Frost Station Alpha 1-6: The Complete Series (30 page)

“Apparently, the pirates didn’t get that message,” Tamryn said. “What do we do?”

“Don’t touch it.”

“I wasn’t planning to roll around in it. Trust me.”

Anise finally stepped inside, skirting the table and heading to the back of the lab. She paused next to a ceramic disk. The lid from the amphora? It had fallen without breaking, rolling several feet from the sludge before coming to a stop near a cabinet. Dark symbols had been stamped into the underside.

Anise bent, a hand reaching toward it, but stopped well short of touching it. “I want to try and translate that, but there could be microscopic particles on there.” She took out her tablet and took a few pictures, then walked over to a counter.

“Is there anything we can do to help?” Tamryn asked.

“Stay out of the way and don’t touch anything.”

Tamryn grunted. She thought about staying out in the corridor, but seeing Anise enlarging the pictures she had taken made her think of the camera feeds around the station. “Is there a security camera in here? Can we access the feed? See what happened?”

“Isn’t it clear what happened?”

“We may see something helpful.”

Anise waved toward a computer console without looking away from her new project.

Tamryn followed the outside wall toward the console. Cox shuffled after her, while Makkon remained in the doorway, facing the corridor. She doubted the pirates would return, especially if they had an inkling of what they had unleashed, but she felt better having him stand guard.

Finding the file for the camera recording in the lab did not take long. Tamryn ran the video in reverse until she spotted people walking into the room, people wearing combat armor, very familiar combat armor. The backs of the helmets had identification numbers on them, the same as the rest of the suits on the station. Unfortunately, the camera angle and the faceplates made it hard to see who was wearing them.

“Found our three missing suits,” Tamryn said. “It looks like someone else
did
have the same thought we had, Makkon.”

“The same thought
you
had,” he said. “Are those the pirates? How would they have known where your armory was? And that it would have suits in it that would protect them from the gas?”

“That I don’t know. Yet.” Tamryn backed it up a bit more to the moment the people first walked into the lab. The artifacts—and that amphora—were still on the table, exactly as they had been when Tamryn and Anise had left earlier.

“Do you know anything about those pirate teams that I don’t know, Makkon?” Tamryn asked. “Like how they got aboard?”

“Brax said there was a second ship and that they might have come in the same way we did, by making their own hatch. Since pirates were attempting to board from the military ship at the same time, your alarms were already going off.”

“Hm.”

On the video, the men pointed upward, then one took off his helmet. He had greasy long hair and didn’t look like he’d had a shave or a bath in weeks. He sniffed the air experimentally, then nodded to his comrades. Two more helmets came off. One man had a similar look to the first, but the second had shorter hair with a clean-shaven face. None of them had the powerful builds of Makkon’s people.

As the intruders walked around, opening drawers and cupboards and pulling things out, Tamryn fiddled with the volume, hoping to catch voices. She also pulled up another display and ran an identification program. She doubted she would get a match, since pirate clans often lived and died aboard their ships and never became GalCon citizens, but it was possible one might be notorious enough to have been captured and scanned by the police or military.

To her surprise, the software beeped in recognition for one of the men right away, the fellow with the shorter hair. He had a stocky build and a chiseled jaw, and was examining the artifacts on the table while his comrades dumped items they apparently intended to loot next to him. The identification program displayed his name as Sergeant Raymond Charbonneau, along with discharge dates. Recent discharge dates.

“Anise? You recognize this fellow?” Tamryn paused the playback and enlarged the man’s face, so it would be visible across the lab.

Anise glanced back, her face pinched in irritation. She clearly didn’t want to be bothered, but Tamryn had a hunch.

Anise’s expression changed to one of surprise, her eyebrows arching. “Sergeant Charbonneau? He was stationed here until about three months ago.”

“He know about the FTL engine information? The artifacts?”

“Not... a lot. At least he shouldn’t have, but I’m sure the men speak and overhear us talking.” Anise’s lips thinned. “That could explain how they got in without setting off alarms. There are external hatches on the station, in case people need to go out for maintenance. He and his buddies might have sidled right up to the door while everyone was distracted with the other ship. All of the security codes get changed every month, but maybe he created a backdoor in for himself. He was a techie and had been out there for repairs before. He also would have known about the suits in the armory.”

“So he retired and decided to join forces with some pirates to make some money. I’m sure information on that technology could bring a million aurums on the black market, even without the artifacts.”

“Very likely.” Anise started to turn back as Tamryn let the video continue to play again, but a jolt went through her whole body. “Freeze that,” she ordered.

The video was showing the pirates gathering the artifacts off the table. One had jerked toward the doorway, hearing something perhaps, and fumbled the amphora. It dropped, breaking, and the contents spilled out onto the floor. Tamryn froze it right after a man jumped out of the way, nearly knocking over a stool. The sludge appeared in the frame, much as it did now, except there seemed to be more of it now.

“Shit,” Anise said, then repeated the word several more times.

“What?” Tamryn knew they had trouble already, but couldn’t tell what Anise had seen to escalate their trouble to a higher level.

“What’s the time stamp on that?”

“This all happened... three hours and five minutes ago.” Tamryn tried to guess if that had been before or after she and Makkon had cut through the floor, but she hadn’t taken note of the time then. The three combat suits from the armory had come online about then, and she guessed these men might have been the ones to steal them, but at the beginning of the feed, they were wearing their own suits.

“Look at the size of the spill.” Anise’s gaze was still locked to that frozen frame.

Abruptly, Tamryn understood. “It got bigger.”

“By roughly four times, I would estimate.” Anise approached the spill with a piece of equipment and took more pictures, or maybe she was running an analysis, something she could do from a distance.

“It
is
biological in nature, then,” Tamryn said. “And it’s doubling in size every hour and a half.”

“Exponential growth. I don’t have to tell you what that means.” Anise turned back to the counter, her shoulders hunched as she enlarged holo displays of the pictures of the sludge, as well as of the markings on the lid.

“No.” When they had first walked in, Tamryn had imagined them having plenty of time before those drips ate through the various levels of the station to find the hull, but that wasn’t going to be true at all.

Makkon’s head had turned back toward the lab, and he met her eyes, his face grave. Yes, he knew what it meant too.

“You could tell
me
what it means,” Cox said.

“That the entire station is going to be screwed if we don’t find a way to contain it again.” Tamryn looked toward Anise. “But we can do that, right? We just need another ceramic pot, or something else that it can’t eat through. And a way to transfer it into the pot without touching it.” That would be tricky. They might have to sacrifice a lab robot; there ought to be some around.

“Just let me get an analysis as to what we’re working with first,” Anise said. “We have a few more doublings before it will get too large to manage. It’s probably safest to try and kill it. Though I am concerned it might eat through the floor soon.” She cursed, then added, “Let me work.”

“Did she not say that the pot and its contents were as old as the alien artifacts?” Makkon asked. “How would a biological specimen have survived for that long?”

“They found thirty-thousand-year-old viable seeds back on Old Earth a few decades before our ancestors left,” Anise said, her eyes toward her displays—she had more than a dozen language examples up now, along with the original pictures. “Life finds a way. You’re here, aren’t you?”

Makkon grunted and returned to watching the corridor.

“It’s unfortunate that the inorganic material it encounters seems to work as food for it,” Anise muttered, talking to herself now. “If that could be harnessed, it would make for a useful tool. Imagine the mining implications. I wonder if it can survive in an anaerobic environment? It could be used on asteroids with little risk of spreading into civilized areas. Maybe that was why the aliens were keeping it. That’ll have to be the first test. Does it go dormant when denied oxygen?” Anise continued to work as she talked, scribbling notes on a list her tablet displayed above the counter.

Tamryn turned back to the security feed, instructing it to continue playing. She didn’t know what she hoped to find, but she had no idea what else she could do. It seemed as good a use of her time as anything else. One of the pirates had taken out a tablet and was recording everything. He tapped at the very console Tamryn was now using, then laid a small black box atop it. Some sort of hacking device?

“
Can
we take all of the oxygen out of the lab?” Cox asked.

“Yes,” Anise said. “I’m making a list of things we can try to do to it. Obviously the gas we used earlier didn’t affect it. Well, no, I shouldn’t assume that. It didn’t
kill
the organism, but perhaps it slowed down or sped up its growth. Can it consume gas from the atmosphere and use it as raw fuel, the way it’s consuming inorganic material?”

“Uh, was that question for me to answer?” Cox asked.

“Sorry, Cox,” Tamryn said when Anise did not respond. “I don’t think any of these questions are for you to answer. Or for me, either. That’s why I’m looking at pictures. I—” Tamryn paused, her gaze transfixed by the video display.

The pirate with the hacking device had joined the others, and the trio had been on their way out, but someone must have been coming down the corridor, because they had hurried back in and shut the door. They made shushing motions to each other. Maybe they’d heard some of the scientists out looking for the last of Makkon’s people? The pirates could have overpowered civilians, but maybe they had been worried about running into the Glacians. They must have been in contact with the pirates on the Fleet ship and learned what had happened to them.

One of the men backed up to the table, slipped, and almost toppled backward. Eyes widening, Tamryn saw right away what he had slipped
on
. Some of the sludge. He put his hand on the table for balance, then jerked it away, looking down at his glove. Tamryn thought of the pits in the surface near the table’s edge. Before, some of the goo must have still remained on the top. The pirate dropped the hacking device on the table and tried to wipe off his glove. It didn’t work. He ran to the sink, washed with soap and water, and scrubbed hard with a towel. Judging from his reaction, the sludge still had not come off. From the glimpse the camera showed, it might even have been spreading. And was it starting to eat through his suit? Tamryn couldn’t quite tell, since he was waving his hand around in agitation now.

His two comrades were trying to shush him, and he angrily shoved one, as if demanding them to listen. He’d done the shove with the hand that had touched the table. Tamryn couldn’t tell if that contact was enough to spread the organism. Then the man yelped and shook his hand. He tore off his glove, dropped it on the floor, and gaped at his hand. It was smoldering. Shaking his head, he sprinted for the door.

The ex-sergeant tried to stop him, but the wounded man nearly bowled him over as he raced out of the lab. The sound of the alarm started up in the video. The other two men cursed, grabbed the artifacts and other booty they could carry, and jogged out after their comrade.

“Anise,” Tamryn said. “Somewhere on the station, there’s a combat suit that’s being eaten by that stuff. And maybe a pirate too.”

Anise, engrossed in her work, did not look up, but she muttered a, “Wonderful.”

Tamryn frowned at the thought of a suit somewhere leaking sludge all over the place, of a pirate curled up in a corner being eaten alive by some unstoppable, voracious organism. She couldn’t help but shudder.

So far, she had managed to keep her unease to a minimum, believing Anise would have a way of dealing with this problem. But she was starting to feel daunted. She lifted a hand to rub her forehead and push away strands of hair that had fallen into her eyes, but her fingers clunked on the faceplate. She snorted at herself. A face rub would have to wait. There was no way she was going to remove any part of her suit until that stuff had been dealt with.

“What happened to his glove?” Cox looked around the room. Thanks to the mess the pirates had made, it wasn’t easy to pick things out on the floor or countertops.

Tamryn played the video again, this time to take note of where the glove had fallen. It had been between the table and the door. They shouldn’t have missed it. She walked over to the spot and bent over the floor. It definitely was not there, but— “Crap.”

She pointed down to a dark smear on a pitted section of the floor and a few small black lumps—all that remained of the glove. “It must have eaten right through it. All of it.”

She swallowed. If they hadn’t been careful to follow the walls when entering the room, they might have stepped right on this spot without noticing. She grabbed some debris and made a ring around the smear to cordon it off.

“Does anyone else think we should get out of here?” Cox asked. “It doesn’t look like the suits do anything to help. Captain, can you do the research from a remote location? And can we nuke, irradiate, or otherwise utterly destroy everything in this lab?”