Dark shapes blocked the light overhead as people moved around her. Alan’s face appeared next to her. She thrashed again, and she was on her stomach, her cheek pressed flat against the hard surface.
Her body relaxed for a second, and she took a single, gasping breath before going rigid and loosing a silent howl. The muscles of her face cramped with the force of her rictus, and tears leaked from the corners of her eyes.
Hands turned her over. They gripped her arms and legs, holding them in place. It did nothing to stop the pain.
“Kira!”
She forced her eyes open and, with blurry vision, saw Alan and, behind him, Fizel leaning toward her with a hypo. Farther back, Jenan, Yugo, and Seppo were pinning her legs to the floor, while Ivanova and Marie-Élise helped Neghar away from the clot on the deck.
“Kira! Look at me! Look at me!”
She tried to reply, but all she succeeded in doing was uttering a strangled whimper.
Then Fizel pressed the hypo against her shoulder. Whatever he injected didn’t seem to have any effect. Her heels drummed against the floor, and she felt her head slam against the deck, again and again.
“Jesus, someone help her,” Alan cried.
“Watch out!” shouted Seppo. “That thing on the floor is moving! Shi—”
“Sickbay,” said Fizel. “Get her to sickbay. Now! Pick her up. Pick—”
The walls swam around her as they lifted her. Kira felt like she was being strangled. She tried to inhale, but her muscles were too cramped. Red sparks gathered around the edges of her vision as Alan and the others carried her down the hallway. She felt as if she were floating; everything seemed insubstantial except the pain and her fear.
A jolt as they dropped her onto Fizel’s exam table. Her abdomen relaxed for a second, just long enough for Kira to steal a breath before her muscles locked back up.
“Close the door! Keep that thing out!” A thunk as the sickbay pressure lock engaged.
“What’s happening?” said Alan. “Is—”
“Move!” shouted Fizel. Another hypo pressed against Kira’s neck.
As if in response, the pain tripled, something she wouldn’t have believed possible. A low groan escaped her, and she jerked, unable to control the motion. She could feel foam gathering in her mouth, clogging her throat. She gagged and convulsed.
“Shit. Get me an injector. Other drawer. No, other drawer!”
“Doc—”
“Not now!”
“Doc, she isn’t breathing!”
Equipment clattered, and then fingers forced Kira’s jaw apart, and someone jammed a tube into her mouth, down her throat. She gagged again. A moment later, sweet, precious air poured into her lungs, sweeping aside the curtain darkening her vision.
Alan was hovering over her, his face contorted with worry.
Kira tried to talk. But the only sound she could make was an inarticulate groan.
“You’re going to be okay,” said Alan. “Just hold on. Fizel’s going to help you.” He looked as if he were about to cry.
Kira had never been so afraid. Something was wrong inside her, and it was getting worse.
Run, she thought. Run! Get away from here before—
Dark lines shot across her skin: black lightning bolts that twisted and squirmed as if alive. Then they froze in place, and where each one lay, her skin split and tore, like the carapace of a molting insect.
Kira’s fear overflowed, filling her with a feeling of utter and inescapable doom. If she could have screamed, her cry would have reached the stars.
Fibrous tendrils erupted from the bloody rents. They whipped about like headless snakes and then stiffened into razor-edged spikes that stabbed outward in random directions.
The spikes pierced the walls. They pierced the ceiling. Metal screeched. Lightstrips sparked and shattered, and the high-pitched keen of Adra’s surface wind filled the room, as did the blare of alarms.
Kira fell to the floor as the spikes jerked her around like a puppet. She saw a spike pass through Yugo’s chest and then three more through Fizel: neck, arm, and groin. Blood sprayed from the men’s wounds as the spikes withdrew.
No!
The door to sickbay slammed open and Ivanova rushed in. Her face went slack with horror, and then a pair of spikes struck her in the stomach and she collapsed. Seppo tried to run, and a spike impaled him from behind, pinning him to the wall, like a butterfly.
No!
Kira blacked out. When she came to, Alan was kneeling next to her, his forehead pressed against hers and his hands heavy upon her shoulders. His eyes were blank and empty, and a line of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.
It took her a moment to realize that a dozen or more spikes stitched her body to his, joining them with obscene intimacy.
Her heart fluttered and stopped, and the floor seemed to drop away into an abyss. Alan. Her teammates. Dead. Because of her. The knowledge was unbearable.
Pain. She was dying, and she didn’t care. She just wanted the suffering to end—wanted the swift arrival of oblivion and the release it would bring.
Then darkness clouded her sight and the alarms faded to silence, and what once was, was no more.
CHAPTER V
MADNESS
1.
Kira’s eyes shot open.
There was no slow rise to consciousness. No gradual return to awareness. Not this time. One moment nothing; the next, a burst of sensory information, bright and sharp and overwhelming in its intensity.
She was lying at the bottom of a tall, circular chamber—a tube with a ceiling five meters above her, far too high to reach. It reminded her of the grain silo their neighbors, the Roshans, had built when she was thirteen. Halfway up the side of the tube was a two-way mirror: a large, silvery rectangle filled with the grey ghost of a reflection. A narrow lightstrip along the edge of the ceiling was the only source of illumination.
Not just one but two robot arms moved about her with silent grace, a cluster of diagnostic instruments protruding from the end of each one. As she looked at them, they paused and then retracted toward the ceiling, where they hung in readiness.
Embedded within one side of the tube was an airlock with a built-in hatch for passing small objects in and out. Opposite the airlock was a pressure door that presumably led deeper into … into wherever. It too had a hatch, similar in size and for the same purpose. Glorified jailer’s slots. There was no bed. No blanket. No sink. And no toilet. Just cold, bare metal.
She had to be on a ship. Not the Fidanza. The Extenuating Circumstances.
Which meant …
A jolt of adrenaline caused Kira to gasp and sit upright. The pain; the spikes; Neghar, Fizel, Yugo, Ivanova … Alan! The memories returned in a deluge. They returned, but Kira wished they hadn’t. Her gut clenched, and a long, deep groan escaped her as she fell to her hands, knees, and forehead. The ridges of the deck cut into her skin, but she didn’t care.
When she could breathe, she howled, pouring all of her grief and anguish into a single wailing cry.
It was all her fault. If she hadn’t found that damned room, Alan and the others would still be alive and she wouldn’t have ended up infected by some sort of xeno.
The spikes.
Where were the spikes and tendrils that had torn through her skin? Kira looked down, and her heart skipped a beat.