Contagion

by David Ryker

  Well wasn’t that just so nice and logical? Made me feel expendable. But hey, we were the newcomers with no connections or treaties with the other races. If I had been in R’kk’kar’s shoes, I would have done the same thing.

  That didn’t make me feel any better about it.

  A few minutes later, we launched a small scientific probe about the size of a basketball. It was crammed with sensors and miniaturized lab equipment and could tell us everything we needed to know. We hoped.

  Since we couldn’t operate it remotely with the warp field affecting radio communications, we sidled up close alongside the smallest of the Subine ships and released it on a microfilament wire, only a few molecules thick but incredibly strong, that would send data back to us.

  I sat by Valeria as she worked it from the command deck. She put it on the main screen so everyone could see.

  The probe’s cameras were damn good, and we got a crystal clear look at the Subine ship as it moved in, playing out the microfilament wire behind it.

  Subine ships were as chaotic as their thought patterns. No two looked at all alike. This particular ship, which was a destroyer, looked like a collection of hexagonal tiles stacked in an uneven row by some drunken giant. I couldn’t make any sense of the design. I suppose it made sense to creatures with segmented brains and dozens of tentacles. They did their share of fighting, and that’s what really mattered.

  Valeria steered the probe around the outside of the ship, looking through portholes. The inside of the ship was just as crazy as the outside. Corridors went off every which way like some 3D maze. The Subines moved on a pad of cilia that could adhere to almost any surface, so floors were more a matter of convenience than necessity. Control panels were just as likely to be on the ceiling as they were on the walls, and right angles didn’t look like they were in fashion. We saw all sorts of strange rooms and odd contraptions.

  What we didn’t see was the Subines.

  Valeria had the probe clamp onto various places on the hull and listen with sensitive detecting instruments. We heard no conversations or sounds of movement.

  “This is too damn familiar,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Valeria said.

  Once we had found out all we could—which was pretty much nothing—Valeria sent an order to the probe to reel in the cable once we snipped it at our end. We were taking no chances with any infection.

  The Dri’kai had different plans.

  After we sent a communications probe to General R’kk’kar with the data we got from the probe, he sent a message back ordering us to board the Subine destroyer and see what was happening.

  So much for avoiding potential contagion.

  “We should dispute that order,” Foyle snapped. “Look what happened with the last infection.”

  “The Subines are an important part of the fleet,” the commander replied. “We would be severely handicapped without them.”

  Foyle clicked his tongue and shook his head.

  “I’ll go over in a mech suit,” I said. “That was proof against the last Centaurian infection. And we don’t even know it is an infection.”

  “Take a team,” the commander ordered.

  “We only have four mech suits. That doesn’t make much of a team.”

  The Nansen wasn’t designed to be a warship. We didn’t think we’d need to be. We certainly didn’t think we would end up fighting incredibly advanced bioweapons from another arm of the galaxy.

  “Four is better than one,” the commander said. “Pick your team.”

  I picked Qiang, Colonel Chen, and Valeria.

  Yeah, I picked my girlfriend to go on a dangerous mission. She was an exobiologist, and we would need her help.

  To be honest, she was the worst exobiologist in the fleet. All the Dri’kai and Vlern and Vrimjlen exobiologists had the advantage of actually knowing there were other races in the galaxy before two months ago. Valeria was on a bit of a learning curve.

  But we weren’t going to get any of them on this mission. Wasn’t that fucking great?

  Valeria didn’t seem to mind, though. In fact, she seemed excited.

  “I’ve been cooped up in this ship too long,” she said as I instructed her on how to put on the mech suit. It was pretty basic to use as long as you didn’t try to use any of the weapons, and I didn’t have time to train her on those.

  “If you don’t like being cooped up on spaceships, maybe you shouldn’t have signed up for a fifty-year mission,” I said.

  “There’s Terra Nova at the end of it. Then it’s going to be all blue skies and clean seas.”

  I smiled. Everyone was talking about Terra Nova now. Whatever kept them motivated was fine by me.

  “Just stay in the middle of the group and let us handle any trouble.”

  The mech suits controls can be adjusted depending on the size of the user, and because Valeria was smaller than your typical soldier we had to fiddle with a lot of levers and switches to get her into the thing. It would have been nice to have a self-adjusting system like on the Shadow Fighter I flew, that sensed your body’s contours and transformed itself to your needs. What the hell kind of technology had the Dri’kai stumbled on, and what else did they have hidden up their sleeve?

  Once she was in, her body encased in ultralight alloy, her arms arrayed with weaponry, and only her face appearing through the glassteel viewplate, she made a few experimental movements.

  “This feels surprisingly light,” she said. “It’s all supported by hydraulics, I presume?”

  “Yes, but don’t underestimate the extra weight. You’ll feel it soon enough, especially if we get into trouble and have to get physical.”

  “I can take on anything in this!” she said, running with a thumping gait to one side of the hangar and back. She grinned at me from behind the viewplate.

  “You look cute in that thing.”

  She cocked her head. Well, at least tried to. The mech suit doesn’t have a mobile head section, so she just thumped her head into the padded side of the interior.

  “I have a PhD in astrobiology, three masters degrees, and am at the top of my field.”

  “You can still be cute, can’t you?”

  Corporal Chen called over from the other side of the hangar, “If you two can stop making kissy faces at each other, the shuttle is ready.”

  “We’re not making kissy faces,” I said.

  “Yes you are,” Qiang said.

  “Wiseasses, the both of you,” I grumbled, and suited up.

  A shuttle took us to within a hundred meters of the Subine airlock and we used our jetpacks to go the rest of the way. The commander didn’t want to take any chances. Sure, we’d run the risk of infection, but there was no reason to expose the shuttle. The fewer people and objects exposed, the easier it would be to contain any outbreak.

  We moved over to the airlock, taking it slow and looking all around us as we seemed to hang suspended in the shimmering golden glow of the warp field. We moved in silence, the radios unable to transmit in the warp field. Why we could travel through it and radio transmissions couldn’t was not something I understood. Valeria had tried to explain it to me once. Way too much math involved. I just took her word for it.

  I glanced at Valeria a couple of times and found she was keeping formation. She had been trained in using a jetpack in zero gravity with a spacesuit, and the mech was basically the same thing, although it had a lot more powerful jets and you had to go easy on the thrusters.

  She was doing fine.

  I forced myself to focus. This was a military mission and I couldn’t let my personal feelings distract me or take my eye off the general situation.

  Qiang took the lead, turning on the electromagnets in his feet and knees and clamping onto the doorway. He looked like he was kneeling vertically against the side of the ship.

  In that position, he popped off the plate for the airlock control and rewired it to open. The three of us hovered several meters behind him.

  The airlock op
ened and Valeria motioned for us to hold back. She eased forward and did some readings with her scanner before giving us a thumbs-up. The scanner hadn’t picked up any unusual microbes. She had input all the microbe species of the various home worlds into the scanner so we could tell the difference between alien microbes and intrusive microbes from the Centaurians. Hopefully.

  We entered the airlock and closed the door behind us. Then we turned the jetpacks off and settled onto the floor. The artificial gravity was only .8 of Earth normal. The Subine world was smaller than ours, a humid place with a soupy atmosphere honeycombed with caves. That’s all I’d learned about it from what little time I had to look it up.

  Qiang got to work on hacking the electronics on the inner door. I motioned Valeria to get back and leveled my weapon arm. I had bad memories of the last time we’d snuck through a mysterious airlock.

  “We can speak again,” she said with a chuckle. “We’re inside.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “He just thinks those military hand motions look cool,” Qiang said.

  “It’s good to humor him,” Valeria said.

  I rolled my eyes as atmosphere cycled into the airlock. Of course it was Subine atmosphere, and perhaps infected. We didn’t dare get out of the mech suits and into respirators. Valeria continued her scan.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “You sure?”

  “Sure. Maybe something else is going on.”

  “All right. Get back. Chen, take the left. I’ll take the right. Qiang, you ready?”

  “Yep. I can pop this thing right now.”

  “Go for it.”

  He connected a couple of wires and the inner door opened. I tensed, feeling my heart begin to beat fast.

  I had half expected a Subine to come leaping out at me like last time. We were in a Subine ship that might have been infected, after all.

  But nothing happened.

  That didn’t reassure my heart. I should have had Dr. Stark give me one of those sedatives before I left. I had been in too much of a hurry to remember to ask.

  We moved in, me taking point, Qiang coming up next with Valeria behind him and Chen guarding the rear.

  The clanking of our four mech suits was enough to alert the entire ship. The suits weren’t exactly made for stealth and subtlety.

  Beyond the airlock, we hit a maze of corridors, all in that strange Subine style. Most of them were hexagonal, with rounded corners so the Subines could move all around them without weakening their grip. Every surface had an irregular texture to help the Subines hold on. The only smooth surfaces in the whole place were on the computer panels. From what Valeria told me, the Subines had originally been cave dwellers and just as often adhered to the roof of the caves as the floors. Their circulatory system didn’t have a problem with hanging upside down like ours did.

  We found our first one like that after a few minutes.

  At the intersection of three corridors, a Subine hung like some fleshy stalactite, its eyes closed and its tentacles hanging slack like a rubbery curtain.

  We stopped several meters from it.

  “What’s it doing?” Corporal Chen asked.

  Valeria fiddled with the scanner. “It’s sleeping.”

  “In the middle of the corridor?” Qiang asked. “It’s in the way.”

  “And where is everyone else?” I asked.

  “Good question,” Corporal Chen said. “Should we wake it up?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I turned on my external speaker. “Um, excuse me? Hey! You on the ceiling! Could you wake up please?”

  “Shh,” Corporal Chen whispered. “What’s that?”

  A low buzzing filled the corridor, echoing off the irregular walls. It grew in volume, sounding a bit like a swarm of insects, but more mechanical.

  “I think it’s coming from that way,” Valeria said, pointing down one of the corridors. “But what is it?”

  I listened for a moment longer, and then my mind flashed with sudden recognition.

  “Drones!”

  A swarm of fist-size drones wafted around a corner ten meters away and bore down on us.

  We didn’t have time to take cover before they began to fire.

  22

  The drones hit us with a hail of explosive rounds, which burst on our armor and made us stagger back. One struck my viewplate and cracked it.

  “Shit!” I shouted. “Retreat to that room we just passed. We’ll hole up in there.”

  We turned and ran, the boosters in our suits making us sprint down the corridor twice as fast as our normal feet could carry us. Qiang ended up in back with the drones hammering away at him. We rounded a corner and headed along a straightaway for a room just fifty meters farther on. The drones swept around the corner and began to fire again.

  “I don’t think the armor will last much longer,” Qiang said. “I’m getting warning indicators all over—”

  There was a loud discharge of electricity and the corridor lit up. Then I heard a loud clank and the floor trembled.

  I turned to see Qiang had fallen over.

  A spherical drone, bigger than the rest, sent out another bolt of electrical energy at him. Qiang didn’t even move.

  “Get into that room!” I ordered the other two.

  I lifted my weapon arm and sent a hail of flechettes at the drones. Now that we were out of sight of the snoozing Subine, I didn’t have to worry about hitting the thing.

  Maybe it would repay the courtesy by waking up and actually doing something to help, like turning off the ship’s security system.

  Turned out the Subine drones were tough. The flechettes spanged off the little floating bastards, ricocheting off the metal walls and flying every which way, their paths marked by a series of sparks.

  None of the drones fell.

  The electrical drone turned to me and fired.

  But I was already dodging. I didn’t want my systems to get fried like Qiang’s.

  The miniature lightning bolt shot down the corridor. I hoped it didn’t hit Chen or Valeria.

  No time to worry about that. I raised my forearm and its miniature arsenal. Subine metallurgy had thumbed its nose at my heavy flechettes, and while the microrockets would blast one of these things to pieces, I only had four of them, so I picked a fragmentation grenade.

  No need to aim. I just detached it from the launcher and tossed it.

  I blew up a grenade in a crowded corridor a few meters from myself and even shorter distance from my best friend? Sure, you can do that kind of thing if you’re wearing mech suits.

  But even mech suits can’t ignore kinetic energy.

  The blast threw me down, the padding and webbing on the inside of the suit cushioning most of my fall.

  Most of it. It still took a second for me to get my bearings.

  When I did, I found myself flat on my back a good meter from where I had been standing. The drones were rolling around the floor like a bunch of insane baseballs. Some were cracked and steaming from fissures. Others beeped angrily and looked like they were getting ready to fly again.

  I got up, gave the big lightning drone a burst of flechettes at point blank range that did the trick, stomped on a drone that was just beginning to get off the ground, and grabbed my friend. Qiang had still not moved. He had been lying prone, so he didn’t get the full force of the blast.

  I could see him awake and alive inside the mech suit, but the suit had obviously short circuited. He was entombed and helpless. There was a mechanical release catch so he could get out, but if there really was some sort of infection around here, he’d get it. So he did the smart thing for a soldier to do and waited for help, meaning me. I hauled him down the corridor, my suit’s hydraulics giving me strength.

  The blare of flechettes from behind me made me look up. Some of the drones were getting up. Corporal Chen was hitting them and knocking them around. I don’t think she was doing much damage, but she was keeping them from attacking.

  At least until another swarm
, bigger than the first, came zipping around the corner, led by not one but three of the lightning drones.

  “Oh, crap!” I shouted.

  Not exactly an inspiring speech to lead men and women into battle, but hey, it was the best I could think of at such short notice.

  I ducked as a lightning bolt flashed across the intervening space and missed me by inches. Another one got Qiang. The drones were dumb and didn’t realize he was already down. Good thing I had let go of him when I dodged, or I would have been zapped too.

  Just before the drones had time to fire more shots, I grabbed Qiang and made it through the doorway. Valeria slammed the thick metal barrier shut behind me. She got busy trying to lock it but couldn’t figure it out. Nothing was straightforward on a ship designed by multitentacled aliens.

  There was an electronic tone, and the door opened again.

  “Oh fuck, security override,” she said.

  Oh, she swears. That’s kind of nice. Drinks beer too. My kind of woman.

  She hauled the door shut with her metal fingers as explosive rounds erupted on her shoulder, then she put her fist through the interface. Sparks flew and the readout went dead. The electronic tone sounded again, but this time the door stayed shut.

  “You’re a good woman to have around in a crisis,” I said.

  “I have to be,” she replied, pointing at the ground.

  Corporal Chen lay on her side, her mech suit shorted out, a black burn mark covering the left side of the chest.

  I leaned over and she stared out at me through her viewplate. She looked embarrassed. I checked on Qiang, who also appeared unhurt, and then checked my vitals. That crack in my viewplate hadn’t compromised my suit’s atmosphere.

  I had no way of telling if Qiang’s and Chen’s armor was still protecting them from any microbes. I didn’t see any cracks in the armor and their own readouts were totally sizzled. Luckily their emergency oxygen had kicked in. That was mechanical, and would keep them alive for a couple of hours.

  Then I realized we had a more immediate problem. A tongue of blue flame jabbed through the door.