Orbital Decay Read online

  He moved to the middle, desperately trying to ignore the scrabbling sounds coming from the room behind him. He slipped through the door and began to mash his hand against the button on the far side. It was already closing so he forced himself to stop hitting the button. He didn’t want it to decide that he wanted it open again.

  He was just taking a breath when he heard a clattering shuffle to his left. He spun, raising his weapon to find a man in a lab coat fumbling with a 12-gauge pump shotgun that hung on a sling beneath his left armpit. His left hand was bandaged, making it hard for him to hold the fore-grip. An aluminum clipboard lay at his feet, paper falling around him like dead leaves.

  “Freeze,” Ben shouted. “Chicago Police!” He wasn’t sure why he bothered to add the second part – this place was hardly in his jurisdiction – but it seemed to help. The man stopped in mid-fumble and looked up at him with a strange mixture of fear and hope.

  “You’re a cop?” he asked incredulously. “Where the hell did you come from?”

  “We can get to that later,” Ben answered. “But I’ll tell you where you’re gonna end up if you don’t take your hand off that Mossberg.”

  The man looked down, seemingly surprised to find his hand still on the pistol grip of the modified shotgun. He let go as if he’d been scalded.

  “That shotgun have anything to do with what I just saw in the boardroom?” Ben kept his pistol aimed at the young man.

  The man blinked. “They explained what was going on up here, didn’t they? I mean, before they sent you up here, they would have told you what you were facing, right?”

  Ben shook his head, trying to clear what he had just seen. “Nobody sent me. I’m here investigating the death of Dr. Mortensen.”

  “Huh!” The sound was part laugh part sigh of despair. “You poor son of a bitch. Sure, they probably killed Sam, but that’s the least of your worries now.”

  Descent

  From: [email protected]

  To: Oversight23@(withheld).gov;

  CC: Steering23@(withheld).com

  Subject: Progress of Project Chronos – Live testing protocols.

  Several members of the staff have now been isolated following the incident in Lab-Team-Room 13. What we took to be bruising on Dr. Hachette’s face is now understood to be an early indicator of infection.

  Her sudden attack on Dr. Carew was astounding. She was talking about a proposed methodology for immunizing the staff when she suddenly stopped in mid-sentence. Before any of us could react, she had torn Carew’s neck open.

  We cannot stress enough how important it is that you locate Dr. Davis and retrace his steps since leaving this station. Every cough, every touch of a surface could lead to a massive outbreak. Every person he came into contact with has to be quarantined.

  Dr. Kelvin Narcisse

  Gaia Bio Design

  23345 W. Wacker Dr, Chicago, IL

  Tartarus Station

  Low Earth Orbit

  “So,” Ben stopped, squeezing his eyes with thumb and forefinger. If this turns out to be some kind of stupid prank, I’m gonna start shooting. He looked back up at the six people in the room. “So, you were trying to reverse-engineer Midgaard longevity, and the results are… what I ran into down on deck 13?”

  “Yeah,” Dwight, the researcher who had found Ben, answered. His teeth were incredibly bright in the ultraviolet lighting. “The retro-virus mutated and suddenly it was a match for the receptors on the bacteria. What was supposed to be a controlled, second-phase infection suddenly turned into a runaway plague.” He shook his head slowly as he leaned against a table. “Instead of a symbiotic relationship, we had a microorganism that fed on human tissue.”

  “But how does the victim stay alive?” Ben demanded. “You get sick, you die – that’s it.”

  “Before we had to flash the alpha lab, we saw that the infection protected itself.” Dwight shrugged. “You have to understand, Detective, this is an alien organelle. It has a far more complex genome than our own mitochondria. It codes for a ton of compounds and we couldn’t sort out what each one was for. It can break down tissues to feed the most essential systems: circulatory, respiratory, muscles, core brain functions. It literally keeps a body going as long as possible so it can propagate itself.”

  Ben was looking down at a stain on the floor as he listened. “That person I shot down there, Hachette – was her brain still alive?”

  “Sharon?” One of the researchers, Tim, spoke up. “If the infection was anything similar to what we saw with CL13, the parts of the brain that store who you are are the first to get broken down to fuel the rest.” He sighed, looking over at Dwight. “Sharon died days ago, just before she attacked Bill Carew. The infection must have repaired her organs so she could get back on her feet and look for fuel.”

  “By fuel,” Ben raised his gaze to meet Tim’s eyes, “you mean us?”

  “Well, they can’t infect us. At least…” Dwight raised his bandaged hand, “we don’t think they can.”

  “None of the subjects in the second group showed any signs even after we exposed them to the mutated strain,” Tim explained. “We’re pretty sure the original infections confer some kind of immunity. Once the alien organelles are established in your tissue, the mutated version can’t get a foothold.”

  “So we introduce the friendly version into the bloodstream.” Dwight jumped in. “Ordinarily, your immune system would jump on bacteria like a hobo on a cheeseburger, but we tailored this version to fly under the radar. That’s what makes the mutated strain so deadly – you just can’t fight it.” He waved his hand again. “We only had enough serum for half of us. We’ve got more now, but we were lucky that Doctors Brown and Riggs both have type O negative blood.”

  “That’s all it takes?” Ben had been wondering about the bandaged hands in the room. “A quick ‘blood brother’ ceremony and you’re immune?”

  “And semi-immortal.” Riggs grinned. “Don’t forget, detective, the whole point of putting those organelles into human tissue was to match the long lifespan of the Midgaard.”

  Ben stared at the researcher. Words struggling to break free. “You’re gonna live for seven thousand years?”

  “Probably not that long, in my case.” He looked around the room at his colleagues, all younger. “I’m in my mid-forties, detective. I’m already showing a few gray hairs. The modifications will slow the aging process but, if your DNA has already started to age, it can’t be reversed, only slowed down considerably. Kids who get the shot will live for a hell of a long time, though.”

  “Oh, shit!” Dwight heaved himself up from his perch on the table, staring at Ben. “You were in the boardroom with Hachette. You’re infected. If you touched any surface at all, if you were even breathing when you walked in there, then you have it.” He went over to a bank of glass-fronted refrigerators and pulled a vial from a polystyrene block. He grabbed a syringe from the counter and tore the plastic wrapping off.

  “You need a full shot,” Riggs explained. “We need to get a strong dose into your circulatory system so it can get ahead of the infection. At this point, it’s a horse race, but the infection starts out with a pretty weak hold so the shot should be more than enough.”

  “Should be?” A shudder.

  “You might have a few skin lesions, maybe a few sores in your mouth and nasal passages but it’ll pass quickly once the neighboring cells are fully protected by the shot,” Dwight said, holding up the needle. “The healing process is a bit faster than usual, but not by much.”

  Ben stood there numbly, torn between fear of what the needle contained and knowledge of what was almost certainly crawling through his body already. He said nothing as the needle slid into his vein. A sharp prick followed by a cold tingle as the serum flowed into his bloodstream.

  “There’s also a chance the virus might mutate again and turn the inoculation against you.” Riggs said with a shrug. “CL13 might have just been an aberration or it could have been an indicator
of a one-in-a-hundred ratio of mutation. We don’t have a big enough sample size to know for sure.”

  Ben looked up from the growing red dot of blood on his arm, staring at Riggs with one eyebrow raised. “And you couldn’t tell me that before giving me the damned shot?”

  “Would you have refused the shot, detective?” Dwight said in a tired voice. “You’d die without it. Absolute guarantee. Would you really prefer that to a shot at living for a couple thousand years in good health?”

  Ben’s skin tingled. Thousands of years! If I survive the process, that is. He shook his head slowly, still holding Riggs’ gaze. “Not sure I’d want to take the chance if I wasn’t already looking death in the face. I bet a lot of folks down on Earth would turn it down.”

  “They don’t have that luxury,” Dwight said. “Our executive VP locked the place down, but not before he jumped ship to try and save himself.” He still held the needle, looking as though he wanted to stab someone with it. “Stupid bastard landed his escape pod on the roof of our head office on Wacker Drive. I managed to get a link with Sheila, his admin, and she said he took his regular car service home. Even if the army has him locked down, he’s had a chance to contaminate the office, the elevator and lobby of a seventy-eight-floor building, not to mention the driver and everyone he’s been in contact with. And all that was five days ago.”

  “First rule of containment,” Riggs chimed in darkly, “something always gets past the net, no matter how wide you cast it. My money’s on the driver,” he added. “He’s probably dropped off a couple dozen execs at O’Hare by now.”

  Ben was backing away as he heard all this, holding a hand out in negation. He came up against a steel sink with a vent hood built around it, his retreat cut off. “You’re telling me this is loose on Earth? My wife and kid are down there, in Chicago.” The shift in perspective changed everything. It no longer seemed right to think in terms of the separation, of shared custody. Lise and little Brendan were his family.

  He had to get to them.

  “Well, we’re all stranded up here,” Riggs replied. “There’s no pods left; Davis jettisoned every one of them, including the one he hid his own hypocritical ass in.”

  “Wait,” Dwight cut in. He looked at Ben. “You came here in a pod…”

  “Forget it.” Ben waved him off. “I used ninety percent of the fuel cells just getting here. It wouldn’t have enough juice to make a controlled descent empty, much less carrying a person.” He thought about his mad dash to the station and he realized there might be a way, after all. He grinned.

  “I might be able to get our hands on a shuttle.”

  Thin Hope

  From: [email protected]

  To: Oversight23@(withheld).gov;

  CC: Steering23@(withheld).com

  Subject: Progress of Project Chronos – Live testing protocols.

  This is Dr. Dwight Young. Dr. Narcisse has succumbed to the infection and took his own life. His remains were destroyed along with two research assistants when we flashed the alpha lab. As Dr. Narcisse’s account is the only one with surface access, I am using it to notify you that the experiment is now being conducted out of lab number two.

  We believe the subjects in lab two have acquired an immunity to the infection as a result of their successful uptake of the alien organelle. Not having the luxury of time, we have injected our staff with the phase three serum. It seems to have prevented the spread of infection among our group as well as reversing the early stages in two of our team.

  We appear to be too late to save the two hundred other staff on the station who were not connected with our project. The majority of the station didn’t have the same containment protocols that exist in our compartments.

  Dr. Davis is almost certainly the cause of their infection. He toured the entire facility before locking us down and escaping.

  Dr. Mortensen was right, and he’s lucky he won’t have to live through what’s coming.

  Dr. Dwight Young

  Using the account of:

  Dr. Kelvin Narcisse

  Gaia Bio Design

  23345 W. Wacker Dr, Chicago, IL

  Tartarus Station

  Low Earth Orbit

  The sudden staccato of automatic weapons fire caused all eyes to fall on Ben. He took a deep breath. “That means our ride is here,” he told them. “A team sent to kill me and keep the whole thing quiet, and it sounds like they’ve run into your infected co-workers. We should be able to get to the shuttle before they realize we’re not up here anymore.”

  “Is nobody else thinking we’re betting on the wrong horse here?” Dr. Brown spoke for the first time. “No offense, detective, but you’re one guy with a pistol. We’re supposed to throw in with you against a team of soldiers?”

  “No offense taken,” Ben said mildly, “but you’re assuming they’ll rescue you after I’m dead. I’m sure they do have some leeway in interpreting their orders but those orders are to clean up loose ends. Now that they’ve seen this place, I’m thinking they’ll decide the whole damn station is a pile of loose ends.”

  “We can’t know that,” Brown said with alarm.

  “What are the chances that everyone in this room can be relied on to keep quiet?” Ben spread his hands out to the side as though the idea should be able to speak for itself. “After all you’ve been through?” He shook his head. “No, they’ll kill you too.”

  “He’s probably right,” Dwight said over his shoulder before turning back to a screen on the wall. “Whoever’s out there with all those guns, I don’t know them from a hole in the ground. I trust Detective Marks. I’m going with him.”

  Ben crossed over to stand by Dwight. “This is a security feed?”

  “Yep. Our screens tie into the main systems. It looks like our new friends are bogged down in the common area between the bay and our labs.” He pointed to one of the many screen-in-screens. “They’re in the cafeteria. Looks like at least two of them are bleeding.”

  “All right…” Ben pointed to the schematic on the right side of the display. “They’re one floor down from us. Let’s go one more floor up and stay to this side so we don’t run into them. They may try to bypass the cafeteria if they can’t force their way through.” He turned to the scientist. “You have the cooler loaded?”

  “Two hundred doses,” he said, patting the plastic case on the counter.

  “All right, everybody,” Ben began quietly, “we need to move fast. Once they figure out we’ve gone around them, they’ll move damn fast to catch us. It won’t take them a lot of head scratching to figure out what we’re up to, and they’ll have already cleared the way. If you have a weapon, keep the safeties on. I don’t want a panic shot giving us away.”

  “What if we run into infected staff?” Brown was pulling out a pistol to check its status.

  “If they move like the one I saw, you can probably just run around them and keep going.” Ben waited until the Doctor looked back up from his weapon. “Our weapons are for defense against the living, not the dead. If you think a slow-moving corpse is dangerous, wait till you bring a half dozen special-forces operators down around our ears, each firing a thousand rounds a minute.

  “All right, how do we get up to the next level?” Ben asked Dwight.

  “There’s a shaft ten feet down the hall,” he answered, picking up the cooler and sliding its sling over his shoulder. He headed for the door.

  Ben joined him, nodding at the control box. Dwight hit the button and the doors hissed open. Leaning out, Ben saw a clear hallway and moved toward another set of glass doors, ten feet down on the far side. Again, Dwight hit the button and they leaned in to check the shaft.

  “Shit,” Dwight muttered in quiet alarm. “There’s one of ‘em floating up there.”

  Ben reached over and pushed the scientist’s shotgun down. Dwight looked down as though unaware that he had begun to point it at the horrific mess that had been a person only days ago. Holstering his XD, Ben crossed the hall to gra
b an intravenous stand from an alcove in the wall. Holding the stand above his head by the top end, he pushed off from the edge of the floor to float up into the weightlessness of the shaft. He guided the four-wheel base of the stand into the midriff of the animated corpse before shoving up on the chrome pole for all he was worth. The two bodies, the quick and the dead, rebounded away from each other. Ben let go of the stand and flailed his arms, trying to avoid dropping past the floor he had just left and two pairs of hands grabbed him and pulled him back out to the comforting familiarity of the gravity plating.

  “Huh!” Dwight was leaning into the shaft, peering upwards. “We’re clear.” He straightened, looking over at Ben. “Maybe next time you could explain what you’re about to do? I thought you’d gone all Don Quixote on us with your lance…”

  “Well,” Ben replied, double-checking his pistol, “our opponents are a little more dangerous than your average windmill.” He grinned at Dwight. “Let’s get moving, Sancho.”

  As he floated out of the shaft on the next floor up Ben was a little too high and he crashed to the floor, tumbling over to the far wall of the corridor. He watched with rueful admiration as the scientists, accustomed to using the zero-G shaft, stepped neatly out onto the grav plating.

  “Not bad for a first timer,” Dwight said, one eyebrow arched.

  “Really?”