Playing God (38 page)

No, shut off gravity and see how they liked dealing with all that water and everything from Dedelphi, to fish, to furniture, not to mention the soil, and all those plants rooted in it going into uncontrolled free fall, and as a bonus having the ship's vital works turned into one gigantic oven.

Bioverse would be taking the damage out of his pay from now ’til Doomsday, but he was not leaving his ship to the pogos. He was not.

Overhead, the hatch clanged shut, cutting off the shaft of light from the main control chamber. Somebody must have shut him in. The pogos must have made it down to gravitor's ops. If that hatch opened now, they'd see him, or they'd hear him. There was nowhere to hide.

Except maybe there was.

There was a platform just above the changeover line. King opened the gate in the safety rails and climbed onto it. Above him, over the humming of the grid, he heard someone crank open the hatch.

King swung over the safety rail. He lowered himself over the platform's edge until he hung by his hands and his body dangled straight down the shaft. His feet were still a good meter from the changeover line. He prayed he was close enough and raised his legs until his toes touched the underside of the platform. He felt a slight push underneath him, like he was sitting on water, and he let go.

His head swooped down. He bit his lips. The soles of his slippers grabbed the bottom of the platform, and he hung there, head down. The weak magnets were helped just enough by the confused gravity so he stayed in place, an exotic icicle growing from the bottom of the work platform.

He gripped the support girders and pulled himself “up” until he crouched like a spider in the shadows.

Dedelphi climbed down the ladders. The Dedelphi, with their long, grasping toes, loved ladders. They called to one another in their own language, curses or orders, or shouts of excitement, King couldn't tell. He held his breath.

Don't think of it. Please, don't let them think of it.

One of the Dedelphi barked out a set of syllables. Two of them split off and started down a horizontal access tunnel. Two of them kept going down the shaft. They exclaimed loudly as they hit the changeover.

King let himself smile in the darkness.

He waited until the sounds of voices and struggles faded. He strained his ears. Nothing.

King crawled back onto the upper side of the platform and pulled himself back over the security rail. He faced the comm station and slid the command word into the auxiliary slot. He poised his hands over the keyboard and lined up the procedures in his head.

His palms sweated as he worked keys and icons. Each tractor had a bottle of neon gas hooked up to it. A simple electrical current run through the bottle would change the gas into plasma. Upon command, the bottle would open and vent the plasma into the gravity doughnut and start it burning.

What he had to get through first was dozens of questions for each grid section. It all amounted to the same dung. The ship is in full operation, why would you want to do something this stupid? Then there was the fact that none of the shields were down and the ship wanted to know why and King had to tell it to mind its own business.

He heard noise behind him. Hands and feet on ladder rungs. He kept typing. The noises got closer.

“Stop!”

He identified six grid sections to shut down.

“We are not supposed to shoot unless it is an emergency. This is an emergency.”

He saw the request for final authorization appear. King's fingers moved to enter his code.

Thunder boomed, his body jerked, and his right knee gave. His fingertips brushed the edge of the keyboard as he fell, but couldn't reach the EXECUTE key. Gloved hands grabbed his arms. He saw a flood of red under his right knee.

Then he saw that there was nothing left below his knee.

He stared up at the Dedelphi, as if expecting an explanation. One of them reached into the socket beside his head and pulled out the command word.

She said a word in her own language, and then she switched over to English. “Make sure his wound is stanched and bandaged and take him to the airlock.”

It was then the pain hit.

David shut the laboratory door behind him. He'd heard the cut-and-run order and had joined the river of bodies flooding the corridor to try to get to the main hangar before anything happened. As if something hadn't already happened. As the crowd shoved him along, he'd thought,
If this is going on up here, what's going on down on All-Cradle?
Nobody even knew where Lynn was. She might not be alive anymore.

Sorrow and rage tore through him, along with a sick, angry thought.

Now he stood alone in the middle of the lab. The only noises were his breathing, the hum of the analysis systems, and the faint sounds of the confusion outside.

The Dedelphi had broken out. They were filling the secondary domes and taking over the ship.

And I can stop it.
He looked at the virus fridge.

All he had to do was open the fridge and get out two or three of the WKV samples and break them open. Ideally, he should get down to the air recyclers and break a sealed dish open inside the vents to the city domes, but even if he released the WKV here in the Human sections while the Dedelphi roamed in pressure suits, there was still a good chance that one virus would be able to take advantage of one mistake, and there would be nothing they could do.

If he moved fast, he could infect the entire ship very effectively. He might even find somebody to help him. If the plague found just two or three hosts, the entire three thousand could be sick and dying within a week.

If the Getesaph succeeded in taking over the ship, God only knew what they'd do with it. And God only knew what the t'Therians would do when they found out what had happened up here. And God knew what the Getesaph had done, were doing, to Lynn.

David crossed to the fridge. He laid his hand on the palm scanner. The door cycled open. He took out the first rack of flat-bottomed, glass culture eggs and set it on the table.

Their labels said these eggs held one of the strains of WKV influenza. If he infected the population of the ship, they'd develop wet coughs and a fever. Then there'd be the muscle spasms and dry coughing, and they'd know. As their cell pores opened and did not close, and poisons and confused signals overloaded their systems, the spasms would harden into paralysis and their breathing would become more and more labored, and they'd die.

He'd seen it often enough. He'd seen rows of patients in isolation beds, paralyzed, breathing on respirators, dignity gone, hope gone, eyes wide-open and staring, and mouths pulled open in eerie, unchanging grimaces.

The noise had faded outside. Silence pressed heavily against his ears. David subvocalized to his implant for directions down to the recyclers. There was a hatch not too far away. He could crack one egg into the water and one into the air vents, and keep hold of the last one to open when they came to get him.

The healthy would isolate the sick, if they didn't push them out the airlock. They'd look for the seat of contagion, and they wouldn't find it because by then it would be all around them, just like down below on All-Cradle.

He heard running footsteps outside the lab. His head jerked around. The footsteps ran past, and the door didn't open.

He looked at the eggs again. Freed from the cold, the WKV influenza was coming to life in there. It was a wonderfully compact and adaptable little organism. It was hardy and could bide its time. It could jump from host to host in the air or in the water. As a WKV strain, it could kill in a few days, if nothing was done.

His hands shook at his sides.
They took Lynn,
he reminded himself.
They took Lynn, and nobody knows where she is, or if she is still alive.

In his mind's eye, he saw the rows and rows of dying patients in their isolation beds, unable to touch their sisters and their daughters, who hovered outside their beds, pressing hands and faces against the polymer sheds that trapped their dying mothers or sisters or daughters.

But they had Lynn. They had the ship.

He heard the door open. He heard a gasp.

“Don't move!” shouted someone in Getesaph. She switched to tortured English. “Don't move, or you will be shot!”

David kept his hands at his sides.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

Captain Elisabeth Esmaraude sat at her station, amazed at how calm she felt. She was not a military commander. Dealing with organized attacks was not in her job description. There hadn't been any real pirates in centuries. As Humans made contact with various alien species, it turned out they were interested in trading goods, not violence. The few aliens they hadn't managed to establish communications with had just left them alone, which was fine with everybody.

In short, this was not supposed to be happening. Maybe that was what kept her calm. Part of her was treating it as a weird sim exercise.

An info-dump had gone out to Keale. He was probably about halfway to the
Ur
from Base by now. He and his people would do whatever they could.

She'd sent the officers down to the hangars with their orders. Get everybody into the shuttles and off the ship. They had a thousand people on this ship, and none of them had signed up for this kind of hazard duty. They had to be gotten out of the way.

She'd hooked her spectacles into the ship's video and saw engineering stand around too long, staring at the Dedelphi and their makeshift tunnel.

She'd looked down into the hangars and seen that engineering wasn't the only bunch who had been too slow. Who could blame them? This wasn't real. This shouldn't be happening. The Dedelphi had the hangars and all the people in there. People were being sealed into rescue balls and left in heaps on the decks.

There was a short running battle through the maintenance decks between the invaders and Keale's security people, but they were too heavily outnumbered, and it didn't last. Rudu had made a good try down on the gravity deck, but now… She didn't want to think about what she'd seen.

People had slammed bulkheads shut, cut the power, waded into battle with all kinds of improvised weapons. They pulled off the Dedelphi's helmets and left them choking and coughing on the deck. They blinded invaders with fire extinguishers, tripped them with wires, shocked, scalded, and beat them to death.

In response, the Dedelphi had cried out, “Medical emergency!” and the overrides had opened the bulkheads to gain free passage. They had found maintenance jobbers in the corridors and ordered them to repair the wiring and cut apart the booby traps. Keale had sealed off most of the voice commands to everyone but the crew, but jobbers answered anyone. That was the point of jobbers.

The Dedelphi had lain in wait for their attackers, lurking in side tunnels, clinging to bracing. They had tangled them in nets, tripped them, clubbed them with the guns, tied them up with tape and fishing line, stuffed them into rescue balls, and piled them up.

Dedelphi had died. Lots of them. But each death made the rest tighter, more alert.

They were coming to the bridge now. She could see them. They were down in the maintenance deck heading carefully toward her.

So, time to get moving.
She was slow, she was stupid and unprepared, and she'd only half listened to Kaye, but she was all this ship had as a captain. Some orders the ship would not accept from anybody else.

Like the one to shut the engines down stone cold, now. And the one to close down power to the food plants and the water purifiers. Nothing she could do about the air, really, but she could shut down the scrubbers and the heating vents, and dump the regulator data. She tied every crucial database she could think of up tight.

Then there was the command Keale had created, in case worse came to worse. “Ozone?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Mind wipe.”

“Completing request.”

Those were the last words the AI would ever say. Right now it was in there eating out its own brain. If the pogos wanted to do anything with this ship, they would have to enter in each and every command sequence themselves, without any help.

The inner hatch opened and a half dozen Dedelphi spilled into the room. Esmaraude swung her chair around and pulled out the command word as she did it. The Dedelphi looked bewildered, she thought, to see no one left but her.

“You will not be hurt,” said the leader in tilting English. “We want the ship.”

“It's yours.” She held aloft the command word for them to see, and before any of them could move, brought it crashing down against the console.

Lareet nudged the fragments of the shattered command word with her toes. The captain had let herself be led quietly away down to where the rest of her people were being held. Now, only clean-suited sisters filled the command center. Umat stood next to the captain's station, listening to Dayisen Wital give the rest of her report.

“We captured two of the three command words,” said Dayisen Wital. “The head count of prisoners matches the duty roster for the ship. There have been three Human casualties, one very serious, but so far no deaths.” Her ears lowered involuntarily to her scalp. “We lost six hundred sisters.”

Lareet squeezed Umat's shoulder and lifted her ears to the dayisen around them. “We will mourn our sisters. This ship is the payment of their life debt. They, we, have done well. Very well.”

The dayisen swelled with pride.

“Do we have any idea what Keale's doing?” asked Umat.

One of the Ovrth Ondt bustled over. “We have a call from engineering; they estimate about twelve cutter-style ships on their way.”

Umat nodded. “Dayisen Wital, start tossing out the prisoners. That will keep them busy for a while.”

“What do you think they will do, Sister?” asked Lareet softly.

Umat shrugged. “At this point, I have no idea. I am hoping they don't either.”

The shuttle
Theodore Graves
accelerated hard and pushed Keale back into the swaddling couch. The
Graves
was too small to have a gravity deck, so they had been under acceleration gee all the way out. He had rotated the couch so he was sitting upright and able to reach the worktable his portable had been slotted into. Around him, two dozen of his people had done the same. They conferred with their machines, their implants, or one another, in quiet, confident tones. All of them avoided looking at him.