nanites themselves, and while I knew from once-removed personal experience that Bliss could push a coil past the bounds of what we considered traditional death, it was very clear now that it didn’t cause that death. Not in and of itself. The coils before me, now cleansed of the Bliss nanites that had infected them, were still very much alive. In my head, I’d been thinking of the Bliss-infected as zombies, but maybe drones would have been a better word—mindless automatons bound to the will of the hive mind. What waited for us on that bridge in the wake of Korben’s cleansing nano-virus were zombies of a different sort.
They stood in their dozens, suited bodies at rest save for those thousands of minute adjustments we all make every second to maintain balance. Adjustments that are so commonplace, we don’t see them in ourselves, much less each other. At least, not when the adjuster is a living, breathing, thinking being. The formerly infected may have met the technical definition of the first two categories, but a single glance through their helmet visors and into their dead, soulless eyes threw any thoughts of… well, thought right out of the airlock. There was something about them, something about standing in their midst, that was far more disconcerting than their fellows’ mad charge into my bullets. I didn’t have a frame of reference for the feeling, but I was reminded of old, old entertainment vids where the protagonists seemed disconcerted about being alone in a cemetery. I hadn’t understood their fears, but now, standing among the not-quite dead, I could appreciate it on an entirely different level.
“Damn,” the whisper came over the comm, Shay breathing the word in an almost reverent susurration of breath.
“If you could be about the matter at hand,” Korben’s dry words sliced through my shock like a plasma cutter. I tore my attention away from the… dead? Whatever they were, they weren’t a threat, and I’d come here with a job to do. Korben had taken up a position just inside the only hatch leading onto the bridge, machine pistol held in one hand and one of his silvery kukris in the other. The door was shut. For the moment.
“Do you have control over the interior hatches?” I asked Shay over the comm, and I started threading my way through the coils. It was like they were in some sort of standby mode. They didn’t get out of my way, but if I bumped one—a situation I was trying like hell to avoid, but there were so damn many of them—it staggered a bit and then regained its balance.
“Negative,” she said. “When that bitch of an AI lost control of the outer airlocks, she made damn sure I couldn’t use the same ploy on the interior.” There was a brief pause, followed by a grudging, “I’m locked out. I don’t think I’m going to be able to do anything remotely. Maybe if I can get plugged into a physical access port.”
I winced at that, but kept my mouth shut. The shuttle was probably safer than the ship, but it wasn’t my job to keep Shay safe. I suspected she’d have rather strong words for me if I tried. “Roger that,” was all the reply I gave. “Making my way to the consoles now. Tell the security team to make ready. This shouldn’t take long.”
There was no warning. One moment I was making my way to a console, carrying on a conversation with Shay while Korben waited by the door, and in the next the assassin exploded into motion. It took me a moment to realize that the hatch to the bridge had slid upward on silent tracks and that the Bliss-infected had returned. In force.
“Sooner would be better,” Korben hissed through the comm as the initial creature through the door lost its head to a well-timed swing of a blade. He braced himself in front of the door, pistol in his left hand, firing with the eerie silence of vacuum.
I put the tableau from my mind. I wanted to help the assassin but the two of us had no real chance against the horde. Not with dozens more waiting to take the place of each one that fell. Whatever the assassin’s nanite package had accomplished, its effects clearly didn’t linger. The infected charging in showed no signs of being slowed. Our only chance was for me to do what I’d come here to do—gain control over the maneuvering thrusters and