by Greig Beck
Alex dragged the bandage away, opened his eyes, and blinked. “Ouch.” Everything was blurred.
“Good morning, Count Dracula,” Casey said, and he could hear the grin in her voice. “How do you feel?”
“How do I look?” He laughed, and it made his ribs hurt.
“With those eyes you look like you’ve been on a three-day vodka bender.”
Alex slid his legs to the side and blinked. His vision began to clear.
“That’s amazing,” Marion said.
“No, that’s the Arcadian,” Casey said. “The man who can’t be killed.”
Marion narrowed her eyes as she watched him. He knew the cracks and peels in his skin were healing already.
“That’s just a rumour.” Alex groaned as he rubbed his face while more wounds knitted shut. “How are the other two I brought in – they make it?”
“They’re alive. Both in induced comas,” Marion replied. “I expect they’ll stay that way for a few days so they can heal. They’re in a lot worse shape than you are. Than you should be.”
“I’m just lucky.” Alex smiled. “And if it makes you happy, I feel as bad as I look.”
Marion scowled. “No, it doesn’t.” She jabbed a needle into his arm.
Alex let her, knowing what she was doing. He gave her a crooked smile. “I am who I am.”
“Maybe they all think so. At first.” Marion stood back for a moment. “Okay.” She began to nod. “The iron solution would have caused a reaction immediately.”
“Happy to know I’m okay. But we’re now down a shot.”
“Boss, what happened out there?” Klara asked.
“One of the things, or a piece of the thing, revealed itself in the rec room. And one of the guards shot it with a bolt gun. He punctured the wall and the damn room explosively decompressed.” He slid off the table and stood, rubbing his eyes. “Briggs got most out, but a few of us were blown out onto the lunar surface.”
He started to pull his suit back on. “Weirdest thing was, I saw another body, which I assumed was Andy Clark, the creature. But it was all burned up.”
“You mean freeze burned?” Klara asked.
“No, I mean incinerated. Nothing left but an ash outline. A lot of heat was used to do that.” He groaned again and looked at Casey. “Someone else was out there with me. Probably saved my ass.”
Casey frowned. “Who?”
“You were basically blind out there,” Marion reminded him.
“I know what I saw.” He shook his head to try and clear it, but all he did was make his throbbing headache worse. “Think I saw.”
That was the question, he thought. Who could have been out there, and who had some sort of heat or energy weapon on hand? Was it the Russians?
“You think we have an ally, Boss?” Casey asked.
He stared at her. The thing was, he’d felt comforted and protected by the new presence. And he’d felt that before. On the island.
No way. He shook the thought away.
Casey watched him closely. “You okay? You still look like crap.”
He laughed softly. “I just about had my brains sucked out of my ear and eye sockets, so cut me some slack, okay?
“The Arcadian going soft now?” She grinned. “Never.”
“Maybe it was the Russians. I don’t know.”
“Well, whoever it was, we need all the allies we can get,” Casey replied. “Hey, you need anything?”
“Yeah, I do.” He detached his helmet mechanism and handed it to her. “Fix the visor on this thing – it didn’t work. And it’s not exactly beach weather out there.”
Marion touched his upper arm. “You should rest.”
“No time.” Alex squeezed her hand and held it. “One more thing: it knew. It knew the toxin could hurt it before I had a chance to fire.”
The doctor snorted softly. “Of course – collective memory, I should have guessed.”
“Like shared intelligence?”
“Something like that,” she replied. “There’s a theory that animal groups like schools of fish, swarms of insects, flocks of birds, and even bacterium, have displayed group-management and coordinated decision making. In fact, it has a name – hysteresis – where behaviors in groups is so synchronized and intimately coordinated that it has previously been considered to be some sort of hive-mind telepathic communication.”
Casey threw her hands up. “Oh, great, that’s all we need – this thing has damn ESP as well.”
“We still don’t know if it’s one creature or several.” Alex sighed and then pressed his eyes, grimacing as he did.
Marion nodded. “That’s true. And my belief is it’s the same animal that has budded to create either permanent or temporary clones of itself. And I think this thing is displaying collective memory behavior. One part of it experiences something and it can be passed onto the rest of the buds, or other parts of itself, via chemical signals, or some other method we haven’t worked out yet.”
“Like brain cells,” Alex said.
“Yes, exactly like that. The individuals are acting like neurons, storing and passing on thoughts, memories, and pattern recognition, exactly like our brain does.”
“This will make it impossible for us to ambush all of the creatures,” Klara said. “If we successfully take down one, then the rest will know about it.”
“That could also be true,” Marion said.
“We can use this.” Alex folded his arms and paced for a moment, letting his mind work. He turned back. “To flush it out.”
“How?” Casey asked.
“How many doses of the iron solution do you have left?” he asked Marion.
“We only have enough to inoculate about ten people now,” she replied, and then tilted her head. “Less than a quarter of the remaining base personnel.”
“Okay.” Alex rubbed his chin. “We were thinking that we give it to some people to stop them getting infected or invaded by this thing. But like you just did with me, what would happen if we gave it to someone who was already infected?”
The group stared back for a few seconds before Casey began to laugh darkly. “Shit might just hit the fan.”
“It might force a reaction. The creature could be forced to reveal itself.” Marion half-smiled. “Use the solution as a sword rather than a shield? I like it.”
“Exactly.” Alex nodded. “We set up our testing station and start to inject the personnel, a small dose, until we find one of the infected. And then through this collective memory, it passes on the warning to any more hiding among our crew. We flush one out, and the rest will emerge to avoid getting the shot.”
Klara grinned. “Because they don’t know how many doses we have.”
“Should work,” Marion said. “But what if you don’t find one of the infected? How do you choose?”
Alex thought for a moment. “Well for a start, we use some of our own group message delivery. We get everyone ready and tell them the shot will show us who the creature is.”
Casey laughed. “We bluff it. We might not have to administer a single dose.”
Marion drew a deep breath. “There’s something else you need to consider. If by chance you do inject one of the crew who isn’t a person, and this thing breaks out.” She looked up at Alex. “What happens to those in proximity to it?”
“Yeah, it’s high risk, but can’t be avoided. Bottom line, we stop it here, now, or we abandon the moon forever. And one more thing: if we don’t stop it, no one will be coming to take us home, or would let us land if we did.”
“I’ll do it,” Casey said. “I want to look this thing in the eye. And then burn it back to hell.”
“Yeah. For Vin,” Klara added and bumped knuckles with Casey. “Lock and load.”
CHAPTER 54
Alex looked over the crowd of around forty desperate people – less than half of the original moon base personnel. The control room was packed, and given very few people wanted to go anywhere by themselves, not many were even brave
enough to get to the shower rooms. The result was a smell of crushed humanity, ripe with body odour and the sharp tang of fear.
The control room had a raised dais for the center computer system desks and Alex stood tall, hands on his hips. He was a silver giant among them.
“Listen up, everyone.”
The crowd quietened immediately, hungry for news.
“We have a test we are going to use to find out who has the … infection. We’re very confident it will tell us what we need to know.” He waited for the murmurs to die down. “The sooner we get this done, the sooner we make plans for getting home.”
A hand went up but Alex shook his head. The hand went down. He turned. “Marion.”
The doctor stepped up beside him. “Each person will enter the first meeting room one at a time for a simple injection. Afterwards, inoculated people are to go and wait in the blue zone, which is over at the west side of the room.” She indicated an area of the control room that had been cordoned off with blue rope.
“How will we know if it works?” a man at the rear shouted. “If the test is positive or not? I mean, do we know right away, or does everyone stand in the blue area until they know?”
“We’ll know immediately,” Alex replied. “Don’t worry about that.”
More voices stirred and the noise level lifted. Tom Briggs raised his hands and waved everyone to quietness. “If the initial test gives us a positive, then there’ll be more tests right then and there. Those people will just have to wait inside the room until they’re done.”
He looked up at Alex, who simply looked into the crowd, trying to see if there was any furtive behavior, anyone trying to get to the back of the room, or any other telltale sign that a body really didn’t want to get the test. A few of the crew looked like they were trying to shuffle their position, and he knew he only needed one likely candidate.
“Everyone line up.” Alex pointed to a few of those at the back. “You and you, up first.”
A bearded man and a woman glanced at each other, then slowly moved to the front of the line. Alex organized them, then went to the door of the room they were using as the treatment center. He peered in. Casey Franks was sitting at a table grinning back at him with the old battle-scar down her cheek pulling her face into a sneer. With the skull on the front of her silver armor she wasn’t exactly pulling off the caring, sharing nurse look. He also noticed that below the table, on the vacant seat next to her, was her gun with the thermal rounds.
Up against the wall was Klara. The tall, angular woman had her toxic dart stick close at hand and a focused, bird-of-prey expression.
Marion should have been doing the injecting, but he didn’t want her up close to a body that might be housing a monster. HAWCs took those risks.
“Listen up, you pair of Nurse Ratcheds.” Alex grinned. “We want these people to work with us, not run a mile.”
Marion stood waiting with an electronic notebook to match the personnel details of the patients as they entered. She had laid out ten hypodermic needles containing the entire stock of their iron solution.
“This is all we’ve got, so good luck everyone,” she said. She faced Casey. “You’ve injected people before, haven’t you?”
Casey shrugged. “How hard can it be? The sharp bit goes into the soft skin, right?” She began to laugh.
Marion rolled her eyes. “Good luck … to them I mean.”
Alex and Marion stood either side of the doorway. Briggs and a few of the remaining security personnel kept the crew in line.
Alex lifted his chin and Briggs nodded. “All forty-one personnel present and accounted for,” he said. “Ready when you are.”
Alex turned to Marion. “Let’s begin.”
* * *
They had thirty-nine people to go, and only eight injections left. Alex began to wonder whether they needed to dilute the mixture or have some placebo shots made up in the event they went through the first ten without result.
He looked along the line, sighed, and then called the next person up.
As Marion began to take the details down, there was an explosion of yelling from inside the test room, accompanied by shots ringing out.
“Get down!” Alex yelled and most of the group flattened to the ground.
The door bulged outwards as something heavy slammed against it. Alex was about to head to the door when from behind him he heard a man scream. He spun back in time to see something blooming open like a large, doughy flower among the people waiting.
It was as they suspected: the collective intelligence of the things meant that the danger to one of the polyp buds masquerading as a person was somehow telegraphed to one of the other creatures, or pieces of creature, outside.
People fell away from the creature in the center of the room, but two crew members were already lashed to it by fibrous netting. Alex beheld the creature’s true form: something that looked like a dark flower with thick petals opening around madly lashing cephalopod-like tentacles.
Alex dived toward it, pulling out his neurotoxin dart stick and firing several times.
In response, the creature pulled a woman in front of itself. The dart struck her, making her blanch and her body go rod-straight as the muscle paralytic kicked in. The creature threw the woman at Alex, her body flying through the air like it weighed nothing.
Alex caught the woman and laid her to the side, then went after the thing again. This time it headed for the door. Briggs stood his ground and lifted a handgun, pointing it at the monstrous creature as it bore down on him. The base commander shouted something, but even Alex had trouble hearing his words among the cacophony of screams and shouts, plus a sound like shrieking wind during a hellstorm.
Before Briggs even had a chance to fire his gun, a lashing tendril went around his neck and he was jerked upward to strike the top of his head against the ceiling. He was then flung aside like he weighed nothing.
The creature went out the door and Alex followed. But even though he was only a dozen paces behind and moving fast when he exited, he saw the corridor was already empty, both ways.
“Sonofabitch.”
Alex raced back to the testing room. Marion stood against a wall looking terrified, but as she saw him approach, she leaned across to open the door then stood back.
Klara and Casey stood over a huge mound of black sludge. Casey looked up, her teeth bared and breathing hard. She pointed.
“We injected it with the iron supplement and it freaking exploded into some sort of flowery octopus and went crazy. Klara put some darts into it, and then it turned into this shit pile.”
Alex nodded. “Good work. But this thing isn’t dead, just stunned. We need to get it outside and incinerate it.”
“We should do some tests,” Marion said, her face drawn in revulsion.
“No, we don’t have any secure facilities. And we don’t know if a single piece or spore of this thing is enough to infect a healthy person. Right now, I just want to reduce their size, or population – however many of these things there are.” Alex poked his head out of the meeting room and pointed to one of the security guys. “Get me a plastic sheet. Hurry!”
Briggs sat up, holding his head in both hands and looking dazed. He got groggily to his feet. He nodded at Alex, who gave him a thumbs-up in return.
Alex turned back to Marion. “Give those two people who were grabbed by the thing, as well as Briggs, a shot of the iron solution in case they got infected. Watch them as you do it, just in case.”
Casey came and stood in the doorway. “So, was that all of them?”
“Except the one that got away. I hope so,” Alex replied.
“Good, we need a win,” Klara said.
“Captain Hunter, got something here,” Stevens called.
Alex turned. “What is it?”
The control panel illuminated Stevens’ face. He squinted. “Got some people coming back in. Three walkers, Russian suits.” He scoffed. “Waving a white flag.”
Alex stra
ightened. “Seems not all our Russians left town.”
“Don’t go, they could be infected. We need to keep em out,” Briggs said.
“Normally I’d agree,” Alex replied. “But they were there at the start of all this, so they know more than we do. If they’ve got information, then we might be able to trade.”
“Yeah, their lives for everything they know,” Casey Franks declared.
“Works for me,” Alex replied. “Casey, you’re with me.” He turned to Stevens. “Let them in the maintenance bay. Evac all air and keep us isolated until I give the word.
“And Briggs, get that pile of crap down to the incinerator before it pulls itself back together.”
CHAPTER 55
Casey’s hands moved fast and expertly over Alex’s broken helmet. “Needs a new visor. Got one in the pack.”
She ejected the old one and threw it to the corridor floor as the pair headed toward the maintenance garage. She slotted the nanotech face screen into the collar, used a microdriver to secure it, and then tested its ability to fold out and then retract.
“Boss, lean in.”
Alex turned and lowered his head so she could slot the clear ballistic shield into his collar mechanism.
“Try it.”
Alex pressed the stud and the helmet telescoped over his head and face. He nodded. “Good work.” He retracted it and turned down the corridor. “Now let’s go meet our lunar neighbors.”
* * *
Alex stood in the center of the maintenance garage as the three Russians cautiously came down the ramp. Casey stood near the wall, cradling her rifle, its muzzle pointed toward the trio.
As they saw the HAWCs, the Russians raised their hands in the air. Alex held up his own hand, flat, and motioned for them to stay put as he slowly approached, and walked around them, checking their suits to see if they had concealed weapons or whether there were any breaches in their armoured fabric, any black slime, or just anything that looked abnormal.
He pointed to his ear and they nodded.
“We come in peace,” Borgan said in English.
