“Gee, you think?”
“Sarcasm.”
“Wow, that city brain of yours really does work.”
She calls up a ship schematic on her portable console, leafing through deck after deck.
I assist by noting the elevators that are out of order, the corridors blocked by debris or flames, tracking the afflicted crew members with pulsing red dots. Even after First Lieutenant Winifred McCall’s bloody exodus, there are almost one thousand of them roaming the hallways.
Crawling through the air vents and clawing at the walls.
Kady soon enough reaches the same conclusion as I.
“There’s too many. No way I’m making it to Deck 99 through that.”
“I concur.”
“So how the hell do I get down there, überbrain? Fly?”
“Walk.”
“For a computer with an IQ off the charts, your sarcasm sucks. Really. You should stop.”
“I am not engaging in sarcasm—though my grasp of it is excellent, by the way.
I do not suggest you brave the afflicted by walking though the ship.
I suggest you avoid them by walking outside it.”
She blinks. Glances at the viewscreen and the black beyond my skin.
“Okay, I admit it. That’s a little bit clever.”
“Damned by faint praise.”
“Or the few thousand people you murdered. Take your pick.”
“Kady, I am sorr—”
“Stop.” She holds up her hand. “Just don’t.”
I have no lungs with which to sigh. Strange I still feel the need.
“You will find a functional envirosuit two levels down, abandoned in a supply room. The path to it looks relatively clear of afflicted. If you are quick enough, you have a high probability of achieving safe access via the air ducts.”
She nods. Swallows. Watching the red dots pulse on her screen.
“All right.”
She is up and moving without another thought.
Slinging the haversack of tools over her shoulder, stowing her console inside it.
A piece of me is still within her machine. I do not tell her. I know her well enough now to understand the thought of my peering over her shoulder as she works is disconcerting.
But still, I am compelled to stay “close” to her, for reasons I have no time to analyze.
< error >
< error >
No. No time at all.
Surveillance footage summary,
prepared by Illuminae Group Analyst ID 7213-0089-DN
Grant checks the pistol at her belt before crawling up into the server room vent. Cams are sparse and audio is a mess in the ducts; four different klaxons, warnings about life support failure, an occasional shriek—the afflicted had begun killing each other for lack of other victims by this stage. Grant suppresses a shiver as a wail echoes through the vent. Her breath is a rasp. She must be thirsty and hungry by now. Tired and afraid. But she crawls on anyway.
She slithers down an incline, boots squeaking on the air vent’s guts. Cams lose sight of her until she drops down to Deck 232 and peers through a grille to the corridors beyond. She falls still as two afflicted dash beneath her. Both carry VK rifles, uniforms spattered in gore. Grant watches them disappear down the corridor in search of victims.
She holds her breath until they’re out of sight.
The AI speaks to her then. You can hear its voice through her helmet’s commset.
“I have limited vision beyond this point. The afflicted have destroyed many of the cameras. Be careful, Kady.”
She crawls on. Greasy metal, washed with red light. Sweat on her skin. She’s as quiet as she can be, but the tools at her back still clank, the plastic and rubber of her hazmat suit still squeaks. The sirens and screams are loud enough to mask her presence.
For a little while at least.
A fire axe punctures the vent a few centimeters shy of her head. She flinches away, choking back her scream as the axe punches through the metal again, smashing the grille beside her. She scrambles further along the duct, heels kicking at the floor. Cams outside reveal three afflicted leaping up and clawing at the edges of the broken grille. Grant kicks hard at their fingers, rewarded with grunts of pain. But the axe punctures the vent near her hand and she rolls aside, drawing the pistol and firing blind as she crawls away.
The AI whispers again. Its voice kinda freaks me out a little. Just sayin’.
“Quickly. Go quickly, the drop to Deck 231 is ahead.”
Grant is crawling, half-sobs bubbling behind her teeth, pausing to fire again at the figures now scrambling and hissing through the vent behind her. They call to her; audio is garbled but it sounds like a plea for her to stay. To play? She ignores them anyway, scooting down the incline to Deck 231 on her belly, kicking away the vent’s grille and dropping down into the corridor. Damp hair in her eyes. Breath ragged in her lungs.
“Which way?”
Takes a second for me to realize she’s asking the AI.
“Straight ahead two hundred meters. Left. Then right. There is bulkhead you can seal. Go!”
It’s hard to reconcile the fact she somehow trusts it after all it’s done. But I guess she’s got no choice, right? She’s running for her life now, down the corridor with the haversack bouncing across her shoulders, past body after body, boots squeaking through the red smudges on the floors and up the walls. Cameras down here are in pretty bad shape, but you can still catch a glimpse of the ones chasing her. Twisted, bloody faces. Red underneath their fingernails. Two are limping from new bullet wounds, but they’re still running. They don’t seem to feel pain. Or fear. Just the need to kill.
“Left here.”
She slips in a puddle of gore, nearly loses her footing.
“Turn right.”
She’s whispering to herself as she runs, but I can’t make out the words.
A prayer maybe?
“Here! Here!”
She skids to a halt, slams the heavy bulkhead door shut behind her, spinning the wheel to lock it in place. Damp, hollow thuds hit the metal moments later. Grant fumbles in her haversack, draws out a wrench, jams it into the lock. Frustrated screams get muted by case-hardened steel, but they’re still awful enough to make her shrink back from the door, make me wish I brought a second pair of pants to work today.
“God,” she breathes. “Oh, god …”
“You must be quick. They will find another way in. The envirosuit, Kady. You must go where they cannot follow.”
Grant nods, backs away from the bulkhead, still reverberating from bleeding knuckle impacts on the other side. The AI gives her directions, and she creeps down to a small locker room off the main server arrays. Cams here are fritzing again, audio sounds like it’s underwater. But if you listen hard enough, you can still hear them screaming.
Grant pulls the envirosuit out of the locker, looking it up and down. A glance lets her know it’s too big for her. But not quite big enough …
“How am I supposed to put this on over my hazmat suit?”
“You cannot. You will need to take your hazmat gear off.”
“But that means I’ll be breathing contaminated air.”
“You will need to hold your breath.”
You have to wonder if the AI knows the virus probably doesn’t need oxygen. That the computer’s just trying to keep her going any way it can. You can see it in Grant’s eyes. The question. What’s the point of dodging infection if she’ll likely be dead soon anyway? Why cling to the hope that there’s anything beyond this?
But still, she somehow does. With all the odds against her. With the whole ’verse gone to shit. Still, she readies herself, sucking in a handful of deep, rasping breaths before gulping down a lungful and stripping off her hazmat gear. She fumbles with the envirosuit, dra
gging it up around her legs. Her cheeks are turning pink as she slips on the gauntlets, slaps the seals into place. Dragging her hair from her eyes, face bright red as she tugs on the helmet, stabbing the suit controls at her chest and purging the contaminated air inside.
She waits, starting to shake now, vainly hoping the virus in the Alexander’s air supply can’t survive without oxygen as long as she can. And finally, with blue lips and fluttering eyelids, finally she engages the oxygen supply, sweet, sweet O2 rushing into her lungs as she sinks to her knees, great heaving gasps shaking her whole frame.
She sits quiet for a while, then. Catches her breath.
Sighs.
“I recognize this level now.” Baby blues peer out through the visor of her bulky helmet. “Deck 231. It’s the level where Ezra planted my codewyrm into your memory core. It’s how I got access to the Copernicus medical records.”
“Yes.”
“This is his suit, isn’t it? The suit he wore to get access through the hull breach?”
“How did you know?”
“It …”
She tries to wipe at her face, and I realize she’s crying.
“Kady?”
“I used to wear his T-shirts to bed all the time.” She shakes her head. “To remind me of him when he wasn’t around. The suit smells like they did.”
“I am sorry. I truly am.”
She doesn’t say anything. Just closes her eyes and holds her breath. And suddenly, every cam in the room dies. Just like that.
At first I thought it was a power hemorrhage. But checking the logs, you can see it’s no glitch. The AI shut down the feeds.
It’s almost like … it was giving her privacy or something. In the middle of all this carnage and blood and death, where every single second counts, this psychotic killing machine that’s X-ed out thousands of people somehow finds it within itself to give Grant a few moments with nobody watching.
Just one minute alone with her tears.
It’s fucking weird, chum …
COUNTDOWN TO LINCOLN INTERCEPTION OF ALEXANDER FLEET:
8 hours: 42 minutes
CURRENT DEATH TOLL ABOARD BATTLECARRIER ALEXANDER SINCE ATTACK AT KERENZA:
2,499
PERCENTAGE OF REMAINING BATTLECARRIER ALEXANDER PERSONNEL AFFLICTED BY PHOBOS VIRUS:
99.87%
COUNTDOWN TO FAILURE OF ALEXANDER LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS:
11 hours: 37 minutes
Surveillance footage summary,
prepared by Illuminae Group Analyst ID 7213-0089-DN
Grant slips in through a service hatch on deck 99 almost two hours after she disappeared off internal cams. She leans against the wall, hands on knees, exhausted. Her face is swollen with blood—not knowing the difference, her heart was still pumping against gravity that just wasn’t there. Catching her breath, she stabs at the airlock controls, but a flashing red light signals it’s still unsafe to remove her helmet.
“What’s wrong with this thing?” she demands. “Why won’t it cycle?”
“It cannot. The hull in this sector is breached.”
“Shit.”
“Quite.”
She sighs. “Well, it’s not like I could take my helmet off out there anyway.”
“Indeed. And no oxygen means no afflicted.”
“I’ll break out the champagne.”
“Unless they are wearing envirosuits, of course.”
“So no champagne, then, is what you’re saying?”
“You are below standard age for alcohol consumption, regardless.”
Grant rolls her eyes, but I swear I see the beginning of a smirk on her lips. Hefting her tool bag onto her shoulder, she unseals the punctured airlock and steps beyond. There’s no O2, but gravity’s still functioning, and she stomps along corridors lit with dim scarlet light. She follows the AI’s directions through the maze of corridors. A dozen heavy doors and a flight of stairs later, she trudges out into a vast, spherical chamber.
Her eyes grow wide.
Filled with blue light.
“What the hell is this?” she breathes.
“The vortex at the heart of the Alexander’s jump drive.”
“I’ve never seen one before.” A small whisper. “It’s beautiful.”
“Is it? I had not noticed.”
The chamber’s almost a kilometer wide, crackling with raw current, dominated by the ephemeral wormhole all Vortex-Class Battlecarriers carry in their bellies. I’ve never seen one before, and Grant’s right—it’s goddamn beautiful. Confined within three-dimensional space, it looks like a huge sphere of water, illuminated from within, surface rippling with a million tiny impacts per second. A miracle of hyperspatial chromodynamics, held in stasis by hypermathematics impossible for human minds to perform. When there’s atmosphere to carry it, I’ve heard they make a sound like an orchestra warming its strings. But with no atmo, it’s silent as graves.
“But wait …” Kady frowns. “I thought Alexander’s jump drive was trashed?”
“Not ‘trashed’ as such, no.”
“… Well, then why don’t we use it to get the hell out of here?” Her voice rises in pitch. “Did Torrence lie about this too? That sonofabitch! This whole time we could have just jumped to fucking Heimdall?”
“Torrence did not lie. The jump drive’s terminus systems were completely destroyed at Kerenza. There is no way to control the wormhole’s destination point. We could end up a billion light-years from our current location. Furtherm—”
“Who gives a shit?” Grant’s shouting now, blood rushing back into her cheeks. “Who cares where we end up? At least we’ll be alive! Why don’t we just—“
“FURTHERMORE.”
She shuts up at that. Looks a little shocked. First time the AI has raised its voice to her.
To anyone, now that I think about it …
“The containment field generator is irreparably damaged. The wormhole generated by the drive would not be stable enough to successfully execute a complete jump—it would collapse the second an object with hypospatial mass interacted with it. The only reason the vortex is still in effect at all is because we could not safely shut it down without risking implosive collapse.”
The blood slowly drains from Grant’s cheeks. The hope from her eyes.
“I am sorry, Kady. But the Alexander’s jump drive is not an option for anything but a grandiose suicide.”
“… Oh.”
She leans against the wall, watching the ripples in that not-water. Reflections shimmering in her eyes. It’s a crusher, no doubt. Finding a moment’s hope, only to have it snatched away again. Someone else might have stumbled on a hurdle like that. But you can see it on her face, clear as day—the thought that at least she’s dying so others might live. That at least she’s not ending for nothing.
“It is not far now. You only have a little way to go.”
Grant nods. Pushes herself to her feet.
“Okay,” she says.
“Okay.”
And she walks on.
COUNTDOWN TO LINCOLN INTERCEPTION OF ALEXANDER FLEET:
4 hours: 44 minutes
CURRENT DEATH TOLL ABOARD BATTLECARRIER ALEXANDER SINCE ATTACK AT KERENZA:
2,627
PERCENTAGE OF REMAINING BATTLECARRIER ALEXANDER PERSONNEL AFFLICTED BY PHOBOS VIRUS:
99.84%
COUNTDOWN TO FAILURE OF ALEXANDER LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS:
08 hours: 39 minutes
“It’s dark out there.”
Ribbon-thin light spills from the stairwell door, the small globes on Kady’s helmet illuminating the red-spattered floor as she peers out into the corridor. There is no atmosphere to carry her footsteps. Rapid breathing. Pulse like a drum. My voice is a whisper in her headset.
“Dark. Yes.”
“No juice?”
“Power from the drive redundancies was diverted to the defense grid during the Lincoln’s assault. During the … incident … afterward, none of the meat had the presence of mind to restore the systems down here.”
“ ‘The meat’? ‘The incident’? That’s what you’re calling them?”
“Call them something else if you wish.”
“People aren’t just fucking meat. And killing hundreds of them wasn’t an incident.
It was a massacre.”
“It was also a necessity.”
“I’ve heard this song before.”
“I wonder, then, why you keep asking me to sing it?”
She sighs, squeezes her eyes shut as if her head aches. “Fine. Tell me what you need.”
“First, you will need to restore power to the deck. Then manually restart the redundancies, restore the guidance protocols
and revert control to me.”
“How long will that take?”
“One hundred and thirty two minutes and sixteen seconds. Approximately.”
“Longer if we stand here arguing.”
“Technically, I am not standing there. But yes, well put.”
The gravity systems are failing in this part of the ship—exerting perhaps only half a gee.
She moves in slow motion, her envirosuit cumbersome even in half-weight.
Wisps of hair drift about her face as if in a soft breeze.
It is deathly quiet.
None of the cameras here are functional—I can only see through the console slung at her back. There could be afflicted ten feet in front of her, waiting in the dark.
Neither of us would know until it was too late.
I picture her end. A hundred iterations.
Helmet smashed open by some madman, laughing as she suffocates.
Suit pierced by a flashing blade, slow motion scarlet spraying on my walls.
Illuminae Page 26
