For a brief moment, Tor wondered how the Chief Mate had managed to secrete three sizeable hunting rifles into the tidy confines of his cabin. He now realized the competing scent alongside aquavit within Nilsen’s cabin was gun oil, not Styntin. He also realized the collapsing .22 was the very weakest of Nilsen’s armoury he could have issued into the care of Tor, although ultimately it was Mihailov who’d wielded it. Fat lot of use it did him.
The remaining two rifles had removable parts for cleaning, but were considerably more robust. Tor couldn’t admit to knowing much about guns, but the weight of the weapon felt good in his hands, nervously he pulled the remaining tape from the highly polished and lacquered stock and raised the rifle. Sammy still didn’t react.
“Sammy, you asleep?” Tor asked around the body of rifle.
Ten meters away and Tor heard the wet sound of teeth ripping cartilage and tendons from bone. He felt bile rise into his throat, burning his oesophagus once again, the taste had become a familiar tang of wrongness. Something within the shadows was eating Sammy, the stewards flesh was grey. Numb, Tor wheeled to the opposite edge of the corridor, sidestepping until parallel with Sammy. Now he could see a shape flensing meat from bone, a dark outline working away at the Stewards left side.
Momentarily, Tor glanced at the face of Sammy. Muscles slackened, his mouth downturned, he looked partially melted but at peace. Then he noticed whatever lay in the darkness had stopped and was looking at him. Dry eyeballs reflected the flickering emergency lighting like orange peel. “Diego, stay back,” Tor said around the citric tang of bile.
A sepulchral grunt emanated from the shadow, Tor watched the figure rise to unsteady legs. The figure shambled out from the darkness, blood slicked everything below the nose, a ragged wound showed the internal workings of the necks musculature as it turned to look at Diego who stood to Tor’s right.
Tor stared down the scope, concentrating the crosshairs on the figures cranium and realized he was looking impossibly at Jovan Peralta, still wearing an EVA suit marked with the crossed green palms of the Saudi Shipping Company. Wide feral eyes stared at Tor, devoid of recognition. In death his face had regained the movement denied from Peralta in life, his mouth chewed pieces of Sammy Cruz with full mobility.
Tor had been here before, knew better. He yearned to squeeze the trigger but couldn’t. He’d mourned the loss of this man, albeit professionally and selfishly, and yet he stood before him, resurrected and deranged. A malfunctioning abomination to the man he’d been. Tor tried to remember, it was an infection. But infections could be cured. His finger palsied as his body once more succumbed to hesitancy. A madness wept like squid ink through his shattering synapses.
Peralta cocked his head backward, his features coloured in a bizarre wash of pallid postmortis Asian brown and crimson. His mouth distended far beyond its natural limit and a nascent inhaled screech shattered the silence of the moment.
Suddenly, Peralta dropped to the floor, a neat bullet hole perforated the centre of his forehead, old blood welled from the wound a second later. Tor paused, had he fired the rifle? He didn’t remember the bang or the recoil, as he lifted his eye from the rifles scope he felt the hot barrel of a silenced revolver singe the hair at his temple.
A little further down the corridor, to the extent his bodily frozen field of sight would allow, he could see Diego being accosted by a man in what looked like a lab coat, he was also armed and he was pulling Diego’s hands -up in surrender – down to bind them.
“You need to come with us,” an oily female voice said.
Tor recognized it immediately. “Dr. Smith, I have a crewman seriously ill aboard the Riyadh, we need your assistance,” Tor replied, but never turned to face the woman he’d shared a bed with just nights before and the gun she held to his head now. So much had changed, that moment was like a counterpoint to his hypersexual youth and everything had collapsed around it. Of course the cascade had started before that, when Nikolai Falmendikov overrode his cryo bed, or even perhaps long before. Realization took flame in his mind, the kindling there for days. “It was you who helped Falmendikov come here.”
“You will be briefed as soon as you come with us, Captain.” Days before, Rebecca Smith had spoken to Tor with passion, now her voice was flat, analytical.
“Why did you bring us here? Why did my people die?” Tor turned, the silencer was held disconcertingly still, an inch from the bridge of his nose, beyond the blurred barrel of the revolver he could see Dr. Smith, her face reverted back to stern professionalism, bereft of humanity, her features all straight lines beneath a tightly pinned bun. “Why the Riyadh? Why my ship?”
Tor heard his voice waver, felt tears moisten his eyes. Rebecca Smith just stared then beckoned the male over. “Artyom, take this man’s rifle and restrain him,” the direction of her attention shifted back to Tor. “I suggest you hand him that rifle, else I will scatter your brains across this corridor much as I did your bosun.”
For a millisecond, Tor considered wheeling around and trying to get a shot off at Dr. Smith or Artyom. Where he’d failed to kill Falmendikov or Peralta, feral and infected, he felt sure he could kill these two dead eyed people in lab coats with emotional impunity. Rabid, Falmendikov and Peralta had still been his crew. But Dr. Smith was not and never had been. He’d already reconciled that fact days ago in a dark compartment of his mind called denial, but while he knew it, he couldn’t fathom it.
Tor let the rifle fall to his side, then let it clatter to the deck. He became aware of a meaty thumping growing in intensity behind the still slumped form of Sammy and beyond the hydraulic doors to District Six. “You are killing us, you are killing my crew. Stop this!”
Dr. Smith ignored him. “Hurry Artyom, I don’t trust the doors in this place.”
“We control the doors,” replied Artyom his accent thick Russian, a messy tousle of curly hair sat above thick, circular, horn-framed glasses. He pulled black cable ties from the voluminous back pocket of his pristine white coat.
In the doorway, Sammy awoke half eaten and spasmed like a patient jolted by a defibrillator. Still moist eyes focused on the people in the corridor, then fixed on Diego. Shambling from the shadows, Sammy lurched toward Diego who tried to get up, struggling against the binds that held his hands behind his back. Diego flopped like a fish on the dust covered deck and whimpered as he saw what Tor saw. The stewards left arm had been consumed to the elbow and a little beyond. The ulna and radius protruded from the ragged stump of his upper arm, the bone gouged with teeth marks and slicked with blood. Blood dripped from the exposed bone as Sammy closed the gap to Diego.
“Do something,” pleaded Tor, tears running freely down his face, his mind unable to comprehend as Artyom finished ziplocking his hands behind his back.
“Be easier to take just one back,” said Artyom, nonchalantly.
“Agreed,” answered Dr. Smith, the elongated revolver trained on the developing scene.
Diego was crying too now, Sammy was almost upon him. Tor struggled against his binds, trying to kick backwards at Artyom, the Russian put a solid boot into the back of Tor’s knee. Tor felt something within the mechanism of the joint pop and tumbled to the deck.
“Oh God, oh God no!” Wailed Diego, unable to find his feet.
“I can shoot your precious crewman now, and save him the indignity of turning, or,” said Dr. Smith, flippantly, “I can let your Steward feast, and believe me Tor, he is very hungry.”