When we got back to the flagship I asked to be taken straight to Queen M, but it was near midnight and the only person I could find was Kelis, back from whatever mission she'd been out on. She told me that it could wait till morning. I needed to sleep or I'd be making no sense to anyone anyway.
I let her lead me back to my room because I was exhausted – my whole body was one big ache – and also because she just hadn't seemed that surprised when I told her about the people who attacked us and what seemed to be wrong with them. I needed some time to think about what that meant.
The morning dawned bright but cooler. I shivered when I went out on deck in my shorts and tank-top, squinting against the piercing light of the rising sun. The blue sky, the blue seas, the distant palm trees suddenly looked a whole lot less reassuring than they had when I'd first arrived. Trouble in paradise, and then some.
Queen M was already on her throne in the empty pool, lounging back with one leg slung over an arm, looking like she hadn't a care in the world. She stood and smiled when I approached, and I guessed she'd been waiting for me. Only a few people were out at that time of the morning and they drifted away when they saw me.
'They come from Cuba,' she said when I was ten paces from her. 'My people call them the Infected.'
That stopped me in my tracks. 'Cuba?' I don't know why it surprised me, but there was something too known, too package-holiday about Cuba for it to be the source of that terrible affliction.
But she nodded. 'They don't make any effort to disguise it, their boats are easy enough to track.'
'And has anyone gone there to find out what's going on?'
Her bright eyes narrowed. 'Would you go?'
I felt the throb of the deep bruises covering my legs and chest and I shook my head.
'I sent some people, back when they first showed up,' Queen M said. 'Twenty-four went, five returned. Back then it wasn't the whole of the island. Now as far as we can tell it's everyone. And it's started to spread. They say there have been cases on Haiti, some of the other Greater Antilles. As for what causes it…' She shrugged.
'But you're sure it's infectious?'
'How else could it be spreading?' Her eyes were still staring into mine, weighing everything up. She knows I want out, I thought. And this is her way of getting me to stay.
I sighed because, yeah, she might be manipulating me, but whatever it was that was coming out of Cuba was more important than my anger at her, or my desire to escape. The world just couldn't take another Cull. It would be the end of us. 'I'm not just a doctor,' I reminded her. 'I'm a researcher. I was part of the team investigating the Cull, so I've picked up a thing or two. We brought one of the Infected back. I can do an autopsy on him if you like, get some blood work done, whatever you've got the equipment for. See what I can find out.'
She smiled like a cat that had just been given detailed directions to the creamery. It occurred to me then that I'd never been told why the flagship had moved while I'd been on St Kitt's, or why she'd so unexpectedly decided to give me the day off.
What I knew now was that she was the kind of person who was more than happy to kill a sailor or two if it got her what she wanted.
The lab was in the bow of the ship, tucked away behind the casino in one of those areas that Kelis and Soren had steered me carefully away from. I thought it might once have been a crew kitchen, the gleaming metal surfaces and sinks obviously original but the pipettes, Bunsen burners and centrifuges were more recent additions. As was the autopsy table right in the centre of the room.
I had a sudden flash of it being used by Queen M for other purposes, living subjects, the runnels to carry away the blood at the sides a convenience when you were trying to extract information from someone you didn't want to die quite yet.
The current occupant of the table was very definitely dead though. Now I could see him under the bright, halogen lights I realised he was even younger than I'd first thought, barely into his teens. There were three others in the room when Kelis and I arrived, white-coated and bending intently over their workstations, test-tubes and Petri dishes spread out in front of them like a particularly unappetising meal. I gestured at the corpse of the Infected. 'Mind if I take a look?'
The nearest scientists, a harried looking woman in her forties, shrugged. 'He's all yours. I'm an agronomist, corpses aren't my thing.'
'We're both electrical engineers,' the man beside her said, nodding over at a third man who was peering through a microscope at some kind of circuit board. 'You're the crew's first pathologist.'
'Yeah,' I said. 'Except I'm not. I'm a doctor and a biochemist, but I haven't performed an autopsy since medical school.'
'At least you've done one,' the first woman said. 'I wouldn't have a clue where to start.'
Kelis hovered at my elbow, peering over at the body with open curiosity. 'First one you've seen close up?' I guessed.
'Yup,' she said. 'Queen M always told us to steer clear, leave them be. Only recently they started getting aggressive, coming after us.'
I looked down at the boy's body, the vacancy where his left eye had been, and lower, were something had cut into his chest. Now that he was naked I could see other wounds too: a chunk out of his left thigh, two toes hanging off and another two broken and sticking upwards at an impossible angle. It was easy enough to tell which injuries were the result of the confrontation on the boat and which had been around a while. The new ones weren't running with puss, oozing yellow and green into the surrounding flesh.
I decided to take a look at the chunks missing from his legs and stomach first. The edges of the cuts had been blurred by swelling and infection, but on the leg there was one little area that had remained relatively unscathed and it told me everything I needed to know. 'Teeth marks,' I said to Kelis, pulling back on the flesh and standing aside so that she could get a clear view.
She turned her head aside and made a face. Funny, you wouldn't think a woman doing her job could be squeamish. 'Joder! You're saying they eat each other?'
I shook my head. 'Not human. Shark, I think, though I've never treated a shark attack victim, so I can't be one -hundred per cent sure.'
She held a hand over her nose in a futile attempt to ward off the smell of corruption and leaned a little closer. 'Doesn't look like they did anything to it after the attack. There's no stitches, nothing. Why would anyone let an injury like that go untreated?'
'Yeah.' I looked at his stomach, sure now that the flesh had been torn in the same incident. The level of infection was consistent too, both injuries dating back a couple of weeks. 'It's like the shark bit him; he fought it off, climbed out of the water and then carried on like nothing had happened.'
'But that's not possible, is it?'
I shrugged. 'Short term, sure, it's amazing what a flood of adrenaline can do for you. Long term – no, it shouldn't be. He should have been in agony.'
'Any sign of brain damage maybe?' She peered at the boy's head, what was left of it. 'Something that might explain why he can't feel any pain?'
She was quick. I needed to remember that, in my plans. I sawed the boy's skull open but the damage from the bullet was too extensive to make out any subtler trauma around it. 'Brain damage might explain what happened to him, but not the rest of them. It's too much of a coincidence for them all to have suffered the same condition.'
After the brain I went for the other organs, cracking open the ribs to get at them, wincing as blood splashed back at me from the corpse. The gown and mask caught it all and the examination didn't tell me anything I could use. The state of his liver would suggest too much drinking, but alcoholism just wasn't going to explain the things I'd seen on that boat. I used a scalpel to slice off a sliver of it anyway, along with the heart and the lungs, but I wasn't really expecting to find anything. I thought Kelis was probably at least partly right: whatever was wrong with these people was wrong with their brains.
After I was done with the body, hauling a sheet over it because I didn't want to look at the ruin of that young man a second longer, I took the samples over to one of the microscopes. And yes, I'd been right – they told me nothing. Normal. Which left only… but I'd been putting that off since I came into the room, almost as if I'd known from the beginning what I was going to find.
'What about his blood?' Kelis said, watching it soak through the thin white sheet covering his body like a guilty secret that wanted to be known. 'Aren't most infectious diseases blood-borne?'
'They can be air-borne too, transmitted by touch…' But I was just talking, the words didn't mean anything
