by Chris Hechtl
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The disabling of the communication's system was a two-edged sword. The Virus could no longer monitor the enemy's communications. The security systems it had control over would allow it to see, but seeing didn't necessarily mean it could understand what it was seeing. It didn't have the spare processors to process the actions of each organic it was monitoring.
But when the organics began to shut down electronic systems and disable the network, it got the message. It immediately triggered the next phase of its plan. The bots had only invaded some of the station's life support network, Dutch had managed to fend them off, but it might be enough it reasoned.
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Flick swore as he smelled smoke and burning from the electrical panel he was working on. He went to the junction box down the way, cut the power, and then went back to it. He stuck his nose in and sniffed, doing his best not to gag as he tried to puzzle out what was overloading and why.
A spider noted his proximity and triggered the remote reset in the breaker of the junction box Flick had shut off. It then sent a surge of electrical energy through the panel the Neofox had stuck his head into. The rampaging electronic surge looked for the path of least resistance.
A fat spark leapt out into the fox's nose and coursed through his body to exit through his hand that had been holding the edge of the box. The box itself was grounded. The amperage in the arc electrocuted the fox. His muscles froze and trembled in exquisite pain as his flesh and fur at the contact points burned and seared.
The fox felt the discharge as his heart stopped. He couldn't let go, nor flop around. The searing smell of cooking meat made other people in the area gag and look away.
He was one of the first fatalities. He wouldn't be the last.
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Mack took off at a run as he heard the reports of something going on. He got about ten meters when the gravity flicked off, then reversed polarity as his legs pumped and he started to bound.
When he was midair, the switched polarity hit its peak, and he was slammed into the ceiling, then it cut out. He groaned as he drifted down, then the thing kicked again, slamming him against the ceiling again.
“Look out!” someone said as his vision swam. He felt warm and wet on the back of his head. The lights flickered near him then exploded in sparks. He flinched and looked away just as the gravity cut out again and he fell. He got about halfway to the deck and then it cut in at twice the power to slam him into the deck, snapping his nose, several teeth, and some ribs. He bellowed in pain, only half conscious and spat blood and teeth just as the gravity cut out and he started to float. “Damn it! Someone …,” he rolled in the air and tried to bring his knees and arms up to protect himself as the blood smeared ceiling rose alarmingly fast at him. “Do …”
He felt the impact and something snap in one arm. His forehead hit a pipe fitting. He managed to grab a pipe with one free hand. He held on as the gravity cut out again. “Not this time,” he coughed.
That was when a tech got to the power junction for his section and cut power. He drifted as power in the remaining lights switched out one by one. The emergency lights came on after a moment.
“A little help here?” he groaned weakly. He looked around blearily. When he heard the screams and saw bodies floating around, he groaned again. “Frack,” he muttered. “Gotta do something …,” he coughed again and wiped blood and drool with one hand. His right eye stung, he wiped blood out of it with the same hand. His left arm and leg was beginning to throb as were a few fingers and toes.
“What the frack is going on!” he tried to bellow as he slowly oriented himself so he was feet first to the deck.
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“Faugh! What's that smell?” Gemma demanded, one hand over her mouth and nose. “It smells like burning plastic and … what did you eat??!?”
“It's not me,” Leo said from where he was. He sniffed his arm pit anyway and then looked over to a tech who shrugged. When he looked back to the panel he was working on, it blinked. That made him blink in surprise. Electrical panels weren't supposed to do that. His eyes traveled up the electrical lines to a panel they had yet to take off. It was bubbling, and the paint was starting to peel.
His eyes widened as he backed away. “Plasma breech! Everyone out!” he said as the nearest door swung shut.
“Frack! This way,” he said, grabbing Gemma's arm as she looked up in alarm. Techs scurried to get to the far door just as it started to close. “Hold the door! Someone bloody well better hold the door!” Leo bellowed. “PLASMA LEAK!!!” he snarled as the breech behind him got through the last layer of plastic and metal and into the open.
The paint and plastic were turned into noxious gases that began to fill the compartment. They coughed as the techs ahead of them slipped through the closing door.
Leo snarled as the door shut. He pounded on it. “Bloody … hell,” he choked out. He turned to see the flare of plasma snaking around in the air just as the lights cut out. “Open the bloody door!” Gemma snarled, pounding on it with her fist then the flat of her hand. “We're trapped!” she said.
“Tell me something I don't bloody well know,” Leo coughed. He looked around, but there wasn't an emergency box in the area. Frantically he reached through his implants to the WiFi node in the ceiling but there was no response.
Suddenly the door's seal cracked, then it came open. They edged around it, urgent to get out of the compartment. It got about twenty centimeters open and then stuck. The motors froze, locking it in that position.
“Go!” Leo said, stuffing Gemma through the lock. She sucked in and squeezed through the gap sideways, turning her head and feet in order to fit through the narrow gap.
“Leo!” she called out. “Take my hand!” she coughed. He grabbed for it but then his hand slipped. His vision swam, the coughing continued, it was getting harder and harder for him to breathe.
Gemma's hand was replaced by a truehand, then a large lobster-like claw. It latched onto his arm and bodily yanked him through the gap in the doorway, brutally bruising him against the door's latching mechanism, trim, and the hatch combing all over his body while also crushing his arm in the process.
But he was through. The Veraxin let him go on the other side and then used its upper arms to pull the door. “The motor is stuck.”
“Yank the power train and …,” Leo coughed but couldn't get the rest out. His arm felt like it had been yanked out at the socket. His forearm pulsed with incredible pain. He looked up just as another tech got in and pulled the door's motor and then helped the Veraxin pull the door shut and then dog it.
“Thanks for the save, mate. I think you broke my arm, but I'm glad to be alive,” Leo coughed as he slumped next to Gemma. He felt her reach out and slip her hand into his just as he passed out from the pain.
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Galiet nodded to Doctor Fa'rook as the Neochimp rushed past her in a hurry. The chimp was all business, carrying an orange emergency bag. “Need a hand, Doc?” she asked.
“I think I've got it,” the Neochimp said as he entered the open lift. “Coming?”
“Go. I'll take the next one,” she said. He nodded and punched the emergency close button. But instead of closing the doors the lift car rushed down, then up fast.
Galiet gaped and then moved forward. She looked in and then ducked back in time to avoid the rushing car as it flew downward. She heard a distant simian scream as the car hit the bottom of the shaft. Then it started to come back up. She stepped back, hand over her mouth, horrified as other people came to look and see what was going on. Then the lights went out and the gravity started to kick in and out.
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The Xeno A.I. noted a primary target organic, one of the leaders who dealt with the hardware. It shifted some resources and focus to deal with him. With the organic out of the way, their chain of command would be disrupted.
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“Chief, I don't know what's going on b
ut …,” Andy said just as a massive freight airlock opened up nearby and air suddenly rushed out.
“Everyone out!” Chief Bailey snarled as he grabbed a handhold. He tried to grab a screaming woman, but she missed his hand, rebounded off a bulkhead and then flew out of the open hatch and into the star-filled night. An Elf did the same thing, then a second one. Personnel scrambled to safety. Most didn't make it.
Bailey realized he had to move. He saw the distant hatch closing ahead of him and rushed forward, intent to squeeze through it.
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The Virus sensed his approach and overrode the computer's safety system that would have stopped the door and then swung it open. Instead it sent a surge of power through the power motor to swing it closed faster.
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Bailey got most of his body through the gap and was pulling in his right arm and foot in when the door suddenly snapped shut crushing them. He bellowed in pain, wrestling with the door but it didn't let up. Instead it bore down even more and he felt his bones snap then his flesh give way. He fell into the compartment in disbelief, shock, and pain, maimed by the loss of his right forearm and foot. He screamed in pain, left hand going to the stump of his right arm to try to control the bleeding. His mind reeled from the horror of the event.
His implants saved his life. Even though he acted as a civilian, he still had military grade implants. Internal systems sensed the grave bodily injury and their locations. Internal tourniquets clamped down on strategic major blood vessels to cut off the blood flow to the missing limbs and then shut down the pain receptors to the areas.
He had still lost a great deal of blood. The pain numbed for a moment, allowing him to breathe and try to focus on his situation. A horrified woman screamed at the sight of him and passed out.
“Well, you're no help, lady,” Bailey panted as he used the hatch combing and bulkhead as a prop to support his back and he forced himself to a standing position on his one good leg. “I feel like a one-legged guy in a butt-kicking contest. A little help here?” he snarled at the gawking people standing around. “Do I have to do everything myself? Someone call a damn medic before I bleed out!”
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Baxter felt a breeze, then a sudden suction. But there were no alarms, so it didn't alarm him at first, not until he felt the rush of air try to pull him off his feet. Instinctively, he dug into the deck with his claws, spreading his toes for maximum grasp. He even dropped to all fours.
He tried to walk in the direction of the sudden hurricane force wind, but it was nearly impossible. A tumbling Delquir ricocheted off a bulkhead and came at him. He tried to duck, but the alien bowled him off his feet. He grasped for the deck, anything, biting and clawing but only the alien was in reach.
Before he knew it, they bounced off something hard, hard enough to make him gasp out what he had in his lungs, and then they were out into the freezing cold.
There was no sound, but he could sense water crystalizing in his ears and eyes. His ears snapped shut after a painful pop.
He tried to look around, but there wasn't much to see other than a string of other bodies. He tried to find a way to get back inside, but he was too far out.
He instinctively wrapped himself into a fetal ball and tried to concentrate on his emergency beacon while letting his implants do their best to keep him alive.
He wasn't certain how long he had. Hopefully, rescue would come soon.
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Commander Decoure was wishing he was back in his office reading a proposal to allow a family group to open up a jewelry store on the station. Apparently, Quantum had a little gimmick store that turned the ship's waste into plasma jewels which were then custom cut and fitted for her passengers.
He'd been reading the pitch when all hell had broken loose. Getting things all untangled was going to take days, possibly weeks, and it was definitely going to set them back a lot. The casualties alone were going to be hard to explain and possibly detrimental to his career.
All that was running through his distributed central nervous system when a plasma conduit overloaded and breached around the corner from him. He had one moment to rear up at the sound of screams but no time to do more than turn around before the plasma washed around the corner and consumed him and Lieutenant Olson in fire and pain.
Chapter 54
The Virus fought to try to get through the ship's firewalls but each of the ships were too well protected. It was trapped on the station, so it couldn't destroy it without destroying itself. That was a suboptimal result.
But since the organics were reacting, it had no choice but to continue on its plan to destroy them. There were three efficient means to kill the organics in large groups. Suborning the robots on the platform took too long. Instead it concentrated on plasma conduit blowouts initially, but that cut power to some of the decks and deprived it of some electronic resources.
It switched to controlling artificial gravity to crush and throw the organics around, but infiltrating and controlling so many of the distributed nodes took time.
The final method involved either cutting off life support or better still, venting it to the vacuum outside, preferably by opening air locks and discharging the organics into the void. However, there were firewalls preventing such actions, which also took time to circumvent. Once it had the method down, however, it was a simple matter of copying the steps into a bot and then copying the bot a few hundred times and then unleashing it onto the network.
But it found that it was doing most of the killing in Quantum, Demeter, and the freighter. The A.I. Dutch continued to fight for control of the central core and power system. It finally set on taking control of the power nodes leading to the A.I.'s servers and then cutting its power. Dutch tried to reroute in the few milliseconds of power he had left before he went down.
With the A.I. out of the way, the virus was free to work and attempt to get into the ships that were docked around the ring. But it found only the occupied ships had power and were space-worthy. Another setback it hadn't anticipated.
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“Whatever the hell is going on, it is in the computers,” Horatio snarled. “Shut them down.”
“Dutch is down, sir. Central control is without power,” a terrified rating reported. “Something is rampaging through the network.”
“Cut power,” Horatio barked.
“We've got a relay going with personnel, sir, peer-to-peer transmissions. Most of the casualties are in Quantum,” another rating reported. “The data transmissions are going nuts, sir. WiFi and ODN are kicking everyone out.”
“Cut the data lines and WiFi between the modules. Cut the damn power!” Horatio snarled.
“We're trying to, sir,” a Veraxin stated.
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The virus noted grim work crews moving with purpose to shut down every piece of electronics in the station. It anticipated they would eventually go for the fusion reactor so it invaded and took control of the doors between them and shut them, and then vented the atmosphere to form pockets that they would not be able to cross.
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“We can't get to the reactor directly, sir,” CPO Alejandro Garcia said. “The doors have shut. We're cut off,” the Neochimp noncom said, clearly frustrated and bewildered by the situation.
“I saw that it cut us off. The timing can't be coincidence,” Horatio mused. “Once accident twice …,” he shook his head. “This means this isn't random; this is an organized intelligence attacking us,” Horatio stated. He thought fast and then started to issue orders rapid fire. “They have control of the computers. It might be a virus. Most likely it is. Put everything on manual, pass that on through the peer-to-peer contacts,” he said. The sailor nodded. “We need to get people into suits and into the safe zones. We also need a team in suits. Get them outside. Get to the reactor and shut it down. Cut the fuel lines to the reactor if they have to. Do it,” he ordered.
“We're trying to find s
omeone who has a suit, sir,” the Neochimp CPO stated.
Horatio snarled and then did a quick mental inventory. “This way. There is a maintenance lock near the first docking ring. There are emergency suits there, rescue breathers, and life globes. Even some radios and tools.”
“Aye aye, sir,” the CPO said. “I'm new here, so if you don't mind leading the way?”
“This way,” Horatio said pointing in the right direction. “We've got to hustle.”
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The virus noted activity in a maintenance airlock on the belt line. It tried to vent it, but the lock was on manual control. It turned the cameras on in the area and noted organics suiting up. It realized they were not going to be vulnerable to venting and would eventually shut it down. When they went out onto the station hull and headed down the Z axis, it realized what their intent was. It did the only thing it could, it switched all of its concentration from killing those within the station to suborn soldiers it would need to prevent its own demise.
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The moment they exited the lock, Horatio knew things were cascading from bad to worse. He could tell just from the debris cloud forming around the station. He took a moment to look and orient himself and then activated his mag boots and started walking. He pulled out a safety tether with an electromagnet and a motorized clip on each end. Unfortunately, the stash of equipment he had led them to hadn't had any MMU packs so they had to hoof it.
He'd managed to pick up two more ratings for his party. They had a bag of tools, a fire axe, and some pry bars. One way or another, it was going to have to work.
“There are a lot of people out here,” CPO Garcia said, looking around them. “I'm getting a lot of emergency IFF calls. Some of them are medical alerts.”
