Extermination, page 8
“Sit down.”
Jonathan sat, but all the officers, all three of them, remained standing.
Jonathan looked from one to the other with a distinct feeling of discomfort creeping over him. “So, what’s this?” It looked more like an interrogation.
“Where is Fred Wilkins?”
“Why are you asking me that question? I’ve been looking for him, because he came to me and wanted to ask me some questions, and the next thing he’s disappeared.”
“You are the only person in this building who knows that he is here.”
“That’s not true. The organisers know. The man came to talk to me and introduced himself as Mark Stevens. I didn’t know who he was until I put a few facts together. I have no idea why he wanted to come here under a false name, but he was in distress, so that’s why I was looking for him.”
“What did he ask you?”
“Nothing. He asked me if I would talk to him, and then we were interrupted by my colleague arriving.”
Seriously, what did they think he was up to?
“You don’t suspect me of hiding him?”
But clearly they did, or at least they suspected him of something like that.
All the officers were standing around him in somewhat threatening fashion. Jonathan was starting very much to dislike this situation.
“Look, I don’t know what you think I’ve done, but I know as little about this man as you do. If I knew where he was, why would I have been asking about him everywhere? Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”
“He’s wanted for the spread of sensitive information.”
“Well, he hasn’t spread any sensitive information to me. He was trying to talk to me about the destruction of Opis Station, and why we should all know about it.” And there had been something about slimy threads that could repeat bits of computer code and insert them into places where they didn’t belong.
“That was sensitive information, not his to give.”
There was a knock on the door, and one of the officers went to see who it was. He spoke to someone at the door. And came back. “Stay here. We’ll be back soon.”
They all left the room.
Alone in the room, Jonathan looked at the walls and ceiling, both of which were grey and white and very boring.
He was annoyed. He wanted to go back to the conference and listen to the talks. He had no idea why he was here and why they were so hostile to him.
He had no idea where Fred Wilkins was and holding him here did not make him appear.
But if Fred Wilkins had been under some sort of gag order, which he had chosen to ignore, and if someone in the Force didn’t want him to give his talk, why wouldn’t they tell Jonathan the reason?
Maybe they had even tried to detain Fred Wilkins to ban him from the conference. And now he’d escaped custody.
Which meant that was the reason for his distress. Because Jonathan knew how frustrating and dangerous it could be to have important information and be actively barred from sharing it.
But why?
And why didn’t they tell him what the issue was and why Fred’s information was so secret? For all Jonathan could see, this was not information anyone should keep from the public. As he sat there in that room feeling annoyed, the lights went off.
All the other sounds that came with the operation of a space station—the slight background hum of whirring fans and other equipment—just . . . stopped.
It was deathly silent.
It was pitch dark.
A few voices sounded outside.
Carefully, Jonathan got up from his seat. He turned to where he remembered the door being and shuffled across the floor with his hands outstretched until his fingers met the wall.
In that darkness, all he could see was that slide where Fred Wilkins had intended to demonstrate how some organism that manifested as slimy threads copied bits of computer code into places where they didn’t belong, causing automatic operations of the habitat to fail.
He knew nothing of how Fred Wilkins had escaped, but he could guess what had happened at Opis Station: the organism had copied bits of code that turned off vital processes. Suddenly opening an airlock or quickly letting air into an unpressurised room could blow out an air lock or hatches. And all the damage to the station had been of that nature.
Not only that, but if this was an organism, where had it come from? Lots of strange alien microbial life could be found in space. Jonathan had already encountered quite a lot of it. And by coming here, had Fred Wilkins spread the organism to this station?
The darkness grew oppressive and stifling. Jonathan had to force himself to breathe slowly, not to listen for the bang that would precede the violent rush of air out of the station.
The organism repeated commands. It randomly turned on and off lights. Opis Station had been doing experiments to expose plants and mushrooms to the vacuum of space. The organism had remembered the code to open the air lock, because it had been there to watch it being opened.
Jonathan slid his hands along the wall until he found the door.
Very carefully, he opened it and looked into the foyer. A few people walked around in the dark in little pools of light from their devices.
The officers had left one of their group as guard outside the door, but he was talking to someone else down hallway.
Jonathan slipped out of the room, shutting the door behind him.
Chapter Sixteen
FRED ENTERED TARA’S hospital room, dressed in the awkward suit that made him feel hot.
She sat on the bed, with a bandage around her arm, and a patch on her face, but otherwise looking well. That was a relief, in the sea of bad news.
She said, “It’s spread through the entire station.”
So she already knew. He nodded.
She asked, “What are we going to do?”
“Get out of here?” He had argued evacuation with Mariani, but the man refused to believe how serious this was.
“Do you know how to?”
“There are some escape pods at the docking area.” He had studied the emergency procedures extensively.
“I would like to take as many people as possible.”
“They’ll all be infected.”
“If that’s true, we’re infected, too.”
Fred met her eyes, and he knew the situation was hopeless. Space was full of alien bacteria. They attached to the outside of the ship, and they changed the electronics within. All they could do was get out of this place and warn other people not to come anywhere near it.
He insisted. “We still have to go. The station is trying to kill us.”
He rummaged in the coverings of the infection suit, where he had hidden a vacuum suit liner.
“Here, put that on.”
“A camera watches what I do in this room.” She glanced at dark window in the wall.
But Fred had come prepared. He took out a piece of plasti-film and his tape and taped the film over the window.
Someone outside the room started shouting.
“Quickly,” he said, while Tara was doing up the fastenings of the suit.
She had yanked out the drip and some of the machines started to beep.
They did indeed not have much time, because soon the alarms would bring all kinds of people into the room. Fred picked up the drip stand and detached the leads and the bag.
The door burst open and a couple of people in hazard suits came in.
Fred charged at them, holding the drip stand horizontally at chest level.
He charged into the people while Tara crawled underneath, then he dropped the stand and slipped in between as well. During his life, he had done a lot of martial arts, and he knew how to avoid having people grab hold of him.
They ran to the end of hallway, turned left and climbed into the tube that led into the centre of the station. They became lighter and lighter as weightlessness increased towards the centre of the station.
When they were near weightless, she turned into a side tube, and entered the hub in the middle of the station, a round room with a couple of hatches on the sides.
One of them said “Emergency”.
But it was hard to figure out how to open the door.
Tara couldn’t do it, and Fred pushed her aside to try to negotiate the panel.
Meanwhile people entered the tunnel after them.
Just when the pursuers reached the area in the centre of the station, Fred managed to open the door.
Three men in hazard suits burst into the area.
“Go,” Tara said. “I’ll hold them off.”
“No, you go.”
“I’m infected. They’ll be afraid of touching me.”
That was true. And there were a lot more escape vehicles.
Fred slipped into the escape hatch, and settled into the pod.
It was a small rocket-shaped vehicle, with limited engine capacity and fuel, mainly to steer the craft. Most of the space inside was taken up by seats for four people, and the space underneath for air tanks.
Where was Tara?
Through the open door into the pod, he could see a part of the space outside. He couldn’t see Tara anymore, only a part of someone’s leg, not moving.
He called out, “Tara!”
The only reply he got was the hissing of air out of the ceiling vents. He grew very afraid. Something was very wrong at the station. A number of Space Force ships were in the area. He should warn them.
“I’ll go and get help!”
He pulled the control panel of the pod towards him, shut the door and launched the pod.
At first, it had so much acceleration that he couldn’t lift his head or even his hands.
But then, the acceleration slowed, and he was able to use the controls.
He turned on the outside screen projected on the inside of the pod over his head.
To his horror, he could only watch as the air locks opened and air blew out, taking with it debris, furniture, equipment and bodies.
Fred pressed the emergency button.
Whatever happened now, he was going to make sure that as many people knew about this menace as possible.
A voice said in his ear, “Copy Pod 342, what is the emergency?”
Chapter Seventeen
JONATHAN RAN THROUGH the foyer to the lifts.
Because the conference was in full session, the lift foyer lay empty.
He went into the lift, the doors closed, and it started moving, all much too slowly for his liking.
He had no idea what was going on or why people were playing coy with him. He was an expert in alien contamination threats, and here was one, as clear as could be.
A lot of other things suddenly made sense to him. Why Fred Wilkins had been secretive, why he’d come here under a false name, why he’d gone missing after contacting Jonathan.
And now it looked like the Force had lost Wilkins in the station after detaining him earlier.
They might know he had information to share that they didn’t want known, but did they know about the organism that he might be spreading?
He was going to find this man. The station wasn’t very big, and he was likely to be somewhere.
When the lift door opened, Jonathan ran in the direction of the accommodation rooms, using the light from his pad. He checked inside every door that would open, calling out for Fred Wilkins to come out. Most of the rooms were empty. He checked inside the bathrooms, too, and the cupboards. The sounds of opening and closing doors were very loud in that silence.
In his mind, he imagined Fred Wilkins hiding in a cupboard, too afraid to come out.
He imagined the man dead on the floor with slimy threads growing all over him. It wouldn’t be the first time that this had happened either.
Damn it, where was this man? Worse, was he, Jonathan, now going to get the blame for being involved in his presence here?
Halfway down the corridor, the overhead lights came back on and the air started hissing from the ceiling vents again.
Phew.
That was something at least.
He heard the distinct zoom of the lift and the opening of the doors.
No, he should probably have warned the conference delegates not to come here. If there was an infection, it would be spread throughout the station.
A group of people came from the other direction.
Jonathan recognised one of them: Colonel Patel.
Holy crap.
“There you are, Bartell. I heard you did a runner.”
Holy crap, holy crap. “I’m very sorry, ma’am. The power went off, and I realised something that would be of utmost importance to the safety of the station and all the visitors.”
“The visitors have been most rattled by the power outage.”
“It’s about the power outage, and the demise of Opis Station.”
She gave him a blank look.
Jonathan couldn’t gauge whether she was giving him her military poker face or truly didn’t know what this was about. The former, he hoped.
She nodded at him. “I think it’s time that we had a frank talk about security.”
With a feeling of dread, Jonathan followed her into a room.
It was one of the corridor common rooms like the one where he had shared drinks on his first night here. All in all, this conference had been an unmitigated disaster, and he felt like an idiot. Of course the Force had reasons to keep secrets as it did. Maybe he would even have been briefed on them if he hadn’t kept running away.
“This is about the enemy,” Colonel Patel said.
That was the least likely reply he expected to hear.
She said, “Does that surprise you?”
“Yes. Because, just to be honest with you, a lot of people question whether there even is an enemy. And definitely, I would not expect to find any of them here.” If an enemy in fact existed.
“Yes, I know that the common rooms and the mess halls are full of gossip, that we are supposed to inflate the risk of an enemy so that we can get more funding and other stuff like that.”
Heat crept to Jonathan’s cheeks.
“But do you really know why we acquired these stations that were formerly in the hands of a small mining research company? And do notice how I emphasise the word research.”
“To be honest, that’s a mystery. I assumed that these stations came with another deal that was more important to the Force.”
“No, Bartell. They were the focus of our acquisition.”
“You actually wanted these dilapidated stations?”
“We wanted to set up a research hub in this area. It’s going to be of vital importance for our defence against the enemy.”
She left a few moments silence for dramatic pause.
“You see, and I’m telling you that this is only for your ears, just for the sake of that rebellious streak of yours that seems to wriggle out of situations against protocol.”
Jonathan’s face grew hot. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry won’t cut the mustard when we’re all dead.”
“Now you have me curious. What is this enemy that we are not supposed to know about?”
“You see, it’s an enemy unlike any, an enemy that the military is not designed to defend themselves against. It’s an enemy that is everywhere. It is an enemy that uses tactics that cannot be fought with weapons.”
Jonathan was beginning to see where this was leading, and a cold feeling crept up in him. He should have known this. “The enemy are all microorganisms, aren’t they?”
“That’s correct. The further we have pushed into the edges of the solar system, the more ships have been plagued with strange diseases and conditions. Sometimes we’ve almost taken them back to Earth. Sometimes the organisms have died from exposure to too much sunlight, or not enough nutrients. But whenever one dies, there are hundreds and thousands to take its place. That is the reality. Deep space is full of rapidly multiplying, rapidly evolving microorganisms that are waiting to kill us. And we need a defence against them.”
“But why haven’t you said anything about it earlier?”
“Can you imagine the panic that would have caused on Earth? No, it’s much easier pretending that we are out there fighting some bogey in spaceships that can be seen with the naked eye than to let people think any particle of a breeze can be laced with something that is going to change humanity forever.”
She said nothing for a while, and he met her eyes. Whether he took what she said at face value, or believed there was a political reason, was immaterial. The horror of what she was saying was only beginning to sink in. His work at the Orbital Launch Station and the Moon were not isolated incidents. The prevalence of harmful bacteria was not so high out there because of the power of sunlight, but that was the threat: rapidly evolving bacteria everywhere, hungry for places to infect and grow.
“So, there you go. You now know a secret that maybe some people suspect, but few people know about officially. You were getting to the stage where you needed to know this anyway, but I expect that you will be required to keep silent about this.”
“Also my partner?” And because that sounded too intimate, he added, “My work partner—she’s a doctor. She’ll understand.”
Was that a smile over her face?
“Ah, Dr Gaby Larsen. Use your discretion. But impress upon her that this must not get out. You will in fact be commissioned to work on a project of utmost importance about fighting this menace.”
“That is what I was meant to be doing at Ceres?”
“That’s correct. Actually, we already started some of these experiments.”
“Let me guess: Ken Ward was working for you?”
A sharp look. “You’re not dumb, Mr Bartell. He was an eccentric to say the least, but that made him suitable to receive our funding.”
And this was another reason for the secrecy. If Lemura got wind of that, there might be legal consequences.
And at that moment, the lights went off again.
Chapter Eighteen
FRED WAS FLOATING through space. It was dark and silent, and he could see very little.
