Orbital Decay (3 page)

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:
[email protected]

To
:
Oversight23@(withheld).gov
;

CC
:
Steering23@(withheld).com

Subject
: Progress of Project Chronos – Live testing protocols.

Samples of the Mg Phage from infected tissue exhibit full viability. All genes appear to have been restored. We should have seen this coming. It may already be too late.

We believe the phase I retrovirus has mutated in subject CL13, allowing it to act, not on the subject, but rather on the alien organelles introduced into the subject. Dormant genes have activated to cause unbelievable symptoms. This has transformed the organelles into fully functional and highly infectious bacteria.

Several members of the staff are exhibiting symptoms and have been placed in isolation cells in #3. If we can’t find a way to stop the progress of the infection, we will have to initiate the flash protocol.

Dr. Davis has placed the facility on full lock-down, no further shipments will be allowed through the shuttle bay and all escape pods have been jettisoned. We have not seen him since our last review and fear that he may have entered one of the pods before they were ejected. Given the high potential for infection, we recommend the immediate apprehension and isolation of Dr. Davis.

Dr. Kelvin Narcisse

Gaia Bio Design

23345 W. Wacker Dr, Chicago, IL

Low Earth Orbit

B
en climbed into the station through the open hatch. He stood there, in an empty hallway, bathed in a bluish light, the white stripes of his dress shirt glowing painfully bright.

Either they’re having a rave or something bad is happening,
he thought. An involuntary shudder ran up his spine. Ultra-violet lighting was used in labs to kill pathogens.

Where the hell is everybody?
 He pulled out his shield and clipped it to his belt. It somehow seemed a futile gesture. A CPD detective badge in an orbital lab had about as much meaning as a campaign promise.

Or a promise that promotion to detective would mean less shift work and more flex-time with family.

Still, it gave him some small measure of confidence. He wasn’t just some lost tourist – he was here investigating a death. He picked a direction and started walking, trying to look as though he routinely boarded orbital stations in the performance of his duties.

The corridor ended at a large set of sliding glass doors. He looked through a coating of filth and saw what he took to be a lab, but it wasn’t the kind of ultra-clean, shiny facility one expected. The place was a mess.

Scorch marks circled the perimeter of the ceiling and faded their way down the walls. Rows of glass-fronted compartments along the back wall held small piles of ash. Small lumps of melted plastic lay between glass beakers and flasks on the central work stations.

Three piles of ash lay on the lab floor, just inside the doors, another in the middle of the floor.

Dead end,
thought Ben, turning to try the other direction. His foot struck something and he was sure he recognized the sound as the small object skittered across the floor. He bent down and retrieved the small brass cartridge.
.45 ACP,
he mused. The same ammunition he used in his XD Service semi-automatic.

What the hell did I walk into?
He drew his weapon and cocked it before moving on. As he came to a right-hand turn, he saw what looked like blood spatter on the bulkhead. This was not shaping up the way he had expected.

He reached back to the holder on his belt and pulled out a thirteen-round magazine. The ten was ideal for concealed carry, but his pinky finger always slid off the bottom of the grip with the short mag. He switched them out, giving himself a more secure grip on his weapon.

He was about to take the right-hand turn when he heard shrieking from dead ahead. Pistol at the ready, he moved down the hallway, coming to another glass door.

This one was clean and the lab inside was more to his expectations. The clean, glass-fronted compartments on the far wall held dozens of chimpanzees. They had been the source of the noise.

Movement caught his eye and he realized that the large blue tarpaulin wasn’t a tarp at all but a researcher in a biohazard suit. The individual stepped back from an enclosed chamber, withdrawing his hands from heavy reversible gloves built into the front.

Without even thinking about it, Ben pushed up against the wall to his right, staying out of sight of the man inside.  He had a fear of germs, stronger than most people, and the scene before him radiated danger.

He sidled along the wall until he reached the turn and breathed a sigh of relief as he stepped around the corner and out of sight of the man in the biohazard suit. He realized his breathing was loud enough to wake the dead and his heart was racing. He stood there for a moment, forcing himself to calm down, bringing his breathing under control.

Looking down the new corridor, he saw yet another sliding glass door set back in the corridor wall, and on the floor gleaming dully were more brass cartridges. Ten feet beyond the door, the corridor ended in a set of heavy steel doors with small windows. A large ‘13-L’ adorned the sliding doors, white on gray. He moved toward the glass door, holding his weapon in both hands. As he drew closer, he became aware of decay. The stench of it was growing in his nostrils as he approached the spent brass on the floor.

His foot slid on a cartridge as he reached the door and he crouched, throwing out his right arm to regain his balance. The door must have been equipped with a proximity sensor because it slid open as Ben flailed his arm.

And the lights came on in the room.

It was a boardroom. A standard boardroom. There were touch screens on the walls with sketches of cells, the names of chemical compounds, and line after line of notes. A large table dominated the center of the room and on the far side slumped two corpses, busily maintaining the foul stench that assaulted Ben’s senses.  

The one on the right, a man, looked like an ordinary murder victim to Ben. There was a jagged tear in his neck and his lab coat was black with dried blood. Cause of death was a no-brainer.

The one sprawled next to him was anything but ordinary. Her skin appeared to be melted, sagging in translucent folds from her face. Black stains of blood were on her lab coat as well and there were five holes in the grimy garment.

Going on first impressions, Ben would have said that she had attacked her colleague and got shot for her troubles, but what had she used for a weapon? He stood there, stomach roiling at the smell as he assessed the crime scene.

He stepped back out into the hall, partly to count the brass on the floor but mostly to get some slightly better air.
Six rounds,
he thought.
So where did the missing round end up?
He stood to look through the door and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. One of the victims was missing.

He stepped back through the door, his right hand squeezing the pistol’s grip safety as though it knew better than the rest of him. As he cleared the door frame, he became aware of movement to his right and he swung to face it, pistol up.

And there she was.

Ben’s breath exploded in a wordless rush and his heart went to full speed. Five feet away from him stood the corpse with the five thoracic gunshot wounds. Sections of rotted flesh were hanging loose from her face and neck. The body shifted erratically, constantly correcting for overbalances. Her eyes focused dully on his general form.
No way could she be alive. No way…
His mind screamed at his body to do something.

She took a step toward him. A painful, shuffling step that spoke of a deliberate expenditure of limited resources. She gathered herself for another lurching step, and Ben’s hand took over, adjusting his aim and squeezing the trigger. The sound filled the room. Comforting. The smell of gunpowder strong in the room, neutralizing the stench.

The grisly horror was thrown back and Ben stumbled backwards out of the room. He saw the door at the end of the hall and ran to the right-hand side of it where a large red button was mounted on what he hoped was the control panel. He slammed his left palm against it and the massive doors slowly began to slide open.

He moved to the middle, desperately trying to ignore the scrabbling sounds coming from the room behind him. He slipped through the door and began to mash his hand against the button on the far side. It was already closing so he forced himself to stop hitting the button. He didn’t want it to decide that he wanted it open again.

He was just taking a breath when he heard a clattering shuffle to his left. He spun, raising his weapon to find a man in a lab coat fumbling with a 12-gauge pump shotgun that hung on a sling beneath his left armpit. His left hand was bandaged, making it hard for him to hold the fore-grip. An aluminum clipboard lay at his feet, paper falling around him like dead leaves.

“Freeze,” Ben shouted. “Chicago Police!” He wasn’t sure why he bothered to add the second part – this place was hardly in his jurisdiction – but it seemed to help. The man stopped in mid-fumble and looked up at him with a strange mixture of fear and hope.

“You’re a cop?” he asked incredulously. “Where the hell did you come from?”

“We can get to that later,” Ben answered. “But I’ll tell you where you’re
gonna
end up if you don’t take your hand off that Mossberg.”

The man looked down, seemingly surprised to find his hand still on the pistol grip of the modified shotgun. He let go as if he’d been scalded.

“That shotgun have anything to do with what I just saw in the boardroom?” Ben kept his pistol aimed at the young man.

The man blinked. “They explained what was going on up here, didn’t they? I mean, before they sent you up here, they would have told you what you were facing, right?”

Ben shook his head, trying to clear what he had just seen. “Nobody sent me. I’m here investigating the death of Dr. Mortensen.”

“Huh!” The sound was part laugh part sigh of despair. “You poor son of a bitch. Sure, they probably killed Sam, but that’s the least of your worries now.”

From
:
[email protected]

To
:
Oversight23@(withheld).gov
;

CC
:
Steering23@(withheld).com

Subject
: Progress of Project Chronos – Live testing protocols.

Several members of the staff have now been isolated following the incident in Lab-Team-Room 13. What we took to be bruising on Dr. Hachette’s face is now understood to be an early indicator of infection.

Her sudden attack on Dr. Carew was astounding. She was talking about a proposed methodology for immunizing the staff when she suddenly stopped in mid-sentence. Before any of us could react, she had torn Carew’s neck open.

We cannot stress enough how important it is that you locate Dr. Davis and retrace his steps since leaving this station. Every cough, every touch of a surface could lead to a massive outbreak. Every person he came into contact with has to be quarantined.

Dr. Kelvin Narcisse

Gaia Bio Design

23345 W. Wacker Dr, Chicago, IL

Low Earth Orbit

“S
o,” Ben stopped, squeezing his eyes with thumb and forefinger.
If this turns out to be some kind of stupid prank, I’m gonna start shooting.
He looked back up at the six people in the room. “So, you were trying to reverse-engineer Midgaard longevity, and the results are…  what I ran into down on deck 13?”

“Yeah,” Dwight, the researcher who had found Ben, answered. His teeth were incredibly bright in the ultraviolet lighting. “The retro-virus mutated and suddenly it was a match for the receptors on the bacteria. What was supposed to be a controlled, second-phase infection suddenly turned into a runaway plague.” He shook his head slowly as he leaned against a table. “Instead of a symbiotic relationship, we had a microorganism that fed on human tissue.”

“But how does the victim stay alive?” Ben demanded. “You get sick, you die – that’s it.”

“Before we had to flash the alpha lab, we saw that the infection protected itself.” Dwight shrugged. “You have to understand, Detective, this is an alien organelle. It has a far more complex genome than our own mitochondria. It codes for a ton of compounds and we couldn’t sort out what each one was for. It can break down tissues to feed the most essential systems: circulatory, respiratory, muscles, core brain functions. It literally keeps a body going as long as possible so it can  propagate itself.”

Ben was looking down at a stain on the floor as he listened. “That person I shot down there, Hachette – was her brain still alive?”

“Sharon?” One of the researchers, Tim, spoke up. “If the infection was anything similar to what we saw with CL13, the parts of the brain that store who you are are the first to get broken down to fuel the rest.” He sighed, looking over at Dwight. “Sharon died days ago, just before she attacked Bill Carew. The infection must have repaired her organs so she could get back on her feet and look for fuel.”

“By fuel,” Ben raised his gaze to meet Tim’s eyes, “you mean us?”

“Well, they can’t infect us. At least…” Dwight raised his bandaged hand, “we don’t think they can.”

“None of the subjects in the second group showed any signs even after we exposed them to the mutated strain,” Tim explained. “We’re pretty sure the original infections confer some kind of immunity. Once the alien organelles are established in your tissue, the mutated version can’t get a foothold.”

“So we introduce the friendly version into the bloodstream.” Dwight jumped in. “Ordinarily, your immune system would jump on bacteria like a hobo on a cheeseburger, but we tailored this version to fly under the radar. That’s what makes the mutated strain so deadly – you just can’t fight it.” He waved his hand again. “We only had enough serum for half of us. We’ve got more now, but we were lucky that Doctors Brown and Riggs both have type O negative blood.”

“That’s all it takes?” Ben had been wondering about the bandaged hands in the room. “A quick ‘blood brother’ ceremony and you’re immune?”

“And semi-immortal.” Riggs grinned. “Don’t forget, detective, the whole point of putting those organelles into human tissue was to match the long lifespan of the Midgaard.”

Ben stared at the researcher. Words struggling to break free. “You’re gonna live for seven thousand years?”

“Probably not that long, in my case.” He looked around the room at his colleagues, all younger. “I’m in my mid-forties, detective. I’m already showing a few gray hairs. The modifications will slow the aging process but, if your DNA has already started to age, it can’t be reversed, only slowed down considerably. Kids who get the shot will live for a hell of a long time, though.”

“Oh, shit!” Dwight heaved himself up from his perch on the table, staring at Ben. “You were in the boardroom with Hachette. You’re infected. If you touched any surface at all, if you were even breathing when you walked in there, then you have it.” He went over to a bank of glass-fronted refrigerators and pulled a vial from a polystyrene block. He grabbed a syringe from the counter and tore the plastic wrapping off.

“You need a full shot,” Riggs explained. “We need to get a strong dose into your circulatory system so it can get ahead of the infection. At this point, it’s a horse race, but the infection starts out with a pretty weak hold so the shot should be more than enough.”

“Should be?” A shudder.

“You might have a few skin lesions, maybe a few sores in your mouth and nasal passages but it’ll pass quickly once the neighboring cells are fully protected by the shot,” Dwight said, holding up the needle. “The healing process is a bit faster than usual, but not by much.”

Ben stood there numbly, torn between fear of what the needle contained and knowledge of what was almost certainly crawling through his body already. He said nothing as the needle slid into his vein. A sharp prick followed by a cold tingle as the serum flowed into his bloodstream.

“There’s also a chance the virus might mutate again and turn the inoculation against you.” Riggs said with a shrug. “CL13 might have just been an aberration or it could have been an indicator of a one-in-a-hundred ratio of mutation. We don’t have a big enough sample size to know for sure.”

Ben looked up from the growing red dot of blood on his arm, staring at Riggs with one eyebrow raised. “And you couldn’t tell me that before giving me the damned shot?”

“Would you have refused the shot, detective?” Dwight said in a tired voice. “You’d die without it. Absolute guarantee. Would you really prefer that to a shot at living for a couple thousand years in good health?”

Ben’s skin tingled.
Thousands of years! If I survive the process, that is.
He shook his head slowly, still holding Riggs’ gaze. “Not sure I’d want to take the chance if I wasn’t already looking death in the face. I bet a lot of folks down on Earth would turn it down.”

“They don’t have that luxury,” Dwight said. “Our executive VP locked the place down, but not before he jumped ship to try and save himself.” He still held the needle, looking as though he wanted to stab someone with it. “Stupid bastard landed his escape pod on the roof of our head office on Wacker Drive. I managed to get a link with Sheila, his admin, and she said he took his regular car service home. Even if the army has him locked down, he’s had a chance to contaminate the office, the elevator and lobby of a seventy-eight-floor building, not to mention the driver and everyone
he’s
been in contact with. And all that was five days ago.”

“First rule of containment,” Riggs chimed in darkly, “something always gets past the net, no matter how wide you cast it. My money’s on the driver,” he added. “He’s probably dropped off a couple dozen execs at O’Hare by now.”

Ben was backing away as he heard all this, holding a hand out in negation. He came up against a steel sink with a vent hood built around it, his retreat cut off. “You’re telling me this is loose on Earth? My wife and kid are down there, in Chicago.” The shift in perspective changed everything. It no longer seemed right to think in terms of the separation, of shared custody. Lise and little Brendan were his family.

  He had to get to them.

“Well, we’re all stranded up here,” Riggs replied. “There’s no pods left; Davis jettisoned every one of them, including the one he hid his own hypocritical ass in.”

“Wait,” Dwight cut in. He looked at Ben. “You came here in a pod…”

“Forget it.” Ben waved him off. “I used ninety percent of the fuel cells just getting here. It wouldn’t have enough juice to make a controlled descent empty, much less carrying a person.” He thought about his mad dash to the station and he realized there might be a way, after all. He grinned.

“I might be able to get our hands on a shuttle.”