Virus (16 page)

Hiko stood with Foster and the captain on the bridge of the
Volkov,
all three of them casting uneasy glances at the crazy woman seated several feet away. Her hands were tied in front of her and she was eating a granola bar next to a table, her face angry and sorrowful at once as she stared blankly at the humming computers.

Hiko was unhappy with the whole situation. The wound in his leg was
mamae
and throbbed like a bastard, the others were still missing, and now Foster and Everton were arguing in heated whispers about what to do without addressing the real problem—that they were trapped on a strange and unfriendly ship in the middle of a typhoon.

Porangi,
all of ’em. Nuts.

Foster was still trying to get Everton to consider their captive’s repeated requests to shut the power down. “This ship belongs to the Russian government, Captain. And she’s a senior officer.”

“What the fuck was she hiding in a locker for?” Everton whispered angrily.

Hiko sighed. “Foster’s got a point, Captain.”

Nadia, the crazy, was watching them carefully. Everton walked a few steps farther away and they joined him, Hiko’s leg aching miserably.

“Shut up, both of you,” Everton hissed. “This ship was a derelict when we found her; her engines were down, her crew’s either dead or deserted—she’s up for grabs, and Olga Korbut over there knows it. Any admiralty judge in the world’s gonna side with us—”

“You’re all going to die,” called Nadia, and Hiko scowled. Could she possibly shut up? He was sick of hearing about the horrible danger they were all in, sick and tired and angry.

Not as angry as Everton. “Hear that, Foster? We’re all going to die because
aliens
are on the ship. Officer or not, she’s not mentally competent to run this vessel!”

Hiko sighed again. That was true, also.

Everton walked over to Nadia and towered over her, his cheeks flushed with high color. “I’ve got a man missing and I want some answers. And no ‘Twilight Zone’ shit this time.”

Nadia stared up at him. “I can prove every word I said.”

They locked gazes, and what Everton did next proved that he was as
porangi
as she was. He unholstered his revolver suddenly and leveled it at her head.

“Bullshit. Five seconds, or I’m going to blow your head off. One . . .”

Foster shot a terrified look at Hiko and stepped forward, her voice high and anxious. “Wait! She was hiding in the sick bay, she doesn’t know where Squeaky is.”

Everton didn’t look away from Nadia’s cold and angry eyes. “Two . . . She knows. She dropped an anchor on my boat and
fired
on us. Three . . .”

Foster stepped closer, pleading now. “Put the gun down! Hiko—?”

Hiko shook his head slowly. He didn’t want to see the woman die, but it wasn’t up to him—and the pain in his leg was vicious. Besides, Everton was bluffing, he had to be. “Somebody dropped an anchor on me. I ain’t feeling too sympathetic.”

“Four . . .”

Everton pulled back the hammer and Nadia stared at him defiantly, steely cold. She was not afraid, and Hiko pushed away from the console he’d been leaning on and moved towards Everton, suddenly not sure if the captain was bluffing at all. The woman didn’t
look
crazy in the face of
mate,
and that meant—Hiko didn’t know what that meant.

“Goddamn it, Captain,
holster that gun!”
Foster cried.

Nadia only stared at Everton intensely, her voice cold. “Do it. Shoot me, I don’t care. Just
shut the power off to this ship.”

Foster grabbed the captain’s arm, shoving the revolver away. “She’s not going to tell you what you want to hear, Captain!”

“I’d like to hear what she has to say about this.”

They all turned, saw Steve and Richie and Woods standing at the hatch, the three of them carrying a body. They walked onto the bridge, struggling beneath the weight of their load, a smell of rot drifting along with them.

They moved to the chart table where Nadia sat and slammed their stinking burden down. Hiko hobbled a step closer and felt every hair on his body stiffen and stand. He reached for his
wahaika
instinctively, clutching at it, but there was no comfort to be had, no respite from the nightmare laid out in front of them.

It seemed that the Russian wasn’t crazy after all.

• 16 •

N
adia looked away, wishing that the captain, Everton, had shot her.

It is too much! Oh, Alexi, how can I go on?

“What . . . the
fuck
. . . is that?” Everton, his expression stunned. He still held the revolver out but had apparently forgotten his promise to kill her.

One of the men who had carried the creature to the bridge spoke, the dark-skinned man. “Beats the hell outta us.”

Nadia couldn’t bear to look, not yet; she knew exactly what they saw. She studied the faces of the American crew, trying to fix names to each in an effort to subdue her breaking heart; these were the people who would live or die now, the men and woman who had yet to face the nightmare.

Everton, Foster, Hiko—and the young dark-haired man she’d seen before, he was Steve. The other two would be Woods and Richie, though she didn’t know which from which. The pale blond man had been wounded in his shoulder; she decided that he must be Woods, because he seemed—weaker than the other, Richie. Richie was the one who had spoken so strongly over the radio.

They all wore the same face now as they stared at the horror in front of them; fascination and disgust played across their tired features in equal measure.

Nadia stood up slowly and looked down on the biomechanoid, trying to see it through her scientist’s eyes—the tiny fiber optics that lay across the motor cortex, leading away to the partly exposed parietal lobe of the brain; the slivers of metal woven throughout the dermis and visible deep fascia, the tenosynovitis at the wrists—

She couldn’t do it. “It is Alexi,” she said softly. “My captain.”

“This thing tried to
kill
us,” said the wounded man; definitely Woods.

Hiko flared his nostrils, frowning. “Smells funky.”

“Squeaky’s missing and somebody’s welded the engine room shut,” said Steve.

Richie shot a dark glance at her and then addressed the others. “And
she’s
got friends down there. Can somebody explain what the hell’s going on?”

Everton finally lowered his revolver and she felt their eyes on her, all of them ready to listen now that they had seen.

Foster stepped closer to her, and Nadia saw true regret on her face, an apology—and a will to survive in her serious gaze that was hauntingly familiar.

Only eight days ago, I was this woman . . .

“Finish your story,” Foster said.

Nadia’s bound hands were shaking. “I need a cigarette,” she whispered.

Hiko handed Nadia’s satchel to Foster, who rummaged through and pulled out her cigarettes and lighter. She handed one to Nadia, then lit it for her and stepped back.

Nadia inhaled deeply, blew out, and told them how it had happened.

“The thing that came onto this ship . . .
infested
the mainframe computer, the labs, the machine shops. It activated the halon fire extinguishers as we slept. Sixty-seven died, a quarter of the crew the first night.”

The woman took another drag off her cigarette and Steve watched her, wanting to see the lie on her face, hear it in her voice—but her heavily accented English was brutally honest, her pale face betraying no hint of deceit.

“It cut us off from the machine shops . . . and started building. The little ones first, the gatherers.”

Richie nodded. “Yeah, we saw a whole room full of them!” He glanced at Steve, still nodding. “That’s what nailed Woods.”

The woman went on, the smoke from her cigarette dismally reminding Steve of Squeaky. Just the thought of his partner, alone, somewhere on the
Volkov—

“Then came something much more dangerous.” She glanced at the table, then looked away quickly as if it caused her pain.

“Made from parts of dead crewmen. Half man, half machine, a—biomechanism. Engineering beyond our comprehension that can kill in horrible ways . . .” She took another deep drag.

“The crew quickly deserted, taking their chances in the sea. Only Alexi and I stayed to fight. We cut cables, destroying its ability to move through the ship—”

Foster interrupted gently. “What does cutting cables have to do with anything?”

“The machines are controlled by the—electrical energy in the computer. Cut off their source, their power . . . they die.”

It finally hit Steve, all of the cables they’d seen—he reached for the frayed cord that led from the back of the biomechanoid and tapped at it thoughtfully.

Of course. But—what started it? How?

Woods had reached for his hip flask, fumbling out what looked like the last of the whiskey. Steve watched him upend the bottle with real envy; he suddenly wanted a drink very badly.

“So what
is
this thing?” Steve asked.

She took a last drag from her cigarette and dropped it to the deck, crushing it beneath one boot. “A life-form unlike anything we know. Extremely intelligent. A life-form that is electrical in nature.”

Richie frowned. “You mean—like lightning that can
think?”

She nodded, reached up awkwardly to pull at a battered set of dog tags she wore. “And subject to the same laws of physics. It has no form, no shape; it’s giving itself what it lacks, creating a new life-form using parts of the ship and crew. It’s—evolving.”

“Evolving into what?” Foster asked quietly.

The Russian didn’t answer, and Steve could see it was because she didn’t know; they all stared at one another, then back at the creature that she called Alexi, the bridge deathly silent—

—except for the droning hum of the computers that surrounded them, feeding themselves on the power that coursed through the vessel from the massive engine deep below.

Foster believed it, all of it. She had succeeded in rationalizing to herself each single event that had happened since they’d come aboard the
Volkov,
explaining to herself that it had been strange but not necessarily impossible; but the combination of her own intuition and the growing list of improbable events was too much to be denied when taken in full. Nadia’s story explained everything—the missing crew, the anchor sinking the tug, the sense she’d had all along that they were being watched by something she couldn’t name . . .

The
—creature
on the table in front of them only cinched it for Foster. Richie had taken out his penknife and was poking at the exposed brain tissue of the biomechanoid while the rest of them absorbed Nadia’s story, each lost in their own thoughts. Nadia had closed her eyes, sat now with one trembling hand pressed lightly to her temple.

Foster leaned over to see what Richie was doing, swallowing dryly. There was a tiny circuit board implanted in the jellied mass; waveforms danced on a minute instrument screen connected to it by homonoid fibers. Richie was using his knife to peel back layers of the wet tissue, exposing wire threads and metal components like she’d never seen.

He continued probing, his expression one of stoned fascination. She watched as he followed a bundle of fiber optics down a metal-link spine, edging along with the tip of the blade.

“Look at this,” he murmured, and Foster leaned in closer. “Right here is some kind of coil, a self-contained power supply built right into it . . .”

He looked up for a moment, saw that everyone was watching him. “This brain is still alive,” he said softly.

Nadia turned to look, saw what he was doing, and winced. She stood up, moving opposite from Richie at the head of the table, a look of pain on her fragile features. Richie didn’t even seem to notice, too involved in his morbid searching.

Nadia leaned down and whispered to the creature, her eyes bright with sorrow. “Alexi? Alexi—”

She went on in Russian, but the tone was clear; a mourning lament in her own language, each strange word a soft testament to her aching loss. Foster watched uncomfortably, wondering at the depth of emotion.