Draft 2

Month 3: The Dead Zone Continued

Helen kept the sprayer low against her thigh, the way Janet held a scalpel she meant to use. The sedative bottle rode in her hip pocket, the thermal lance dead weight across her back. Its charge was almost empty; it was practically a bludgeon at this point.

“Cabin Six, Madam. Magnus Cantarini. Crew classification: cargo deckhand. Physical classification: the largest person on this vessel by a comfortable margin.” Seven hovered in front of the door.

“I know how big Magnus is.”

“I am simply observing that the aerosol has an effective range of three feet, and Mr. Cantarini occupies a great deal of those feet.”

“You’re a real comfort, Seven.”

“I try to be honest first and comforting second, Madam. They are not always available in that order.”

The keypad glowed green, and the lock was open.

“Seven. Did you unseal this cabin?”

“Negative, Madam. I have no access to the crew-block locks. They route through the Captain’s authority and, as of recently, a Science Officer override.”

“So the door unlocked itself?”

“Doors do not generally develop opinions, Madam. Someone unlocked it.”

The list of someones was a short one. One of the names on it was sitting in his lab, and that lab, she’d bet anything, wouldn’t open for her either.

“Seven, what’s the status of the Science Lab?”

“Sealed under an independent lockdown, Madam. I cannot open it. Neither, I suspect, can you.”

Helen opened the cabin’s door. “Magnus? It’s Helen. Are you in there?”

No one answered her from the quiet cabin.

She stepped inside. It looked like a bar brawl had occurred. The mattress was dragged off its frame, a footlocker overturned, and a tool-roll was open with half its contents gone.

“He’s not here. His harness is gone, so is the spanner. Can you find him?”

“Working, Madam.” A pause. “I am having difficulty.”

“Difficulty how?”

“My internal map is fragmented since Mr. Cantarini introduced my chassis to the deck plating. I can read the quarters block. I cannot reliably track a single heat signature past the next junction. I am, to use a technical term, guessing.”

“Go ahead and guess.”

“Mr. Cantarini’s two strongest documented feelings are loyalty to you and hatred of Claude Kinskey. You are here. Therefore, the probability he has gone looking for the Science Officer is high. If a man wants to hit something, Madam, he walks toward the thing he hates.”

Helen walked out of the room. “The lab’s sealed. He can’t get in.”

“No, Madam. But he can stand outside it and make a great deal of noise trying. And—” Seven’s optic flashed a warning red. “Madam. New telemetry. The primary bulkhead doors to Cargo Bay Four have been retracted.”

“Retracted. As in open?”

“Fully open. The quarantine is breached at the structural level. The biological specimen is no longer confined to the bio-dome.” A beat. “It is in the transit corridors. With us.”

For a moment she just stood there. Magnus had walked out toward the lab. The creature was loose in the corridors between here and the lab. And the doors hadn’t fallen open on their own any more than Cabin Six had. “Somebody opened that bay.”

“Correct, Madam. Bulkheads of that scale do not retract by accident. The command originated from a station I am not permitted to name without sounding paranoid.”

“Say it anyway.”

“The Science Lab, Madam.”

Somewhere under the sedative’s fog she had known it. Claude hadn’t just been hiding cargo, he’d opened the door and pointed it at them.

“We’re going after Magnus.” Helen walked fast, gripping the sprayer.

Then she noticed something like footfalls that landed hard. “Seven, tell me that’s the dampeners.”

“It is not the dampeners, Madam. The airborne spore count is rising the further we walk, which tells me we are heading toward the source and not away from it. The specimen is somewhere between us and the Science Lab.”

“How close?”

“I cannot be precise, Madam. The one mercy in a creature this size is that it cannot be quiet. That is, I’m afraid, the entire list of mercies.”

As Helen moved forward, the amber haze thickened in the air. The spores had a rotten fruit smell, but she also picked up a second smell, like the inside of a kennel that hadn’t been cleaned in months.

She was nearly to the forward junction when Seven said one word.

“Stop.”

Helen stopped. The thing was in the junction ahead. It filled the cross-corridor, a seven-foot tall monster on two legs. It had a blunt head on a thick neck. Amber gas rolled from the pores of its dark, leathery hide. She knew that color. It was the haze that had been bleeding into the ship’s air. The source of it, standing right in front of her. Its forelimbs ended in claws.

It hadn’t seen her. Its head was turned the other way, toward the far end of the hall, where sounds of pounding metal were coming from. It had to be Magnus.

Helen took one step backward into the recessed maintenance alcove and pressed flat against the panel. At that exact moment, Seven emitted a sharp whine, landed on the shoulder mount of her harness, and died.

The little body sagged, then fell down her chest where she caught him with her free hand. Just a palm-sized drone of salvaged metal going cold in her grip while Claude’s monster stood thirty feet away.

She did not breathe. She found the seam along Seven’s underside with her thumb, and pressed the reset button by feel.

The creature’s head began to turn in her direction until the pounding came again from the far hall. The bullish head swung toward it. The thing moved away from her, and ambled down the corridor, toward the noise. Toward Magnus.

Seven’s optic woke against her chest. Blue.

“—apologies, Madam. Involuntary shutdown. I trust I did not miss anything.”

“You missed almost everything,” Helen said. “Did you happen to get a good look at it before you passed out?”

“The escaped cargo, known as specimen X-44, colloquially known as a Kaelen Monster. It is an apex predator and a highly valued biological weapon. It is extremely dangerous and needs to be avoided, Madam. I calculate our survival odds in direct physical combat at less than zero point one percent.”

“A biological weapon? You mean the spores that are coming off its body?”

“Precisely. The creature is the source. It hosts a symbiotic extraterrestrial fungus in its respiratory tract and hide. The amber fog is a psychoactive gas that drives prey into extreme paranoia.”

Helen opened the bottle of sedatives in her pocket and swallowed one. “I think it’s hunting Magnus because he’s making a lot of noise. We have to get to him first, but that thing is between us and him. Does the service spur off Frame Twelve still feed back into the handling bay?”

“It does, Madam. And it is far too narrow for the specimen. You would come out the far side while the specimen is still taking the long way around, assuming you can outrun a hyper-lethal creature.”

“Watch me.” She ducked through the access hatch into the spur, a low, cramped run of conduit and cable tray. She ran it hunched and came out the far end of the handling bay, ahead of the monster.

The cargo-handling stretch opened up outside the Science Lab, and there was Magnus, hammering the spanner against the lab’s door. And there she was, holding a sprayer with a three-foot range, facing a feral man twice her weight, and a predator closing on both of them.

“He doesn’t see it coming,” Helen said.

Then she saw the loader. It sat parked and charging in its alcove off the handling bay. Magnus used the exo-frame every dock day, a cage of yellow hydraulics and grab-arms tall enough to stack freight.

“Seven, I can use the loader. But I need you to walk me through it.”

“Madam, you have never operated a Class-Three loader. The recommended certification is forty hours of supervised handling. You have had zero.”

“I’ve watched Magnus. I think I can do it.”

“What is your plan, Madam?”

“I need to get close enough to Magnus without letting him kill me.”

Seven paused, then said, “Right pedal is hydraulic power, left is the dampener, the yokes are the arms.”

She climbed into the cage and slammed the safety bar across her lap. The frame woke around her. She found the right pedal and loader took a lurching step, then another. The noise turned Magnus around to look.

“Yokes, Madam!”

She shoved both yokes forward. The grab-arms clumsily swung out. One of them caught Magnus across the chest and drove him back into the bulkhead, hard enough to pin him against the wall.

Magnus thrashed as Helen leaned out of the cage as far as the bar would let her, sprayer extended, and put the nozzle a foot off his face.

“Sorry, Magnus.”

She squeezed the trigger, causing a mist to cover his mouth and nose. He gasped, which only pulled more of the sedative in. She sprayed him again.

“Madam, it is here, it is here—”

Helen turned her head. The Behemoth rounded the corner and moved toward her.

She hauled one yoke back and swung the loader’s free arm in an upward arc. The industrial steel caught the thing across its head and knocked it sideways into the wall.

It shrieked and came back at the frame, both arms swinging. Claws raked furrows down the loader’s arm and ripped the hydraulic line. The frame’s warning panel lit and the arm seized.

But the thing had been hit, and it didn’t like that.

Seven remounted on Helen’s shoulder. “The ambient temperature in this area is fifty degrees, Madam. The creature’s thermal dependency makes it sluggish in the cold. The impact compromised its equilibrium.”

It reared, vented a wall of amber spores, and lumbered back the way it had come.

Magnus had calmed in the cage of the arm. She powered down the frame, jumped next to him, and pressed a tablet past his lips. “Swallow it. Come on, Magnus, swallow.”

He swallowed and coughed. A moment later he looked at her. “Chief? What the hell are you doing with my loader? You’ve got me pinned.”

“I’m saving your life. Hold on.” She climbed back onto the loader and released the arm’s grip, setting Magnus free.

He looked around, rubbing his chest. “Why am I here? Was I trying to . . . kick Claude’s ass?”

“The spores made you do it. We have to take these sedatives until we find an antidote.”

“I detect declining agitation markers, Madam. But I recommend a second tablet because of Mr. Cantarini’s size.”

Helen handed him a pill. “Take this and then we gotta get out of here; there’s a monster loose.”

“What was that thing?”

“I’ll explain it on our way to the Med-Bay.” Helen turned to Seven. “We need a new plan.”

The Kaelen Monster