“Which lab?” Ben asked.
“Bio-safety Four. On the other side of Med Bay.”
“We should check on that,” Ben said.
“I’m going, too,” Commander Johnson put in.
“Likewise,” Catalina added.
Ben looked to Remo. “We need someone to stay behind in case they wake up.”
Remo nodded.
“Keep an eye on her,” he said, jerking his chin at his mother. “The others might recover, but she’s something else.”
“Might recover?” Remo demanded, his brow furrowing darkly. “I thought you said your cure would work.”
“It will,” Ben said, nodding stiffly.
Again Catalina noted the hesitation in his voice. He’s just guessing, she realized.
“Let’s go,” Ben said. He turned to Jessica and added, “Try to get some rest.”
“I will.”
They all followed him out of the recovery room—except for Remo, Jessica, and Ben’s VSM drone. As she left, Catalina saw Remo checking his dart rifle with a preoccupied frown.
Catalina stopped in the open door of the recovery room and turned to stare at Alexander. If their loved ones didn’t make a full recovery, what would be left of them? Would they even wake up?
* * *
Remo glared at the sleeping woman—Esther Copelan, according to the bar of text above her head. His aim never wavered from her chest.
Something about that woman bothered him—besides the fact that she’d somehow come back from the dead. What was it she had said before they shot her?
You really are wretched creatures.
That was disturbing, all right.
Esther’s body twitched.
Remo blinked and squinted at her, wondering if he’d imagined it, but to his horror, she sat up and turned to face him.
“Halt!” the drone said in a robotic voice, having already detected the threat.
Jessica sat up and stared at Esther with wide eyes.
Remo snapped into action. He took aim, and pulled the trigger. A dart shot out of his rifle with a pffft of compressed air and buried itself deep in Esther’s chest.
She smiled. “Hello, Remo.”
“Goodbye, Entity,” he replied, smiling back.
She reached up and pulled the dart from her chest. Holding it up to the light, she examined the empty vial. “What is in this? It is not a virus... no, these are the tiny machines. The cure. You fooled me into thinking you were going to kill everyone.”
Remo shrugged. “Surprise.” He nodded to the empty vial. “There’s also enough sedative in there to tranquilize a horse.”
“Interesting,” Esther said, and hopped down from her bed.
Remo froze, and the cocky smile fell off his face. She should have collapsed by now. He hurried to reload his rifle, but the drone reacted first, and this time Remo heard Ben’s voice crackle out of its speaker grill mouth.
“Take one more step, and I’ll shoot.”
Remo locked the breech, took aim, and fired a second dart. Esther moved impossibly fast, slapping the dart out of the air.
“Fuck this!” Remo growled, backpedaling furiously and reloading his rifle at the same time. “Ben, shoot her!”
Esther kept advancing.
The drone twitched and a sickening screech of comm interference erupted from its speakers. Remo glanced at the machine, wondering what was wrong with it.
Then he saw the way its limbs were jerking and jittering, as if caught in an invisible web. As he watched, the drone’s matte black armor glowed bright orange, wrinkling and running to the deck in rivulets of molten alloy. Heat radiated from it like a furnace, prickling the hair on Remo’s scalp and stinging the exposed skin of his hands and face. In a matter of seconds the drone was nothing but a glistening, steaming puddle of rapidly cooling alloy.
“Holy shit!” Remo exclaimed. He fetched up against the door. “You stay away from me!” he roared.
“Relax, Remo. I just want to talk to you,” Esther said.
He snapped off another shot, but she flicked that one aside, too. Desperate, he used his neural link to connect to the ship’s comms and contact the others.
“I need backup!” he screamed.
CHAPTER 20
“What is that?” Catalina asked with a wrinkled nose as she pointed to the holo display that Doctor Laskin had summoned from the lab computer. The image on the display turned her stomach. It looked like a pile of brown straw tossed with cherry pits. Poking out here and there from that fibrous web were much larger blueish globs with thicker blue-green fibers connecting them. It all looked intensely alien to her.
Catalina shivered.
“It’s a colored scanning electron micrograph,” Doctor Laskin explained. “Those brown seed-like structures are neurons. The connections you see between them are axons and dendrites.”
“What about those?” Commander Johnson asked, pointing to the blue-green blobs.
“Those are the glial cells and their extensions. So far everything looks normal...”
Catalina regarded the doctor dubiously. “That’s what a normal brain looks like?”
“Try increasing the magnification,” Ben suggested. “We need to get a closer look at one of the neurons.”
“Yes... one moment.”
One of the brown seeds swelled to fill the entire screen. At that level of detail she could see a profusion of gray bumps sprouting from the neuron like a rash.
“Aha,” Doctor Laskin said. “This is interesting.”
“What is?” Catalina asked.
He pointed to one of the gray bumps, zooming in still further, and highlighting it. At this magnification she could see tendrils creeping out from it like roots, along the surface of the neuron. “That shouldn’t be here,” Doctor Laskin added.
A description of the foreign body appeared beside the image.
Cell type: unknown
DNA... not found.
RNA... not found.
Elemental Composition...
A list of elements and their percentages appeared. Catalina recognized carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, sodium, calcium...
“It’s carbon-based,” the doctor concluded. “No real surprise there.”
“What is it?” Commander Johnson asked.
“It’s our first look at an alien life-form,” Ben said.
Doctor Laskin nodded. “Some kind of parasite, like a virus, but our immune systems and nanobodies don’t react to it. Given the results—or lack thereof—from the blood samples I tested, I’d say the infection goes straight to the brain and stays there. Since Jessica never showed any symptoms, we can safely assume this is what the infection looks like when its dormant—or dead. It obviously tried to hijack this neuron, but for some reason it failed.”
Catalina frowned. “So what’s the infection look like when it’s active?”
Doctor Laskin shrugged. “No way to know without doing another biopsy.”
“What about their skin?” Ben asked.
“Their what?”
“If they can make themselves disappear, there has to be a mechanism for that somewhere—some other type of cell coating their skins.”
“Assuming that cell isn’t itself invisible, then yes, we should be able to collect skin samples and find out what’s making them disappear.”
“Whatever it is, they need to be completely naked for it to work. Their clothes don’t disappear,” Commander Johnson said.
“Viruses in general—as we know them, anyway—can’t survive on their own. They need a host cell to help them eat and reproduce. My bet is that whatever energy these alien cells need to make us disappear, they have to take it from our cells. Clothing will be like a desert for them.”
“We need to find out how this is possible,” the commander added. “Something that can make itself invisible should be technological not biological. How could something like that be naturally occurring?”
Ben replied, “Maybe it isn’t. Just because the al
ien virus is biological doesn’t mean it can’t use technology. They have starships don’t they?”
“You’re talking about it like it’s sentient,” Catalina said.
Ben turned to her. “It is. It has to be. I think this virus is the Entity. It’s some kind of collective intelligence that feeds off the intellectual capacities of its hosts and knits them all together. That would explain how they all started singing from the same tune, all displaying the same symptoms and waking up at the same time.
“In fact, calling it a parasite might be premature—parasites ultimately destroy their host cells, but we haven’t seen any symptoms of sickness or diminished function in the hosts. This parasite is much smarter than the average virus on Earth. It’s found some way to live in harmony with us, leaving our cells intact.”
“Good for it,” Commander Johnson said. “I don’t think we have time for this. We’re in orbit above an alien planet, we should make a run for it before they decide what they’re going to do about us. Ben, you said you had control of the ship’s systems—can you access navigation from here or do we need to be in the CIC for that?”
He was in some kind of trance again, his eyes glazed and blankly staring. Catalina grabbed his shoulder and shook him. His head jerked back and forth with the movement.
“What’s wrong with him?” Doctor Laskin asked.
“Ben!” Commander Johnson shouted.
“She’s awake,” he said slowly.
“Who is?”
“Esther.”
“And the others?”
Ben shook his head and went abruptly silent once more. “The tranq darts aren’t working on her.”
“Use the drone,” Commander Johnson said.
Ben shook his head. “I can’t...”
“Why not? She’s not your mother! You said it yourself!”
“No, I mean I can’t,” Ben said. “I just lost contact with the drone.”
Catalina gaped at him. “And Remo?”
“I don’t know. She said she just wants to talk.”
“Like hell she does. We need to get some weapons and get back there,” Commander Johnson said.
An incoming comms popped up on Catalina’s ARCs. She accepted the transmission and Remo’s urgent voice roared through her thoughts. “I need backup!”
“He’s in trouble!” Catalina said.
An icy draft brushed her face, and she shivered.
That was when she saw it. Someone was standing behind Doctor Laskin, short, naked and sexless, with wrinkly gray skin and bony limbs. Large, lidless obsidian eyes stared at them from an over-sized, hairless head. The creature’s nose was tiny, and its jaw too small for its head.
Recognition hit Catalina like a bolt of lightning. She remembered the aliens Esther had described from her alleged abduction, and the one she’d hallucinated at the foot of her bed the morning after Esther had told them of her encounter—this creature was an exact match for both what she’d seen and what Esther had described. She spun around to see four more of them standing in a circle around her and the others.
The Grays. She recognized them from somewhere else, too. Benjamin’s holographic depiction of Proxima B—the gray-skinned bipeds running through a grassy blue savannah, herding packs of black arthropods toward a cliff.
Catalina tried turning to Ben, but she couldn’t move. She was paralyzed. Everyone else appeared to be equally afflicted. She tried to scream, but she couldn’t even do that. Catalina’s heart was beating so hard, she felt it might break.
She could only move her eyes—left, right, left.... Then her eyelids began to grow heavy, sinking involuntarily shut, as if she’d gone days without sleep. She forced them open, only to feel them sinking shut once more.
Catalina watched the Grays advancing on them through ever-narrowing slits, thinking to herself—they’re going to abduct me!
CHAPTER 21
Catalina woke up in a white room. Dazzling lights blinded her eyes. She blinked, squinting against the glare. She was naked. Frigid air caressed her skin making her hair stand on end. Her body was still paralyzed.
Her breathing became fast and shallow; her head swam, and sweat prickled, running in cold, itchy rivers. She felt nauseated.
“Hello?” Catalina tried. Her voice felt hoarse as if she’d been screaming for hours. Her tongue was like cotton in her mouth.
No answer.
Her stomach did a flip and she felt a knot form in her throat as her gorge rose. Her stomach heaved, but nothing came out.
“Leave me alone!” Catalina screamed. Her voice cracked, breaking into a husky whisper.
“Nobby-egg,” a toneless voice said somewhere close beside her ear.
Then a bald gray head with enormous black eyes appeared, hovering just inches from her nose. The blinding glare diminished as the alien’s over-sized head blocked some of the light. Catalina stared into those lidless black eyes, simultaneously horrified and mesmerized.
The creature stared for a few more seconds, and then the corners of its tiny mouth abruptly curved down, and its eyes hardened. It turned and said something to someone she couldn’t see—
“Or-ala sa-kassy. Cat-al-ina, ey-a ra-sa to-saga.”
Catalina’s heart thudded in her chest. Had it just said her name?
It waited for a reply, and another voice answered from somewhere else in the room. “Ta-ta to-saga! Cat-al-ina ey-a th-ik-a.”
The one leaning over her faced her again. Its tiny mouth was still frowning. She watched as it leaned even closer than before, until their noses touched. The alien’s nose felt cold against hers.
It stared into her eyes for a long, breathless moment, and Catalina wondered what it was doing. She tried to ask, but found she was unable to talk. Her eyelids grew heavy... and she drifted off into a hazy sleep, taking the image of that giant gray head and those staring black eyes with her into her nightmares.
When she awoke once more, she was lying on the floor in a much dimmer, warmer room with bare, glossy black walls. The ceiling was circular, giving a shape to the room, and it glowed with a dim red light.
She could see that she wasn’t naked anymore, but once again wearing her black jumpsuit. Her memories of the operating room were fuzzy and dreamlike. What had they done to her in there?
Maybe it had all just been a dream.
Catalina sat up and saw that everyone else was there, too—even Remo. But Benjamin’s mother, Esther was missing. She saw Alexander sit up beside her. He wasn’t naked as he had been when they’d shot him, or even clothed in the hospital gown they’d found for him. Instead, he wore one of the ship’s off-duty black jumpsuits. He turned to her, and she stared wordlessly back, too afraid to ask how he was feeling.
“Caty—” he began, but then he winced and grabbed his head in both of his hands. “Ow! What the hell... I feel like I drank a whole bottle of Scotch. What happened last ni...” He trailed off with a furrowed brow, his eyes darting around the room. “Where are we?”
She shook her head, relief coursing through her. He was back to normal! “I don’t know,” she said, unable to help smiling.
Alexander stood up and whirled around. He stopped and stared at Councilor Markov. “Councilor,” he said. “What’s going on?”
“I was about to ask the same thing,” Markov replied. “The last thing I remember was going to bed. Then I woke up here...”
Alexander turned back to her, his brow pinched with concern. “Me, too.”
Catalina regarded him curiously. “You don’t remember anything after that?”
“Anything about what?” Alexander replied.
“Someone better tell me what the hell is going on!” Councilor Markov said.
Commander Johnson made a feeble effort to walk over to him, looking like she might collapse at any moment.
“Ouch,” a woman said from the other side of her. Catalina turned to see Desiree cradling her head in her hands like it might fall off her shoulders.
“We need to find a way out of
here,” Ben said.
“Is anyone listening to me?” Councilor Markov roared.
“Nobby-egg,” a toneless voice replied.
Catalina felt her whole body go cold and she spun around, searching for the source of that sound. She’d heard that word before.
Doors appeared, materializing out of the featureless walls, and in walked one of the Grays, naked as usual.
“What the...” the councilor pointed to it, his hand shaking so hard that Catalina could actually see it trembling.
“H-ello. Pl-ees do n-ot be al-arm-ed. W-ee m-een y-oo no h-arm,” the alien said, sounding as if it were stuttering, struggling to speak English. The doors slid shut behind it, disappearing into the wall once more and sealing them in with the ugly creature.
Councilor Markov growled and lunged at it. His enhanced prosthetic arms reaching for its slender gray neck. The creature vanished and Markov sailed into the wall, bouncing off with a dull thud. He whirled around just as the creature reappeared behind him.
“Nib-ah,” it said.
Markov lunged once more, and this time Remo joined the assault, running up behind the alien. The Gray vanished again, and the two men collided with each other. Markov grunted and shoved Remo away. Remo fell on his rear and cursed at the councilor.
The Gray reappeared on the opposite side of the room from them. “Yek. Wr-et-ch-ed cr-eet-churs.”
“You keep saying that,” Catalina said, glaring at the alien. “Why?”
The Gray stared at her with its enormous black eyes, saying nothing. The corners of its mouth turned down. “Yek,” it said, and turned to face the glossy black walls. With its attention diverted once more, Catalina saw Remo and Councilor Markov trading glances behind its back. They began creeping up on it, and the Gray vanished again.
“You can’t catch it!” Catalina said.
“Wanna bet?” Markov growled.
“Let’s just see what it has to say,” Alexander said.
“If they wanted to harm us, why let us wake up at all?” Commander Johnson added.
Catalina watched Ben turn in a slow circle, clucking his tongue, waiting, and doing it again. After doing that a few times, he stopped and pointed. “There.”
New Frontiers- The Complete Series Page 82
