‘Margarita?’
‘I don’t like the salt.’
‘But you’re holding up okay?’
‘You know,’ said Rye, ‘everyone else on this rig may be desperate to explain themselves, to be understood, but I deal with my own shit.’
Rye crouched behind a snowdrift. She hunted by moonlight. She watched dim shadow-shapes of Hyperion passengers standing motionless on the ice. She used infrared binoculars. Distance-to-target calibrations, like a sniper-scope. The landscape in negative. Pale, luminescent figures on a black landscape. Body temperature was way down. The figures had barely any heat signature. Rye couldn’t understand how they were still walking around. They should be frozen. They should be starved. There were a dozen different ways they should be dead.
She circled a crowd of passengers gathered at the waterline, mesmerised by the installation lights of the rig. She stalked a man in a dark suit who seemed to have strayed from the herd
She stepped from behind a snowdrift.
‘Hey,’ she called. ‘Wanna buy a Rolex?’
The man turned. He took a couple of stumbling steps towards her, arms outstretched. She zapped him with the Taser. He fell in an epileptic spasm.
Rye threw a sleeping bag over the prostrate man and bound him with rope.
She gave the guy another jolt of current. She lashed him tight to a stepladder and dragged him to the zodiac.
She laid him in the boat. She pulled back the sleeping bag and shone a flashlight in the man’s face. Metal erupting from flesh. A dog-collar. The man was a priest.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ asked Jane. Rye had been spending a lot of time on C deck. Jane had tracked her to a vacant storeroom.
‘These freaks rule the world now. They are the dominant species. We better find out exactly what makes them tick.’
Four tables. Four passengers strapped down.
‘There are dozens of them out there on the ice,’ said Rye. She was wearing a lab coat, gloves and a heavy rubber apron. ‘They’ve been there a while. Minus forty and they are walking around in ball gowns and tuxedos. The average guy would succumb to
hypothermia in a couple of minutes. These folks have lasted days. Something pretty fundamental has happened to their metabolism.’
‘You brought these fuckers on board without telling anyone? I’ll help you put them over the side. We’ll do it now, do it quick. If the guys in the canteen find out about this they’ll break your fucking legs.’
‘These creatures were adrift aboard Hyperion for weeks,’ said Rye. ‘No sign that they ate or drank. What the hell makes these things tick? Aren’t you curious? Do they run on air, or what?’
‘Damn. This guy’s a priest.’
The priest’s eyeballs were black. He stared up at her. He didn’t blink.
A Bible on a nearby chair.
‘It was in his pocket,’ said Rye.
‘King James. Good choice.’
An inscription on the flyleaf.
‘David. Is that you? You used to be David.’
Jane recited the Lord’s Prayer.
‘Our Father, who art in heaven…’
The priest slowly lowered his head and closed his eyes.
‘Doc, have you any idea how bad it smells down here? It smells like ammonia. My eyes are watering.’
‘Let me show you something.’
Rye put on goggles and a mouth mask. She picked up a scalpel.
‘Hey,’ said Jane. ‘This guy’s still alive, all right? He’s still breathing.’
Rye paid no attention. She stabbed Father David in the shoulder. She twisted the blade, dug it in.
‘Whoa. Hold the fuck on.’
The priest lay, unconcerned, as the knife ground bone.
‘Is he even alive?’ asked Rye, talking to herself. ‘Undead? Nosferatu? Is that what we are dealing with? I think he still has sensation. He can feel the knife. He just doesn’t care.’
Rye twisted the knife some more.
‘Less blood than I would expect,’ she said. ‘Look at his face. See his skin? Frost damage. His skin cells are turning to putty. He’s slowly rotting. Those Hyperion passengers out on the ice aren’t immortal. The cold is killing them sure enough. But it’s taking a long while.’
Rye leaned over the priest’s chest, leaving the scalpel imbedded in the man’s shoulder.
‘He seems to take a breath every couple of minutes. Can’t get close enough to hear his heartbeat, but it must be way down. Basically, he’s a vehicle. A chassis. A lump of meat steered left and right. Core body temperature doesn’t seem to matter.’
She stood back and contemplated the priest.
‘Is this what waits for us when we get home? Cities full of walking dead?’
Jane crossed the room. A table draped with a sheet.
‘What’s this?’
Rye pulled back the sheet.
‘Fucking hell,’ said Jane, covering her mouth.
A flayed body. Jane couldn’t tell if it had been male or female. Skin and muscle stripped away. A skeletal frame of bone and sinew. The body was still strapped to the table. Hands grasped. It twisted and squirmed like it was trying to sit up.
‘My God. How can it be alive?’
‘He’s dying,’ said Rye. ‘He was stumbling around out there dressed as a flamenco dancer. Blood loss and trauma are killing him as sure as they would a normal person. But it seems to be taking days. These filaments. This stuff embedded in gristle and bone. Definitely metal. It can be magnetised. But it seems to grow like hair. As far as I can tell it radiates from the central nervous system. All this stuff wrapped round his legs and arms can be traced back to his spine. And look at his head.’
Jane stood over the flayed man. The bloody skull-face watched her approach. Lipless jaws snapped and gnashed. Grinning, biting.
‘More metal, see? Lots more, centred round the brain stem. Seems pretty obvious we are dealing with some kind of super-parasite. This isn’t a man. This is a metal organism wearing a skin suit. Limited lifespan. Slowly kills the host. It’s like ivy round a tree. God knows where it is from. Tough to kill. I gave one of them a dose of Librium. Should have been fatal. Didn’t seem to bother him much. These things have the nervous system of a cockroach.’
Rye stood back and folded her arms.
‘We have no alternative but to destroy the carrier. This is a terminal illness. Nobody will recover. That much is clear. Memories, personality. All gone. So we don’t have to feel bad about killing them. It’s pest control. It’s not murder. Grenade, if you have one. Otherwise, a shot in the head will kill them stone dead. If you shoot them in the gut, if you blow off an arm or leg, they will keep trucking long enough to bite a chunk out of you. Headshot. Every time.’
‘You’re wrong,’ said Jane. ‘Something is left. Something remains.’
Jane returned to the priest. She opened the Bible.
‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and God said: “Let there be light…”’
Father David thrashed and snarled, then slowly settled like he was soothed by a lullaby.
‘See? He remembers.’
‘You don’t know for sure,’ said Rye.
‘No, I can tell. He remembers the words.’
‘We have to find out everything we can about these creatures. We can’t afford to be sentimental.’
Jane left. She came back with a shotgun. She put the barrel to the priest’s head. He sniffed it.
‘It’s all right, Patrick.’
She blew his head off. Nothing above the neck but a flap of burning scalp. She shot the three remaining specimens. Lumps of brain tissue, flash-fried by gunpowder, lay on the floor and steamed.
‘Clean up this shit and scrub the room down,’ said Jane. She pressed the shotgun to the chest of Rye’s lab coat. The hot barrel burned a scorch ring. ‘You bring any more of these fucks aboard I will personally execute you on the spot. You think I’m kidding? Try me. Just fucking try me.’