Toxic (72 page)

"We killed their buddies on the farm road. They want revenge."

All of the faces turned towards him.

"Those crazy fuckers are after us?"

Masters nodded for the diva and like Elaine would have done, told them to think instead of get angry.

"They're going to turn over every square inch of the villa."

He pointed to the one meter long hatch through which they had entered.

"Locating it is just a matter of time. They will end up finding us. So, we need to find a way out of here."

What those people had reserved for them once they found them went without saying. Alva closed her eyes. Masters turned towards Bruce.

"Your father must have planned an escape route in the case of a fire or something. I can't imagine for a moment that a man like him would lock himself up in a dead end."

Everywhere they looked, they couldn't make out anything that closely or distantly resembled an escape route. The marine started to ruffle through the shelves. He opened one box and examined the contents before moving on to the next. After checking several of them, he stopped for no reason. His forehead creased.

"The trunks."

Alva got up and looked around her. "What?"

The diva lifted the lid. She took out rugs and duvets, which she piled up on the floor.

"I don't see anything. No secret tunnels," she said ironically.

"Can you move it?"

She tried and failed.

Even with Bruce's help, the metal box refused to budge an inch.

"The person who built this place was absolutely set on this trunk staying in this spot," Masters smiled.

The biologist suddenly recovered his energy. His eyes lit up. "If there's a device, there must be a way of activating it. A remote control or something like that."

The colonel pointed to numerous containers. Right away, they all started to open them frenetically.

Before the blunt words of the Lynian, Elaine tried to keep calm.

Jool confirmed what numerous infectious disease specialists had suspected when country health services still worked, before the exceptional rapidness of the virus obliterated all chances of thwarting it. A strategy that had been thought out, premeditated and prepared with utmost care, she discovered with alarm.

"Just after my landing in a lake, the first person with whom I spoke was called Valery Emetievich Orlov."

Elaine was lost for words.

"The founder of Pharmaline."

"Exactly. He was... the human for the job. He was in charge of the Russian bacteriological warfare program and was well-informed regarding dissemination. The idea of the vaccine came from him."

The nurse leaned in towards the creature, grinding her teeth despite herself.

"What did you put in Siva-B?"

"Did Jave speak to you about our planet of origin?"

She remembered the alien's revelations in the ship's baggage hold.

"His people... Your people," she though wise to correct, "were exterminated."

"A tragedy, as it is. One more. The history of the Collective is built on the ruins of civilizations. About that, at least, Jave was always honest. You are a sort of Säzkari, according to your friends on the other side of the glass, right?"

"I'm a nurse; I can understand certain notions. And those aren't my friends," she responded in a harsh tone.

"OK. A very ancient disease was present on our world. In the distant regions of virgin continents, a sort of fever gave life back to dead beings. The organism responsible is a bacteria that to my knowledge isn't found anywhere else in the Three Galaxies. When our civilization became the target, like yours, of a consortium, a group of wise Lynians guided by their talent tried to develop a biological defense based on its effects on necrotized flesh. Unfortunately, it was too late. Our planet had been destroyed."

The alien paused. His nasal vents opened and he put a hand on the table. His claws caressed the fist-shaped hole in the table.

"A sample of this product came to me."

"Why didn't you use it against this Collective?"

"Very strict rules and protocols have been developed to avoid that sort of catastrophe. It's a subject that they take very seriously. With a bit of success, I would have been able to contaminate a small area and would have ended up executed in an oxygenation chamber."

"A what chamber?" she asked, before concentrating on the urgency of the situation.

"We're on the verge of going extinct. Our only chance is the antidote. Tell me that it has been created, I'm begging you."

"It's a product in three stages. The first two eliminate the bacteria and the last prepares the body for regeneration."

"What?" Elaine said with surprise.

"The infection is only part of the problem. It's also necessary to repair the flesh ravaged by the disease."

She remembered having used the same argument with Jave. What had he responded then? Everything in time... She considered those words.

"I think a demonstration would be worth more than all these words," the alien declared, giving Richardson a sign. The man in charge of the site expressed his worry through the intercom.

"You're sure?"

"Don't worry. She will prove to be reasonable."

He turned towards her. "Isn't that right?"

Elaine agreed with a brief nod of her head. Upon getting up, she felt feverish. Her mind was expecting all types of horrors. She prepared herself for the trial with a big breath of oxygen.

Jool's quarters weren't limited to that room and one or two connected rooms provided with an adapted atmosphere. She realized that they covered several floors. They took a staircase, with large and high steps, designed for the girth and without a doubt the weight of the alien. She had to hold herself up crawling like a child. The nurse felt tiny, an insignificant shadow behind a creature that had come right out of a fairy tale or mythology. Jool stopped on top of a landing painted yellow. Red warning symbols surrounded a prominent airlock.

"What you are going to see may shock you," the alien warned her. "You need to understand that this is absolutely necessary, and that it is part of the process."

She had already gone through the worst, in a certain sense. With time, all of these horrors. she would end up armoring herself against them, censoring what her senses showed her. This way of going about things had its advantage: preserving sanity. Her profession had taught her that there were limits to what one could stand.

Jool activated the opening mechanism, which was made up of a keyboard with buttons as large as one of her fists beside a lever that was similar to that of a safe. The memory of her visit to the navy warship came back to her clearly. Her eyes wide, she recognized the cylinders immediately. There were dozens. Each one held a human or an infected creature and measured around three meters high. Cords and cables covered the floor.

Her heart skipped a beat. Her legs turned to jelly and she had to control herself to not faint.

She stopped in front of the first individual in the row, submerged in a olive-colored, bubbling liquid. His bare head shone with a sordid glow. His hair was fanned out and his eyes closed, as hundreds of milky, pot-bellied worms crawled over his body. The alien slid to her side.

"Those are Oksan worms."

These strange leeches resembled giant maggots. The ringed bugs scrambled along his ligaments, pieces of skin, muscles and tendons. It even seemed like a free-for-all. Some of them buried their way between the others to reach the flesh to devour it.

"We also call them flesh-eaters," Jool specified.

Elaine closed her eyes, on the verge of throwing up the bile in her stomach.

O
fficer Kuhn presented himself in Dubai for his report. He wasn't very confident, conscious of his failure to extract the secrets of the ship Exthyne stored in Woomera. Despite their efforts, his team of seasoned technicians hadn't accomplished the miracle that the Primark expected. The latter was looking over the summary of the investigations, letting out whistles of ill omen. He retracted and stuck out his claws on the desk in a repetitive movement.

"The lack of material proof is evidence in itself," the Kathari then said.

The reply burst out right away.

"That's not the type of argument I want to hear, officer Kuhn. Not at the moment."

"
Haj! Primark.
"

For a while, the giant's fur had been developing a reddish color in certain places. His paw fiddled with one of these areas. On his home world, the pigmentation of fur developed over the eleven seasons of the vernal cycle. However, it had never taken on this strange color. Maybe he should talk to the Säzkari about it. For a moment, he thought he was sick, but felt perfectly fine.

Naakrit arrived at the main point of the report. His scaly face rose up from his flexible screen.

"The atmosphere of the cabin? That's all you found? We're wasting precious time following clues which are like grasping at thin air instead of concentrating on deliveries and respecting contracts."

The reptilian left the flexible screen on the console and then moved a few steps in the direction of the central display, which held the tactical situation around the eighth planet.

"And those ships," he thundered, "what are they doing here?"

Officer Kuhn waited a moment for the storm to pass before going back to the subject of his investigations. He counted to eight and then continued his presentation.

"The pilot erased the information database, the flight registry and the maintenance ones. The ship was doctored: the certification engravings and series numbers are missing. On a legal level, it's as if it never existed. A superb job aiming to stop someone from retracing the history of the vehicle and its course to find its point of origin. They omitted one detail, however."

Naakrit turned around, his interest sparked. He retracted a claw.

"We all make mistakes at one time or another; it's inevitable. No intelligent being in the Three Galaxies is exempt from that rule. And now, what is that detail?"

"The carbon filters."

"All ships are equipped with them; they are necessary to purify..."

Naakrit interrupted himself suddenly. His officer bowed his head slightly, happy with having earned the attention of his superior.

"Yes, except that these ones are unused. Or almost. That means that they weren't functioning. We can then assume that the pilot was not uncomfortable with an elevated level of carbon dioxide and to my knowledge, one species corresponds particularly well to that..."

"A Lynian..." Naakrit whistled, cutting the Kathari short.

"It's a likely hypothesis."

"I thank you, officer Kuhn. You have earned a bit of rest. Excellent work."

"
Haj!
"

One Lynian
, the Primark repeated to himself,
was complicated enough. But two...
He left the operations room, taking his flexible screen with him.

Jool, the emissary sighed, looking for answers in his peat. His rootlets feasted on the soil rich in nutrients.

His old friend had created the virus. In doing so, he had certainly saved the species, at the cost of a horrible transformation and the collapse of civilization through the spreading of a nameless chaos. The idea behind it all - making humans unfit for consumption - was ingenious, however. Jool didn't possess his talent, but he compensated for that lack of clairvoyance through limitless determination and imagination.

The fact that their paths diverged didn't only seem desirable but rather inevitable to him. The Lynian race couldn't stand up against the Collective any longer. They had lost that battle ages ago, even before them and their parents were born.

Jave opened the palm of his hand. The ball levitated a few millimeters above it without changing color, giving off a milky gray tone.

The door rang suddenly. He closed his fingers.

"Emissary Jave, we need to talk," he heard.

Naakrit.

The Lynian hurried to get out of the tub and let the leader of the mercenaries in once he had dressed. He pointed to one of the volcanic rock benches on which Kjet had sat during a previous visit. Jave got the impression of dꫠ vu while decoding the reptilians expression.

His talent was never wrong.

The Primark produced a flexible screen with the results of an analysis. Jave leaned over it and learned about officer Kuhn's report. At least, he told himself, that confirmed his hypothesis regarding Jool's arrival.

"This is a surprising development," Jave reacted.

The sudden dilation of his pupils constituted a reliable indicator of his nervousness. Add to that the movement of his claws and the Lynian understood: Naakrit was angry.

"You don't know anything about one of your fellow Lynians coming to Earth; is that so, Emissary?"

He would end up discovering Drajdel's den, as the reptilian expression went.

"How could I have known? I'm not informed of the movements of each Lynian in the Collective, and even less so outside of it."

"There exists a terrorist organization," Naakrit advanced with a tone of disdain to accompany the movements of his forked tongue.