Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,113

security personnel.

“I don’t know, Shay,” I said. I flexed my fingers, making a conscious effort to loosen my death grip on the submachine gun. “Maybe your circuit breaker thing forced a reboot or whatever. Or maybe we’ve done more damage than we thought. It’s possible the crew of the liner figured out they were under attack and fought back. Maybe there’s not as many infected as we feared.”

“Do you really believe that, Carter?” she asked. There was a note of hope in her voice and I felt like an instant asshole.

“No,” I said. “No, I’m afraid I don’t. I think you either gave Bliss a hell of a migraine, or it’s up to something. But I can’t imagine the passengers of this tub putting up enough of a resistance to have mattered. Look at the losses we’ve suffered… and we knew what we were up against.”

She was quiet for a few heartbeats, staring ahead at the backs of the security team. “What are we up to, Carter? Why didn’t we just destroy this entire ship? This all seems so pointless.”

It was my turn to be quiet for a few moments, though we kept moving, kept making our way ever deeper into the bowels of the ship. “I wish I knew, Shay,” I said at last. “It’s clear Genetechnic wants something. Something more than just a sample, or we could have left with any of the coils we dealt with on the deck.” I ignored the shudder that coursed through me at the memory of the hellish walk across the hull. “We do need some more intel on whether or not this is it.” I waved one hand at the ship surrounding us. “If Bliss has spread farther than this ship…” I trailed off. Shrugged. “But for all the talk about how blowing up the ship might just make the problem worse, there has to be more to it. Maybe they need a more wide-scale test of their hunter-killer nanites. Maybe they know something we don’t, and Bliss is already out there.” That thought made me shudder, but I wouldn’t put it past them. “If so, they’d need to know how effective their ‘cure’ really is.”

“It makes a certain amount of sense,” Shay said. “First test a small-scale version with the grenade Korben had employed when you entered the ship. Then test a wide-scale distribution method like the life-support systems. If both those worked, maybe you’d have enough data to create something that could… what?”

I grunted. “Something that could be deployed across an entire dome maybe.” I felt an uncomfortable little shiver course through me. “But I don’t see how they could get it to work on a planetary scale.”

“Which means if Bliss did get out, the habs and colonies might be okay,” Shay agreed. “But Earth…” She trailed off.

Earth, I thought, would be well and truly fucked.

I didn’t say anything in return. I didn’t have to. We both knew the danger of the virus getting out on Earth. People weren’t packed quite so close planet-side as they were in your average hab, but there were billions upon billions of souls. And they all traveled freely, casually, with an ease that space dwellers could only envy. Epidemics were mostly a thing of the past, natural viruses and mutations powerless before the might of modern medicine. But Bliss wasn’t a normal virus. It was technology on a level that rivaled, maybe exceeded, anything on Earth. The damage it could do…

The conversation lapsed, and we pushed on, guided by the sullen glow of the sensor readouts burning in our vision, herding us down ladders and through compartments, to grandmother’s house we went. I hoped to hell we weren’t walking right into the wolf’s den.

We made it.

By the grace of Shay’s trap or the strength of whatever cobbled-together hack she and Bit had managed on the ship’s sensors, we made our way through the corridors and compartments until the team—the half-dozen or so of us left—were stacked up outside an innocuous man-sized hatch stenciled with the words, “Life Support.” The other side of the door was green on our HUDs, indicating that the sensors weren’t picking up any life forms on the other side. No one seemed inclined to take those sensors at their word, however, no matter how well they’d served us to this point.

All around me, I sensed the hefting of weaponry, the drawing of deep, steadying breaths. The conscious gathering of courage to go through one more door, to fight one