“Back in a moment,” he said, and scurried over to a corner of the lab where a pile of clothes was draped over a chair.
He dressed fast, his face growing redder by the minute, until he had some clothing to put between his bare skin and the rest of us.
“A lot of the labs do virus stuff,” he said. “It’s not our specialty, so we kind of ignore them—and then there was a shipment to 24B, and suddenly the management went into top gear, and not just with the viral testing, but with what they wanted us to do here, too.”
Two warning growls made him go wide-eyed as he looked at us, and then he shrugged, and glared at his colleagues.
“Well, they know, now,” he said, “and we’re going to need them to get ourselves out of this corner, so what does it matter?”
Boss Boy gave a grunting, whining huff, and sighed, and Quiet Guy continued.
“Two days ago, we were feeling a bit off, but we came in, anyway. We had timelines we had to meet, and the clan isn’t very understanding, if you fall behind. It was mid-afternoon when we noticed the lesions. We’d had a fever from about mid-morning, but we weren’t saying anything, in case we vanished.”
He paused, swallowed hard, and shook his head—and neither Delight nor I pushed him; vanishing scientists we could look into later. Right now, there were more important things to do. The scientist obviously thought the same, because he continued.
“Anyhow, the lesions really tipped us off that something wasn’t right, so we looked up the symptoms, and then narrowed down the diseases by where the latest packages had come from. The only weird one was the one that came from on-world, and by then we knew that only two diseases on record came anywhere close to the symptoms, and neither of them originated on Costral. We didn’t want to die, so we figured we’d take on the werewolf DNA, and hope we survived.”
“And you just happened to have a werewolf handy...” Delight let her tone of voice tell them just how unhappy she was with them having a werewolf in stasis. “I don’t suppose he volunteered.”
The scientist blushed even redder than before, and the two wolves at the table hung their heads.
“We were never told,” the man admitted, “but, given what we were doing...”
He sighed, looking hunted.
“We tried really hard not to think about it, because of what would happen to our families if we did.”
“Someone’s going to talk to you about that,” Delight said, “but, right now, you need to wake him up, and get him to help you with what you need to know about being a were. For instance, how to change between forms.”
I watched them process that piece of information, and look uncertainly towards the stasis pod. The scientist who’d lucked his way into human form gave Delight a pleading look.
“He might be mad,” he said, his voice a little over a whisper, and Delight bared her teeth at him.
“Then you’d better hurry,” she said, her tone like iron, her aim with the Glazer unwavering.
I watched the man’s Adam’s apple bob up and down as he looked back towards the pod, and then his shoulders sagged, and he moved over to set the process in reverse and open the box. Delight and I waited while the wolf inside went through the process of waking up, but we didn’t waste any time while we did.
I ran a keyword search through the pharma’s record’s systems using: ‘Blaedergil’, ‘Hazerna’ and ‘Melari’. None of those brought me any joy, so I tried ‘Skymander’ and hit gold.
“He’s calling it Operation Skymander,” I said, and Delight rolled her eyes.
“Sooo original,” she snarked. “Why am I not surprised?”
“Send that over,” Tens demanded, then added, “Delight, your people will be here in another six standard hours. They say to tell you they’re fast-jumping a quarantine boat in, and two cruisers.”
“Confirmed. Tell them we need Wolf Pack Liaison. There’s been an—”
A thunderous growl ripped through the lab, accompanied by two sets of yelps and a very human scream.
“—incident. Gotcha. Out,” and Tens was gone.
Delight and I looked over at where the fully awakened werewolf was raising a bloodied muzzle from the human-shaped scientist before him. It read the horror on our faces and smiled.
“Pack discipline,” it said, having mastered the art of making human sounds from a wolf-shaped mouth. “I will let him live.”
He narrowed his eyes, and studied Delight.
“Odyssey?” he asked, and I wanted to know where they had met before.
“Never you mind,” Delight snapped, inside my head. Out loud, she said, “Odyssey, but this was not our mission.”
The wolf nodded.
“I will see you in the debrief,” he said, and his lip curled when we continued to stare. “You will see us all in the debrief, although in what shape, will depend on how fast they learn.”
Delight bowed her head, and nodded towards the store-room. She hesitated as she reached for the door.
“Don’t leave this lab,” she said, “and stay away from the door; it’s electrified.”
The wolf dipped his chin in an abrupt nod, and then turned back to the man under his paw.
“Change,” he snarled.
25—Infection
With the wolf’s demand echoing in our ears, Delight and I hurried into the storeroom. I wondered how she’d made it through the door without being zapped, and she answered the question before I could ask it.
“I accessed the system,” she said. “You and Tens aren’t the only ones who can hack it.”
Well, that made sense. We both ran a scan to make sure the ducts were clear, and then crawled through. Neither of us bothered to pull the vent cover back into place; we were no longer trying to go in undetected. That ship had well and truly flown.
Instead, we were aiming for speed. We had to reach the lab where the serum for Melari’s virus had been stored—and we had to hope
