Endurance: The Complete Series Read online

  Maureen shrugged. “Maybe the plague affected something he didn’t check. Like DNA.”

  “Great,” said Chris. “Just great. Can we check my DNA to make sure it hasn’t been rewritten?”

  “Not now, Fish,” Thomas said quietly, staring down at the dying man. Maureen finished the injection and stood. “Will this work?” he asked the room at large.

  “I think so,” said Maureen. “But please note that I am not a licensed physician and—”

  “Yes, I know,” said Thomas. “Let’s just hope the drug makes his body stop working before he dies, brain and all. Get a stretcher and take him back to the medical bay. We owe it to him to see this through.”

  Near the wall, Bradshaw and his partner tap-tapped away. After a moment, the O&I man looked up and made eye contact with Thomas. His eye twitched once, twice, and then flicked back to the notes on his comp.

  There’d been accusation in that stare, and Thomas couldn’t help feeling it was warranted.

  As Maureen and another officer prepared Drugugo to be moved, Thomas faced the viewports. One of the overhead display screens showed a thermal reading of the medical building. The initial traces of heat had grown in both size and number, and now read as dozens of humanoid shapes walking, or in some cases, running through the halls.

  It had worked. They’d revived the other zombies.

  He swallowed. “Time until they go nuts?”

  The scanners operator shook his head. “Based on how much faster they revived, it could be minutes, sir. Definitely under an hour.”

  Thomas rubbed his forehead. That wasn’t enough time to find every confused alien wandering the building, confine them to hospital beds, and turn them back into zombies before they started trying to kill everyone.

  “We need to reverse what we did,” he said to the bridge at large. “Give me options.”

  No one moved.

  “Is there a way to distribute the zombie drug through the entire building quickly?”

  “No,” said Ivanokoff, rubbing the bruises on his arms. “If the drug could be made airborne, the aliens would have done so.”

  “We didn’t bring enough aboard to treat everyone. We need to get to the hospital’s stash without any of them noticing.”

  “Areva can do it.”

  Thomas nodded. “Then we can start covertly re-drugging them before they start having symptoms.”

  Ivanokoff arched an eyebrow. “There is not enough time. When the plague begins affecting them, they will succumb to intense pain and attack anyone nearby.”

  Tap, tap went Bradshaw’s notes, no doubt listing Thomas’s sins as a commander. Thomas’s lips formed a thin line. He had to correct this before “accidental genocide” became his latest failure.

  “When that point comes,” he said, “we’ll just have to fight our way through the rest.”

  * * *

  Ivanokoff paced outside the hospital, Dickens and Dante holstered at his sides. No spacesuits for him and his team—they’d need to move fast to rezombify the aliens without getting bitten or clawed. They weren’t sure yet if the zombie infection could spread to human tissue, but he had no desire to find out. In either case, those fangs could still deal lethal damage.

  He regretted recommending Areva for the initial infiltration. He should have volunteered himself. Yes, she was better at stealth—a lot better—but Chris’s “two days from retirement” comment kept running through Viktor’s mind.

  He tapped his intercom interface. “Areva, report.”

  His headset crackled with Areva’s breath as she whispered. “Viktor, are you going to ask me that every sixty seconds?”

  “If I wish. I am the senior officer.”

  She sighed. “Okay, Lieutenant with seniority, everything is fine. I’m nearly to the lab where you saw the cache of zombie drug.”

  Viktor checked the time on his pocket comp. Ten minutes had passed since the conversation on the bridge. That left a maximum of fifty minutes for Areva to pick up the drug and administer it to as many aliens as possible before they attacked.

  “How’s the doctor?” Areva asked, her voice still a whisper.

  “Dying, but in the way we prefer,” said Viktor. “His organs are shutting down and his brain is returning to the zombie state. Maureen thinks the plan is working.”

  “Good. I’d hate to shoot all these people for no reason.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “You talk about shooting people.”

  “I’m fine. Really,” said Areva in a businesslike tone. “Like you said, they were already dead, so I’m just re-killing them. And if I do it right, none of them are going to see me anyway.”

  “True.” He hoped that last part was true. The zombies had easily found them in the library and on the rotunda.

  But Areva was alone now, able to utilize her sneaking to its utmost potential. She would be fine.

  She would be fine.

  A few minutes passed, during which Viktor paced some more and fought his urge to check in again.

  His communicator crackled. “I’ve got the drug. Filling the pack now.”

  This part of the plan was questionably moral at best. They had armed Areva and the rest of the strike team with bazooka rifles—handheld directed energy weapons that they had received from another alien culture, which had stolen them in turn from the Haxozin. The plan was to stun each alien and inject them while unconscious. Viktor had proposed simply coating bullets in the drug, but the captain deemed that too likely to kill some of the aliens before they, well, died.

  Another few minutes later, Areva spoke again. “Just made the dropoff at the main entrance. I left enough of those tube things for everybody to take three. That’s twenty-four zombies each. Thermal scans show about a hundred in here, so we have plenty of spare injections. I’m heading back in to start shooting.”

  “Understood.” Viktor paused. “Areva, be careful.”

  He could hear the smile in her voice. “I always am.”

  He could also hear Chris Fish’s voice in his mind: Saying that guarantees something will go wrong.

  Sergeant Ramirez snuck into the hospital to retrieve the pneumatic cylinders and bring them out to the strike team. “Uh, got them,” he said as he returned with a standard-issue backpack dangling from one hand. “They’re kind of, um, heavy, sir. So, uh, yeah.”

  Viktor and the other officers on his strike team took them with gloved hands and stored them in pouches alongside their gun holsters.

  Viktor eyed Ramirez as he checked to make sure Dickens and Dante were still at his sides. “No one saw you. You are sure?”

  The young man bobbed his head. “Positive. I’m, uh, not as sneaky as Areva, but I can sight out of seen. I mean stay out of seen.” His youthful face flushed crimson, and he murmured, “Stay out of sight.”

  Another member of the team, the woman who worked bridge defensives at night, frowned at him. “Calm down, man. You’re never this jumpy on the night shift.”

  Ramirez flashed a look at Viktor. “I know.”

  Viktor was familiar with the sergeant’s tendency to get nervous in front of senior officers. He made a point of looking elsewhere. He had ample practice at that with Areva.

  Her voice came into his ear again, and he tensed, fearing bad news. But all she said was, “Got three. Tracking a fourth.” A sizzling rifle shot echoed through the channel. “Four.”

  “Are they aggressive?”

  “Not yet. Most of them are just wandering around looking confused. The hospital’s too big for them to have found each other yet.” Zap. “Five.”

  Ninety-five to go, thought Viktor.

  She reached nine before the problems began. “Tracking number ten,” she reported. “He’s having a few minor convulsions. I think it’s starting.” Zap. “Got him. But it looks like you should come in now.”

  Viktor motioned his team toward the airlock. “Move in pairs. Check your thermal monitors to avoid surprise attack
s. Do not let them get close. Shoot, inject, and repeat.”

  All eyes stared at him, as if waiting for him to say something else.

  “Go.”

  As the teams spread out to enter through the building’s various doors, Viktor heard Ramirez say, “Rousing speech, yeah? I know I’m inspired.” His night shift colleague laughed.

  Viktor headed for the front. His pocket comp, mounted on a strap around his forearm, pinged Areva’s position, guiding him to her. “Areva, I am on my way.”

  “Waiting for you.”

  Viktor hefted his bazooka rifle and yanked open the door. Ten soldiers wisely led, he quoted, will beat a hundred without a head. Euripides.

  He wondered if only a fool would enact the battle plan of a tragedian.

  * * *

  The first alien attacked when Viktor was halfway up a flight of stairs. Thermal scans showed several bodies on the next floor, a safe distance away, but then an entire section of the ceiling caved in and a shrieking, clawing body flung itself at him. He shouted in alarm and raised his bazooka rifle, balancing the barrel in the crook of his arm, and fired. The white energy blast zipped out of the barrel and struck the zombie, fizzling out along his limbs and neck. He trembled in paralysis for one heartbeat, two, then collapsed. Viktor inoculated the alien with the first compartment on one of the pneumo-injectors.

  On the second floor, a pungent odor assaulted his nose as he approached the heat blip that represented Areva. His pocket comp showed no other heat sources nearby. Whatever stank, it wasn’t the aliens.

  He found Areva crouched behind a tank of water filled with the desiccating remains of alien fish.

  “Good hiding place,” he growled at the one boot and tip of the bazooka rifle that wouldn’t fit behind the tank.

  Areva’s voice answered, “Thanks. The aliens don’t seem to like the smell.”

  “They are not breathing.”

  “Scents come straight through olfactory receptors in our noses. If those are strong enough, the aliens could smell particles that just drift up into their nostrils.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Some book.” Areva laughed. “Honestly, Viktor, don’t you ever read?”

  He grinned. “Come. We should move on.”

  As he turned, the fish corpses caught his eye. One had a row of lobster-like claws protruding from its head and was lying on its back at the bottom of the tank. The rest of the fish floated in pieces, a fin here, a head there, a tentacle there, some cleaved right in half. “The clawed fish killed the others,” he said. “The plague spread to the animals.”

  Movement at his elbow told him Areva had emerged. “Vicious.”

  “Yes.” A glance at his pocket comp showed Viktor a pair of heat blips moving erratically through the rooms further down the hall. “Two there,” he said, pointing.

  “You lead. I’ll cover.”

  They advanced as one entity.

  Those two aliens went down easily, followed by half a dozen others scattered around the building. Viktor and Areva worked their way up the stairs, sticking to the western wing and coordinating with the other teams through intercom. An hour into the fighting, sixty-one aliens had been stunned and injected. Forty-some-odd to go.

  The difficulty increased on the fifth floor. After injecting yet another alien, Viktor checked his pocket comp and saw a heat blip moving along somewhere below them. He tapped his intercom interface. “Teams two through five, are any of you on the fourth floor?”

  A round of negatives came back. Viktor glared at the heat blip. One of the aliens must have snuck through the lines. “Areva and I will eliminate the readings down there. Keep moving upward.”

  They headed back down a flight of stairs to the floor below, but the heat reading kept moving, plunging deeper into the facility. “It is trying to escape,” Viktor realized.

  “If it does, it’ll die,” said Areva.

  “It does not know that.”

  They tracked their quarry all the way to the first floor of the facility. The heat signature spread out as it moved, and Viktor came to another realization. “There are multiple targets.”

  “Confirmed,” said Areva, monitoring her own pocket comp. “I count four.”

  “They are moving to that large room. What is there?”

  “I don’t know. None of us have been through here.”

  They passed a wall-mounted sign, and Viktor wished he could read the alien print inscribed on it. No doubt it would tell them exactly what part of the hospital they’d discovered.

  The heat signatures stopped in the room.

  “They are lost. They must have expected an exit. Hurry.”

  “Right behind you,” said Areva.

  They crept down the hall, their footsteps treading lightly on the cold and cracked tiles. Light filtered in through the large windows on either end of the hall and the few plasma bulbs still shining in their recessed domes, but most of the artificial lighting had burned out. Shadows covered the area surrounding the door to the aliens’ hiding place. Viktor put his hand on the handle and made eye contact with Areva, who blushed at the gaze but gave a nod.

  In one fluid movement, Viktor flung open the door, brandished his bazooka rifle, and charged in.

  They’d miscounted.

  There were five aliens.

  And they were ready.

  Viktor had hoped to fell one, maybe two by surprise, but the aliens reacted at once, as if they knew the humans were coming. If Areva was right about their noses, perhaps they smelled them coming. Five fanged mouths opened in roars as Viktor burst through the door, and five sets of orange hands shot toward his throat.

  He raised his gun and realized too late that the aliens had armed themselves. Clutched in the orange fingers he spotted glints of metal, and his first shot went wide as he leapt aside a thrust from a surgical tool. Three of the aliens broke off to follow him, while the remaining two went after Areva. She fired, taking down one, but the other careened toward her, waving a jagged bit of pipe.

  Viktor fired and brought one of the aliens to the ground. This gave him enough breathing space to take note of the rest of the room. In the center sat some sort of large diagnostic machine shaped like a full-body imaging scanner from Earth, with a patient bed that could insert itself into a transparent sphere of glass.

  Areva’s opponent pressed her back toward a booth in the corner shielded by a half-height wall and another pane of glass connecting to the ceiling. Viktor took his two opponents away from her, toward the sphere and bed. He slipped a thrust from the scalpel-wielding alien and rolled backward over the diagnostic bed, putting it between them as a barrier. The blade-wielder hesitated, but the other one, armed with a length of thin plastic tubing, leapt over the bed and swung the tubing toward Viktor’s throat. He ducked and dodged, but the alien spun moved with him, too agile to outmaneuver. While Viktor struggled to keep the scalpel wielder in his sights, the alien with the tubing darted behind him and threw his weapon over Viktor’s head. The thin plastic line wrapped around his neck and dug in.

  Viktor raised his rifle and fired forward just as the scalpel wielder scrambled onto the bed. The alien toppled forward and crashed to the floor, and the scalpel skittered away. Viktor tried to aim another shot behind to target the strangler. The bazooka rifle proved cumbersome, and the alien dodged the attacking end of it with ease. The only part of the alien Viktor could see were his hands. Veins popped out of them, and the orange knuckles tinged white as he twisted the tubing deeper into Viktor’s flesh.

  Air and blood both stopped flowing, and Viktor’s body panicked. Dark spots flickered in his vision. Every heartbeat throbbed in his temples. Raw skin chafed where the tubing cut into it and his lungs began to burn. The dark spots in his eyes edged forward, crowding out the rest of the room.

  He dropped the rifle and flung himself backward, ramming the alien against the wall. The alien grunted but clung to his back, and Viktor’s fingers clawed uselessly at the tube. He threw himself
backward again, with no results.

  Someone screamed his name, but the sound came to him as through a long tunnel. His muscles began to flag, and tremors wracked his knees. His legs and arms both felt distant, detached. The urge to give up, to sleep, blanketed his thoughts. Darkness engulfed everything but a narrow spot in the very center of his vision, and he stared through blood-rimmed eyes at the glass sphere around the bed.

  With one last burst of effort, he wrenched his body around and threw himself backwards through the sphere.

  Glass shattered and the bed creaked as the full weight of Viktor and his opponent landed sideways across it. Something sticky sprayed Viktor’s right arm. The dark spots crowded out all sight. His grip slipped on the alien’s hand.

  A moment later, the pressure on his throat lessened, and Viktor choked in a gasp of air. His head cleared rapidly, and he smashed his skull backward to where he hoped the alien’s face lay beneath him. Bone crunched on bone, and the alien shrieked. Something began beeping in a complex rhythm, and strange bursts of light erupted from every direction as miniscule fibers running through the remnants of the glass sphere came to life.

  The dark spots receded, and Viktor yanked the tubing away from his throat. The alien still clung to the other end of it with one hand. His other hand dripped blood from glass wounds all along the arm. Viktor used the tube to yank his opponent toward himself, spearing him in the gut with his free hand. He then seized the injured alien in a headlock, grabbed the pneumo-injector from his belt, shoved it against the other man’s neck, and activated the cylinder.

  The alien fought him for a few more seconds, then went still as the zombie drug flooded his veins.

  Viktor dropped him and looked around for Areva.

  She stood in the control booth behind her own wall of shattered glass. The fifth alien lay unconscious on the bank of buttons and screens behind the little wall. “Are you hurt?” Viktor asked.

  Areva shook her head, breathing heavily. “You?”

  “I am fine.”

  “Good.” She ducked beneath the controls, staying out of sight once more.