Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,103

Bliss employed were likely to get more sophisticated as the evening progressed… let’s just say I appreciated it a little less.

It took only a few moments to get resupplied with air and ammo. Once that was accomplished, I took stock. Shay was already at work, a fiber-optic cable pulsing between her tablet and one of the bridge consoles. She hadn’t, I’d noticed, jacked directly in from the neural port behind her ear. We knew Bliss had taken control of the computers, but we couldn’t be sure that the nano-virus hadn’t somehow migrated into them. Direct neural interface may have given her a slight advantage, but it also risked an infection vector for the virus. No way in hell Shay, or any of the rest of us, wanted to take that chance. There was nothing I could do to help her with her work, though. Hell, I wasn’t even entirely sure what she was doing to begin with.

The security personnel had taken the time to install a temporary hatch over the breach I’d cut into the hull. It seemed pointless, given that Bliss was the one in control of pressurizing and depressurizing hull sections. I supposed if we got that function back, it’d be nice to be able to pressurize the bridge. With the exterior locks fried, it was still our best way off the vessel once we’d accomplished whatever it was Korben had been sent here to do. I didn’t believe for a minute that it was simply to eliminate all of the Bliss-infected and destroy the AI.

That thought drew my eyes back to the assassin. The man was in deep conversation with the officer in charge of the Genetechnic team, both standing near the main hatch leaving the bridge. That hatch was still being covered by a pair of security operatives while the rest moved about the room, stacking the dead so that they’d have room to set up a base of operations. Korben and the officer stood close together, a function of habit rather than need. With the room still in vacuum, the only way they could hear one another was over the comm. Sarah, ping their channel.

My agent obliged, sending the request to join the conversation. A moment later, my own comm crackled to life. “What’s next?” I asked.

“We secure this area,” an unfamiliar voice—the Genetechnic officer—replied. “Once that’s complete, we penetrate farther into the ship. Our mission is to find the primary node of the Bliss entity.”

“I thought it was a distributed intelligence,” I replied. “How are we going to do that?”

“We search the ship,” Korben cut in. “Compartment by compartment, if need be.”

“Okay,” I drawled. “I get that. But how will we know we’ve found the ‘primary’ node? What are we even looking for?”

They were silent for a long moment. Neither seemed to have a good answer. In the end, Korben offered a slight shrug. “I’m certain we will know it when we see it, Mr. Langston.”

“Wonderful,” I muttered.

“This is an entirely new entity, Mr. Langston,” the assassin said, voice as calm and cool as always. “One that has had sufficient time to evolve its methods and possibly even its structure. There is no way to know precisely what we are dealing with. For all we know, the nanites have infiltrated the ship’s hardware or perhaps downloaded their intelligence matrix into the ship’s computers.”

“Nope.” It was Shay’s voice, cutting into the channel. I grinned. She hadn’t been specifically patched in and the casual way that she intruded on encrypted conversations filled me, for some reason, with a sense of pride. “I’ve scanned the software and run diagnostics on the hardware. No ghost in these machines. Looks like Bliss, at least whatever of it is aboard this ship, is all wetware.” I couldn’t help a small wince at the term. There was far too much blood on the decks to miss the significance of the words. Shay, still bent over her tablet, didn’t notice. “I’ve managed to get some of the ship’s internal sensors online. Not enough to draw any conclusions on where this ‘primary’ you’re talking about might be, but I can at least tell you where the largest concentrations of the infected are.”

“Let me guess,” I offered. “Just out of sight and ready to ambush us?”

“Pretty much,” Shay agreed. “Though, by rough estimates, the numbers gathered are nowhere near the total passenger manifest. By my estimates you and Korben… accounted… for roughly one hundred and forty of the former passengers between you, but the