on, I want a word with him.’

~~~

There were ten people on the landing pad, Nayland and Corazon among them. All were dressed in heat suits, and all were armed, but none of them were security personnel.

‘This is it?’ Ella asked as she walked towards the small group with Kottigan.

‘You were the last person I could find in the labs. Nayland didn’t want me going in for another sweep as it was.’

‘Bastard.’ She raised her voice as they got closer. ‘Nayland! This virus, or whatever it is, it’s fucking Xinti tech, isn’t it?’

‘Keep your voice down!’ Nayland hissed. ‘They don’t know we’re here yet.’

‘You brought technology back from some site,’ Ella went on. ‘Something some Humans got their hands on and developed out of something they got from the Xinti.’

‘We don’t know,’ Corazon answered. ‘We don’t know exactly where they got the nanovirus from. We know they didn’t develop the initial strain…’

‘Shut the fuck up, Lisa!’ Nayland shouted, ignoring his own advice.

‘What’s the point?’ Corazon replied. ‘We’re never getting out of here alive. None of us are.’

‘We get on the shuttle,’ Nayland began, ‘and…’

‘And what? The next supply ship isn’t due for days. The shuttle’s got air for twenty hours at best. We die down here, or we die in orbit. We don’t even have a pilot!’

Nayland raised his pistol, pointing it at Corazon. ‘Shut up! Shut up or so help me I’ll…’

Both Kottigan and Ella raised their weapons, levelling them at Nayland, but it was Corazon who spoke. ‘Go ahead. At least it’ll be quick.’

‘The shuttle,’ Ella said. ‘Everyone into the shuttle.’

‘We can’t fly it,’ Corazon reminded her.

‘No, but we can seal it and on the ground the air won’t run out. There’s heat in there too.’

‘She’s right,’ Kottigan agreed. ‘We can hole up in there, get food in. It’s our best chance of surviving until the next supply ship comes.’

With everyone aboard and the hatches sealed, people drifted into seats, largely attempting to avoid sitting too near anyone else. That was not difficult; the shuttle was a Concordia-class transport with two cabins and a small lounge. They were used for moving passengers up and down between New Earth and its orbital stations, and on those the lounge had vending machines for drinks. Here there were far more comfortable chairs in the lounge, but no drinks. Still, it was a good place to drag Nayland and Corazon to talk to them.

‘Okay,’ Ella said, ‘what do we actually know about this bug?’

‘We didn’t actually lie about anything we told you,’ Corazon said.

‘You didn’t tell me much, and I’ve never seen the written reports you said you had.’

‘Commercial secret,’ Nayland stated flatly.

‘Are you fucking nuts?! This virus wiped out the researchers who originally created it. They couldn’t control it. It killed
all
of them.’

Corazon looked resigned as she spoke. ‘The written reports went into a lot of detail about their initial studies, their attempts to re-engineer the virus, and their tests, of course. We have full specs on the eventual machines they constructed, but no reports on the final stages of the last tests.’

‘Yeah,’ Ella said, ‘because there was no one alive to write them up. Wait, it’s not actually a virus?’

‘Viral nanomachines. Organic, yes, and structured like a virus superficially. They have far more complex mechanisms for altering replication in living cells. You were right; the complexity is beyond anything we’ve ever encountered before. They never
said
they salvaged it from some Xinti site, but there’s no way that they could have created the basic system themselves.’

‘And you thought it was a great idea to experiment on these things?’

‘Have you any idea what advances we could make in medical science studying these machines?’ Nayland asked. He was covering up insecurity with anger. ‘Genetic defects can be altered
after
conception, on fully grown adults. Limbs can be regrown. You have cybernetic eyes. With this technology your eyes could have been entirely regrown!’

‘Uh-huh… and that’s why you drugged me and spent days analysing my blood.’ Ella had to admit, he was good; his passionate defence of his noble ideals stalled on his face for barely a tenth of a second. ‘The only thing I can think of that makes me any different from anyone else is the stuff the AIs on Negral put in me. They didn’t want us catching anything, so they gave us some sort of nanomachine antibiotic…’

‘Oh, it’s much more than that,’ Corazon interjected, her eyes lighting up. ‘Your machines attack just about any microbial or viral agent that gets into your blood. We introduced mutated blood cells to some of them and they were shut down quickly and efficiently. You’re probably immune to cancer. We found evidence that they’ve been cleaning out deposits in your blood vessels. Gopi, they’re cleaning plaque off your teeth!’

‘Okay,’ Ella conceded, ‘they’re engineered, perfect little body cops and you’d like to study them. Why the subterfuge? This is
exactly
the kind of technology we were planning to disseminate through the Galactic University programme.’ She paused for a second as both Corazon and Nayland looked away. ‘It’s not just competitive advantage, is it? If these things can destroy a bacterium, they can destroy a cell. You’re creating bio-weapons. The rumours are true.’

‘Doesn’t really matter, does it?’ Corazon replied. ‘We’re all going to die.’

~~~

Ella slipped onto the flight deck of the shuttle and settled into the co-pilot’s seat, leaning back into the slightly reclining position with a sigh. It was getting dark outside and she was hoping to get some sleep, but the last people she wanted to be near were the men and women who had drugged her into oblivion. Kottigan, sitting in the pilot’s seat, was not exactly on her favourite people list, but he had done nothing to harm her and had actually returned to the labs to pull her out.

‘Hope you don’t mind the company,’ she said, her voice low mainly because it felt like a good idea.

‘Huh,’ the grunt was half-laugh, about as much humour as he could manage. ‘I’ve had worse-looking people keep me company on guard duty.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Okay, a lot worse.’

Ella chuckled. ‘It’s okay, I wasn’t fishing. Have you got a partner? Family?’

‘Not really. One of the reasons I took this job was to get away from my last partner.’ He glanced across at her. ‘It wasn’t an entirely amicable break-up. I swore off anything committed for a while. Haven’t done without, y’know? But there’s no one to miss me and no one I’ll miss. You’re with that woman they found, right? The one from Old Earth?’

‘I found her. Aneka.’ The thought that she might not see Aneka again surfaced and was immediately suppressed. ‘What do we know about the things that come out of the cocoons?’ she asked to change the subject.

‘Not a lot. Uh… They’re stronger than average. The lasers burn them, but they don’t seem to care. I saw one lose a hand and it just kept coming. I hit one in the chest, should’ve killed it, but it didn’t. The cold doesn’t seem to bother them. Several of them walked over from the Beta site in indoor clothes. They act more like animals than Humans, and they go crazy when they’re wounded. Their skin looks… old, kind of dull and slack, and they stink. You can smell them before you see them. Oh, they, uh, they eat…’

‘Us?’ That just sounded like it rounded out the whole package.

‘Yeah, but they’ll eat their own kind too. We nailed one of them, laser right in the face and it went down. Several of them stopped coming at us and just started tearing into the corpse.’