Brigade Models

Madiwa hurried over to the small terminal in the corner of the cargo hold’s admin office. “What’s up?”.

He turned the monitor towards her and pointed excitedly at a graphic showing the upper floor of the station. Several coloured dots pulsed on the screen. “Transponders in the command centre – there are people there”.

“Dead or alive?”. Madiwa wasn’t getting her hopes up.

“At least a couple of them have moved, so they’re not dead”.

“OK, let me rephrase that – alive or zombie!?”.

Straight’s face fell. “Um – no idea. I can’t get IDs or any biometric data from them, we weren’t able to get into the database to identify the tags. I just know they’re there”.

“So they might not be alive ?”.

“No. But it’s the first time we’ve found anyone – and they’re in the command centre, which would be an obvious place for any other survivors to head to”.

The executive officer pondered briefly and then straightened up. “OK, we can’t hang around here all day – and it’s starting to smell anyway. Getting to C&C was always the goal, so everyone up saddle up, we’re moving”.

The cargo bay was on the outer part of the station – Command and Control was three decks up in the middle, so it wasn’t a short walk. The next deck up was mostly crew quarters, clustered around the ship’s mess and rec rooms. Helen took the lead, flanked by Harker and Barry, each toting a blaster rifle. Instead of the obvious route down the main corridor, she took them straight across to a side passage that led to a workshop. She moved a pile of boxes, slid a welding trolley to one side and revealed a battered access ladder fixed to the wall. She climbed up a few rungs, then turned two latches that held a maintenance hatch in place.

She carefully lifted the hatch a fraction, peering through the gap to make sure that there was no-one (or no thing) moving in the space above. Satisfied that all was clear, she swiftly climbed the ladder and emerged into a shower cubicle. Stepping through the open door into the head, she motioned for the rest of the eight crew from Hiber-D to follow her.

She stepped over to the exit door that led into one of the corridors on the accommodation level. Again, she opened it a fraction and squinted into a dimly lit corridor. She was beginning to become used to surprises every way she turned, so the sight of four more blood-stained corpses in the passageway didn’t do too much to phase her. Except that these weren’t crew, the gore-spattered bodies were dressed in military green armour and clutching some serious looking weaponry.

Since being dragged out of hibersleep several weeks before their planned waking date, things weren’t going well. She’d had a spanner thrown at her head by one of the station’s Janebots, which were supposed to make life easier for the crew, not attempt to kill them with metal implements !

Unable to contact the command centre or anyone else on the station, she and the seven other occupants of Hiber-D made the short journey to the cargo hold – and found several other members of crew in various states of dismemberment. There was no clue as to what had happened, although one or two of the corpses seemed to be holding improvised weapons as if they’d been trying to defend themselves. No-one wanted to get too close – even Dr Whitman seemed to be spooked by the sight.

As they tried to come to terms with the death of their crewmates, Helen had seen someone approaching from a side corridor behind a row of shelving. The light was dim – during hibersleep periods the station’s internal lighting was reduced to save power – but she thought she’d recognised the form of Winston Rhisiart, the jovial Welsh deckhand from B-shift, silhouetted in the light from the bulkhead lamp behind him. Yes, it was definitely Winston – wearing odd socks again ! He was carrying what looked like a crowbar in what, when she looked more closely, was a rather elongated right hand. Actually, those arms were also rather too long, giving him a slightly simian appearance. And he hadn’t seemed to be walking all that well, rather a painful looking shamble rather than his normal jaunty stride.

As he’d rounded the end of the last shelf and moved into the brighter lights of the main hold, someone had cried out – she wasn’t sure who it was, maybe the researcher Michael Straight ? And it was obvious why – Winston had been … green. His skin was a sickly, rotting verdant colour, punctuated by red and purple blisters, and his scalp seemed to be one huge scab. He’d raised the crowbar, aiming to take a swing at Anna who’d had the misfortune to be closest. Fortunately he seemed to be very slow, clumsy and uncoordinated and Anna, mature in years as she was, dodged it easily. Then came a loud CRACK-CRACK from behind Helen, and Winston had fallen to the ground. It turned out that Madiwa Aquino had used her command privileges to open a small arms locker in the hold’s admin office and had fired two rounds from a handgun into the crewman. What followed was five minutes of arguing over whether or not Madiwa should have shot Winston rather than trying to disarm and restrain him – the prevailing (and contradictory) view from several other members of the group was that they should have tried that, but no-one seemed to want to be the one to get close to the diseased looking deckhand.

The discussion was brought to an abrupt end by a commotion in the access corridor, and they all watched in horror as more outlined shapes shuffled behind the shelves. Some were recognisable – she spotted her good friend Stephanie Took from the station’s admin office, and ‘Uncle’ Eryck Gabelhofer, everyone’s favourite cook from the kitchens on deck 2. Others she wasn’t so sure about – one was wearing the flight jacket of Commander Rojeros, the shuttle pilot, but the face was so disfigured he couldn’t be sure. All were variously discoloured with irregular skin blistering – what was wrong with their crewmates ?

This time no-one argued; as the figures rounded the end of the shelves and began to cross the hold towards them, Madiwa’s pistol rang out again, soon to be joined by others that Harker and Barry had liberated from the weapons locker. Stephanie looked at Helen and, through glazed, green tinted eyes almost seemed to recognise her. She broke into a run, viridescent hair streaming behind her and reaching out for her friend. Multiple shots slammed into Took’s torso and she fell at Helen’s feet even as the mechanic hurriedly backed away.

Harker and Francois had both raced to seal the hatchway into the access corridor to prevent more incursions. When they had returned, they both reported seeing a figure with a blue, lizard-like face scuttling away down the main passageway outside the hatch. Everyone assumed that it must have been the lights playing tricks on them, except for the fact that both were utterly convinced of what they had seen. At this point, who knew what they’d seen.

Fortunately, by now Madiwa was on her game, caffeine or not, and she moved into her smooth, efficient administration persona. She had stifled any signs of panic or hysteria, and got the group to clean up the hold. Dr Whitman had immediately pointed out that the other crew could be carrying some sort of infection and might be contagious, so Helen supervised a pair of droids while Bullneck drove the powerloader and between them they dumped all of the bodies out of the smaller cargo airlock. The hold was equipped with high pressure hoses for cleaning, so the blood and gore was also hosed into the airlock and ejected into space. It wasn’t perfect, this wasn’t a deep clean by any means but it would do for the moment. Some of the infected crew had somehow got hold of weapons (although they’d made no attempt to use them), so they tried to salvage those to add to their small arsenal.

She’d half-expected Dr Whitman to act the stereotypical mad scientist and insist on dissecting the corpses to learn their secrets, but it turned out that he’d seen the same horror films as she had and was well aware that this was a course of action that never ended well for the protagonists in the movies. So he was quite happy to consign their crewmates to the void and worry about it later.