"Watch out." Zahara raised her hands to shield herself and the engineers sitting next to her. On the other side of the bed, the 2-1B continued to hold Vesek in place. When it looked up, she saw that its cowling and visual sensors were covered with blood. Vesek collapsed backward on the stained sheets, as if the act of vomiting had drained all the fight from him.
"Get him in the bubble," Zahara said. "All of them, the guards, engineers, whoever came off that Destroyer, get them sealed off from the other patients-now."
The 2-1B's sensors had already cleared themselves and reflected back at her attentively. "Yes, Dr. Cody."
"Run labs on them, a full tox screen, find out what they were exposed to up there."
"Anything else?"
She forced herself to stop and think, taking inventory in her mind. "We better let the warden know what's going on. He'll want updates."
"Right away."
"Wait," Zahara said, "I'll take care of that myself." She didn't wait around as the surgical droid started giving instructions to the engineers. Their faces were freckled with Vesek's blood, and they looked frightened now, more scared than sick.
"You," she said, looking at the name on his badge, "Greeley, how many men went aboard the Star Destroyer?"
"Two teams of five," Greeley said, "but…"
"Where are the other five men?"
"They came back before us."
On the bed, Vesek made a throaty groaning sound and shifted his weight, rolling onto his side so that his back was to them. The other two men stared at him with matching expressions of encroaching panic as the droid led them away.
"Hey, Doc, what's the good word?"
She turned and saw that Gat, the Devish, had left his bed and made his way over to see her. He was gazing at the guard on the blood-stained bunk, fingering his broken horn with the unconscious compulsions of someone prodding a loose tooth with his tongue.
"Nothing you need to worry about."
"I heard you say something about the bubble."
"I'm just playing it safe," Zahara said, "until we get a better handle on things."
The Devish cocked his head and then nodded. "If there's anything I can do, let me know, okay?"
"Thanks, Gat. I'll keep that in mind." Without thinking, she put one hand on his shoulder and felt another pair of eyes on her from across the room.
Austin was glaring at her.
And smiling.
She walked back to her workstation, thumbed the console, and watched as Kloth's face materialized on the screen in front of her. Some kind of contrast malfunction had rendered the image too bright, making it appear bleached and monochromatic. He was sitting at his desk, the viewport behind him partly eclipsed by the massive bulk of the Star Destroyer's underside directly above. It blocked out more stars than she had expected and gave the odd appearance of having arrived at their destination.
"Dr. Cody? What is it?"
"I'm down here with five of the men from the boarding party," she said.
"How are they?"
"Not good. I'm placing them in the quarantine bubble. Where's Captain Sartoris?"
"In his quarters, I assume. But Dr. Cody…"
"I'll need him up here, too," she said. "What about the other five?"
"That's just it." Kloth shook his head and she realized for the first time that the pallor on his face had nothing to do with the contrast of the monitor screen. "The second team never came back."
Chapter 11
Red Map
Sartoris was dreaming when the knock on the door awakened him.
In the dream he was still wandering around the Destroyer, alone. The rest of his party-Austin, Vesek, Armitage, the engineers and troopers-was dead and gone. Something aboard the Destroyer had picked them off, one by one. Each man's departure had been marked by a scream, followed by a sickening crack that Sartoris seemed to feel as much as hear.
Sartoris kept moving, trying to ignore a nagging itch that had spread across the skin of his stomach like a rash. He knew it was only a matter of time before the beast, whatever it was, came after him. It wouldn't be long before he glimpsed its true face, if it had one. Maybe it didn't; perhaps it was simply sickness personified, a brainless and ravenous void that sucked in life.
A maze of hallways stood ahead of him, and Sartoris's pace faltered. He was lost and he knew it. He wasn't even sure if he was heading toward the thing or away from it. The skin around his abdomen itched worse and he stopped to scratch it and felt something impressed on the flesh itself, like a tattoo or a mesh of wrinkles. His dream-self tugged up his shirttail from his pants and he looked down at the skin of his side and saw that there was in fact something printed on his side, some kind of map-a map of the Star Destroyer. The diagrams disappeared into his flesh, and he realized he'd have to open himself up to read it. Steeling himself, he hooked the first two fingers of his right hand and raked them as hard as he could into the muscle above his hip, ignoring the dry-ice spike of pain and thrusting in deeper to peel back the outer tissue layer. The fat came loose from his flank with a sickening ease. Blood gushed out of his side, hot and steaming, running down his legs and filling up his boots.
When he woke up, a scream at his lips, the knocking had turned into pounding.
He sat up, shivered with a kind of all-over wetness, and for a queasy instant thought he was still bleeding. But the hot sticky moisture clinging to his skin was only perspiration-it pasted his hair to his brow and stuck his uniform to his back. The only part of his body that wasn't wet was the inside of his mouth; it was bone-dry.
Opening the door of his quarters he saw two guards in orange bio-hazard suits and masks standing there, looking like refugees from his interrupted dream.
"Captain Sartoris?"
He blinked. "What's this?"
"Sir, we've been instructed to bring you down to the infirmary."
"Why?"
A pause, then: "Orders, sir."
"Whose?" Sartoris asked, and made it easy for them. "The warden's or Dr. Cody's?"
The guards exchanged a glance. The glare off their face-shields made it hard to say which one responded. "I'm not sure, sir. But…"
"Who gave the order to gear up?" Sartoris asked, but he was already thinking about Austin's cough and Greeley's vomiting, and the others, all of them. Too late he wished he'd conferred with Warden Kloth about the other party before going back, to his quarters. It had been a small act of defiance that had blown up in his face, another poor decision in a long and self-destructive chain of questionable choices. He ought to have reported back first: swallowed his agitation and just done it.
"Better come with us, sir."
Sartoris took a step forward to try to identify the men inside the mask. "I feel fine," he said, and although this was the truth, it felt like a lie, maybe because of the guards' reaction-when he came forward, they both took one big step back.
"How are Austin and the engineer, Greeley?"
"Austin's dead, sir. He died about an hour ago."
"What?" Sartoris gaped at them, feeling gut-punched. "That's impossible. I was just talking to him." How long had he been up here sleeping? A new thought occurred to him then-a desperate realization of an eventuality that he might have to face, sooner rather than later. "What about Vesek?"
"I really couldn't say, sir. They're all in quarantine. I think. " The guard, whom he'd finally identified as a short-timer named Saltern, was taking another step backward. "Maybe you better just come up and talk to her yourself."
"Dr. Cody, you mean."
"Yes, sir."
Sartoris didn't ask any more questions. He came out, and felt the guards falling in a step behind him.