‘So what’s the situation over there?’ Arkwright asked Sloan. ‘Any samplers?’
‘One or two.’ Sloan pulled back his hand as my mother reached for it. He had already cut off his own ID band. ‘I’d forgotten that those pressure doors open into the surgical theatre -’
‘In case something happens to one of B Crew,’ Mum interjected. ‘It means a fast transference.’
‘Right. Well, I only had to duck into the theatre. Plenty of stuff to choose from. The door to Pathology was open, but I couldn’t see much activity. One or two samplers. One scent pellet. They didn’t bother me. I didn’t check the Infirmary. I would have had to cross the street to do that.’
‘What about . . .?’ my mother began, and stopped.
I knew what she wanted to ask. We probably all did.
It was Yestin who finally found the courage.
‘Was anyone else there?’ he queried, in a very small voice.
Sloan didn’t reply immediately. He rubbed his wrist where the ID band had been. At last he said, without lifting his gaze from the floor, ‘I only saw two people.’
‘You did?’
‘They were dead, though.’
‘Oh.’ My mother returned the laser-head to him.
‘We have morgue facilities somewhere, don’t we, Quenby?’ Sloan continued, in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘Body bags, and such?’
‘Yes, but . . . they’re on the other side of MedLab. A few streets down.’ Mum swallowed. ‘Did you see who they . . .
I mean, did you recognise them?’
‘I recognised one of them.’
We waited. Suddenly, Sloan turned on his heel, and threw back his head. He was eyeing the access hole. ‘It was my mother,’ he declared flatly. ‘Arkwright, could you give me a leg-up?’
But Arkwright just stood, frozen to the spot. Mum covered her mouth with one hand. I felt the tears well in my eyes.
I couldn’t stand it. I just couldn’t stand it any more.
‘Oh, my dear,’ said Mum. ‘I’m so sorry . . .’
‘It wasn’t entirely unexpected.’ Sloan seemed more irritable than anything else. ‘Arkwright! Could you help me, here? Time is of the essence.’
‘Yes, I – yes of course.’ Arkwright stepped forward, then frowned. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Back to MedLab. It’s a good spot. Good facilities. Pathology’s almost as well equipped as BioLab. And there’s a food dispenser.’ But nobody moved, and Sloan looked around, grim-faced. ‘Well?’ he demanded. ‘What’s wrong? Has anyone got a better idea?’
Nobody did. I suppose the rest of us were a long way behind Sloan. So much had happened that I, for one, had not caught up with it all. Zennor. Dad. And now Sloan . . . poor Sloan. And Sadira. At least I wasn’t sure that Dad was dead. There was a slim chance that he might be alive. Especially if he’d removed his ID band.
We couldn’t be the only ones who had worked that out.
‘We have to warn people,’ I said hoarsely. ‘About the ID bands. We have to spread the word somehow.’
Sloan nodded. When he replied, however, his response was, ‘First things first, Cheney.’
‘But it’s important!’
‘I know. The trouble is, we might be wrong. We can’t go waltzing off to warn the others without testing our theory about these wrist bands. Not without some kind of protection.’
‘That’s right!’ Dygall agreed.
‘Nothing explosive or electrical,’ Sloan went on.
‘Nothing that will damage the hull, or upset the biosystem. Something localised – a chemical might do the trick. There are plenty of chemicals to choose from around MedLab, and there’s at least one Interface Array for Arkwright to work with. If Plexus is alive, what better place to get a handle on its inner workings than MedLab?’ He waved his hand. ‘We’re certainly not going to achieve anything productive by staying here.’
He was right. We had to do something constructive. People had to be warned. As I stood awaiting my turn for a leg-up, I tried to focus on the problem at hand – to ignore my whirling head and churning stomach. The trick was to think about other things. To distract myself. To put my feelings in a box and lock it, the way Sloan had. Sloan was setting a good example. If we fell apart now, we were lost. We had to think, and we had to plan, and we had to put our hysteria aside until there was time enough to deal with it.
Communication was the key. While Arkwright focused on CAIP, and Mum helped him to master its neural networks, I would try to spread the word. Somehow. Without the use of a comm-link.
‘Arkwright?’ I said.
He grunted. Then, with a heave, he pushed my mother into the air duct.
‘What?’ he gasped, dodging her flailing boot.
‘I was just thinking . . . if the lights are on, and the air’s fine, and the gravitational pull is constant . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘I just wondered – why isn’t the Audio Interlink Network up and running?’
I was last in line, bar one. Arkwright had laced his fingers together, in preparation for my departure. Now he paused in the act of stooping.
‘Good question,’ he said.
‘It’s not normal, is it? It’s not doing what it used to do.’
‘No. But then, you have to consider the structural shift at a subatomic level. What we had here before was a very carefully worked out transmission matrix, with a lot of highly conductive metals involved.’ He scratched his head, glancing around at the moist, spongy surfaces that enclosed us. ‘Now we’ve got a whole ship made of . . . well, I don’t know, exactly, but it’s organic, and it must have some properties unsympathetic to our matrix. Perhaps it’s a better insulator than it is a conductor.’
‘Then how come the scent pellets can track us down? They must have been picking up emission waves from our ID bands -’
‘From a short distance, Cheney. We don’t know about long distances. If they could pick up our signatures from far away, we’d probably all be dead by now. As it is, they seem to be just wandering around until they bump into us. Or that’s the way I see it.’ Arkwright laced his fingers together again. ‘Come on. Up you go.’
I went. The crawl to MedLab wasn’t long; it only took a few minutes. When I arrived at the correct access panel, Sloan was waiting for me down below. He grabbed me as I dropped, and held me up as my eyes adjusted to the bright light. Then he nudged me aside, to make way for Arkwright.
Blinking, I peered around. We were standing in the surgical theatre, which was a compartment that could not be reached from the street. Instead, access was through Pathology (which was right next door), or through the Stasis Banks (which occupied the adjoining pressure cell). I wasn’t very familiar with the theatre – or with Pathology. Even if I had been, I might not have recognised either room. They were like a pair of lungs, now: two bags of air surrounded by springy tissue. You practically bounced with each step. Hatches and storage cupboards lurked somewhere beneath a web of glistening fibres and dense, dark, purple swellings. In the midst of all the strangely shaped nodules that had once been chairs or monitors or surgical tables, the remaining furniture looked very odd. There were a couple of wheeled cabinets, and some gas cylinders, and a stand with various bits of equipment hanging off it.
That stand was being used to prop open the door – or valve – between Pathology and the theatre. Mum had already passed through the gap; I could see her standing over a slumped and lifeless shape in the next room. Dygall was with her.
I recognised the smell that hung in the air. I also recognised the thick, luxurious black hair on the body that my mother was surveying.
I didn’t want to look at it closely. I didn’t need to. Instead, I turned to help Arkwright, who had hit the floor behind me.
‘I’m okay,’ he said, recovering his balance. ‘Where’s Quenby?’
‘In there.’ Yestin pointed.
‘Ah.’
‘This place is no good!’ Dygall called to us from th
e next room. ‘The door’s been burnt through, out here! You can see straight into the street!’
‘Come back, then,’ said Arkwright. ‘This communicating door seems to be intact.’
‘What about . . .?’ Dygall gestured at Sadira’s remains.
‘We’ll deal with that later. Just come back in.’
Arkwright was nervous. So was I. I felt exposed, despite the fact that I was no longer wearing an ID band. As Mum and Dygall retraced their steps, Arkwright said, ‘Who propped open this door, anyway?’
‘Not me,’ said Sloan. ‘It was like that when I first arrived.’
‘Ah.’
‘So we’d better not take the stand away unless we absolutely have to,’ Sloan added. ‘Or we might not be able to get it open again.’
‘I’m so thirsty.’ Yestin was leaning against a wall. His voice was a mere thread of sound. ‘Hungry, too . . .’
‘Well, first thing we do is feed ourselves,’ said Sloan. ‘Then Cheney and I can concentrate on weapons, while Arkwright and Quenby look into accessing CAIP -’
‘What about me?’ Dygall interrupted in a high, hard tone. ‘I want to concentrate on weapons, too.’
‘Fine. Whatever.’ Sloan waved his hand. ‘Once we have weapons, we can start some reconnaissance sweeps . . . try to pass the word about those wrist bands . . .’
‘Do we even need weapons, if we don’t have wrist bands?’ Mum inquired, and Sloan shrugged.
‘You tell me. Personally, I’d rather be safe than sorry.’
‘So . . . hang on.’ I couldn’t get things straight. I put my hands to my head. ‘What are we doing?’
‘I need some kind of neural map,’ Arkwright announced. He had moved over to the theatre Interface Array, which was still vaguely recognisable, though the console was all pulsing lumps and the plasma had turned pink. ‘I need to superimpose a neural map on the circuitry network,’ he said, ‘and then I might know what I’m doing. Quenby?’
‘A map’s all very well, but there’s still the question of access.’ Mum joined Arkwright at the Array, wringing her hands. ‘I’ve been thinking – immune cells release cytokines. Cytokines are communicator proteins, which determine immune response type. There’s even one class of cytokine – it’s called chemokine – that’s responsible for the actual positioning of immune cells. Perhaps, if we could inhibit the production of chemokines somehow . . .’
Sloan poked me. When I glanced at him, he jerked his head.
‘Come on,’ he murmured.
‘Huh?’
‘They’re onto it. They’re busy. Let’s see what we can find out here.’
I stared at Sloan, who was speaking and moving more quickly than usual. Apart from that, he seemed virtually unaffected by our situation. His dark hair was ruffled, his neck was scratched (how?), but he didn’t seem upset. He didn’t seem aware that his dead mother lay just a few metres away.
I couldn’t understand him. I admired him – I was even in awe of him – but I couldn’t understand him.
Dumbly, I followed him into Pathology, which was a larger room than the theatre. Most of it now sagged and quivered when touched, but there were a few items that had not been affected. Sloan headed straight for a set of canisters stacked to our right, opposite the door to the street.
I edged around Sadira’s body, carefully averting my eyes. The smell made me hold my breath. Through the ragged gap in the outer door, I caught a glimpse of the street, and of a leg sprawled across it. From where I stood, I couldn’t see exactly what the leg was attached to – but I could see something that made me jump.
The leg was twitching.
‘Sloan!’ I squeaked. ‘Look!’
‘I know.’ He was checking the canisters, discarding them one by one with a disappointed hiss. ‘Somebody’s dead. I saw.’
‘No – it’s moving!’
‘What?’ He spoke sharply. He probably turned around; I’m not sure, because I was edging towards the burnt hole. With each step, my view of the leg improved. The limb was attached to a torso, and the torso was twitching, too. I carefully craned my neck until I was positioned well enough to see the top half of the person outside – and pulled back abruptly, slamming my head into Sloan’s chin.
‘Ow!’
I couldn’t apologise. I could only retch. Dygall reached me as Sloan pushed past, anxious to see what I had just seen. Yestin had also followed us into Pathology; he watched Dygall grab my arm.
‘What is it?’ Dygall hissed. ‘Cheney?’
‘Shh!’
‘What’s the matter?
’ ‘Good God,’ breathed Sloan. One look was enough for him. He stumbled away from the opening, flapping his hands at us. ‘Back!’ he whispered. ‘Get back!’
‘What -?’
‘There’s something out there!’ Sloan’s voice was barely audible as he shooed us across the room. Dygall tried to resist.
‘What do you mean, “something”?’ he demanded.
‘It looks like – could it be an OTV? Cheney?’
‘I – I think so.’ It certainly resembled an On-board Transport Vehicle. It was the right size, the right shape and the right colour – a charcoal-grey capsule, as big as a standard single bedroom, with a thin red strip along its flank. It had retained the little black shield on its nose, and the hand-grip shafts next to each door. But the shafts were now whipping around like tentacles; the vast expanse of tinted glass was now part of a slimy, fibrous envelope; and the doors were now wrapped around . . . around . . .
‘It’s eating,’ I groaned. ‘It’s out there eating someone.’
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
‘He was already dead,’ Sloan hissed. ‘He was. I saw him earlier. That thing wasn’t around, then . . .’
‘We’d better get back.’ Yestin tugged at my sleeve frantically. ‘Let’s get back in the air duct. Now! Before it sees us!’
‘Wait.’
Sloan was watching the hole in the door. ‘It probably can’t see us. Not without our wrist bands.’
‘Sloan -’
‘I know. Don’t take risks. But there’s a bunch of Dewar flasks over there. I need to find out what’s inside.’
‘Sloan!’ I couldn’t believe it. ‘Do you want to get eaten? Don’t be a fool!’
‘We have to get back in the theatre!’ Yestin pleaded, under his breath. ‘Now!’
‘Just wait,’ Sloan rejoined quietly. ‘Just get in the theatre and wait. I can use my laser-head if things get nasty.’
‘Against that?’ I squeaked. ‘It’s enormous!’
‘Exactly. It’s far too big to get through the hole.’
‘Sloan -’
‘I won’t be a second.’
And he bolted across the room, towards the vacuum flasks. I pursued him, of course. It never occurred to me that I shouldn’t. Dygall came too – but not Yestin. He dashed back to alert Mum.
I was furious. I didn’t want my mother out there.
‘Yestin!’ I whispered. ‘Don’t – damn it -!’
‘Nothing,’ growled Sloan. The label on the flask in his hand was signalling ‘empty’; there was nothing on it except a pressure reading. The flask that I picked up was the same. Together we scrabbled through them, glancing over our shoulders every so often while Dygall passed behind us. He was heading for the dispenser, which lay on the far side of the room.
‘Get back, Dygall!’ I was so angry, I found it hard to keep my voice down. ‘You idiot!’
‘We need food!’
‘Dygall!’ I reared up, and scurried over to him. ‘Leave it!
Come on!’
‘Let go!’
‘It’s probably like a macrophage of some kind,’ Sloan murmured distractedly. ‘They’re scavenger cells . . .’
Then several things happened at once. As my furious mother appeared at the communicating door, something charged through the other door – the door to the street. An eruption of fluid was accompanied by a horrible tearing sound, and there it
was, suddenly. Between me and the theatre. The OTV.
It was like something you would normally see through a microscope. Its cylindrical body bobbed about in a fluid kind of way, and through the pulsing, wallowing, charcoalgrey walls of muscle I could vaguely make out pale, heavy shapes that might have been (God, it was awful) the limp remains of its latest meal. Its tentacles lashed about, and its doors – one on each side – opened and shut like the mouth of a sea anemone.
I couldn’t believe how big it was, even in that big room. It had torn a huge hole in the wall, and was squirming around in the yellow goo now spurting from all the damaged vessels. I don’t know where its eyes were, but it could see. Or sense. Because it headed straight for Sloan, who was standing right in front of it.
He dodged away. Though it was quick, it wasn’t quick enough. Sloan sprang aside, and hurled himself through the theatre door, which snapped shut as he knocked down the stand that was holding it open. I saw all this in the split second it took me to grab a handful of Dygall’s suit. I didn’t think. I just moved. I made for the ragged, bleeding gash that the OTV had left behind. In other words, I made for the street. Screaming.
If the OTV had been quicker (as quick as a sampler, for instance), I wouldn’t be alive now. Perhaps all its scavenging – all the corpses in its belly – had slowed it down. Whatever the reason, we got out, Dygall and I. We scrambled into the street and ran, ran for our lives, without the faintest idea of where we were going. We were so stupid. So lucky. For all we knew, there was another OTV just around the next corner. It never even crossed my mind that we could have been running into a nest of OTVs. I never stopped to think: ‘Oh! Does this mean that the samplers can target us even without our wrist bands, or is it just the OTVs?’ I simply ran like an animal, up one street, sharp right at the tube, slipping and sliding and stumbling along until I reached the next street. Down that one. Left at the intersection. And left again . . .
Then I was pulled back. Dygall had dug in his heels.
He was pointing.
‘There!’ he gasped. ‘Air duct!’
The air ducts. Of course. We had to get into an air duct.