Virus (2 page)

“MIR Station, MIR Station, this is the Akademic Research Vessel
Vladislav Volkov.
Do you read, over?”

She looked up at the screen and into the pleasantly squinting face of Colonel Kominski. He was wearing a Houston Rockets T-shirt, a well-worn gift from one of the American astronauts, and looked as tired as she felt.

“Loud and clear,
Volkov.
Nadia, is that you? Over.”

Nadia smiled. “Good morning, Colonel. Is your disk array in position?”

“That depends. It’s early yet, I haven’t had my tea.”

Nadia heard Alexi chuckle behind her; the captain of the
Volkov
was a notorious tea drinker, always a cup in hand.

Nadia rolled her eyes, still smiling. “Very funny, Colonel. Your data, please?”

The cosmonaut reached overhead and flipped switches, then sighed dramatically in mock resignation. “Finalizing coordinates as we speak; preparing for data downlink in—thirty seconds.”

He pointed to his second-in-command, Captain Lonya Rostov, who tapped at another switch on his console. “Yes, sir.”

Nadia grinned at the two cosmonauts, 150 miles above the
Volkov
in the core module of the MIR. The data about to be sent was of particular interest to her, the first of a series of tests on cell factories performed in Kvant 1; she looked forward to studying the results and adding to her research on bioprocesses.

But right now . . .

“Lonya?” she asked sweetly.

The captain arched his eyebrows. “Yes, Nadia?”

“Bishop to king six.”

Lonya Rostov frowned and looked up at the chessboard mounted over his console, studying it intently. Nadia had to suppress an urge to gloat; it was a strong move and she could tell that he hadn’t considered it.

Put that in your belly, Rostov!
He wasn’t going to win this one.

Behind the frowning captain, Nadia saw one of the visiting female cosmonauts at an observation port—Kostoev, Nadia thought, but she couldn’t remember the woman’s first name. Ludmila? She held a camera and had raised it suddenly to take a picture of whatever she saw.

Colonel Kominski interrupted Rostov’s chess musings abruptly. “We are twenty seconds from downlink corridor. Mark . . ."

Rostov sighed and took it up. “Mark. Starting automatic sequencing, now . . . eighteen . . . seventeen . . .”

The woman, Kostoev, broke in urgently, her voice high and anxious. “Lonya, out your starboard portal—something is coming straight at us.”

Rostov stopped the verbal count and turned, peered at something offscreen. Nadia saw something like fear pass over his even features and felt her own muscles tense—Lonya Rostov was not an easily frightened man.

“What is that? Colonel, you’d better look at this. Something’s approaching and we just got in its way—”

Nadia waited, suddenly filled with a deep sense of foreboding. “Something” approaching? Though highly improbable, perhaps a meteor, an unscheduled shuttle—but what could be headed for the MIR that Rostov wouldn’t know?

Alarmed, she leaned closer to the monitor, watching carefully—and although she had a clear view, the next few seconds were a confused blur of motion and sound.

There was a crackle of sharp static and the screen flashed a vivid blue, overlaying the interior of the module in a lightning-fast series of brilliant shocks. The cosmonauts were suddenly outlined by what looked like giant bolts of electricity, arcing and snapping through the air. There was an eerie, high-pitched electronic squeal like nothing Nadia had ever heard—

—and the picture on her console distorted and turned to dark snow. Over the blaring static, Nadia clearly heard screams and shouts of mortal terror.

Horrified and bewildered, Nadia punched at the relay keys, her heart pounding. And then everything went out, the screams cut off abruptly as the monitor died.

“MIR Station? MIR Station—?”

Only silence and a blank screen; nothing. Nadia turned to the captain, met his stunned gaze with her own. “Alexi, all audio and visual links are gone, something is very wrong—”

The transmission!

Nadia looked back at her console, at the smaller screen set next to the video receiver. The numbers flashed, green against black, and suddenly she wanted to scream, unreasonably frightened as the MIR completed the countdown.

3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .

The soft beep from the machine seemed incredibly loud in the shocked silence of the room. Nothing happened, and Nadia looked back at Alexi, opened her mouth to say something, ask him what to do—

—when a strange and terrible light erupted into the control room.

Huge, blue electrical arcs snapped across the chamber, crackling with power and heat. Nadia leapt to her feet, saw and heard the other crew members do the same, shouting and stumbling to get away from the surging bolts of brilliant light.

Nadia spun, searched wildly for the source of the energy, terrified—and stopped, stared at the console computer screens in the chaos of the invading radiance.

Information scrolled across the monitors so rapidly that she could hardly make any of it out. Numbers, lines of flashing icons, layout prints, and pages upon pages of stored data whipped up and were gone as she watched, frozen in disbelief.

What—

A string of letters and numbers suddenly appeared alone on one screen, followed by another and then a third. Nadia’s mouth went dry as she realized what they were.

“Captain, someone’s accessing the main computer!”

Alexi followed her wide-eyed gaze, stared at the monitor in pure astonishment. “Impossible! I’m the only one who knows the access code—”

There was a jolting flash of blue light and they were both knocked to the floor. Static screamed from everywhere and the electronic squeal that she’d heard from the MIR filled the room, shrill and insane. Papers and readouts flew through the air.

“Shut the power off!” Alexi screamed.

Nadia looked up, saw her research immunologist still on his feet. “Shut it down! Shut it all down!”

She saw the terror on Yandiev’s face, but he didn’t hesitate. The scientist lunged for the power switch—

—and Nadia saw a bolt of the crackling blue light strike him, rip through his chest like an electrical sword. The brilliance seared his flesh, enveloped him, and Nadia screamed then, all semblance of control, of rational thought, torn away.

Anatoly Yandiev had burst into flame, every part of his staggering body consumed by raging fire. He crumpled, burning, to the deck.

Nadia was still screaming as everything swirled away, that horrible high-pitched sound chasing her into a blackness that crackled and spat with a dark and unknown purpose.

• 1 •

S
even hundred forty nautical miles south of Fiji, Leiah had grown from a petulant child into a serious bitch in a matter of hours—an insane, terrible, class four screamer that had churned the seas into forty-plus-foot swells, raging beneath an ominous, boiling night sky!

Kelly Foster sat on the heaving, humid bridge of the
Sea Star
and studied the typhoon, pulsing spirals of innocuous-looking light on the radar when it wasn’t obscured by surges of violent static. The tug rocked wildly, thrown into the storming night on heaving waters and plunged back down into deep valleys of ocean. Foster was scared, and more than a little pissed off.

She’d warned Everton as soon as the system had organized into a tropical depression; he’d had hours, listening to her increasingly urgent reports of convections on the rise. Had he heard any of it, let her change course to give the storm a safely wide berth? “We’ll clear it, she won’t turn, I
know
these waters,” he’d said.

The typhoon had made the upgrade to light magenta at just after 0300, and by the looks of it, Leiah would hit white before she was through.

And here we are in the midst, here I am like a goddamn fool on a ship run by an even bigger fool. What the hell was I thinking, signing up for this?

The ship bucked and moaned against the turbulent waters and Foster winced as another giant wave crashed against their tow. The heavy container barge was going to drag them down,
if
the aft winch actually held out, and the captain still wouldn’t listen to reason. He’d let their options run out with each decision put off, and now they were all going to pay for it.

Foster gritted her teeth against rising anger and turned to the man who paced the deck behind her, chewing nervously on his damned peanuts. Captain Everton had stalked back and forth for over an hour, wearing his battered wool hat, a 6 shot strapped to one hip like some mad, grizzled sailor from an ancient movie.

Just call me Ishmael,
she thought sourly.

“Winds gusting to one-ten,” she said. “If it gets to one-thirty, we’re on the verge of a category five.”

Everton didn’t answer, walked past her to stare through the bridge’s aft window, searching for his precious cargo in the driving darkness. He bellowed to the third member of their little bridge party as if the helmsman were deaf, his voice rough and powerful.

“Put ’er back into the wind, Woods! Forty-five degrees down-swell!”

J. W. Woods, Jr., spun the wheel tightly, coffee cup in one hand, his face stretched taut and shiny with sweat. The lanky blond helmsman still wore a fading black eye from his last bar fight and looked unhappy but loyally determined, always eager to prove his worth; Woods was the only crew member who truly seemed to enjoy kissing Everton’s ass. The man was a toadying creep, pure and simple, and she could expect no help there. Steve, Squeaky, and the other two hands probably had more sense, but they were busy below—and not too likely to side with her about anything, the way they’d ignored her for the past week. No one in the small crew seemed to know each other well except for Steve and Squeaky, the engineers; they had obviously worked together before.

And the rest of us, strangers. Great way to meet people. I’ll definitely have to do this again . . .

Foster looked back at her screens as the
Sea Star
turned against the movement of the barge, wondering again why she’d signed up for this run; well, she knew
why,
but pride didn’t seem like a good enough reason at the moment. There was more blindly dogmatic testosterone poisoning on this tug than she experienced in all her years with the navy. Everton had made it perfectly clear since they’d set out that he’d only hired her because he hadn’t had time to find anyone better, and no one on board seemed to disagree with him. It was as if having boobs made her useless as a navigator to these jerks, her opinions ignored or scoffed at. God forbid she might know what she was doing . . .

There was another thundering crash as a huge swell slammed into the tug, jolting her out of her self-righteous reverie. All that mattered now was getting out of this alive; she could complain to someone who cared when,
if,
they managed to thwart Leiah, and currently the odds weren’t looking so hot.

The
Sea Star
lurched suddenly as the barge was hit with another big one, a towering wall of seething foam that assaulted their tow with devastating force. There was a groaning shriek as the connecting cable pulled tight. The thousand-pound weight that anchored the cable had jumped; Foster knew it and prayed silently that the drag wouldn’t be too much—

The
Sea Star
jerked like a dog at the end of a short leash and stopped dead, breaching herself to the furious seas. Everton grabbed for a support and Woods fumbled for his flask, uncapping it and pouring a healthy slug into his coffee.

Jesus, what is he waiting for?

“Captain, the barge is taking on water,” she said.

Everton said nothing, his scruffy face set and closed.

“Captain—”

“We’re not releasing the cargo, Foster. There’ll be no discussion,” he snapped, and popped another handful of peanuts, staring out at the barge.

Foster studied him for a moment longer, unable to believe that any man could be this suicidal or any captain this blatantly irresponsible; he hadn’t
seemed
insane when she’d met him, he’d been pleasant, handsome in a weathered way, radiating authority and self-confidence. What had happened to that man? Who was this sexist idiot munching on nuts in the skirt of a raging typhoon and ignoring his navigator?

Well, fine. The cable would tear loose, the winch plate would rip out of the deck, and they’d dump the goddamn cargo anyway; she’d already kissed her percentage good-bye, and if he wasn’t going to listen to the truth, he could just choke on it.

She turned back to the screens frustrated and nervous, wishing again that she hadn’t taken the first job to come her way when she’d hit the South Pacific—and hoping that they all wouldn’t choke on it with him as the
Sea Star
took another pounding at the writhing black claws of Leiah.

Steve Baker was tired and grimy and the engine checked fine, just as it had the day they’d left port and every damned day since. Everton had turned out to be one of those controlling types that rattled under pressure, saw trouble and reacted by making his people jump through hoops.