I quickened my pace. Only my feet thudded in the silence. Yet my chaser was also running faster. I felt sick with fright. I summoned Katia, but after alerting her was unable to grasp a sentence, a command, anything. The faceless silhouette seemed to be gaining on me.
Faceless was right. It had no features, no detail. Eventually I reached an exit. The airlock sequence amputated the chamber from me. I did not stop running, even when I realised that the doors behind me were remaining closed. The shadow-man remained with the sleepers.
But I had seen enough. It was not human. Just a man-shaped hole, a spectre.
I found the quickest route back to the command deck of the Wild Pallas. Immediately I ordered Katia to begin a rigorous search for intruders, though I knew of course that no intruder could have escaped her attention thus far. My Katia was omniscient. She would have known the exact location of every rat, every fly, aboard the craft; except that aboard the ship there were no flies, no rats.
I knew that the shadow was not a revived sleeper. None of the reefers had been opened or vacated. A stowaway was out of the question — what was there to eat or drink, apart from the supplies dispensed by the computer?
My mind veered towards the illogical. Could someone have entered the ship during its flight — someone dressed as a chameleon? That imagined intruder would have somehow had to achieve invisibility from Katia’s eyes. Clearly impossible, even disregarding the unlikely manoeuvres required to match our velocity and position undetected.
I chewed on my lip, aware that each second of indecision counted against Janos. For my own defence, Katia would permit me access to a weapon, provided of course that the existence of the intruder was proven. Alternatively, I might best confront the situation by not confronting it. I could perform surgery on Janos without straying into those regions of the ship that the intruder had apparently claimed as its haunt. In a day or so, therefore, this ordeal might be over, and I could re-enter reefersleep. The most faceless, inhuman entities I would have to contend with upon my next revival would be Solpace Axis customs officials. Let them worry about the unseen extra passenger. Hadn’t the shadow permitted me safe slumber so far?
I chuckled, though to my ears it sounded more like a death-rattle. I was still frightened, but for once my hands had stopped playing arpeggios on the keys of an invisible piano.
I absorbed myself in technical eidetics outlining the medical systems Katia and I were about to employ. The gleaming semi-robotic tools were the culmination of Yellowstone’s surgical sciences. Even so, they would undoubtedly appear crude by Earth-side standards. This dichotomy galled me. Even if Janos would necessarily worsen by the time we arrived, how could we be certain that we were not reducing his chances with our outdated medical intervention? Perhaps Earth would have accelerated so far beyond our capabilities that the equation was no longer balanced in our favour.
Yet Katia would have weighed the issue minutely before selecting the appropriate course of action. Perhaps, then, it was best simply to silence one’s qualms and do whatever was required.
Drones assisted me in carrying the medical machinery into the crew reefer room, where my five colleagues lay in frozen sleep. I wore a facemask and a gloved jumpsuit, inwoven with a heating circuit. Katia would lower the room’s temperature before slightly increasing Janos’s own.
‘Ready, Uri?’ she asked. ‘Let’s start.’
So we commenced, my eyes constantly flicking to the open reefer I hoped soon to re-enter. The room rapidly chilled, lights burning frigid blue from the overheads.
Janos’s reefer cracked open with a gasp of release cold. I looked at Janos, still and white and somehow distant. Let that distance remain, I prayed. After all, we were about to open his head.
Katia, in fact, had already performed some preliminary surgery. The skull had been exposed, skin pulled back as if framing the white pistil of a flesh-leaved flower. Slender probes entered the scalp via drilled holes, trailing glowing coloured cables into a matrix of input points in the domed head of the reefer. The work was angstrom-precise, rendered with a robot’s deadening perfection. I had been briefed: those cables were substituting for the cybernetic implants within his brain that had fallen victim to the Melding Plague.
‘When you have the top of the skull free you should feed it back along the cables,’ Katia told me. ‘It’s crucial that we don’t lose cyber-interface with Janos.’
I prepped the mechanical bone-saw. ‘Why? What use is he to us?’
‘There are good reasons. If you’re still interested we can discuss it after the operation.’
The saw hummed into life, the rotary tip glinting evilly. Katia vectored the blade down, smoothly gnawing into the pale bone. Little blood oozed free but the sound struck an unpleasant resonance with me. Katia made three expert circumferential passes, then retracted. I took a deep breath, then placed gloved fingers on the top of Janos’s head. The scalp felt loose, like half of a chocolate egg. I eased the section of skull free with a wet, sucking slurp, exposing the damp pinkish mass of dura and gyrus, snuggling in the lower bowl of the skull. I took special care to maintain the integrity of the connections as I separated the bonework. For a while, humbled, I could only stand in awe of this fantastic organ, easily the most complex, alien thing my eyes had ever gazed on. And yet it managed to look so disappointingly vegetable.
‘Husband, we must proceed,’ warned Katia. ‘I have warmed Janos to a dangerously high body temperature, whilst not greatly increasing his metabolic rate. We don’t have time to waste.’
I felt sweat beading my forehead. I nodded. Inward, inward. Katia swung a new battery of blades and microlasers into play.
We operated to the music of Sibelius.
It was intriguing and repellent work.
I succeeded in detaching my mind to some extent, so that I was able to regard the parting brain tissue as dead but somehow sacred meat. The micro-implants came out one by one, too small for the naked eye to discern detail, barbed hunks of corroded metal. The corrosion, observable under a microscope, was the external evidence of the cybervirus. I studied it with rank feelings of abstract distaste. The virus behaved like its biological namesake, clamping onto the shell of the nanostructure and pulsing subversive instructions deep into its reproductive heart.
After three hours my back boiled with pain. I leaned away from the reefer, brushing a sleeve against my chilled forehead. I felt the room swimming, clotting with blobs of muggy darkness. For an instant I became disoriented, convinced that left was right and vice versa. I braced myself against the reefer as this dizziness washed over me.
‘Not long now,’ Katia said. ‘How do you feel?’
‘I’m fine. And you?’
‘I’m… fine. The op’s proceeding well.’ Katia paused, then stiffened her voice with iron resolve, businesslike detachment. ‘The next implant is the deepest. It lies between the occipital lobe and the cerebellum. We must take care to avoid lesion of the visual centre. This is the primary entoptic infeed node.’
‘In we go, then.’
The machinery snicked obediently into place. Our ciliated microprobes slid into the tissue, like flexible syringes slipping into jelly. Despite the cold I found myself hot around the collar, iced sweat prickling my skin. Another hour passed, though time had ceased to have very much meaning.
And I froze, conscious of a presence behind me, in the same room.
Compelled, I turned. The watcher was with me.
I saw now that it could not be a man. Yet it did have a humanoid form, a humanoid of my build and posture.