“Oh,” Irie said, unable to clearly hear her own voice. “I think it vaporized them.”
“Well, I think that’s a bit of them, and that, and that.” The captain wobbled, looking at bits of dark, burnt meat around the room.
“What by the bones happened here?” grumbled a voice from the doorway. It was Val, holding his rifle and with Cassandra still attached to his back.
11
Green Serum
“Captain… What is that thing on your arm?” the Duergar growled.
“This? Oh…uh, it’s the Device. The one that Ponos sent us to get,” he said distractedly, crossing to Cassandra on Val’s back and checking her eyes. They were unfocused, and she was making feverish, gnashing-teeth noises as she twitched.
Oh, Cass… Eliard felt the sharp, piercing pain of shame and guilt as he realized that he still hadn’t found any medical supplies to help her, and when he asked Val, the big alien just shook his head.
“We got a canteen and some of those rat things instead. Horrible little buggers.” The Duergar shivered, growling as it continued to look at the Device. “Does that thing come off?”
“Yeah, well, I think so…” Eliard made to move his forearm out of it, to feel a moment of resistance. Before their eyes, the sides started to constrict and fold in on themselves and the scales opened to reveal Eliard’s hand holding something like a bone-scepter of deep midnight blue and black. The captain flexed his wrist and waved it in the air a little. “It’s a bit tight, and my skin feels a little tingly, but no lasting harm done. I think…”
“Don’t trust the Q’Lot,” Val grumbled, shrugging at the feverish agent on his back. “Their technology doesn’t mix with ours. They don’t mix with us. It’s different.”
“Come on, Val. There was a time that the Imperial Coalition said that about the Duergar as well.”
“And they would be right,” the Duergar scowled. “We are different.”
But Eliard could see what he meant. Cassandra was shaking now, and there was a white foam forming at the corners of her mouth. She looked as though she was going into toxic shock, and they still didn’t have any medical supplies.
“But, Captain,” Irie whispered. “There is one thing that will save her…”
Eliard looked at her, and he saw her suggestion in her eyes. “No. Absolutely not. No way.”
“She’s been infected by something, by this Q’Lot virus or whatever it is anyway, right?” Irie pushed herself to her feet. “We know that whatever the E.B.L.U. was working on had the ability to heal all injuries, to give the person’s body the ability to heal itself.”
“At what expense? Turning her into one of those things?” Eliard gripped the bone scepter so hard that he felt it changing, starting to grow back into the larger weapon it had once been.
“No, Captain. You heard what that Argyle Trent was saying on the log. That they were working on diluted serums. Ones that would allow the Armcore soldiers to keep their original human DNA.”
“And look where it got him!” Eliard pointed out. “The guy is immortal, and has crab claws.”
“He took the red serum,” Irie pointed out. “Or even, God forbid, the blue, and he’s been in that unit for decades without any sort of other medical intervention. I’m talking about giving Cassandra the green serum. The one designed for human health, right? We could just give Cass enough to have a fighting chance, and then, as soon as we get her back to the Mercury, we fill her up with every medication we have until we can get Ponos’s help.”
“No.” Eliard shook his head. “I won’t do it.”
“Then you will have to watch her die,” Irie said stubbornly.
“But it was an experimental serum, Irie!” the captain burst out.
“And it hadn’t been tested yet, I know. But Armcore knew what they were getting themselves in for, before the Q’Lot arrived,” Irie said seriously, before sighing deeply and taking a breath. “Look at it this way. We’ve failed. I respect your decision because you’re the captain, and I understand why you don’t want to mess with Cassandra’s DNA, but I also think that you’re stupid if you’re not going to take a chance when you have one.”
Eliard glared at her, wishing that his little mechanic didn’t quite make so much sense all the time. But she did. It was her practical mind, he supposed. The green serum really was the only hope that they had of saving her right now. “But not the others. Not the Red, and no way in hell the Blue,” Eliard said stubbornly.
“Then we’d better do it quick, because she looks pretty bad,” Irie said softly as Cassandra started to spasm.
Without a word, the crew of the Mercury Blade moved as one, back to the E.B.L.U. laboratory where this particular nightmare had started.
“Where is it!?” Eliard was complaining as they ran back into the ruined room to start ransacking through drawers and cabinets. In the middle of the room, the pincered form of Argyle Trent was still twitching and looking at them intently, opening and closing his mouth as if he could taste them. It gave Eliard the creeps.
Don’t think about Cassandra turning into one of those things, he told himself over and over again as he moved to the back of the room. There were metal units built into the walls with reinforced glass windows. Odd tools and machines sat in them, little grabber hands holding test tubes, or plates held just a few centimeters apart from each other.
“C’mon, c’mon…” He moved from unit to unit until he found one where a hiss of cool steam partially obscured a tray of test tubes standing in their own plastic holders. This had to be it. He hit the buttons on the outside until the door hissed and the tray slid out.
Squeeeeeak! The sound of Argyle’s claw scratching across the glass made the captain’s jaw ache.
“Shut up!” He snatched the tray and carried it to a metal table, swept the equipment and console screens and everything else from it, and put the tray down as Irie detached the House Archival Agent from Val and laid her on the table as carefully as she could. It was a struggle, as Cassandra’s limbs were shaking and thrashing.
“Whoa! Steady!” Eliard said, peering at the tiny tubes of glass at their contents. There. A selection of five tiny glass containers with a green serum contained within, and another five with red, and another five with blue. Very gingerly, Eliard picked up one of the green tubes and held it between thumb and finger as if it might explode. “What do I do with it? Where are the instructions?” He looked again at the tray, and then at the chilled unit it had come from. Absolutely nothing. Do I pour it down her mouth? Inject her with it?
“Give it here,” Val grumbled. He grabbed the tiny green-filled tube between his massive talons, flicking off the cap with one claw, and proceeded to pour the stuff down Cassandra’s throat.
“Wait! You don’t know—” Eliard said in horror.
“Neither do you. But at least I did something about it.” Val shrugged. He was a born warrior, Eliard reflected. Such worries were not a part of his makeup. “She either dies of the illness or this, or she survives.” The Duergar stepped back as Cassandra’s body suddenly relaxed on the table, as still and as silent as the dead.
12
One Tough Cookie
“She’s dead,” Irie whispered.
The laboratory had fallen into a low murmur of noise: the hissing of broken machinery, and the subtle ticking of the monster that had been Argyle Trent on the window of his containment cell.
No. Eliard watched as his engineer checked Cassandra’s wrist for a pulse then again at her neck, leaning over to put an ear over her mouth, before pulling back up slowly. The look on her face said it all when she turned to Eliard.
“I’m sorry.”
“No.”
“She was one tough cookie, Captain,” Irie said carefully, frowning at the body, and then at her feet. “I was even starting to like her.”
So was I. The Captain couldn’t believe it. How could this fierce, strong, and wickedly smart woman just die like that? After what—being bitten by a rat crea
ture!?
“It was that damn serum.” The captain felt a spike of hate and hurt feelings score through his body. Even though he knew that probably wasn’t true, he heard his mouth saying, “She might still be alive if we hadn’t given it to her.” If you two hadn’t have given it to her, his darker self sneered silently. It had been Irie’s plan to use the serum, and it had been the Duergar who had finally forced it down her throat. What were they thinking?
“We had no choice, Cap,” Irie mumbled, before falling silent under his fierce glare.
“Boss—” Val started to say gruffly, but Eliard cut him off.
“No. She’s dead. We might as well leave her.” Something was happening inside of Eliard, a tidal change of emotions that he had experienced only a few times before.
That time when my father had hit me for the last time, and I looked at him and realized that I would never, ever live under his roof again.
That time when the Trevalyn Academy Magister made me stand in front of the class and repeat the Imperial Coalition Oath for my disobedience, and I realized that I didn’t mean any of it.
That time when my father told me that he would force me to join the Imperial navies, and I knew that I was going to steal his Mercury Blade racer before the moons rose that very night.
Eliard Martin had been accused of being intractable, even difficult, in the past by various employers and his crew. But that was just the thin visible edge of the truth. He knew that he acted wild and reckless, uncaring and brash, but the truth was that he was capable of very deep emotions, and very deep feelings of jealousy, pride, and shame. Maybe it was true for every royal brat like himself, or maybe it was some malady of his own genetic makeup. But the truth was that once Eliard had been hurt, he was capable of terrible things.
It felt like his insides were freezing. He had been a fool to start caring for Cassandra, just as he had been a fool to trust her, maybe even to let her on his boat. She was a house agent, for stars’ sake, he thought. She was always going to leave him and his crew, and they would always be better off without her.
I should always have just kept my eyes on the prize. On the payment, he told himself as he turned from the table, unable to even look at the cadaver that had been his friend. It was his fault. She was dead because it was his fault.
No, he argued with himself. He had let himself start to believe that he was anything other than a cheap and nasty space pirate. Who had he been kidding? Coldly, he totaled what he should expect to make from this mission.
From Ponos? Nothing. That Armcore intelligence was holding them to ransom, trying to get them to kill Alpha for it. Well, two can play at that game.
From House Archival? Eliard and his crew had been promised one million Imperial credits for information about Alpha. Would they still honor their offer when one of their prized agents was lying dead in an invisible research station at the far end of space? Eliard knew that most of the people he usually worked with wouldn’t, but House Archival would. They exhibited that rare streak of selfless, idiotic righteousness that ran through some of the Imperial Houses—just like House Martin was supposed to have, he tried not to think. You couldn’t trust House Merriman as far as you could throw them—which wouldn’t be very far, given their commitment to overindulgence—but some of the houses really believed in all of that ‘being the best human’ crap that Eliard’s father had tried to beat into him. Yes, House Archival would honor their contract and pay the money, even without the return of Agent Cassandra.
“We’re out,” Eliard said, nodding to the door. “Keep your eyes peeled, I don’t want any more of us getting bitten by those rat-things.”
“But, Captain! We can’t just leave her here. The rats…the blue scale…” Irie looked horrified.
“A good fighter deserves a good funeral,” the Duergar grumbled.
Eliard ignored them. “I don’t need to remind you that we’ve got employers waiting, and we’ve got something that everyone wants.” He hefted the strange black shell-bone scepter. “Irie? Grab those serums as well. I’m sure that someone will pay thousands for that.”
“But, Captain!” The mechanic made to put a hand on his arm, but he snapped at her and was already stepping out of the laboratory door.
And it was in that precise moment when the entire station shook and trembled, as if it had been struck by something.
“Now what!?” Eliard snarled at the empty corridor that was starting to tilt. He struggled to maintain his balance. “Can’t a guy loot an abandoned station and make some money in peace anymore?”
“Boss…” Irie said reproachfully, following him out the bulkhead, but looking back at the sprawled form of the house agent on the table behind them.
“Get moving! We got what we came for!” Eliard barked. His tone was such that, when Val and Irie shared a look behind his back, they knew that the captain would not brook any further argument. They had only ever seen him like this rarely, and it was usually before he did something either impossibly brave, or obscenely stupid.
But as soon as the crew of the Mercury Blade stepped out into the corridor, their concerns were momentarily eclipsed by a strange sight.
The entire corridor was moving.
No, it wasn’t the corridor that was moving, Eliard thought as his eyes tracked another ripple that spread its way along the floors and walls, like a pulse. It was the patches of the blue-scale lichen. They twitched and fluttered, spreading out in ripples of force like it was deep underwater.
“What’s happening to it?” Eliard said in alarm, making sure that he didn’t step on the strange stuff as he walked.
“It seems to be reacting to something, but…” Irie shook her head. Whatever this was, it was beyond her mechanical know-how.
Eliard scowled and kept moving. He wasn’t going to allow some alien space virus to stop him from completing this mission. He had taken almost two steps when something boomed far away against the hull, and the entire station rocked. The lights flickered overhead, turning from the dimmed white-blue to a flashing orange.
“That’s an emergency light. This place is under attack.”
“The raiders?” Irie wondered aloud.
“No idea. But somehow, they managed to see this place, underneath that invisibility shield,” Eliard croaked, picking up his pace as he rounded the curve in the tunnel.
BOOM! The tunnel shook once more, and this time, he saw the ripple of the lichen spreading away from the noise. Maybe that was all it was, a reaction to sound?
“Gah!” Irie shouted in shock and fear behind him. He spun around to see that one of her boots had gotten stuck in the blue-scale lichen, which had somehow morphed in moments to a large, plant-like growth, wrapping blue-green vines around her ankle. “Get this thing off me!” she screamed. Val stepped forward, snatching her bodily and pulling her up into the air. The Duergar was a near seven-foot-tall, solid mass of muscle and he was easily strong enough to pick up the diminutive, compact engineer, but, with a fair degree of horror, Eliard saw that the alien-like vines weren’t giving up on their prey. They stretched and unraveled, blue-scale plates fracturing and bursting as the stringy growths were pulled from their alien habitat.
“Watch out!” Eliard reacted, raising the strange bone scepter with the intention of firing it. The thing sensed his actions and unfolded itself into its far larger, forearm-encompassing cannon. With a powerful whump of energy, the captain sent a ball of energy into the vines, obliterating their grasp of his crew member and creating a horrid, acrid smell. He could almost swear that he had heard a squeal.
“Holy crap. Holy star crap, I thought I was a goner,” Irie kicked off the last of the wilting and burnt vines as Val put her down, and they turned to run faster down the corridor as the entire station shook.
“They’re getting taller!” Eliard shouted, blasting at one of the patches of lichen that stretched from floor to wall, grown out from its stationary home in seconds, sending out more of the blue-green runners, roots, and vines to tast
e and wave in the air. Within moments, it was like running into a jungle clearing as the blue-scale virus started to mutate and grow at an exponential rate, threatening to choke the way forward.
“Rargh!” It was Val’s turn to be caught, as the much larger Duergar was an unmissable target for the alien plant. The small, knot-like little vines had reached out to grab the big alien’s ankles and sucker onto his shoulder armor, but the Duergar was managing to push onwards, snapping the vines as he barreled forward—although he was slowing fast.
“C’mon!” Eliard snarled, firing the Device ahead of them to clear the way. Was that the bulkhead door to the hangar bay that he could see up ahead? As frustration and fear mingled in his gut, he pulled the trigger and the Device seemed to respond to his level of enthusiasm, flaring a bright light as an incandescent ball of energy burned a hole through the tunnel, through the blue-scale vines, and cracked the bulkhead door behind it.
I don’t even know what fuel this thing uses, Eliard thought, his ears ringing with the sound of the blast. But it seemed to have different settings—settings that were at least partially controlled by how angry or determined he was to kill...?
Whatever. He didn’t care how it worked right now, he just had to make sure that it did. He thought about the body of Cassandra, lying back behind them somewhere and probably even now being covered by the terrible blue-scale mutation…
THUMP! This time, the blast from the Device filled the corridor with white-hot plasma, burning a hole that reached the walls and even scorched the metal.
“Captain? Captain!” Irie was floundering behind him, rubbing her eyes and shaking her head from the Device’s deafening rapport.
“It’s okay. We’re clear now,” he said, although he was sure that from the ringing in his own ears that his crew wouldn’t be able to hear him. He pointed to where the Device had not only killed all the attacking blue-scale ahead of then, but it had also seemed to destroy the two-foot-thick bulkhead door. They could even see the Mercury Blade on the other side.
Alien Evolution (Valyien Book 3) Page 7
