Extermination, page 7
Fred spent most of the evening writing up the report.
Unfortunately, that was not the end of the story.
Over the next few days, the lab workers continuing the cleanup or working on samples from other rooms continued to have issues with their computers. Twice, the lights went out, but without cuts to the general power supply. The electric sliding door into the lab opened and closed several times without clear reason.
Both Tara and Ashley complained a few times about losing data.
Fred dismissed it as them being tired, but then Tara came to show him something.
On screen, she had two images of computer code.
“This is the one that is the correct code as we entered it. The other one has been altered, as you can see.” She pointed out a bit of the code. “I did not write that. This seems to be some command for doing something based on an external input. Like turning on and off the light.”
“Have you run it past station operations?”
“I’ll do that now, but I just wanted to show you. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m scared. I want to get out of here. I think this whole place is doomed.”
Tara left, and Fred sat looking at the wall in his office.
What she said made a lot of sense. He should get together with Mariani, and they should order the evacuation of the station until he could fix what was wrong.
Evacuate the station, just because of a few slimy threads?
He would have to do a better job at justifying that course of action to his superiors, in particular Patel, who was very keen on having this station. But something inside him felt bad about this.
He remembered reading that in the cases of the Orbital Launch Station and the moon, the same young scientist had helped resolve the case. His name was Jonathan Bartell. He assumed that this man would come to the conference that he had registered for, and he had every intention of asking for advice.
But the next morning, when he came into work, he knew that something was off as soon as he came through the door.
The light did not come on.
There was also an odd smell in the room, one he had associated with the lab, but which he now recognised as belonging to the slimy growths.
But before he backed out of the room, he noticed blue-purple dots of light that moved against the back wall.
He used the light on his pad to see into the lab—and the entire far end—where the computers were—had been covered in mucusy threads.
His stomach churned.
He used his pad to take photos. Now they would have to evacuate the station for sure.
“What’s going on—holy crap!”
Tara had arrived at the lab. She stood at the entrance, her hand clapped over her mouth.
“Don’t come any further,” Fred said.
So they went through the cleaning operation again. Fred went to speak to the station operation manager about the infection. They had no problems in the rest of the station, but couldn’t fully isolate the lab.
Fred said, “Then turn off the air supply and we’ll vacate the area.”
The reply was that he would have to raise that with Mariani. Fred did, but he got no direct reply, because Mariani was just as new in the job as he was, and needed to consult with other long-term staff, most of whom would be unlikely to see the problem.
Fred was frustrated and went back to the lab, where Tara and Ashley were still cleaning up. Ashley was just coming out, carrying a box.
He heard the pop when he had his hand on the door handle. He saw the door move in its frame, and then the door buckled and was sucked into the lab.
Fred grabbed the doorframe as the air rushed past him through the lab, through the open door to the experiment room. He couldn’t see the air lock in the experiment room from here, but he presumed it had opened.
There was only one thing to do.
He let go of the doorframe and slid into the room on the rush of outgoing air. He ran across and scrambled for the door to the experiment room. He took it off the hook. It flew from his hands and slammed shut.
The rush of air stopped.
Phew.
The window in the experiment room held—for now. First, close the cargo hatch.
With that done, he turned on the light.
He expected to see more slimy threads, but there were none.
“Tara.”
She lay against the wall that separated the experiment room from the lab, bleeding from cuts of broken glass.
The rush of air had slammed her against the closed greenhouse door with such force that she was barely conscious.
“I’ll take you to the hospital.”
He managed to get her to her feet. Tara was crying and saying that she’d had enough of this place and its strange unexpected disasters.
Yes, he had, too.
Chapter Thirteen
NEEDLESS TO SAY, Jonathan didn’t sleep very well.
He never did when he came to a new place, but now there were all the other things to think about.
Also, the alcohol he had consumed made him feel hot.
He tossed and turned, and his mind stewed over a number of things.
In the first place, what was he going to say to Gaby tomorrow? He would have to apologise, but it would be so awkward. They were just colleagues, after all, and he didn’t want to ruin their amicable, professional relationship.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, he worried about Fred Wilkins. If he had really been in such distress as he had shown when he asked Jonathan for help, then he might be in a lot of trouble. Would people from the Force really try to silence him by removing him from the station?
He found that hard to believe.
But he would have to investigate, and to that end, he would have to confront Colonel Patel, who was going to show up at this conference to brief him on his upcoming project on Ceres.
He knew nothing about her, other than that she was said to be a disciplinarian.
Great.
Jonathan didn’t like conflict of any sort. He had seen enough of it when he had still lived at home with both his parents. His mother would make defensive comments when his father wasn’t there, and then would make defensive comments when he was there, and occasionally they would have arguments over his head at the dinner table.
The best conflict was one you didn’t have.
He slept for a bit, but his sleep was plagued with dreams of failing space stations.
He was lost in dark, low-ceilinged corridors, feeling that at any moment the power could fail and he would be dead, floating around in space with no way of contacting anyone, and the next time someone discovered him would be two hundred years later and he’d be frozen and all dried out.
He got up earlier than usual, and found Gaby sitting in the dingy canteen clutching a cup of tea. A few other people were in the room, but no one who justified him joining them, so he got his tea and breakfast from the back of the room, and sat down opposite her, with a feeling of dread coming over him.
“Couldn’t sleep?”
She shook her head. “This place is creepy.”
Yes, it was. “The other side of the station is nice.”
“Yes.”
And then they ate for a bit, not knowing what to say.
Jonathan’s head throbbed with the headache that he was developing. His own stupid fault for drinking too much.
Finally, he looked up to her and said, “I’m sorry.”
At the same time she said exactly the same thing.
And they both laughed, awkwardly.
“You’re right,” Jonathan said. “I did have too much to drink last night. But you know I really don’t enjoy parties like that. I just feel uptight and uneasy.” It was a very lame excuse.
Gaby shrugged. “You didn’t miss much after you left. There was no raunchy behaviour and no dancing naked on the tables.”
They both laughed, because the sort of behaviour she referred to was quite common at the Orbital Launch Station and some of the larger ships which docked there, now that finally an adequate supply of alcohol could be provided from Earth.
“I watched that presentation,” Jonathan said.
And so they were back at work, the only thing that they could comfortably talk about, because everything else was just too hard.
“What was it about?”
Jonathan told her in a few sentences what he had seen last night, and also that the presentation wasn’t finished and that Gina had told him not to get involved. “She definitely knew what it was about when I talked about Mark Stevens, and she said that I shouldn’t get involved and that this was by the order of the military.”
“And we are the military. We don’t know.”
“I have this feeling that when Patel arrives here, we’ll hear something about it.”
“I received a message that she’ll be here later this afternoon.”
Well that was something at least.
They finished breakfast and got dressed for the day.
The conference session started with a lecture about a new type of filter in recycling. It was an interesting subject, but halfway through the talk some sort of commotion arose in the back of the room. People kept walking in and out of the lecture room. When Jonathan turned around, it turned out to be security personnel.
The speaker got a bit nervous, and eventually he stopped the talk at the point where questions would be asked.
He said, “Excuse me, but is something going on that requires you to disturb the proceedings?”
Now a security officer walked down the stairs to the front.
He turned to face the crowd.
“I would ask the attendees to please remain seated for an announcement.”
People looked around raising eyebrows at each other.
The second officer with a pad joined him.
Some talk broke out in the audience, people wondering what was going on.
The officer with the pad began, “We have to report on an unfortunate situation. One of the conference’s attendees has been reported missing. We are currently looking at security footage of the area around his room and will be asking the residents a few questions. You do not have to comply, but you would be most advised to do so, especially if you have seen any suspicious activity.”
Gaby said, “What’s the bet that this is about Fred Wilkins?”
“I’m sure I’ll be asked.”
He was right about that. An officer was already coming in their direction.
Chapter Fourteen
WHEN TARA WOKE UP, she found herself alone on a hard bed in a bare room in the Opis Station medical centre. The walls and floor were made from metal, and the room contained no furniture except her bed and the trolley that held the heart rate monitor. A curtain of clear plastic covered the door. She knew the signs: it was an isolation tent.
She wore a thin hospital gown. Her right arm was bandaged and there was a patch stuck to the side of her forehead. She was attached to a machine, which was measuring heartbeat and other things that such machines normally measured.
What had happened?
She vaguely remembered being flung across the room, thinking she was going to die.
The air lock hatch had opened, while the inner door was still open, sucking out the atmosphere.
How come she wasn’t dead? Why had the hatch opened? Where was everyone?
She lifted her head. “Hello, is anyone there?”
A voice came from somewhere in the ceiling. “Yes, I am seeing you, although you probably can’t see me.”
Tara looked around and spotted a dark coloured window in one of the walls. “You’re watching me from in there?”
“Yes, I’m here. We will keep you in isolation for a while. Please let us know if you need anything. The robots in the room will bring it to you.”
Tara found a wall panel that looked like it could open, from which food would probably be dispensed. Next to it, a screen flickered into life with the station’s old Lemura logo. It hadn’t yet been changed to reflect the station’s new ownership.
“How long have I been here?”
“Two days. You’re lucky. Lt Wilkins managed to shut the door just in time, because otherwise you’d have been sucked out into space.”
Tara vaguely remembered a big crash and hitting the wall between the lab and the experiment room. She did not remember Fred.
The voice continued, “The entertainment channels are all available to you, and please let us know if you need anything else. Food will be served shortly.”
Tara flicked through the entertainment channels, already bored.
She was looking for news, but the news they got at the station was heavily filtered through the various services, and the company never had the resources to keep a journalist on staff for each of its stations.
Consequently, the news was all about things that happened elsewhere. Tara wanted to know what was happening to the station. She wanted to know what had caused the hatch to open, and why she needed to be in isolation.
She asked the faceless person behind the dark window, “Excuse me, can you tell me what happened?”
“There was a breach in the hull, but I don’t know any more than that. Your superior will be coming to visit you soon, so you can ask him.”
Superior, her arse. Did that mean that Fred was going to see her in this flimsy garment?
He would probably berate her about having left the hatch open or something stupid like that.
She could still see the strange line of characters creeping over her computer screen. She could still see the lights go on and off and on and off again. She could still see the strange threads growing out of the computers. And the little lights travelling along them.
Anyway, all that should by now have been destroyed.
But the question was, why had the hatch opened?
The panel door opened and the robotic arm came out, but instead of dinner, it carried a syringe.
“Hey, what’s going on? You said there would be dinner.”
“The robot will serve you dinner.”
“It’s got a syringe. What’s in it?”
There was a short silence. The arm stopped moving.
And then, “I don’t know.”
This was followed by the sounds of discussion between the nurse and someone else in the room out there that Tara couldn’t see.
But meanwhile, the robotic arm started moving again. And she still didn’t know what was in that syringe.
She didn’t trust it.
Tara climbed out of the bed.
“You can stay in bed, dinner will come to you.”
“I want to know what’s in that syringe. I want to know what it’s doing to me.”
There was some more discussion that she wasn’t meant to hear. Someone in the room said, “Stop the process now.”
And the nurse said, “It’s not responding.”
The robotic arm was still coming at her.
Tara was attached to a drip stand, and she wheeled it to the side of the room. Then she pushed aside the plastic covering on the door. When she touched the door handle, an alarm started blaring and an orange light flashing above the door.
The nurse said, “Stay inside the room.”
“But that thing is trying to do something to me.”
She could see the line of numbers going across the screen now, and she knew that whatever had infected the lab had not been incinerated. It was right there in the computer.
“We need to get out of here. We need to evacuate.”
She opened the door, but was met by two male nurses who grabbed her by the arms.
One said, “Stay inside the room, please. You have not been properly decontaminated.”
“There’s no point, all of the computer systems are infected, too. It was the computer virus that opened the hatch. It’s over there on that screen.”
She turned to the screen in her room, but it had gone back to its normal state.
“Go back into your room, please. Dinner will be served shortly.”
The nurses pushed Tara back into the room. They folded the robotic arm back into the wall panel.
She sat on the bed, looking around for clothes. She had to get out of here. She had to warn Fred, or anyone else who would listen to her. He had seen what the computer virus did. She had a bit of hope that he wouldn’t dismiss her story out of hand. He was actually a lot nicer than she thought he had been when she first met him.
But then she heard a familiar voice outside the room.
“I just want to see her to check if she’s all right.”
It was Fred, sounding genuinely concerned about her.
“Let me into her room. I just want to speak with her very briefly.”
“Would you see Lieutenant Wilkins in your room?” the nurse asked her.
“Yes, please let him in. I have important things to tell him.”
Chapter Fifteen
“WE WOULD LIKE to speak to you,” the officer said.
“I take it this is about Fred Wilkins?”
“Just come with us, please.”
Jonathan got up and followed the officers through the hall. Gaby came as well, but they stopped her at the door into the foyer.
“Only him, please.”
Jonathan turned around to Gaby, wondering why this was necessary.
He wanted her to come with him. She was part of his job, part of his life.
But he said, “Just wait here. I’ll be back soon.”
She nodded.
So he went out with the officer, leaving Gaby behind.
He knew it was a bad idea, but there was nothing he could do about it. Superior’s orders were superior’s orders and they weren’t always sensible, but disobeying, talking back or questioning was never a good idea.
The man took him into a small room at the back of the conference room. Jonathan imagined that this room was for small gatherings, maybe preparing talks.
There was a chair and a desk in the room and a projection panel on the wall, which was turned off.
