The Furnace

by Timothy S. Johnston

  “Makes sense,” Manny said. He turned to Malichauk. “What would it take to develop a test for this?”

  “How about a simple blood test?” Katrina asked.

  “No,” he answered. “Based on their programming, the nanos will cluster in the brain. A blood test won’t reveal anything.”

  “What about blood from the fingers?” I said. “Nano-infected blood is how they spread, right?”

  “Yes, but the nanos stay in the brain until infection is imminent. That’s part of the reason it takes so long. They don’t migrate to the fingers until—”

  My eyebrows arched. “Why program that into them?”

  He looked surprised. “To avoid detection, of course. I wanted the nanos as far from potential discovery as possible.”

  “And as a result, we have no way to test for them.”

  He sighed. “That was the whole point.”

  Was there a chance he would help us? He had already refused to answer questions about the nanos’ defense mechanisms. Whatever the case, I had to ask—there was no choice. “Can you think of anything?”

  His brow creased. “I’ll try. But I need to be in the clinic. There’s a possibility, but it might take a day or so to develop one.”

  I considered that for a moment. “Fine. We’ll assign two people to stay with you, just in case.” I turned to Shaheen. “Can we seal all the modules?”

  “They’ve cut the power, Tanner. We can’t do much.” She looked lost in thought. “But in an emergency all the tunnel hatches should lock...”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “That we fake an emergency, get the modules cut off from each other. The hatches work on battery power if the computer thinks there’s a depressurization accident.”

  “But what will that achieve?” Balch asked. “The tunnel hatches lock. So what?”

  “It will confine those two,” Shaheen said. “We can search the station module by module until we find them. That way we can all stay together while we’re looking. It might also disrupt whatever they’re planning.”

  “Will they be able to open the hatches?” I asked Shaheen.

  “They’d need the override codes, which they don’t know.”

  Manny interjected, “We don’t need to fake an emergency, Shaheen. I can simply command all the hatches to lock. Even on battery power I can do it with the security codes. We’ll go to the command center to give the computer the orders.”

  I thought that over. Trap them in a module and stay together as a group as we searched the station. Find them, restrain them, then wait for Malichauk to develop his test. It was the best we could do.

  Despite the idea, however, a part of my mind screamed at me about best-laid plans.

  I should have known better.

  Chapter Twenty

  We prepared silently to venture out of the mess and up the two levels to the command center. The faces that looked back at me were pale. Lingly in particular seemed terrified; she jerked her head this way and that, as if one of us meant her harm.

  “They could be right out in the corridor, waiting for us,” she hissed.

  “Who cares?” Grossman rumbled. “There are eleven of us and two of them. They don’t stand a chance.”

  “But there’s no use presenting them with an opportunity to hurt—or infect—some of us,” Manny said. “We’ll have to be careful at all times.”

  I studied Grossman out of the corner of my eye. He had seemed to object to everything the rest of us agreed on. He had been belligerent since my arrival. Now he was upset it was taking so long to organize everyone.

  “It’s only two levels,” he growled. “We’re practically there already. Let’s just go!”

  Finally we moved en masse out the hatch and into the corridor. It was nearly pitch-black; the only illumination came from the red emergency lights spaced evenly along the bulkheads. There was no lighting on the ladder, so we moved upward one at a time into a dark, yawning well of inky black. Rickets and I were the only ones armed, so the first officer led the way and I stayed at the rear. I preferred it that way—I could keep an eye on the entire group to make sure nothing happened.

  On the uppermost level, the corridor came to a dead end. Before us, a hatch led to the command center. Manny opened it and we moved quickly inside.

  Manny marched to a console and started to enter commands into the station’s central computer.

  An alarm ripped through the station. I jumped from the sudden noise.

  “It’s okay,” he said over the din. “Just a precaution.”

  An instant later a clang sounded as the hatch we had just entered locked. A red light on its control panel lit up.

  “It’s done,” Manny said. “All over the station. Wherever they are, they’re trapped.”

  I fixed my eyes on his. Time to hunt our prey.

  * * *

  Manny was out in front with Rickets; the first officer unlocked each hatch as we moved through. I brought up the rear and sealed each hatch as we passed. The clinic was in the same cylinder as the command center, and we stopped there to leave Malichauk to work on his test for the infection. We left Balch and Anna behind with him. They didn’t protest, but they didn’t exactly look happy.

  “How long will this take?” Manny asked.

  Malichauk answered with a shrug. “Twenty-four hours at least. I’m not even sure how to do it, without taking a direct sample from the host’s brain.”

  A simple blood test wouldn’t work; Malichauk had designed the nanos well. To make matters worse, he still didn’t exactly seem eager to help us.

  “Can’t do that,” I said. “Could kill someone.” A thought suddenly occurred to me. “Wait a minute, Lars. Can’t we just use a nano programmer to access the nanos directly? If you scan a person and get a response from one, it’ll give him away.”

  He shook his head. “The nanos won’t respond to a programmer once inside the host.”

  I frowned. “But we used one earlier to access the nano Reggie found in the drop of blood.”

  “That one had been outside a human body for weeks. There was no host, so the nano allowed contact.”

  I grunted. It made sense.

  “Get it done,” Manny grumbled to the man who had caused all this. “But don’t take too much time.”

  The doctor looked incredulous. “You’re asking—”

  “You better damn well come up with something to help us, Doctor!” Manny bellowed.

  Malichauk pulled back and seemed to deflate. “Aye, sir.”

  We sealed Balch, Anna and Malichauk in the clinic. They watched, completely silent, as the hatch shut and locked with a clang.

  It would not open until we returned.

  * * *

  “Why are we leaving two people with the doctor?” Katrina asked. “Why not just one?”

  “What if we just left Balch, and it turned out he was infected?”

  She thought that over. Then, “But what if two of the three people we left behind are infected?”

  “Then the third one is in trouble,” I said. That was a dilemma we would face no matter how many we left behind. Just how many of us were gone? There was no longer any doubt—this was a nightmare. My own superiors had abandoned me to this mess. In fact, they might have even expected me to die.

  I clenched a fist. Death, at least, I would fight to the bitter end.

  “Why don’t we all just stay with the doctor and wait for the test?” Grossman suggested. “Then when we figure out which of us are infected, we take care of them and call Earth for help. Surely they’ll come then.”

  I studied his expression. His lips had pulled back, and his teeth were bared. “What do you mean, take care of them?” I asked.

  He snorted. “Restrain them, or
kill them as Katrina suggested. Whatever.”

  “There’s still Lieutenant Kayle. And Bram.” I shook my head. “We can’t leave them running around the station.”

  “Why not?”

  I stopped short, swore, and the entire group came to an abrupt halt in the corridor with me. “Put yourself in their position, Grossman. What would you be doing right now?”

  “You mean, if I was infected and trapped somewhere on the station?” His brow furrowed. “I guess I’d be figuring out how to escape.”

  “And?”

  He looked puzzled. “I—I’m not sure.”

  “Then I’ll fill you in. They have to kill or infect every single one of us, Grossman. And they have to do it fast.”

  “But why?” Lingly said.

  “Because we represent a huge threat. We know about them. We know what they are and what their plan is. If we expose them, we threaten their survival. We can’t let them attack. We have to keep them on the defensive and somehow capture them.” I considered our options. I still didn’t know what would happen to an infected host. I had assumed that they were already dead, that the infection would be impossible to cleanse. Still, there might be a way...

  Grossman didn’t say anything as he mulled that over. “You may be right,” he said finally. “It’s what I’d do. If my life were in danger, I mean.”

  I examined the hatch directly before us—the tunnel to Module B. We had checked Module C and found no one. It was time to move to the next cylinder: officer’s country. All the officers’ quarters and recreation facilities were there.

  The hatch slid aside at Manny’s command, and we entered the tunnel.

  * * *

  We moved from cabin to cabin and investigated each thoroughly. Rickets and Manny performed the bulk of the search; I stayed in the corridor with the pistol and watched our backs. A group of eight people was an unwieldy size to coordinate, but it was smarter to keep as many together as possible.

  As we finished our search of the officers’ module, Shaheen noticed something amiss. She looked at the others, her forehead creased.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “Where’s Sally?”

  We looked at each other and realized the scientist wasn’t with us. Shit. We were all together just a minute ago...

  “How the hell could she just disappear?” Manny growled.

  “She must have left on her own,” I said. “No one could have grabbed her. We would have noticed.”

  “Damn,” he muttered. “What do we do now?”

  I chewed my lip, frustrated. It was too damn dark in the corridors. “Continue searching and hope she turns up,” I said. But if enough time passed before she reappeared...

  “Yeah,” Grossman said. “Turns up infected.”

  I understood his fear. “Then we keep her separated until Malichauk’s test is done.”

  We began to move down the corridor to the next module. Minutes later, the sound of clanging steps echoed to us.

  I spun and raised the pistol. “Hold it right there!”

  Sally skidded to a halt and almost fell on her ass. She raised her hands in protest. “Wait! Don’t leave without me!”

  “Where the hell have you been?” Manny hissed.

  “The lavatory,” she said, her eyes wide. “I used Lieutenant Bertram’s quarters, just back there.” She gestured down the corridor in the direction we had come from. “I didn’t think you’d leave without me.”

  I checked my watch. Eight minutes had passed since she had disappeared. Not enough time.

  I hoped.

  She studied our faces in turn, her expression of guilt clear. “It was stupid, I know. But don’t worry—I’m fine. Let’s continue the search.”

  “Wait a minute,” Manny growled. He turned to the others. “No one leaves the group again. Not to use the lavatory, not for anything. Is that understood?”

  Everyone mumbled agreement. Keeping people together was proving more difficult than I had planned. There was strength in numbers, without a doubt, but what about when there was a threat from within? What if one of our group was one of them?

  We continued the search in Module A.

  * * *

  We searched all nine cylinders with no luck. Everyone looked downcast and despondent that we had uncovered nothing. There was even talk of looking in Module I, the storage module sealed after the meteor had penetrated the hull, but we quickly abandoned the idea.

  “It’s open to vacuum,” Rickets said. “And the only way to get in would be with the captain’s code, which Kayle and Bram don’t know.”

  Weary and beaten, we marched back to the clinic and Dr. Malichauk. We climbed the ladder and approached the—

  My breath exploded out in a rush.

  The hatch to the clinic had been forced half open, and a body lay draped across the threshold. There was blood—a lot of it. It had spilled from the person’s head and puddled on the deck. It spread outward even as we watched.

  “Oh my God!” Lingly cried. “What happened here?”

  Rickets bent and turned the gory mess over. Larry Balch.

  Inside the clinic we found Anna Alvarez, also dead.

  Malichauk was gone, along with any chance of a test for the infection.

  * * *

  “Was Malichauk infected?” Manny asked as he hovered over the two bodies. “Or did Bram and Lieutenant Kayle do this?” He hesitated as he said the name of his lifelong friend. Perhaps it had just dawned on him that his friend was as good as dead.

  “Who knows,” I said. “Maybe we’ll never know the truth. Malichauk is gone, and if he wasn’t infected before, it’s happening to him right now. If he comes back, we have to assume he’s being controlled.”

  “But we checked this module,” Sally protested. “How could they have gotten past us? It must have been Malichauk.”

  “Not necessarily,” Shaheen said. “We may have searched the module, but there are a lot of places we didn’t look.”

  I shot a look at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “There are plenty of maintenance and air-supply ducts, access junctions, and so forth. We only checked the areas that are readily accessible and in plain sight.”

  “You mean we didn’t check the whole station?” That shocked me.

  “Not nearly. I’d say only half.”

  “Only half!” I watched her with a scowl on my face. We had searched the module together; she’d never mentioned that we weren’t looking in every hiding spot. Why hadn’t she suggested it?

  “As a crewman, Bram knows the station better than anyone else. Except maybe me.”

  “Damn,” I sighed. “SOLEX is too big for this. Those two—”

  “Three now.”

  “—can lose themselves here easier than I thought.” I frowned. “There must be a better way.”

  I stared at the two bodies lying twisted on the deck. We had to get this situation under control. More people were going to end up dead. The search had turned up nothing; instead, two more of our own were dead, and the man who had invented the nanos was gone.

  * * *

  We regrouped in the command center, where we could feel a little more secure while we discussed our options. Manny stationed Grossman and Rickets out in the corridor, and the rest of us sat in the darkened room. There were a lot of despondent looks.

  “Manny,” I said eventually. “I need to make an FTL transmission.”

  His brow furrowed. “We’re on battery power right now. Any extra power usage will limit our time left.” His expression was clear. He did not think it was a good idea.

  “How much time do we have?”

  “Twenty-four hours,” Shaheen answered, with a glance at a display.

  Damn. “It’s important I make these cal
ls. Besides, Manny, if we can’t figure this thing out soon, we won’t last a day anyway.”

  He studied me, silent, before finally nodding. “Just keep it short, Tanner.”

  Shaheen entered a code into the communit and the system unlocked for me. She avoided Manny’s glare; she had locked the system without his knowledge in order to help me isolate SOLEX’s personnel.

  I sat at the same console where earlier I had taken the call from Mercury. I shoved the jack in my ear and signaled the station’s Command Group.

  A man appeared on the screen; he looked more than a little suspicious. “Who is this?” he demanded.

  “Lieutenant Kyle Tanner, CCF, Homicide,” I said. “I need to speak to Lieutenant Jase Lassiter, your commander.”

  * * *

  “What is it, Tanner?” Lassiter asked. His face was hard, his tone clipped.

  The screen was dim and flickered with static.

  “I need to know the truth,” I said without preliminaries.

  He looked confused. “About what?”

  “The murders. The investigation. The reason you sent me here.”

  He remained silent for a few seconds. “What’s going on?” he asked finally. “Why is it so dark there? Why is your signal so weak? I’ve been trying to contact you for hours now. I thought you had all the damage from the meteors fixed.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask why the microwave beam to Earth has stopped?”

  He looked cagey. “I assumed it was the meteor damage.”

  He was lying. He had just said he thought we had it fixed. I snorted. “It’s not. Something else has happened here.”

  “I thought so—” he said, before stopping himself. He winced at his slip.

  “Tell me,” I said in a sharp tone. “What do you know?”

  He reached forward to sever the connection.

  “Wait!” I pounded a fist on the console. “Don’t you dare cut me off! You have to tell me what you know, Lassiter. It’s important.” A pregnant pause ensued. I continued, “You know about the infection, don’t you?” Still no response. “We’ve identified some infected people. We’re trying to figure out what to do. We could use some help—”