XLV.

When the sound of distant screaming, howling, and gunfire reached the CIC, everyone turned and looked at each other with great alarm. Alberts, who was standing guard just outside the hatch, raised the nozzle of his flamethrower and pointed it down the hall towards the rear of the ship. Nothing appeared in the red-lit corridor however. The sounds remained quite far off. Franklyn and Oliphant appeared in the hatch behind him and peered down the corridor as well. 

“What is it?” the navigator asked. “What’s going on?”

Alberts shook his head. Pulling out his data pad, he tried calling the Captain, but the device could not establish a link. He tried calling several more times as the sounds of screaming and fighting continued, but nothing went through. He also tried calling Havisham, but without success.

Eventually they heard the clattering of feet approaching and a small group of crewmen appeared, led by Pullman. Finding themselves faced with the nozzle of Albert's flamethrower pointed in their direction, they slid to a halt

“Alberts!” Pullman called. “What are you doing?!”

The foreman lowered the nozzle, but only by an inch or two. He held up a hand of warning, to prevent the men in the corridor from approaching any further. “Pullman, you tell me what’s happening. I can’t get through to anyone.”

“Everyone on the loading deck’s gone mad!” Pullman exclaimed.  “Everyone started fighting each other, and monsters started popping out of the floor!” Pullman took a step forward.

Alberts raised the flamethrower again. “Pullman! Stop! I have orders not to let anyone near the CIC.”

Pullman obeyed, but looked confused.

Stepping out of the CIC, Franklyn came up beside Alberts and reached over to grab the end of his flamethrower. 

“Here, let me see that,” Franklyn said, and switched off the pilot light on the tip of the nozzle.

“What are you—!” Alberts exclaimed, trying to wrestle the flamethrower’s nozzle away from the navigator. Had Franklyn gone mad? Alberts had to reignite the pilot light immediately.

Franklyn had a firm grip on the nozzle, however, and refused to let go. Suddenly he opened his mouth and began to howl in a terrible way. He reached up with his free hand and tried to grab at Albert’s neck, but the foreman caught his wrist and held on for dear life. The flesh of the navigator’s howling face began to ripple and erupt, mere inches from Albert’s own. The foreman could feel the skin of Franklyn’s wrist rippling under his shirt sleeve and the bones within started cracking and sliding past each other. He could hear Oliphant shouting something but could not make it out.

Down the corridor, another howl erupted. Pullman and a few of the others with him spun around to find their rearmost compatriot quivering and beginning to transform. They shouted in surprise and ducked past him back toward the rear of the ship. The thing lurched after them in pursuit.

Struggling as hard as he could and trying to free himself, Alberts watched as the navigator’s head lost all its former shape and transformed into a hideous writhing mass of bulbous flesh, merely inches away from his own.

Then suddenly Oliphant was beside them. The pilot pressed something into the side of the thing that had been Franklyn and there was the loud sound of an electrical discharge. Jerking, the monster loosened its grip on Alberts enough that he managed to break free. Oliphant pressed the device against the creature again and let it have another discharge of electricity. It fell to the floor but remained upright.

The first jolt of the stunner had partially gone through Alberts as well, since he had been touching the monster. As a result, he had lost a bit of motor control, and Oliphant had to physically pull him back into the CIC, where he stood, shakily, partially dazed. Oliphant took the flamethrower nozzle from him and turned it on the man-thing that had been Franklyn. He pulled the trigger but nothing happened, and he started thwacking it. Realizing there was something wrong with the nozzle, he turned to Alberts. He did not have to ask the question, however. The answer was already on Alberts’ lips, despite the mental fog he was experiencing due to the electrical blast.

“Flick the… Flick the wheel at the end,” Alberts gasped, trying to mime the motion that would ignite the pilot light.

The man-thing fell to the ground, but then immediately began to rise again, turning toward the CIC hatch. Just as it reached full height, it  let out a hideous scream and began to reach forward with its appendages, but at the last moment Oliphant succeeded in igniting the pilot light and sprayed the Franklyn-creature with fire, nearly roasting himself in the process. The fire splashed against the creature and singed Oliphant’s hair and eyebrows.

The creature screamed again and fell backwards, scrabbling to get away. Oliphant waited a few moments, then hosed it down again with a fresh stream of fire. Eventually the thing lay still. He stood there looking at it, shaking with adrenaline.

Having recovered a bit, Alberts eventually took the flamethrower nozzle back from Oliphant.

The small device that Oliphant had used to electrocute the creature lay on the ground just outside the CIC. Stooping for a moment, he picked it. It was the small pink stun-gun he had bought for Maybelline at Skapstoti.

Maybelline was hiding behind a workstation with her hands over her head, but she rose when Oliphant approached and handed the stun gun back to her.

“I’m sorry I scared you,” Oliphant said. When Franklyn had started to transform, he had rushed at her, yelling something incomprehensible about her stun gun. She had been quite frightened when the howling started and suddenly Oliphant leapt at her and started manhandling her, sticking his hands in her pockets.  Swallowing hard, she took the stun gun back and stuck it in her pocket again.

Feorn, who had been crouching as well, slowly stood up and peeked out of the navigator’s area.

In some part of his mind, Alberts dully registered that with Franklyn dead and the Captain out of reach and possibly dead as well, he was now the Pater Noster’s commander. Taking a deep breath, he stepped out into the corridor again and peered back into the depths of the ship. Turning his head slightly, he called out to the others in the CIC. “I think we have to officially acknowledge we’re a plague ship.” He paused. “Feorn, start transmitting the plague signal.”

Feorn remained rooted in place however, partly out of shock, partly because he was not used to taking orders from Alberts. Previously, he had only taken orders from Franklyn or the Captain.

Oliphant sensed the change in Alberts' demeanor to that of a commander. Noticing Feorn’s reticence, and acting on some instinctive recognition that a commander requires an Executive Officer to make sure his commands are followed, Oliphant pointed harshly at Feorn and barked Alberts’ order at him. Alberts had played the role of Captain Dale’s XO, and now Oliphant was fulfilling that role for Alberts. 

“You heard him, Feorn! Activate the plague signal!”

Finally stirred to action, Feorn moved over to a control station and pressed a series of commands that would activate a radio beacon that would warn anyone nearby that the Pater Noster was carrying deadly contagion.

“We can’t take the ship to Earth,” Alberts called. “Feorn, what outer planets will we be passing on our way in to Sol?”

The apprentice navigator needed the spurs laid to him again by Oliphant before he managed to read off the list of planetary bodies they would be passing.

“All right, this is what we’ll do,” Alberts said, after hearing the list. “We’ll put the ship into orbit around Jupiter. We can wait for help there. Feorn, how much longer until we’ll be able to speak to someone at Sol?”

Feorn did not need any prompting this time before he responded. “Four and half hours, maybe.”

“OK. Make the necessary calculations to put us into Jupiter’s orbit, then pass them along to Oliphant.”

Feorn obeyed and got to work on it,  though he had to calm himself sufficiently before he could really focus. His supervisor had just transformed into a monster and been burnt to a crisp after all. Franklyn's smoking ruin was only a few steps outside the CIC. The smell of chemical fire and burnt flesh was still in the air.

Alberts called out again to Oliphant. “You should get some more weapons for yourself out of the weapons closet. Something more powerful than that stunner.”

Oliphant agreed and moved to get more arms for himself, Maybelline, and Feorn.

Alberts continued to stand guard at the door to the CIC, watching the corridor, but his mind was racing. This disease—whatever it was—was beyond anything he had ever heard of. The potential threat it posed to the human race was worse than any form of flesh-eating disease  or any other pandemic in history. He could envision it sweeping over the world in a matter of days or weeks, carried by symptomless carriers to all corners of the globe before they transformed and infected others. The thing could then spread to all corners of the galaxy, wherever mankind had settled.

It occurred to Alberts that Constantini must have come to much similar conclusions. How Constantini had (apparently) retained some degree of control over himself while partially transformed was still a mystery. Perhaps the disease had mutated, becoming more potent, since it infected the ship’s former technician.

Constantini had come to one very specific conclusion about how to stop the thing. Alberts sincerely hoped he would not have to do something equally drastic, but he knew he had to at least contemplate the possibility and prepare for the worst. 

He tried to get through to the Captain again, and Havisham, in the possibility that they were still alive, but neither call connected.

XLVI.

Having found a dark corner in the bowels of the ship to secret themselves, Rachaels, Dale, and the others hunkered down and waited. They had slipped into a small utility room that barely had enough space for all of them.

The sporadic, muffled sounds of screaming, fighting, and howling reverberated through the bones of the ship, though these sounds were becoming more infrequent. It seemed likely that the things, both in their human and monstrous forms, were hunting down survivors, either to kill or infect.

Occasionally the sound of footsteps came clattering or walking past them in their hiding spot, and they held their breaths. At one point someone or something tried the knob, but Rachaels had wedged something against the door so it would not budge.

Dale and Rachaels tried to call whomever they could think of, but few of the calls went through— and those that did went unanswered.

Dale looked from Marala, to Havisham, to Jones, to McManus, and finally to Rachaels. It was possible that any one of them might be infected. It was possible they either did not know it or they were biding their time to strike. He put the thought from his mind though. There was no point in worrying about that. In one corner of his mind, Dale realized he was placing remarkably little thought into the loss of his business interests. The reason for this, of course, was because everyone in this time period had the imperative necessity to contain pandemics drilled into their minds from their earliest years—through movies, songs, schooling, PSAs, and even sermon illustrations. All other matters were secondary. In order to survive in space, the human race had been forced to elevate self-sacrifice to one of the highest of virtues. Consequently, now that the threat level was unmistakable, all of Captain Dale’s thoughts were bent toward how to eradicate the pathogen and how to save the crew that remained. He reasoned that there must be some other survivors out there besides the group he was with.

As the adrenaline died down, Dale was able to start analyzing what he had seen so far. No matter how you looked at it, this situation was completely FUBAR, unsalvageable. It was a near-certainty that the things were capable of at least some kind of intelligence and cooperation with each other. If even a single one of these creatures reached a densely populated or highly trafficked location, the consequences could be astronomical. It could even lead to the extinction of the human race.

This thing was not like any kind of flesh eating disease that had ever appeared since humanity began colonizing space, at least so far as Captain Dale knew. Some of the flesh eating diseases catalogued in the medical database were known to alter the thought processes of the infected, causing them to act in ways more likely to spread the contagion, but Dale had never heard of a disease that could so totally subsume the mind of the infected—if that was what truly was happening. It was almost as if the infected were behaving as one singular entity. If the things gained control of the ship, they could bring it into any populated port in the Sol System and release a pandemic unlike anything the human race had ever experienced before. 

“We need to get to the skiff,” Rachaels eventually announced. The screams had grown silent by then. All they had heard for the past few minutes was the occasional howl.

Dale had nearly forgotten about the small government craft that was still attached to the side of the Pater Noster.

Rachaels continued. “The skiff is faster than this boat. We can go on ahead, warn Sol and whomever we meet about what to expect.”

Dale nodded but held up a finger to indicate he was thinking. He looked over at Marala and the crewmen. They were all relatively safe here for the moment, but getting to the government craft would mean traversing a long, winding path through the bowels of the ship before they got to the correct airlock, exposing them all to whatever dangers they might encounter along the way. Leaving them behind and going on ahead was not an option though. Only Dale and Rachaels were armed, out of the entire group, except for Marala with her bent piece of fabricator’s rod. There was also the possibility that one or more of them might be infected already, and breaking up the group could only heighten the possibility of a sudden and bloody betrayal. He could not believe any of them were infected, not with what they had gone through together getting here, it would be the height of folly to presume anything. The Thing was cruel—that much was certain. Dale had a vague feeling that the thing might be intelligent enough to prevent some of the infected from revealing themselves indefinitely—maybe not until long after the events that were transpiring now had concluded.

“All right, we’ll head for the skiff,” Dale agreed. “All of us. We’ll take it slow. Avoid anyone we run into. Just to be clear, I don’t think we can trust anyone we might encounter at this point. If we can’t avoid them, even if they appear to be uninfected, we tell them to hide. And we certainly don’t tell them anything about our plans, OK?”

Captain Dale made sure everyone understood, then Rachaels cautiously opened the door to their hiding place and led the way out. Havisham followed, pointing Rachaels towards the airlock. Then came Jones, McManus, Marala, and finally Dale bringing up the rear.

XLVII.

They had not gone far when loud howling started up behind them, prompting Rachaels to rapidly seek out a new hiding spot, which turned out to be a small room used for storing spare parts. They all clambered inside and Dale quietly swung the door shut behind them. The howling stopped, but then a few moments later they heard slow shuffling footsteps pass right by their door. They could hear the thing taking deep, snuffling breaths. It passed them by and continued on its way.

It was a long time before Dale opened the door again, but just before he did so, another purge cycle began. After consulting with Rachaels, they decided to wait until the end of the cycle to continue. The mechanical screeching might mask any sound they made, but they were too likely to run into something they would rather avoid. It was going to take a long time getting to the airlock.

XLVIII.

The hours flowed slowly by as Alberts stood guard at the portside entrance to the CIC. The other entrance, on the starboard side, was sealed tight. There was no possibility of anyone getting in that way unless they cut their way through with an acetylene torch. Alberts could have swung the portside hatch closed and sealed it just as securely, but he was unwilling to do so, reluctant to completely cut the CIC off from the rest of the ship. Closing the hatch would make it even more difficult for any wireless signals to get through to him.

Alberts shook himself to ward off drowsiness, then did a double take, peering into the darkness at the other end of the corridor that led toward the CIC. The dark shape of a man stood there, barely visible, unmoving.

“Pullman? Is that you?” Alberts called.

The man remained silent and unmoving, staring back at him with an expressionless face. There seemed to be a peculiar dead look to his eyes. Neither the red glow of the emergency lighting, nor the light pouring out of the CIC, seemed to be reflected there.

Squinting, Alberts saw that there were others with Pullman, other crewmen and Feds, all standing just as motionless and inert. Then, in the extreme back, behind all the others, Alberts caught sight of something else—one of the monstrosities. It stood there silently and peered back at him. Neither Pullman nor the others with him were reacting to it like they should have.

Alberts flared the flamethrower in his hands a few times to make sure his eyes were not deceiving him. The brief flares of firelight illuminated the menacing crowd sharply against the shadows behind them.

If Pullman had not been infected before, he certainly was now. It was the only explanation for his lack of concern for the monstrosity behind him.

Alberts assumed a pose of readiness as if daring the things to approach, but they began to slowly step backwards silently and disappear into the darkness.

“Feorn!” the foreman called out. “Bring me a flare!”

A moment later, the young navigator stuck his head out of the CIC and handed him what he wanted—it was from an emergency kit in the CIC. Alberts ignited it by slapping it on his knee, then tossed it down the corridor toward where Pullman had been standing. They had gotten too close without him seeing. The light from the flare would hopefully prevent that from happening again.

Eventually Feorn called out that the Pater Noster should be within range of the Sol relay and that any moment now Sol would hear the warning messages they were transmitting and register their plague signal. The moment that was detected, Sol Central would suddenly make the Pater Noster their number one priority.

“Let me know the moment you have two-way communication with anyone,” Alberts commanded. “Oliphant, the moment we make a connection, get on the horn with literally everyone you can think of and tell them about what’s happening here. All the news stations, all the charities, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the video-loggers, the Mob, anyone.”

“Yes, sir,” the pilot called back.

A few minutes later, Feorn spoke up again. There was a note of discomfort in his voice. “Alberts, I don’t think we’re transmitting,” he called. 

The foreman grunted and called out to the pilot. “Oliphant, check what Feorn’s doing.”

A minute later, the pilot’s voice came back. “We’ve got a ping from the relay station. And we’re receiving, but Feorn’s right—I don’t think we’re transmitting. There’s no handshake with the relay. Here, let me try something…”

Oliphant went over and grabbed a portable, battery-powered radio from somewhere in the CIC and started scrubbing through the frequencies, listening for the messages that Feorn was trying to transmit. Nothing came over the radio, even when he dialed it to the frequency reserved for the plague signal.

“Looks like more sabotage,” Oliphant called out.

The foreman did not respond, and Oliphant had to peek out the door to check if Alberts was still there. “You all right?” he asked.

Alberts had his eyes fixed on the far end of the corridor. “Yeah, I’m just thinking.” After a minute he stepped back into the CIC, though he kept the nozzle of the flamethrower pointed towards the hatch. “We have to scuttle the ship,” he announced. “We’ll program the ship to take a dive into Jupiter, then use the lifeboats to escape.”

Alberts could feel the eyes fixed on the back of his head as he said it, but he kept his own attention fixed on the open hatch in front of him.

Oliphant spoke up. “Alberts… we don’t know how many other survivors there are still left on the ship. Not everyone might be infected.

The foreman was envisioning in his mind the astronomically vast number of people who had died of flesh-eating diseases over the years. If decisive action was not taken, the number of dead from this new pandemic might rise to dwarf a number that was already incalculable. “No. The risk is too great. If we can’t communicate, if we can’t prepare, this is the only choice we have.”

Oliphant, Feorn, and Maybelline blinked at each other. They knew Alberts was right, but it was hard to believe they were in a situation like this. They had read about such things, seen countless films and PSA’s meant to drive home the necessity to make hard sacrifices when you lived and worked in space, but to actually find themselves in such a situation was something else entirely.

“What if…” Feorn began, “one of us is infected?”

Alberts risked looking away from the hatch for a brief moment to lock eyes with each of them. “That’s a risk we’ll just have to take. Besides, if one of us besides Franklyn was going to reveal some hidden monstrous nature, I think it would have happened already.”

Alberts turned back to the hatch. “Feorn,” he said, “make the calculations for Oliphant that will put the Pater Noster in to Jupiter’s atmosphere—not an orbital approach, a dive. Do it now.”

The apprentice navigator moved to obey. Oliphant came over to the hatch to speak to the foreman. “You know, when we eject, someone could come right into the CIC and prevent the ship from crashing into Jupiter. I mean, it would be difficult if they weren’t a pilot, but it’s possible.”

“Yes, I realize that,” Alberts replied. “That’s why I’m staying, to make sure the ship goes down.”

Oliphant nodded, then put his hand briefly on the foreman’s shoulder for a moment. Then he went back to his workstation to await the course alterations from Feorn. He explained quietly to Maybelline what Albert intended to do. Instinctively, she started to raise an objection to the plan, not wanting any harm to come to the foreman, but Oliphant shook his head and she became silent.