II.

On his way back into the CIC, Alberts ran into Maybelline on her way out of it again. Franklyn had probably dismissed her. She looked very upset, but Alberts did not know what to say, so he said nothing and smiled sadly at her as she passed.

Sitting down at his workstation, Alberts pulled up a second video feed, this one showing Lovecraft and Pullman on their way to retrieve Constantini’s body.  They were about halfway there. Constantini had been moving away from the Pater Noster at the moment he died, so his momentum had continued carrying him farther and farther away. Alberts watched as the two men made up the distance, caught the tumbling body, and stuffed it into a body bag. Lovecraft had the body bag tethered to his wrist with a long rope. 

“Grab the tank as well,” Alberts told them. 

“Tank? What tank?” Lovecraft asked.

“There’s no tank,” Pullman agreed. 

“He had a tank,” Alberts insisted. “Scan for it. There should also be a gun.”

After a few moments, the sound of Pullman swearing came over the radio. “I see it on my HUD… That’s far away!” he exclaimed. “Why didn’t he have it tethered to him?!”

“Stop complaining, Pullman. Just get the thing. Put it in the body bag. If you can’t find the gun, just leave it.”

There was an annoyed-sounding grunt from Pullman, but he switched on his propulsors and began moving towards the distant object. The gun was small enough that the suit scanners might not be able to detect it if it had tumbled as far as the tank.

“Well, I’m waiting here,” Lovecraft said, watching Pullman as he floated off in pursuit of the tank.

After another thirty minutes, the tank had been retrieved, and both men began heading back towards the Pater Noster. The gun had disappeared forever into the darkness of space, however. From the perspective of the ship, the black shapes of both men and the body bag were silhouetted against the angry red glow of the gas cloud.

“Wrong door, numbskulls,” Alberts told them when they got closer and he noticed where they were headed. “Go to the medical airlock. Remember, we’ll be following full quarantine procedures. That means full washdown. And don’t try prying open any doors if they won’t open for you.”

Sounds of angry indignation came over the radio.

“Who do you think we are, man?” Lovecraft exclaimed. “That was Onobwe! Not us!”

The incident to which Alberts was alluding was a time where Onobwe had caused quite a lot of annoyance to the rest of the crew by taking a crowbar to a hatch when his personal security card had failed to open it. The Captain had almost kicked Onobwe off the ship over the incident, but at the time Onobwe had been the only crew member who possessed the proper accreditation for flying the landing vehicle. Onobwe had subsequently modified his behaviour enough to conform to the standards Dale required. 

“Well, don’t try anything like that. You’re going to be stuck in the MQ until Burnstyle gives the all-clear. Depends on what the Doc finds.”

“Why is this a quarantine job, anyway?” Pullman asked. “Looks like he shot himself.”

“I don’t know, Pullman,” Alberts grunted. “Captain’s orders.”

Alberts watched until the two men had nearly reached the medical airlock, then sent a notification to the Captain and Doctor Burnstyle to let them know Constantini’s body had almost been returned to the Pater Noster.

III.

Doctor Burnstyle was waiting in the medical quarter (or MQ) wearing a HAZMAT suit—minus the headgear—when Captain Dale appeared, his hair still wet from his shower, and explained the situation to him. The doctor did not express much emotion upon hearing about the tragedy, merely frowned and nodded before closing the doors to the MQ and putting on the last few pieces of his protective equipment. On either side of the door there were two large windows that spanned nearly all the way from floor to ceiling. Captain Dale, remaining outside the MQ, moved over to one of these windows so he could watch Burnstyle’s proceedings. Alberts appeared and strode up next to the Captain, joining him at the window.

The interior of the MQ was meticulously clean, smooth, white, and brightly lit, in contrast to the hallway outside, where Captain Dale and Alberts stood watching. The hallway was dark and industrial-looking, with many pipes and cables strapped to the walls. Briefly, they both looked up at a ceiling vent as the strange, witch-like cackling sound everyone had been hearing came out of it. They shook their heads and turned back to the window.

Burnstyle moved over to the controls for the medical airlock and opened the inner door. Lovecraft and Pullman stepped through, pushing Constantini’s body bag on a wheeled stretcher. They had replaced their pressure suits and propulsor gear for brightly-coloured HAZMAT suits of their own—blue and green.  Burnstyle’s suit was the standard yellow colour.

“Put him up here,” the Doctor ordered, indicating the main examination table.

Lovecraft and Pullman pushed the stretcher over and awkwardly transferred the body bag over to the examination table and dropped it like a sack of potatoes—not at all in the way professional nurses or morticians would have done. They backed away to let the doctor do his work.

“Well at least you put the head at the right end,” Burnstyle commented. He gave the two labourers the stink eye as he pulled open the body bag. The tank Pullman had retrieved popped out and clanked loudly on the floor. It rolled over to Lovecraft, who picked it up.

Captain Dale hit the Intercom button next to the door so he could be heard inside the MQ. “Bring that over here. I want to look at it.”

Lovecraft brought the tank over for the Captain to see and held it up. It was about a foot and a half long, corroded, with a faded label mostly torn off. There was a small bullet hole in one side and out the other.

“This wasn’t pressurized,” Lovecraft observed, helpfully. “Otherwise it would have exploded.”

“Yes, I can see that.” Dale gestured with his chin back into the MQ. “Take it back.” Dale hit the Always On button on the Intercom panel so it would continuously transfer sound both ways.

Lovecaft carried the tank back toward Doctor Burnstyle and laid it down on another table.

Burnstyle had nearly succeeded in completely extracting Constantini from the body bag, which he let slip to the floor and kicked it away. The bullet hole in the front of the tech’s pressure suit was plainly visible. With difficulty, Burnstyle  half-flipped Constantini over one way and then the other, looking for something.

The doctor turned to the Captain. “There’s no exit point. He’s got a bullet lodged in his thorax somewhere. If that didn’t kill him outright, I’d say acute space sickness finished the job.” Through the Intercom, the doctor’s voice sounded a bit tinny.

“How’s he… look?” Dale inquired, gesturing vaguely toward his own face. 

Burnstyle stared at the Captain for a moment, then turned back toward the examination table and slowly leaned over to peer at Constantini’s face through the glass of his pressure suit. He paused there a moment, his face about a foot away from the dead man’s, then he straightened back up and reported, “He looks dead.”

“Does he look like himself?” Dale clarified.

The doctor blinked. “Huh?”

“Does he look like himself?” the Captain repeated. 

Burnstyle slowly bent over to look at Constantini’s face again. This time he lingered for a bit longer before straightening again. “Well, I must say, he does look a bit under the weather—a bit puffy, you might even say, but otherwise, yes, he looks like himself.”

Lovecraft spoke up, helpfully, “That is what people look like when they’ve been exposed to the vacuum of space.”

“What’s this about, Captain?” Pullman asked. He had hopped onto another patient bed. “You know something we don’t?”

Dale shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve… got a feeling.”

Alberts nodded. This was not the first time he had heard the Captain say something like that. He had learned not to question Dale’s intuitions.

Lovecraft spoke up again. “Yeah, Captain. Normally we wouldn’t be doing all of this—” he gestured to his HAZMAT suit “—unless we were visiting a completely uncharted alien planet or something.”

Alberts called out, “The Captain’s got good instincts, Lovecraft, so don’t complain.”

“I wasn’t complaining!” Lovecraft insisted.

“Well don’t start,” Alberts told him.

Lovecraft threw up his hands and shuffled over to another patient bed to take a seat, imitating Pullman.

Dale called out to the Doctor. “Doc, I want a full tox chart on Constantini and all three of you as soon as possible. And do not open this door until I get a chance to approve it.” Dale looked back and forth between the two labourers. “You two, help the Doc if you can. Otherwise stay out of his way or take a nap. Do not break protocol until I lift it, understand?”

Both men responded with a Yes, sir.

Burnstyle nodded and began trying to extricate Constantini’s body from his pressure suit. The propulsor harness came off easily enough, but then he started having some difficulty with the helmet. He managed it, eventually, but then started to have trouble again getting the suit open, and the two labourers came over to lend a hand.

Captain Dale left them to it, then began walking back to his cabin. A few moments before, Franklyn had appeared and joined him and Alberts at the window. As the Captain walked away, the navigator called out a revised estimate for when they’d be able to get underway again. Dale acknowledged him with a very tired-looking wave.

A few moments later, there was a loud outburst of exclamations from Alberts, Franklyn, and the three men in the MQ. Captain Dale came thumping back to see what had caused the commotion.

Both Alberts and Franklyn had backed away from the window, leaving Dale a fully unobstructed view into the MQ. Burnstyle, Lovecraft, and Pullman had also backed away from the examination table.

Pullman was swearing so fast he left out any actual vulgarity and it came out more like, “Whatthewhatthewhatthe!”

Lovecraft was shouting something incomprehensible in garbled Cantonese.

Burnstyle had fallen silent, but he had both his hands up in a vaguely defensive position and his eyes were darting as he examined what had been revealed within Constantini’s pressure suit.

Upon opening Constantini’s suit, what had been revealed inside was unlike what anyone could have expected. From his neck down, Constantini’s flesh  appeared to consist of a red and white mass of twisted ugly shapes and fibrous, organic looking ropes. Parts of it had expanded or folded outward upon being released from the confines of the pressure suit, almost looking like unfolding leaves or some sort of bizarre underwater creature. It almost looked like it was moving of its own volition as it spilled out over the side of the examination table and began to drip down onto the floor.

“It sprang out at them!” Alberts exclaimed. 

Captain Dale held up his hand in an attempt to get everyone to calm down, which eventually they did. They stopped cursing, anyway. 

“What is that!?” Lovecraft exclaimed, looking at the Captain. 

Dale shook his head. “I have no idea. Doc?”

Burnstyle had his hands raised in the instinctive manner of a physician who’s just washed his hands and wants to keep them sterile. He looked back and forth between the Captain and the thing on the table. “You want me to examine that?” he asked. 

“Yes, I do.”

Lowering his arms a little bit, Burnstyle slowly approached the examination table, picked up a pipette from his kit, which was lying nearby, and tentatively poked at the hideous mass. He looked like he was afraid the thing would jump at him, but there was no response. “Captain, I wouldn’t even know where to start with this.”

“I recommend you start with a DNA analysis—give us a genetic profile—hopefully match it with something in the database. 

Burnstyle nodded and carefully proceeded to cut a small portion of the mass from a particularly fleshy-looking portion of it. He took the piece over to a workstation and prepared the sample for being inserted into the gene sequencing device, which was built into the wall nearby.

The Captain’s calm demeanor seemed to have reassured everyone, and their hesitation began to subside. This was unlike anything any of them had ever seen or heard of before, but if you looked at the Captain, he was not acting like anything particularly unusual had occurred—or at least anything that could not be dealt with through normal procedures. The matter-of-fact way in which the Doctor began to analyze the thing also helped to reassure everyone.

Dale turned to Alberts. “We’ll leave the Doctor to his work. You and I have to go check something. Franklyn, you stay here and watch everything that goes on in that room.”

“Er… yes, sir,” Franklyn agreed.

The Captain turned and began to walk away, with Alberts following, but then he stopped and pulled out his data pad. He tapped into the shipwide Intercom and made an announcement. “Now hear this. This is the Captain. We have identified a potential biohazard on board, which at the moment appears to be contained to the MQ and is under control. Go about your regular tasks. Dale out.”

Alberts expected the Captain to lead him toward the CIC, but it quickly became apparent that they were headed somewhere else. Dale led the way to the steerage room where he had been playing his guitar earlier, opened the door, and stepped inside to take a look around. Alberts waited at the door, wondering what the Captain was doing.

“Everything look normal in here to you?” the Captain called to him.

Alberts examined the room. It was a bit dark, but nothing seemed out of place—except for the Captain’s guitar case, which was lying on the floor not far from the hatch. “Looks OK. Why?”

Dale grunted. “How long did it take me to get to the CIC when you called me?”

“Uh…” Alberts had to think about it. “I dunno. Twenty, twenty-five minutes?”

Dale nodded, but he did not seem reassured. Picking up his guitar case, he came back out of the steerage room, then led the way toward the CIC, noting the time on his data pad at the beginning and end of the journey. It took them nineteen minutes to reach the CIC from the steerage room. Dale only entered the CIC for a moment to drop off his guitar, then came back out and used his security card to open the weapons lockup room just down the hall. He retrieved an incendiary device, then led the way to Constantini’s cabin, which was set apart from any of the others. When they got close, he went over to an environment control box on the wall and made some adjustments so that there was negative pressure inside Constantini’s cabin. Then, using his security clearance to unlock the tech’s cabin, he carefully opened the hatch, armed the incendiary device, and tossed it inside. He closed the door and waited.

Inside the cabin, the incendiary device began to glow and spark. Then it began to screech like a firework and belched fire in all directions, devouring anything not made of metal and ceramic inside Constantini’s cabin.

“Hope there wasn’t anything important in there,” Alberts commented.

Dale nodded but did not otherwise reply. After a few minutes the screeching died down and Dale took another look inside the cabin. It was full of ash. “Have someone clean that up later,” Dale said. He closed the hatch and sealed it, then led the way to the CIC again.

When they reached the Command Information Centre, Dale indicated that Alberts should sit down at his work station. “Pull up the security footage database,” the Captain said.

Alberts took a seat and pulled up the video files.

“Find the first video of me after you placed the call,” Dale said. He pulled out his data pad, found the call log, and showed Alberts the time stamp on the call.

The UI for the security footage system showed a schematic of the ship with dots representing the location of all the security cameras. Alberts zoomed into the guts of the ship.

“There’s no camera in the steerage room…” Alberts said. “There’s one down the hall, though. I’ll pull it up.” He scrubbed backwards through the footage until he neared the timestamp Dale had indicated. “There you are,” he said, catching sight of the Captain in the video. “You came out of the steerage room about five minutes after I made the call.”

“All right. Then it took me another twenty minutes to get up here.”

Alberts thought about it and nodded. That was about how long it would take to traverse that distance at a slow pace. The halls in this part of the ship were very tangled. “You know, Captain,” he said, “I don’t think you could have possibly done anything to help Constantini. I don’t think it would have changed anything if you’d got here any faster.”

“Thanks, Alberts, but that’s not actually what I’m thinking about. I think I may have… fainted after you called me.”

“Oh? Well, you have been up for nearly a full day.”

“Yeah. Can you scrub backwards a bit farther? Constantini walked past the steerage room about fifteen minutes before this.”

Alberts rewound the recording until the point Dale indicated. In the video, they saw Constantini shuffle down the hallway, wave at the Captain through the hatch, then continue on his way.

“He saw you in there?” Alberts asked.

Dale nodded.

“You didn’t think it was odd he was wearing a pressure suit and… shuffling like that?”

Dale did not respond. He was thinking about something else. “I want you to go through all of our security footage and find every time Constantini is visible for the past week—and anything else out of the ordinary. Get, uh, Maybelline to help you, and anyone else who can use the video UI.”

Oliphant was the only other occupant of the CIC at the moment. He had been eyeing Dale and Alberts since they came in. “Any news, Captain? What’s with the biohazard alert?”

Dale had been leaning over Albert’s workstation, but now he straightened. He looked toward the pilot. “Looks like Constantini may have been infected with something.”

Oliphant’s brows furrowed. “Was it flesh-eating disease?”

“I wish,” Dale said. “Then at least I’d know what to do.” He shook his head. “Burnstyle’s working on it. We’ll know soon enough.”

Surprisingly, this seemed to reassure the pilot. To his mind, if the infection was not flesh-eating disease, it could not be that bad. “Was he out of his mind?” he inquired.

“I don’t know. Maybe.” Dale went over to the portside CIC hatch. “Alberts, stay here. I’m going back to the MQ.”

IV.

At first, Franklyn watched with rapt attention as Doctor Burnstyle went through the autopsy process, but eventually it grew quite monotonous and the navigator took a seat on a long bench on the far side of the hall, away from the windows looking into the MQ. Burnstyle took scrapings and cuttings and took many different sorts of scans using various devices suspended from the ceiling on mechanical arms.

Eventually Captain Dale reappeared and silently joined him on the bench. A few minutes later, Franklyn noticed that the Captain had fallen asleep.

Lovecraft and Pullman seemed restless, sometimes trying to relax as best they could in their HAZMAT gear, sometimes pacing around the room or examining the medical equipment as if they were in a museum looking at curiosities.

After a few hours, Burnstyle came over to the window, got Franklyn’s attention, and asked him to wake the Captain. Franklyn jiggled the Captain’s shoulder until he awoke, then waited for him to remember where he was. When the Captain seemed sufficiently aware of his surroundings, Franklyn pointed at Doctor Burnstyle in the window, where he was waiting patiently. 

Dale stood up and approached the Doctor. “Yeah. What you got?”

Burnstyle grunted. “Absolutely nothing.”

“What?”

“I have no idea what that is.” Burnstyle half-turned and gestured vaguely at Constantini’s body. “Gene sequencer’s useless.”

“Is it broken?”

“No. It works for me and those two chuckleheads,” Burnstyle indicated Lovecraft and Pullman, who were lying awkwardly on patient beds, evidently trying to sleep. “Can’t make heads or tails of whatever that is on Constantini, though.”

“You’re saying the thing doesn’t have DNA?” Dale asked.

“No, it’s got DNA all right. The machine just can’t read it.”

“How’s that possible?”

The Doctor gestured with his hands to indicate that he did not know. “I tried sequencing a piece from Constantini’s head, since that part looks fairly normal. Same problem. I even tried his hair. Unreadable.”

Dale frowned. “Does that mean that’s not actually Constantini’s head? It just looks like him?”

Burnstyle gave him an odd look. “Well, that’s an odd thing to say. I don’t know. I’d say it’s more likely his DNA was altered long enough ago that the mutation is present in his hair—a few months, maybe.”

Dale took a deep breath. “What about the physical examination? Did you find anything?”

Burnstyle shook his head. “From the neck down, his body’s been transformed into what looks like a cancerous mass of boney stuff and fibrous tissue. Other than the boney bits, none of it is anything identifiable. I can’t even tell what parts are muscle. There’s some internal organs, but nothing I’m familiar with. As far as I can tell, he shouldn’t even have been able to walk around. There’s nothing left of his human anatomy.”

“You mean that’s not just growing on him? It’s in him?”

“Yes. That stuff has basically replaced his original body.”

Franklyn had a question. “Any sign of a vector?”

“Not that I can see,” Burnstyle replied. “I mean, if Constantini’s head wasn’t stuck on top of it, I wouldn’t even know to classify this as a disease. I’d just think it was some sort of alien creepy crawly that only kept its shape because it was stuffed inside a human-shaped pressure suit. I haven’t been able to detect any spores or viruses or swimmers. Nothing.”

Dale rubbed his eyes. “I’m not sure if I should find that reassuring or not.”

Pullman sat up. “Um… I might have an idea about what’s wrong with the gene sequencer.”

Dale looked at him. Pullman was a bigmouth, but it could not hurt to hear what he had to say. “Let’s hear it.”

“So… there’s pharmaceutical companies that engineer retro viruses, right? I think I read somewhere that they were engineering something that would prevent their designs from being reverse-engineered—something that would prevent modified DNA from being read by a sequencer.”

Burnstyle scowled, surprised that Pullman knew anything about genetic research. “Yeah… that might be something,” he had to admit.

Dale tilted his head and looked thoughtful for a moment, then he covered his face with his hands and swore slowly.

“Captain?” Burnstyle and Franklyn asked at the same moment.

Dale took his hands away from his face and a brief look of anger came into his eyes. “Burnstyle, hold down the fort here. Franklyn, we’re going to wake up the passengers.”