Atlantia Series 2: Retaliator (9 page)

The Marines were already crouching with their rifles ready, aimed at the doors.

‘Plasma rays,’ Bra’hiv ordered.

Immediately C’rairn and another Marine hefted the big flame–throwing plasma rays and aimed them at the doors. The weapons fired a stream of super–heated charged particles that melted anything they touched, an effective defence against a swarm of Infectors or Hunters that might surge from within the bridge.

Bra’hiv nodded and two Marines accessed the panel codes and the bridge main hatch hissed as it was pulled open, C’rairn’s plasma ray roaring as it swung into action. The lieutenant held the weapon in place, heat haze rippling from its muzzle as Evelyn glimpsed the interior of the bridge, but nothing rushed out at them from its gloomy depths.

The Marines waited and then Bra’hiv edged forward. Evelyn shook herself into motion and joined him, covering his advance with her pistol as he reached the bridge entrance and peered inside.

The bridge was almost entirely dark but for four small emergency lights that cast their dull glow over abandoned control panels, the captain’s command platform and the main viewing screen. Evelyn saw no reflections from swarming bots, no movement, the bitterly cold air silent and still.

‘Advance by sections,’ Bra’hiv snapped as he lurched into the bridge.

Evelyn ran in behind him as the Marines plunged en masse onto the circular bridge and spread out, clearing each control station as they advanced past it.

‘Clear!’

‘Clear!

‘Clear!’

Evelyn relaxed her grip on her pistol as Bra’hiv lowered his rifle and pointed at C’rairn’s plasma ray.

‘Shut it down, lieutenant,’ he said. ‘Bridge is clear.’

The roaring of the plasma flame spluttered out as Evelyn looked around her. The bridge was shut down, entirely deactivated as though the ship were in a space dock back in orbit around Ethera. Andaim moved across to one of the control panels and activated a screen. He wiped the frost from it with one gloved hand and scrutinised the display, the blue screen glowing against his visor and illuminating his face.

‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘this gets stranger. The ship’s computer says that it has at least fifty per cent of its fuel remaining and that supplies are at thirty eight per cent. She’s full of the things we need.’

‘She’s stocked?’ Bra’hiv uttered in disbelief as he strode to join Andaim. ‘Then where the hell is everybody?’

‘I don’t like this,’ Evelyn murmured, looking around her. ‘It feels like bait.’

‘That doesn’t figure either,’ Qayin said. ‘If this ship was put here by the Word to bait humans then they wouldn’t have used a Veng’en distress signal and revealed themselves.’

‘He’s right,’ C’rairn said. ‘There’s something else going on here. Can we start the engines from the bridge?’

Andaim moved to the helmsman’s position and scanned the controls, activating one of the touchscreen displays and reading from the screen. He frowned.

‘Engines are functional, but the command controls have been deactivated at the engine room relays,’ he reported. ‘Somebody shut the connections down on site in the generator room.’

‘Why the hell would they do that?’ C’rairn asked.

‘Whatever this is all about, it’s an opportunity we can’t afford to miss,’ Bra’hiv snapped and keyed his microphone link to Atlantia. ‘This is Bra’hiv. Ship is secure, send over shuttles as soon as you can to begin shipping supplies.’

‘Roger that.’

Evelyn felt a pulse of alarm surge through her. ‘You can’t do that, not yet. We haven’t checked the rest of the ship.’

‘We will,’ Bra’hiv promised, ‘but this ship could provide us with months’ of supplies and I’m not passing that up.’

‘It could take days to check this vessel over,’ Evelyn insisted. ‘And what about scanning the supplies? They would be the perfect vector for the Word to get aboard Atlantia and…’

‘Evelyn,’ Bra’hiv cut across her. ‘I get it, okay? You’re concerned about the Word getting aboard. We all are. Let me do my job and it won’t come to that. Agreed?’

Evelyn bit her lip and forced herself to nod in agreement. Bra’hiv turned away and began directing his men toward their duties as one of the Marines walked up onto the control platform and began flipping switches.

‘Hey!’ Evelyn yelled. ‘Get down from there!’ The Marine looked up at her in surprise as she dashed to his side. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘Getting some warmth in here,’ the Marine protested. ‘The civilians can’t come aboard while it’s sub–zero!’

‘The Legion prefers warm temperatures!’ Evelyn snapped. ‘You do that, you could kill us all.’

The Marine looked at General Bra’hiv, who replied in a monotone voice.

‘We’re not detecting any presence of the Word, and if it were here it would have maintained a temperate environment, not shut the ship down and let itself drift to nowhere,’ he said as he looked at the Marine. ‘Kyarl, as soon as you’re done there I want you on guard duty back in the landing bay, understood?’

‘Yes sir!’ Kyarl replied, and stepped down off the platform.

‘This is insane,’ Evelyn gasped. ‘Don’t any of you have any concerns at all about what might happen if I’m right?’

Nobody answered her, and even Qayin seemed to be avoiding her gaze. The realisation hit Evelyn hard. ‘You all think I’m crazy, is that it?’

‘Nobody thinks you’re crazy,’ Lieutenant C’rairn said. ‘But you’re wound a little tight right now Evelyn, if you know what I mean?’

Evelyn looked pleadingly at Andaim, who offered her a brief smile. ‘It’ll be fine,’ he promised.

‘That’s what people probably said right before the damned apocalypse,’ Evelyn shot back and then turned to Bra’hiv. ‘You brought me here to take point and now you’re ignoring me?’

‘I’m not ignoring you, ensign,’ the general replied, carefully emphasising Evelyn’s rank, ‘but right now we’re secure enough to move forward and frankly I think you’re over–reacting. If anything happens we’ll pull out without hesitation but for now we’re staying put. You’ve got a problem with that, take it up with the captain.’

The general turned and walked off the bridge, leaving Evelyn to fume in silence.

***

The Infectors were mesmerising.

Meyanna Sansin stood in her laboratory and watched the writhing ball of bots as they swirled in a dense black cloud the size of her fingernail inside the magnetic chamber. Too small to see individually unless they stopped moving, each was smaller than a grain of sand and contained a simple but exotically crafted series of components, some of which she had been able to identify by scanning the devices with X–Rays.

Infectors flowed through the human body using the bloodstream, spreading to all corners of the body within minutes of infection. Looking like small hump–backed insects, with six legs and probing antennae around two pincer–like jaws, they latched on wherever they were programmed to go and inserted thin, electrically conductive probes into vital organs or nerve centres. One probe went in from the Infector’s head, the other from its tail. Signals from various human organs were thus intercepted on their way to the brain, or vice versa, “
hacked
” with the Infector’s new commands, and sent on their way through the body. Thus could a small number of Infectors hack the human body from the brain stem and control it, all the while using the human body’s resources to multiply their numbers and solidify their control.

What fascinated Meyanna most was their ability to extract small amounts of iron from human blood, and use it to replicate more of themselves. The human body contained enough iron to make a large nail but to extract it all would fatally injure the victim: thus, the Infectors extracted only small amounts, building more of themselves over time until they gradually took complete control. From there they could extract other elements through the victim’s skin from contact with other surfaces, building molecule by molecule as they metamorphosised their victim into an inorganic version of itself, such as the horrendous charicature of Commander Tyraeus Forge that Evelyn had described coming face to face with aboard the Avenger.

Meyanna shivered. Because the iron in human blood was essentially paramagnetic it had to be harvested by the Infectors in other ways, usually through it being dissolved in red blood cells. Once the human victim was completely under the Infector’s control, iron could then be sought out through dietary means, providing the Infectors with fuel for yet more replication.

She leaned close to the chamber, watching the cloud of bots swirling in their spherical prison. The Infector’s construction inevitably created some level of magnetic polarity, especially when they were beyond the shielding effect of human cells and the fast–flowing protection of blood, which protected them because its force was far greater than that of magnetism. But suspended in air, inside a powerful magnetic field, they were effectively incarcerated by forces far greater than their own.

And that, Meyanna had decided, might be a weakness that could be exploited.

Infectors could not survive outside of a human host for long. Too small to generate much internal power, and easily fried if they attempted to hack into ordinary power conduits, they relied upon electrical impulses inside the human body for power. These continuous, low energy pulses that drove motor–function and the brain provided an easily tapped source of energy for the Infectors, furthering the vicious cycle of infection, replication and deeper entrenchment within the human victim.

Outside of the body, devoid of a power supply and assaulted by air currents, microwaves and all manner of corrosive chemicals, Infectors survived for just minutes before shutting down and crumbling into dust. Their vulnerability to microwaves had for some time been the only way to detect their presence in a human being: by bombarding the victim with microwave radiation at the same frequency as the components within the Infectors, they would burn up and die. Unfortunately, with the bots swarming around major organs such as the optical nerves, brain stem and spinal column, the human host would also typically die an agonising death as they were fatally burned from within.

Meyanna had conceived a secondary test, a safer one that had been used on the entire ship’s compliment months before. This involved a two–stage process. The first was to scan the human for their metallic content, essentially an X–Ray designed to pick up on the presence of Infector swarms around major organs. The entire human population of the Atlantia had thus been cleared of infection using this process, but Meyanna knew that it was not fail–safe: the bots could easily disperse into the blood–stream and be indetectable by the scans, leaving only a small number in place to ensure that control of the host was not lost.

Therefore, she had devised a second test. The X–ray scan was re–done, while at the very same time blood was drawn from the subject in small doses for five minutes. With nowhere left to run, one test or the other would expose infection.

For the past few weeks she had been conducting these exhaustive tests on ten people per day as well as running the hospital itself, systematically clearing civilians and crew members of infection. She was over half–way through and so far nobody had shown any sign of the infection that Evelyn seemed so certain was present aboard the Atlantia.

Evelyn’s immunity to the Word was another mystery that confused Meyanna even further. Her body clearly was capable of rejecting the Infectors, its immune response attacking them and ejecting them from her body in much the same way it would a common cold virus. The Infectors’ tiny size, in Evelyn’s case, was also their weakness. How her killer T–cells recognised the invaders as foreign, and were able to immobilise them, was the greatest part of the mystery.

Meyanna watched as the Infector’s roiled and seethed in mid–air. She knew that if this tiny sphere of living machines broke free of their magnetic incarceration, they would eat through the glass walls of the chamber within seconds and seek to infect any living person they could find before they were drained of power. She shuddered as she imagined walking into the laboratory and finding a tiny hole in the glass wall, seeing the Infectors flash by in front of her eyes as they…

‘Doctor?’

Meyanna turned, mildly startled, and saw Dhalere standing in the laboratory doorway.

‘Councillor,’ she greeted her. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you come in.’

Dhalere glided toward Meyanna, her exotic eyes friendly. ‘Sorry, I knocked but you seemed busy.’ Dhalere’s eyes drifted toward the sphere inside the magnetic chamber. ‘Is that,
them
?’

‘It is,’ Meyanna replied, ‘but don’t worry, they can’t break free from containment.’

Dhalere seemed to shiver as she crossed the laboratory to the examination bed, and she coughed into her hand. ‘I’d rather stay away from them, if it’s all the same to you. Those things give me the creeps.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Meyanna replied, and then opened a drawer filled with hypodermic needles and selected one. ‘You okay with this?’

Dhalere glanced at the needles and nodded.

‘I won’t say I’m a fan but it’s better than the alternative, right?’

Meyanna moved across to Dhalere and pulled the X–Ray transmitter from its wall socket. She levered it out and over where Dhalere lay on the bed as she prepared to extract her blood. The Councillor coughed again, covering her mouth with the back of her hand.

‘You okay?’ Meyanna asked.

‘I’ve been coughing a lot lately,’ Dhalere admitted. ‘Must be a bug or something.’

‘Are you taking anything for it?’

‘It’ll pass,’ Dhalere replied. ‘I’ll fight it off.’

‘I won’t take much blood and it won’t take long,’ Meyanna promised. ‘If you have any Infectors in your bloodstream they won’t have anywhere else to run and we’ll detect them. And if you’ve got anything else worse than just a cold, I’ll see that too.’

‘How long does it take?’ Dhalere asked. ‘The analysis, I mean?’

‘A couple of hours or so,’ Meyanna replied. ‘I’ll let you know as soon as I can what the results are.’

Dhalere lay back and stared up at the ceiling. She barely made a sound as Meyanna slipped the needle into a vein and then using a remote–control activated the X–Ray scanner. The device hummed as Meyanna extracted a small amount of blood, waited a few seconds, then drew a little more.