The Patch

Chapter 13

13---------------------

Sonya Nero woke in darkness, choking on air so hot and moist it felt like drowning. She gasped, and hot plastic flooded into her mouth, coating her face in sweat and spit as the rest of the hood over her head clung to her skin.

“Check it again.”

She was grabbed by the scruff of her neck, the bag over her head pulled up from her neck slightly. Cool air rushed in at her neck and she gulped it in greedily. A firm hand steadied her pendulous swinging, and she realizeds all at once that she was not touching the ground, but rather swinging from her arms bound over her. She couldn’t move her feet and felt a dull itch of pain at her ankles when she tried.

Someone pulled her hair away over her shoulder and inserted the long probe of a datatap into the port at the base of her skull. She struggled away from it and was stilled by a stiff blow to the top of her head. She felt no pain, but the impact was sharp enough to knock her senseless. After a time the probe withdrew from the port and she heard electronic sounds to her left.

“Negative, Colonel.”

Someone tore the plastic wrapping from her head, and dizzily she tried to blink though the stars and the blinding light to get her bearings. A man, an aged man of war with cold, steely eyes and hair lifted her chin and drew close to her, using his other hand to force her eyes open. He leaned close, looking deep into each eye. Nero could feel his breath on her lips, see the sweat gathering on his brow.

“Call Doctor Patel again,” the man called back to someone standing behind her. “Tell him to hurry. I want him to see this. Install it again.”

They put the datatap into her head again. A young man behind her checked an electronic meter. “Negative, Colonel Paddock.”

The soldier slapped her stiffly with a gloved hand to bring her to her senses. He held her head still by the chin and locked eyes with her. “Look at me. Identify yourself.”

“You first, dickhead.”

He didn’t take the bait. He stayed cool and instead looks to the man over her shoulder.

A young man, almost a kid in surgical scrubs came around into her field of vision, nose-deep in a datapad. He was dark-skinned, probably Hispanic. He was the very model of efficiency, bashing out text on the touchpad faster than her eye could see his fingers moving. “Sonya Lee Pell-Nero, Corporal U.S.S.M.C. Five-foot-ten, one-sixty-five, divorced, on her third tour. Two bronze stars. Demoted from officer’s rank of lieutenant following the Ixion mutiny—“

“So this is Sonya Nero,” Paddock said. He sounded pleased, but no trace of that happiness could be seen on his face. Instead he let her go, letting her swing back and forth gently from her wrists. “I know who this is, Rubin. Heard she was dead.”

“I get that a lot,” Nero said. Paddock didn’t even seem to hear her. He turned to talk to Rubin, glancing over his shoulder at the datapad the young man holds.

“Such a miracle of modern technology,” he mused. “It’s good we found her. If there are any complications—“

“There aren’t,” Rubin interrupted irritably, taking Nero by surprise. Paddock didn’t look like the kind of man who took interruptions kindly. “It’s perfect. There’s something wrong with her. We should kill her now.”

Paddock looked to Nero with a thoughtful frown. He continued to talk as if she weren’t even a person. “I didn’t expect that response from you at all. We have so much to learn from her. This might not be an isolated case.”

“I can learn whatever I need from an autopsy,” Rubin said, putting his datapad under his arm. “She’s dangerous.”

The door squealed on wet tracks as it opened, admitting harsh white light from outside. Nero could see for the first time the boundaries of the room she was in: a tiled communal shower room lit only by emergency overheads that flickered noisily. It was hot in here, damned hot. And there was blood on the floor. A lot of it. Nero realized with fear that she couldn’t tell if it was all hers. She looked up and saw her hands bound around a pipe with plastic zip-ties, her weight slicing cruel raw wounds into her wrists. Blood ran down her arms, but she felt little pain other than a tickling in her joints.

A tall Persian man in a white lab coat entered, looking stressed and angry. His eyes were so brown as to be nearly black-on-black, and upon entering the dark showers his pupils dilated wide so that his face seemed frightening and hollow, like a doll’s.

“We will not harm her,” said the Indian doctor. Nero recognized his voice from the comm on the elevator down to Sci-Sector: Doctor Sandeep Patel. He took the pad from Rubin with a sharp tug. Rubin looked cowed; he shuffled away from his superior and stood in the shadows until called-for.

“Why do you want to kill her?” Patel demanded. “That is not how we do things. Not anymore.”

“The Patch is ineffective.”

“What?” Patel glanced between Paddock and Rubin, then approached Nero to get a closer look. “That’s impossible. She’s wired.”

Paddock nodded. “Well something’s wrong. She didn’t respond to the activation signal when she entered Sci-Sector.”

“Maybe she somehow missed the installation when she arrived on Callisto.”

“That’s what we thought, so we tried a direct installation just now.”

“And?”

“Nothing. No response.”

Patel scowled. He stepped behind her to inspect her port. “Something’s blocking the installation. She can’t possibly be immune to the sequence. It’s something external.” He fingered the scar tissue at the back of her neck, pulled her uniform down and stroked the puffy span of flesh down her back and along her shoulder.

Rubin stepped back into the light. “I’ll check her medical history. I saw a number of invasive surgeries. If she’s career she might have been given some neurological implants.”

He took the datapad back from Doctor Patel. Face illuminated by the glow of the screen, he started reading off an extensive list of her surgeries. “Microfiber muscle augmentation, genetic bone reinforcement treatment, platelet reservoir implants—“

“Neurological implants, Rubin.”

Rubin scrolled down the list. It took a few seconds. “Marine issue TargetLink, reflex wires, occipital enhancement.”

“All tested. Non-factors.”

Nero struggled in her bonds, tried to get the Colonel’s attention. It was her only chance of getting out of here. She thrashed away from Patel’s grip. “Who the fuck are you people? What the fuck are you doing to me?”

They ignored her. Rubin read the last item with a note of surprise. “A pain filter. We didn’t test that.”

“No,” Patel agreed, “but that’s interesting.”

“What does that mean?” Paddock asked.

“It means,” Rubin lectured, “that she has a small implant grafted to her spine right under the brain stem that filters or blocks pain reactions from registering in her brain. In extreme cases it can eliminate these sensations completely, to the point of being self-imposed leprosy. It’s dangerous to the point of suicidal. We have those pain responses for a reason.”

“Can we remove it?”

“Unlikely,” Patel mused, “but it’s possible. I’d have to perform a CATSCAN. I don’t think there’s any way to bypass it either. But this is fascinating. It’s such a simple, almost crude countermeasure to the Patch. Simply filter the foreign signals? Brilliant.”

“Then our schedule is unaffected.”

Patel nodded. “Broadcast the signal. Nero is an aberration. Nobody else on the station is wired this way. It’s lucky we encountered her early. She might have posed a problem we could not have anticipated.”

Nero swung her legs backward, driving her heels into Patel’s groin. Rubin dropped his datapad in surprise just as she rocked forward, booting him in the teeth. She wrapped her feet over the young man’s head and locked her ankles tight around his throat, using her weight to drag him to the floor.

Paddock reached for a weapon at his hip. Nero roared in exertion and ripped her arms to the sides, snapping the plastic bonds around her wrists and doing enough damage to her flesh that her pain filter shut off all sensation to her hands entirely. She crashed heavily to the floor, not thinking to roll to the side to absorb the fall in time. The breath flew from her body, but she fought through it. She tried to use the young doctor as a human shield, dragging him up to her reach with her legs.

A gunshot rang deafeningly through the room and Nero’s lower body went numb. She released Rubin and got her legs underneath her, charging towards Paddock. She heard another shot, but she was already on Paddock by then, pushing his wrist aside to send his arm astray. Paddock moved with surprising speed, put a hand to her throat and used her momentum to throw her bodily into the wall.

She rolled to her knees to make another leap at him, but found herself staring down the barrel of his pistol, a bulky black antique weapon that she didn’t recognize. She breathed through bared and gritted teeth, staring cross-eyed at the inside of the gun, but made no move.

“We don’t kill unless we have no other choice,” Paddock said. “But your options are rapidly running out. We’re trying to help you.”

“Help me?” Nero wheezed. She could feel blood running hot down her stomach from the gunshot wound. She could tell she’s hurt badly and she doubted she could run very far like this even if she got the gun away from Paddock now. The only thing keeping her conscious, she figured, is that she couldn't feel the pain from the wound. “Bullshit.”

She tried to swat the gun aside anyway and lunged for him. She didn’t know for sure, but she thought she’d rather be dead than live for whatever sick torture they had in mind for her. At her best, uninjured, she could have taken him. But now, Paddock just backed up and smashed the butt of his pistol down across her face, and she forgot everything but breathing.

They rolled her onto her back and injected her with something, probably a heavy sedative. Her eyes drifted independently up towards the ceiling, looking to Doctor Patel as he knelt over her.

“We can save her,” Patel said.

“Save her for what?” Rubin asked, “She’s immune to the Patch. She’s useless.”

“You don’t understand yet, Rubin. You won’t until you’re given the Patch too, I think. But nobody is useless. She may yet have a role to serve.”

“Strip her clothes off,” Patel said, “I want to see what’s been done to her. Rubin, bring me that chart again.”

Paddock peeled her sweat-soaked clothes off and threw them over his shoulder, leaving her lying in a pool of water and blood mingled together in a sticky soup. Patel put on a pair of glasses and examined her clinically, running a finger along the catheter implants along her arms, the magnetic induction pads on her hands and feet, and squeezing her calf muscles to feel the taut microfiber weave beneath her skin. Old depressurization wounds, napalm burns, and high-velocity AP scars made her a sickening sight, and the invasive implant surgery and skin grafts had given her body an ugly patchwork look.

“My God, what have they done to you?” Patel said breathlessly. “What have you allowed them to do to yourself? She’s beautiful. Look at her, Colonel. She’s but a shadow of the future. There’s more to come, much more. No, she’s not useless. She’s art. She’s a beginning. We could learn so much from her.”

He ran his hands down her hips and between her legs, squeezing her thighs appraisingly. Like a judge might size up a show dog by feeling its hindquarters. “Yes, good…We could send her to the pools,” Patel said, “Make her part of the SN Project.”

Rubin shook his head. “No. She’s been surgically sterilized already. It’s on the chart. She can’t reproduce.”

Patel frowned and looks at the datapad. “Yes…I’ll need to examine her more closely after looking over her chart. Maybe Saras will be able to think of something suitable for her. Treat her injuries, Dr. Rubin, and make sure she’s adequately restrained. I’d still like to perform a CATSCAN and confirm our suspicions about the pain filter. I’m willing to bet that the Patch will eventually work around the filter. You’ve seen how it evolves. It may find a way around her neural blocks on its own, and I’d like to keep her for observation until we know for certain.”

“Yes, doctor.”

The door opened again, but Nero was unable to move her head to see who it was. A woman’s voice comes from the doorway. “Colonel, Saras has control of C&C communications. Sisyphus-1 is under a complete signal blackout. Callisto’s flight plan has been temporarily frozen. Advance units are in position.”

Paddock stood and reached for his jacket hanging over a nearby shower head. “Good. Test the net once more and transmit the activation signal in five minutes. Once the colony is pacified we’ll start bringing ships down in an orderly fashion.”

Nero tried to speak, but her mouth was dry and she was still delirious from drugs and a certain concussion. She reached up to grip weakly at Patel’s throat, whispering a curse. Gently he laid her hand back down and kissed her on her forehead. She felt another needle enter the catheter on her arm and the rush of drugs flooding hot into her system.

“So much anger. So much pain. Sleep now, Sonya Nero. When you wake up you’ll be in a whole new world. A better world. You’ll like what you see, Sonya. Trust me.”

She felt a cold scratching at the back of her mind. A piercing, void cold clawing at her soul. But she knew that it isn’t real. The cold wasn’t there. But she could hear it…hear it burrowing. Tunneling. Growing.

“A better world. Our only hope. Trust me.”

Chapter 12

12---------------------

Pinball huddled in the cockpit of his modified Trojan long-range recon craft, at this moment the most technologically-advanced starfighter in existence, and wished very much that he had the balls to take his sidearm and unload it into the console. At first he’d been honored to be the one chosen to test-pilot the Saras package. He’d figured he’d be a little piece of history being made, and all day from the time he’d been given the news to the time he’d launched, he’d been on top of the world. Finally his name would be attached to something big. His promotion prospects could improve.

Two hours later it finally sank in. It was history all right. He’d been spending all day bouncing through the paces of a combat patrol, training this damn computer how to do his job. The entire function of this exercise was to feed Saras live data on spaceflight and the flight capabilities of the Trojan craft.

Most of the spaceflight process was automated already by the onboard computer. This was nothing unusual; it had been this way for a long time. Passenger jets and space transports flew almost exclusively by computer control since the 20^th century, but there was always someone behind the stick in case something went wrong. When things were routine a monkey could do his job: wait for computer cues and push a button. Pinball had just finished coming to terms with his role as a “redundancy.” He still had a larger part to play, particularly when things weren’t routine. No autopilot could handle a dogfight. He was far from useless, and the attack at the foldpoint a couple of days ago had reminded him of that.

But now the brass wanted to run Saras through wargames. They wanted to teach it how to fight as well as U.S.S.F pilots. Or better. Without the limitations of human pilots like blackouts or redouts, stress, fatigue, and reaction time, drone fighters under Saras’ control could revolutionize warfare at no risk to human pilots. That did not comfort him much, and he didn’t care if it was selfish to think so. All he’d ever wanted to do was fly. He had been given the prestigious task of putting himself and the entire U.S.S.F. out of a job.

Pinball idly wondered if he shouldn’t just spin the ship to the side and auger this son of a bitch into an asteroid. Nah. Too easy to recover the black box. They’d probably show the tape to his mom.

He was busy wondering if the Nacho King on Callisto is hiring when the computer signaled their proximity to the Jupiter foldpoint. He grunted like a gorilla and masheed the proper button with his knuckle to engage the retrofire and slow the ship down for its arrival. The computer did the rest.

“Excuse me?” the A.I.’s voice chirped through his helmet comm. Pinball couldn’t answer, too busy being pinned back in his seat by the thrusters and relishing the near-blackout feeling before the intertial system in his suit kicked in.

“Lieutenant Troy?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand you.”

“It was just a noise, Saras. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Silence for a moment. Saras was confused. “But what was the noise? I continue to experience trouble fully understanding the individual phonemes of speakers whose patterns have not been assimilated in my database. This problem is compounded by your imprecise diction and varied use of tropes. I have a brief training exercise prepared if you would care to spend a short time reading several paragraphs of text so that I can analyze your speech patterns--”

“I don’t want to talk right now, Saras. I’d prefer it if we could focus on the exercise.” Pinball wishes that he could get this day over with quickly so he can get back to the barracks and start bashing out his résumé.

“I understand.”

That was easier than he thought. Now if he could avoid making any more animal noises he might be able to get through this without hearing any more about his imprecise phonemes. Now he could stew over his own obsolescence in silence again. Pretty soon they wouldn’t even need him to do the monkey’s job anymore. Maybe Nero could put in a good word for him in the Marines. No shame in that. No computer was going to replace an elite ground-pounder. Saras couldn’t hold a rifle. Unless the Synapse Corporation decided to build robots or something…

Pinball keyed in Corporal Nero’s comm on the Magnum transport at his starboard side, only to get an error signal. He tried again. Strange, she was on the flight roster for this exercise.

“Corporal Nero is not currently aboard Magnum flight.”

“She was on the roster,” Troy said, “What’s the problem?”

“All I know is that she failed to report for duty this morning. Corporal Witt is in operational command of Magnum flight. Shall I open a link to him?”

“What do you mean she failed to report for duty? Where is she?”

“I don’t have that information.”

Pinball blinked and stammered in incredulity for a moment. “Saras, the first thing they did with you was hook you into the surveillance network. She has a locator like everyone else. Give it a ping.”

“I tried the moment you tried to open a link with her. There is no response. Her commanding officer has been informed of this problem.”

The computer’s apparent calm was maddening. “You don’t find this unusual at all? How is it even possible you can’t find her in Sisyphus-1?”

“There are many possible explanations. It’s possible her locator was damaged or faulty. There are also several areas of Sisyphus-1’s security net that are still being upgraded to the new IT infrastructure. These areas are effectively offline until installation and testing is complete. There is also the possibility that she has left the colony.”

“Left the colony?”

“It is only a possibility. I apologize. I didn’t mean to alarm you.”

“No…” Troy breathed, still turning over this new unexpected problem in his sluggish mind. “No, you haven’t. It’s just…I’m not so much interested in where she is, but why she’s not here.”

“I don’t have that information.”

“Well where did you last track her location?”

“That information is classified.”

Pinball made an irritated sound, one that Saras was seemingly able to interpret.

“I can tell you’re concerned. The matter is under investigation. I will inform you of any developments.”

“Yeah, thanks. We’re coming up on the foldpoint. Are you ready for the exercise?”

“Yes.”

Troy keyed in the open comm. “Cavalier and Magnum wings, this is Cav-Alpha-1. Check in.”

“Repeat: Cav-Alpha-1, Cavaliers check in.”

“Hello? Can anyone hear me?”

“Anyone?”

Chapter 11

11---------------------

“Then why the fuck am I hearing a security alert in this section?”

O-Face stirred restlessly behind her, fiddling with his riot baton and chuckling at the high-pitched whining sound the e-cells made when he extends it. Nero threw an elbow back against his chest to keep him in line. Their knees buckled momentarily as the cargo elevator’s motors surged into motion, taking them down into Sci-Sector’s slave pens. Most of the marines called the guys who worked down there Morloks, but whoever coined that term got their metaphors crossed; the intellectual elite lived below while most of the menial labor took place on the surface and in the shining towers of Sisyphus-1.

“The alert has been cancelled,” she heard Saras’ neatly-clipped, accent-neutral alto voice from her earpiece. On cue, the ringing klaxon cut away in the middle of a downward drone. The sudden silence stung her ears. “It has been logged as a false alarm. You may return to your normal duties.”

Nero snorted incredulously and made herself double-check the report on her P.C.I.. “A false alarm? Who logged that? We’re the closest responding units. I heard the call.”

“This is Doctor Sandeep Patel,” said an unfamiliar voice over the comm. The voice was brisk, rushed. A little breathless. “You can stand down, Corporal. There was an accident in one of the labs. A small chemical spill. Got into somebody’s eyes and one of the lab techs panicked.”

“Is everything all right? I can call for medics.”

The doctor gave a heady laugh, “Oh no, no. Our facilities are more than adequate. Please, you needn’t concern yourself.”

Nero thought about it for a moment. Keyed her mic: “Copy that, Doctor. You have a good day, now.”

O-Face holstered his riot baton and headed for the lift controls. “Didn’t wanna spend all day trippin’ over their comic books down there anyway.” But Nero slapped his hand away from the panel. “Hey!”

“Can’t hurt to check it out if it’s nothing,” she shrugged. If there’s one thing she learned working in the British Embassy it was how to tell when she was being snowed. That nervous “it’s nothing” chuckle set off her bullshit detector like she was watching a presidential candidate debate. She didn't really want to say that, though, because King would probably make some crack about women’s intuition or ask her a bunch of questions she didn't want to answer. “Besides, I’m tired of walking the fucking mall. Never seen much of Sci-Sector beyond the front offices.”

O-Face grimaced. Evidently Nero wasn't much of a liar anymore either. “You gonna get us into trouble.”

“I don’t take orders from that guy. Or that computer.”

They were going to the fourth sub-basement, which was a little misleading in terms of the distance the elevator was going. The bottom two floors were separated from the rest of the station vertically by about a mile of ice, with a vast stretch of nothing in-between. The elevator traveled even farther than that, riding a steep angled track so it could haul heavy cargo and better withstand Callisto’s inconstant geological stability. To Nero’s imagination, it resembled more a huge mine car with no doors or walls, only waist-high rails marked with hazard stripes. Soon the landing gantry for the second sub-basement passed behind them and shrank to a black spot at the limits of her vision. All that remained in either direction was the repetitive, featureless cross-hatching of support girders and the slow parade of yellowed utility lights marching overhead.

A stiff, constant wind rushed down the shaft. The shaft was an umbilicus: water, waste, and power are exchanged through pipelines, air blown down from the tremendous scrubbers at the top. It was bitterly cold, blowing her hair forward and into her eyes. She turned around to face it and saw King rubbing at his bare arms, hopping on the balls of his feet to keep his circulation going. Nero gave him a queer look, to which he smiled sheepishly and chuckled, his breath rushing from his mouth in a white cloud.

“You don’t feel that? It’s gotta be ten below in here.”

She looked down at her hands, feeling surprised and a little stupid. As she flexed her fingers she could feel tightness in the joints, see the skin drained of color. She shook some feeling back into them and stuffed them under her armpits. “Back on my first tour through Kuiper the Chinese started using magnetic mines. Only these didn’t pick up on scanners because they fused rock to ‘em. Made ‘em look like small pieces of drifting asteroids. By the time you knew anything was wrong—if you even noticed—you were already well within optimal blast range.”

“Heard about that. Didn’t the use of mines get banned?”

“Sure, if you could prove it was happening. If you could get one intact, prove it was made by the Chinese and prove that it was used on the directive of the military. You probably don’t know how they operate out there, but they’re partisans. And they don’t have a private sector; all their shit’s military. If some of our people get shot at or blown up, they’ll say ‘well what can you expect from idiot colonists? They never call. They never write. We didn’t tell you we’d put a station there? Fuck, those are hard to keep track of, aren’t they’?”

“We were running a shipping lane patrol from the Ceres Hydroponics station. The hit happened right behind where I was standing. Didn’t breach the hull too badly, but it didn’t have to. Concussion’s enough to bounce everyone inside around like the inside of a bag of popcorn. Sends me head-first into the far wall, breaks my neck, collarbone, splits about four vertebrae. The shrapnel cut straight through the weave armor right here, exposed me to vacuum. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see. Blacked out from the pain.”

O-Face cringed. “Sheee-yit.”

“So we get boarded. Last thing I remember is Bottin dragging me out, telling me I was gonna be okay. Then he dropped on top of me, left half of his head blown off, the other half…napalm. Covered in napalm. Looked like a burning match. I couldn’t feel it, but I caught a good piece of the nape too.” Nero sticks her thumb into one of her nostrils and blows, clearing out her nose. O-Face is looking like he’s seriously re-evaluating his current line of work. She hasn’t thought about Bottin in years. Couldn’t remember his first name anymore, just that one night drinking he corrected all of them, red-faced and angry, on the correct pronunciation of his last name. ‘Bo-teeeeeeen,’ he’d say, to which everyone parroted ‘Bo-TEEEEEEEEN! Bo-TEEEEEEEEN!’

“Anyway, I spent about 18 months in rehab just learning to walk again. The surgeons implanted a pain filter, a full set of spinal wires, reflex jacks, optics package. Other stuff. The filter blunts off pain, reduces tremors and palsy in my hands. I know it’s cold but I guess I don’t feel it as much as you do.”

King wasn’t comforted a whole hell of a lot. “Oh I’m feelin’ it. I guess if I was going to re-up for another tour out there I’d volunteer for all the upgrades they’d give me, too. I just can’t believe you’d come back for more after injuries that bad.”

Nero’s face felt tight, probably numb from the rushing wind. No wonder the eggheads came down here in parkas. She turned to look down the shaft, thought she could see some light at the end of the tunnel at last. “I’ve had worse.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

O-Face almost shoved her out of the way once the lift sighed to a halt and the rails dropped. He slapped the door control and let the pressure doors cycle. Nero was surprised to see how dirty it was down here. Grimy ice and frozen grease settled in deep ruts shorn into the ‘crete flooring, evidence of heavy machinery and traffic. It was clear that the custodial staff was chased out of here a long time ago, probably afraid that they might clean some rambling doodles off a dry-erase board or throw out a string of pseudocode scribbled on a Nacho King napkin. Who could process ice samples and write code for robotic surface rovers with someone running a shop-vac underneath their desk? There was no downtime down here, always a shift of bleary-eyed hackers and middle-managers working on code and signals intelligence data. Never a good time to change the light bulbs.

Still, it surprised her how unlike the rest of the station this part of Sci-Sector was The lighting was dim and there was a metallic tang to the air, brought on by the thermal system that King was enjoying greatly at the moment. It reminded her of outer colonial posts, of her old combat tours. Work got done here. A lot of it. It all had that broken-in look, like a good pair of jeans. The office space here might have been a shambles and an organizational nightmare, but that wasn't to say the thought-product out of here was substandard.

But it wasn't what she expected. Controlled chaos made sense for Marines, but it seemedwrong in a place of science. But she’d never poked around down here—no call for it, it’s always been quiet—and she didn’t really know what kind of work went on down here. She’d thought it would be the kind done in pristine labs, with Bunsen burners and microscopes, measuring temperature in Kelvin like scientists enjoy doing while wearing impossibly clean white lab coats and birth control glasses. People chasing other eggheads around shouting “Look! Look! I’ve managed to turn this beaker of shit green! Let’s test it on a baboon!” Come to think of it…

“Where are all the geeks?” asked O-Face, his lower-jaw still shivering.

Nero was already bringing up the floorplan on her P.C.I., calling up the locator implants implanted in the base of the skull of every registered colonist and officer on the station. Nothing came up; the screen on her wrist hung up on the floorplan, showing only a single blue dot in the center: herself.

“What’s wrong? Bad reception?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” She drew her sidearm, a blocky Flechette pistol that shot tiny packets of needles at about Mach 3, which did things to a human body that can best be described as turning whatever they hit into a sloppy joe. Barely made any sound except for the shrill keen of the inner mechanism and a polite coughing sound when it fires.

“Jamming?”

“I don’t know,” she repeated impatiently, “Maybe.” It was hard to tell. They were around a lot of heavy machinery like the thermal units. It was hard to jam the Marine P.C.I.; it used spread-spectrum techniques specifically to resist interference. But it was possible. But Saras should have had audio pickups down here. It should have heard this whole conversation, and that thought set loose a stampede of paranoid thoughts.

“Chime in anytime, Saras.”

Nothing. Halls stretched out in three directions before them, windowless rooms sealed each with manual double-doors. Colored stripes were painted along the walls, handy navigation aids to the major labs. Nearby there was an office directory listing the numbers for each staff member’s office under a floorplan on the wall almost identical to the one on her P.C.I. It looked like the interior of a hospital without the patients or medical staff.

Nero held up a finger, calling for silence, and closed her eyes. With a mental trigger, she exhaled slowly, turning her head between the halls arrayed before her. She could hear a pair of heavy heartbeats pounding in her ears, something she quickly tuned out like nearby voices in a crowded room. She could hear the others, dozens of others. Could almost see them through the walls. She opened her eyes.

“Everyone’s indoors. Inside their labs and offices. They’re not moving, probably barricaded inside. They sound relatively calm.”

O-Face clicked his tongue, shrugged, and took out his own sidearm. “Okay, let’s check it out.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I’m gonna find myself a coat before I take that elevator back.”

Nero laughed and led the way, following the red stripe on the wall that led to the microbiology labs. It sounded like the kind of place someone would get chemicals accidentally sprayed into someone’s eyes. “A coat? Yeah you might have to pull that off someone’s dead body.”

She almost slipped and fell the moment she rounded the corner. A sticky black pool of blood streaked all over the ‘crete, spread underneath the body of a young woman. She had Asian features, but her skin was so drained of color it was nearly blue. The blood coated the front of her body, staining her coat like a dark apron. An ugly, sucking hole filled the middle of her face, as someone had either torn or perhaps bitten her nose off.

The woman’s hands were still clasped at her throat in death, probably in some desperate attempt to staunch the torrential bleeding at her throat. Nero didn't need to look her over with her implanted heartbeat sensor to know that she’d been dead for a while. There was blood everywhere, smeared and sprayed into streaky semicircles by the last desperate thrashing of her legs like some grisly snow angel.

Bloody footprints led from the scene of the murder: wandering, pacing prints of bare feet that circled the body a number of times as if the killer didn’t know what to do. Strange circular red stains dotted all over the walls along with a second trail of bare footprints leading back and forth between the body and the nearest door, an unmarked room that looked more like a supply closet than the entrance to a lab.

Nero squatted down near the body, motioning for O-Face to cover the hall. “Jesus,” he said in a shaky voice that told her this was the first time King’s been exposed to this kind of shit, “What am I looking at?”

She pulled at the woman’s hands. Lifeless, they dropped easily away from her throat. Half-coagulated gore spilled down her chest from a gaping, ripped-open wound that looked like it was caused by a mauling dog. Only… “These look like human teeth marks. On her throat and her nose.”

“Why wouldn’t they want security in on this?”

Nero shook her head and moved for the door. She could hear a single heartbeat within, steady and slow. Almost too slow; the internal processor in her head clocks it around 52bpm. They took positions on either side of the passage. Nero reached for the door control when she heard a voice on the other side. Almost in a sing-song cadence. She threw the door open and King performed the entry, rushing inside while Nero followed at the opposite angle.

A large chair dominated the small, closet-sized room. It reminded her of a dentist’s chair if not for the elaborate IV stands clustered around it and the heavy nylon straps dangling from the armrests and base. The lights had been smashed; the only light came in through the doorway. Recumbent on the chair was a young man, looking quiescent despite the blood caked all over the front of his bare chest. His expression was one of dreamy satisfaction, like a man pleasantly engorged after a Thanksgiving meal.

“Down! Down, fucker! Down on the ground!”

The man’s eyes lolled open, looking at Nero under heavy, leaden lids that looked swollen and black from sleep deprivation. His brow was pronounced, the sockets of his eyes deep. His scalp was shaved and scarred with red and white knots of tissue from old surgeries that never healed properly. He wore only the drawstring cotton scrub-bottoms of a surgeon, once powder blue but now wet and sticky with blood.

“No…” he seethed, stringy red rivulets of saliva clinging to his lips. “I want to stay in the chair. I didn’t like it before, but I want to stay in the chair. I want to stay in the chair. I can think clearly here. Can come up with my poetry.”

“Don’t make me say it again, shouted King, “Get your ass down on the ground or we’ll put you down.”

“You will?” the man looked up, his face hopeful. His eyes were steely and full of tears. “You’ll kill me? Kill me!”

“Shut up.”

“Kill me! I can’t do it myself. I was going to bite into my own wrists, but I don’t know if it will work.” He held up his hands, and Nero could see that he had no fingers; they’d all been torn—or gnawed—off after the knuckle.

“They won’t let Jericho die,” he wept, “They won’t! They want Jericho to stay awake all the time and type. Always typing what they want. Recursion. Quantum logic. I don’t want to know what Jericho knows. I don’t want to think this way anymore.”

Nero put her sidearm away and got out her riot baton and a pair of handcuffs, although she had no idea what good handcuffing him will so, or even if they’d stay on. Better to have a gag. “Cover him. He even looks like he wants a bite of me, take the shot.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he whined, turning his chair away from her. “They wanted to hurt me. Now it’s over. They can’t make me type anymore.”

As the chair moved, she could see a tangle of bodies dressed much like the woman outside. Three or four other men in lab coats. The body on top was looking with sightless open eyes at her with his head twisted unnaturally to one side. Nero hissed in disgust. How was this freak even capable of murder? They must have come to subdue him and he killed them all. She backed up, baton raised to strike.

She realized that Jericho had been staring at her intently, as if he could read her soul as plainly as if it were written on her face. He smiled a toothless, grisly smile. “It can’t get to you, can it? But you’re not safe. You need to get out.”

Nero jammed the end of the riot baton into the madman’s ribs. He pitched forward instantly, spasming into a fetal position. She cuffed his ankles together in an attempt to keep him from kicking. “Let’s get him back to the elevator,” she said.

Jericho sobbed miserably into the floor. Nero was about to stand when she heard him mumble a name into the floor. A name she recognized. “What?” She kneels down. “What did you say?”

“Robin” he whispered, rolling his head so that he could see her out of the corner of his eye. “You were going to name the baby Robin if it was a girl. Robin Lee. Ethan if it was a boy. After your parents.”

Nero staggered backward into the wall, letting her baton drop to the floor. “Who the fuck are you? I never told anyone…”

“You’re not safe!” he shrieked, his voice cracking at the limits of human pitch, “I know the cold of the unwell, I know the cold of traitor’s hell…”

Nero stared uncomprehendingly down at the gibbering, deformed mess of a man on the floor, and at her bloody hands, clutched protectively against her stomach. O-Face put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed comfortingly. She looked into his face just as he rammed the pointed end of his riot baton into her throat.