I wanted to tell him that they weren’t my people, but he was gone before I could form a response, turfed off the line by same voice that had ordered Delight and I to stay put.
“We’re sending a team in via the maintenance hatch to the lab. Patch us into the feeds.”
She could only mean one set of feeds, so I gave her access to the path I’d hacked into the station’s systems, and then sent her the blueprints and highlighted the nearest hatch. I also sent her brief clips of the spider mutants, and the plagued, and heard muffled curses in the back of her transmission.
Couldn’t be helped. At least they wouldn’t be coming in blind.
And then I remembered the werewolves.
“Is there a wolf contingent?” I asked.
“They’ll be docking shortly. Seems they received a signal for help. Something about a rogue comms signal a wolf ship was being blamed for sending.”
I ignored that, and got straight down to business. The less anyone looked into that signal, the better.
“They have one of their own, and some new additions, here,” I told her, highlighting the laboratory where I’d found the newly turned scientists. “They didn’t think they had a choice.”
“That’s a story, I’ve been hearing a lot lately,” and didn’t she sound impressed. “If the ones in charge weren’t native to the world, we’d indict the lot of them. As it is, I can only appeal to the High Council of Clans, and hope they see things our way.”
Privately, I thought that the clans might be convinced if she could show them an economic advantage, but given the Corovan’s place in the pecking order, that was unlikely. Of course, Mack hadn’t picked up Melari, yet.
“Mack’s still on station,” I said, and Delight looked at me.
I waited for her to catch on. When she didn’t, I nudged her along.
“As in, he hasn’t retrieved Melari.”
“Fuck.”
Delight’s summary of the situation didn’t seem to faze the operations leader.
“Give me the coordinates.”
I didn’t know them, so I patched her through to Mack.
“Got it, and done—and hang on, captain. We are coming.”
They were coming.
My relief was short-lived, because the latest plagued to look in through the door took a deep breath, and gave a sudden guttural roar, its face contorting, and its mouth growing out of all proportion with the rest of its features. I had the Glazer up and firing before I realized what I was doing.
The first three shots didn’t stop it, but, by then, it was most of the way through the gap in the door, and Delight was firing, too. I watched as another set of arms ripped their way through the lab coat it had been wearing, and I kept shooting, hoping it was the only one, that there weren’t any more behind it.
I caught a flash of fangs and ichor, and then its head exploded.
“I thought you said non-lethal.”
“That thing was beyond help,” Delight told me, but she was already thumbing the settings’ switch back to stun.
“Can we hold them if I switch off the drones?”
“Why would you do a stupid thing like that?”
“Your people are going into the ducts.”
“Well, fuck. We can try.”
It was like hearing a mirror of myself, and I wondered if Pritchard might not be right.
Delight gave another of her eloquent snorts, mocking the idea we could be in any way similar... or maybe the idea that Pritchard could ever be right about anything. It made me smile, even as I fired at the next attempted entry.
“I’ve got this. You switch the drones,” Delight said, and I realized I’d lost focus.
Actually, I realized I was having trouble focusing at all, and I couldn’t work out why.
“Drones,” Delight said. “Tell me when you’re done. I’ll get them to tell us when they’re in the vents.”
I nodded, not caring that she couldn’t hear me. The coding for the drones was easy to find. After all, I’d been there before. Even so, I was glad I didn’t have to do more than tell the drones to stop.
“It won’t fix the other counter-measures,” I said.
“So. Fix it!” and I wondered why Delight was being so short-tempered—and I mean more so than usual.
That task was a little harder to do. There were so many, and I felt... unwell. Light-headed. Shivery.
“How far away are they?” I asked, and the commander replied.
“We’re in the ducts. Good job.”
“You cover the door and the wall to the left,” Delight said. “I’ve got the alcove, and the duct the cure’s going through.”
It sounded weird, but that pretty much matched the world I was in, right now. Weird... and definitely not quite all there.
“What’s wrong with us?” I asked, and Delight gave a jerky laugh.
“We’re infected,” she said.
“I thought we were immunized,” and I had.
“Oh, crap,” the technician said, and scientist echoed her with an “Oops, we forgot.”
Well, fuck. You’da thought we’d have been the first on their list of priorities... okay, maybe first after working out how to deliver the cure station-wide. Oh. Yeah. Well, that would explain it. They’d kinda been busy saving the rest of the world, and we’d slipped through the cracks.
“Let me fix that,” the scientist said, but I’d caught a flash of movement at the edge of the duct I was watching, and it coincided with yet another plaguer trying to claw their way through the door. Of course, it did.
“Oh. Shortly. Let me fix that shortly!” the scientist corrected, but I was no longer listening.
I stunned the one at the door, and hoped its body would be the one body too many that meant nothing else would think about trying to get to us. As I did, another spider mutant dropped out of the vent, and rolled slowly to its feet. It hissed as it raised its head, and I centered my next shot between its eyes.
When the shot seemed to do nothing, I fired again, and then again, and once more. It was still coming, when its head exploded and another dark form slipped
