Chapter 23: Chapter 23: Blocks.

A scream woke me. It was a moment before I realized that the screaming voice was my own. I looked down. My hands were not claws. The only blood I could smell was my own, soaked into the rough bandages on my right arm and leg. My heart thundered in my chest as I looked around wildly.

No zombies. Red, amber, and green lights reflected off the armor glass. No sounds but my own harsh breathing and rapid heartbeat. A nightmare. Only a nightmare.

The possibility of becoming a zombie still worried me though I was trying hard not to think about it. This made twice I’d been bitten. Twice that I should have died and joined the flesh eating horde, but didn’t. The mass of stolen nanites in my body pressed against my insides, leaden and swollen.

It wasn’t a good idea to carry so large a colony inside the human body. Nanites required energy simply to exist. Without access to energy they degraded rapidly. Selectively culling parts of the colony was not possible, strictly speaking. They had to be expelled in a carefully controlled manner under strict supervision to prevent damage to the host.

Fortunately for me, I was qualified to carry out the operation under those carefully controlled conditions. Unfortunately, “carefully controlled” was back in my lab. And I was a long way from there, if the equipment was even still functional with the recent power fluctuations.

Had the power finally failed for good? If it had, what did that mean for the two survivors? They’d be lost in the dark, unable to see the zombies that would eventually find and kill them.

There was no evidence that power had completely failed yet. The docks had been dark for most of the time I’d observed them. Granted that had only been a few days. But the possibility that this was a localized phenomenon was at least possible.

Worrying about it would produce no actionable intelligence. I struggled to sit up, feeling weak and tired still. The medkit was only two steps away. That was not the problem. Removing the panel to get to it with only one functional arm was.

I finally managed to rip the panel off by yanking it with my one good hand as I let myself fall backward. The panel bounced to the ground beside my head and the medkit dropped onto my bad leg. A pained grunt escaped me as I levered myself up and investigated what a freighter bridge crew deemed worthy to store in case of emergency.

Several chest pumps and wound sealers for decompression injuries fell out when I opened it. There was also the usual gauze, suture needle and polythread, multi-spectrum disinfectant, blood clotting agents and wound gel. There were also several patches with cloned blood paste in them to accelerate wound healing.

Patching myself up had become old hat a long time ago. Having the proper tools to fix myself up wasn’t always something that was available. I tried to get my nanites to help by forming structures within the wounds themselves to hold them together. My efforts met with limited success as the nanites barely moved.

The nanite swelling was something I’d have to address, and soon. Carrying excessive amounts of nanites came with more issues than simply an increase in appetite. Larger nanite colonies could be useful, in theory. In practice what they were was dangerous. Cook your organs, literally fry your brain, poke little tiny holes where no holes should ever be on the inside kind of dangerous.

It wasn’t just news reports and college textbooks that warned of nanite bloat over certain limits. I’d seen it before.

To purge the extra nanites from my body I would need a power source and a container. Standard station supply would not be enough. The container was actually the easier part. It just needed to be able to hold the nanites and close enough to the power to keep them active briefly while I performed a safe disconnect. Heck. A decently sized terminal storage device would do as long as it was fixed in place and near enough to the right kind of power source.

I ate more meal bars, trying to sate my stomach’s voracious desire for more food. Despite stuffing myself just the night before my gut demanded more fuel as the overpopulated nanites stripped away energy nearly as fast as my body produced it. There was a chance that the clinic in Security Medical would have the equipment I needed for a purge. But I’d have to get there first.

That meant finding a space suit and getting out of this ship. The cloned blood paste was doing its job. My arm was sealed up and no longer bleeding. My leg would support my weight again, even if it was still a little weak.

The mini-horde in the mess hall might have been the only ones left on the ship. There was food and water available there, even if the nutrient paste dispenser was broken. I’d seen the remains of water bulbs that had been gnawed on. It wouldn’t do to blindly assume that was the case. But still, it was possible.

There was a map available for new crew and visiting inspectors, so I downloaded that to my HUD. There was probably an access point for that at the airlock, too, but I’d missed it on the way in. After a decent night’s sleep, food, and proper medical care, it was time to go looking for a space suit.

The place to find suits was obviously the airlocks. The ship had two. One in the cargo hold where I’d entered, the other on deck two. Since it was closer, I decided to check the latter first. And along the way, grab more meal bars to keep my stomach full.

Going down the stairs was less painful than I’d expected. The uncomfortable heat and itching that went along with the dull ache was a familiar sign of healing. Or at least, that is what I told myself. It wasn’t hard to find the airlock once I’d descended. It was not far past the stairs going forwards. The airlock where I’d entered was in the mid-aft port side.

Turning down the corridor towards the starboard side I began to see problems. The airlock was open with only the exterior hatch remaining closed. Parts were laid out on the deck around the inner hatch. The hatch itself was visibly warped. There was no way that it could hold pressure like that.

Not having exterior access was a problem. But if I could get a suit, there were other airlocks. Getting to them might be a problem. But that problem would only matter after I found the suit. Searching the inside of the lock yielded empty lockers and a note telling someone named Evie that the suits were down for maintenance while the lock was out of commission, not like they’d be in use while their only exterior access was inoperable.

I left the broken airlock behind to search the one in the cargo hold. By now the trash piles in the corners and the dingy, yellow-brown stains on the bulkheads were a familiar and depressing sight. They also signaled zombie activity. How much did the zombies have to wander for the corridors to get this messy?

Down in the cargo hold the refugees remained still and silent in their faintly glowing stasis fields. Fortunately these larger pods appeared to be more robust. I didn’t want to think about one of them failing and ending the lives of so many innocents. Which reminded me of all the dark the Hospital pods that were never saved. That couldn’t happen again.

The port airlock creaked open and another tiny bit of rust fell from the hinges. Likely this ship hadn’t been in the best repair even before the collapse. Inside, the lockers opened to reveal several spare O2 chargers and spare parts, three helmets, and suit patch kits. But no suits.

Another note was left here, telling the mysterious Evie that since the ship was in dock, she would be taking these to perform the required 40, 60, 120, and 200 hour checks and updates. A bit of snark followed, saying that if the checks had been done on time, like the regulations said they were supposed to, then all the suits wouldn’t be taken offline at once. But since the proper maintenance schedule hadn’t been adhered to...

I agreed with the unknown author’s complaint. Having those suits deadlined during an emergency could be fatal. And it just might have been, judging by the state of the ship.

But that meant the suits I was looking for would be somewhere else. Maintenance. There was a machine shop adjacent to the main engineering compartment. And main engineering just might have the kind of power source I needed to perform a controlled purge. Nanite bloat had long since passed being uncomfortable. The headache that accompanied it was growing worse by the hour.

Engineering was aft, right next to the main engines. It took up almost as much room as the cargo hold, making the bunks and bridge section something like a hat sitting on top of main cargo with engineering as the boot. The hatch to engineering was closed as I approached. It creaked open with another small shower of rust, ending with a high pitched squeal.

Any zombies that were still alive would surely not sleep through that. I pulled out the pistol and stalked forward. No howls or groans sounded in the bowels of the ship.

The area inside the lock was clean. A massive machine dominated the space inside. Pipes and wiring looms could not completely disguise the shape of the reactor bottle. Below that and along the walls were several consoles showing various readouts related to the health and maintenance of the ship. Many of them were amber, but a few were still green. A handful were red. I had no idea what any of them meant.

No zombie piles made of trash and bones littered the corners. Which reminded me, I hadn’t seen any zombie nests yet. Sometimes they slept next to their food supply, but that wasn’t always the case. Something about that bothered me.

The only exits were the hatch that I’d entered through, a maintenance hatch that led to the main engines themselves, and one that led to the machine shop. I closed the hatch behind me, just in case. Purging my nanites would take most of my attention and focus. Getting attacked in the middle of it would be disastrous.

And so when I started to force my nanites into the reactor console, using the ship’s main power to keep them stable and active, of course that was when I got attacked. Only it wasn’t the way I was expecting.

Something within the console was trying to force itself into my body, on the nanite scale. I could feel it pushing, but the internal force of my own massively overpopulated colony completely prevented the attack. That’s what it felt like. An attack.

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Closer examination proved to be difficult. I could feel the nanites that were making it in to the console disappearing, as if they completely lost connection to me. That shouldn’t be able to happen. It was only a few at first. Then the pain started.

Nanite training requires the use of the brain interface that everyone gets in childhood. I can “feel” what my nanites are doing through it, making nanite training possible. Getting a pain signal was not a first, but it shouldn’t be happening now. Not like this.

I shoved at my nanites to get them into the console. It was like I’d suddenly gained another fifty pounds and sweat started to form on my forehead. The pain grew, but with the chunky mass of my colony now entering, I began to get a picture of what was going on.

There were other nanites already in the console. Active. That shouldn’t be possible, but it was.

And they were destroying tiny bits of my own colony.

They were trying to get inside me.

Like an infection.

Alrighty then. I rolled my shoulders and tilted my head to the side, popping my neck. Let’s do this.

I pulled back on my colony, squeezing it inside. The pressure spiked. The invading nanites entered and immediately began attacking my colony again. This time they were annihilated. Once again I was unable to examine this rogue colony.

I pushed back into the console and the rogues were still there, still trying to infect me. The pressure seemed to be a bit weaker coming from outside this time, and I was able to push them back. But only push.

The engineering console contained machine code and hardware that I did not want to damage. It was easy enough to tell my colony to destroy something. Gather information and transmit it back was a more difficult task. But destroy this but not that? That was a more difficult proposition.

Difficult, but not impossible. Probably. It was still a risk. But one I chose to take.

Nanite training does not happen immediately. Even with all my years of experience in working with my own colony, altering the instruction set on the fly is a tricky business. It requires a sort of singular focus that has proven difficult to achieve for even the most disciplined.

There was a trick to it though. If one paid enough attention to the information that was feeding back from the colony and sorted it on a yes/no basis as to whether or not the given behavior was congruent with the new instruction you wished to create, then slowly the ratio would improve.

It did require some time to start. But once it did, the rogue nanites began to fall as my own colony went on the attack.

The console grew warm under my hand. I could feel that there was collateral damage, but couldn’t tell what that damage was yet. Deeper into the system the resistance mounted. But my side had massive numbers and was increasingly proficient in their target selection. The rogue nanites were still fighting back though. The pain behind my eyes spiked as my stamina began to drop even faster.

The shape of the battle inside the console changed as the pressure spiked in one direction and lessened in another. A hefty chunk of my colony was wiped away as it contacted a high power current, frying instantly. Stabbing agony fed back into me and my knees buckled. But I didn’t release my grip on the console.

I still had large reserves of nanites still within my body though. I urged them deeper into the console in the direction the spike had come from. This time when the pressure weakened in one area I only lost a bare handful of nanites. My colony was learning at the same time that I was.

Twice more the rogue colony managed to lure mine into a trap, but each time there was more than enough to continue on until finally something stopped me. I could sense a power source. A tuned power source that would be able to keep a nanite colony active indefinitely.

That was the sort of specialized equipment that I had back in my lab on Level 5. It wasn’t something that I’d expect to find on a poorly maintained tramp freighter.

It was so suspiciously exactly what I was looking for that I almost missed the rogue colony’s last gasp. And the revelation that occurred when a handful of rogue nanites reappeared.

The rogues had been replicating themselves. The tuned power source was the key.

I searched the console for any remaining rogues. Nothing. My nanites stopped drawing on my own stamina reserves and began sustaining themselves on the sweet, sweet power coming from deep within the engineering console.

Nothing about the rogue nanite colony was welcome. They acted like... zombies...

It could explain so much. How the virus propagated so swiftly. How we were never able to pin it down. But even with that, the rogue nanites could not change the human body so drastically. At least, that is what the consensus was in the medical community in the short days before the collapse. The biological virus had to take hold, too.

If people were primed to become victims of the biological virus, it wouldn’t take much for it to take hold. Most people were insensitive to nanite intrusion. They might think of it as a sudden headache, then proceed to forget about it minutes later when it passed.

While I was pondering this newest revelation, I decided to take another look at how my wounds were healing. With the pressure off and using the ship’s power I found foreign material inside several of the cuts and claw marks on my arm and several in my leg. That required me to change the dressings, but that was not too troublesome.

Then I zippered them up with nanite scaffolds. A few of the forming scabs broke and bled, and again I had to clean up blood. Only a little this time. That and fresh, oxygenated blood to the wound site would keep the healing going at an optimal speed.

At the rate things were going, I wanted to be as healthy and whole as possible as quick as possible.

The relief from nanite bloat was immense. It felt like I could finally think clearly, unencumbered by the constant low grade headache and queasy feeling. I sighed. There was still a space suit to find. Then get out onto the hull somehow and make it back to Security Medical. Experiment Number One was probably driving the two survivors up the wall by now.

The machine shop was the most likely place for them, based on the notes I’d found in the airlocks. This time when I opened the hatch there was no rust. Tools were scattered across the workbenches. And the deck. Some were embedded in the bulkheads as if thrown with great force.

I stepped inside with the pistol in my hands. Something had happened in here. Given that I had already found zombies on the ship there was still a chance that there might be more. It looked like a small hurricane had landed in the machine shop.

Then I saw the nest in the far corner. It was the biggest nest I’d seen yet, made of... scraps of space suit. And the owner of that nest was similarly huge in every dimension. A veritable giant, even withered into a zombie it looked like it could bench press a shuttlecraft. With one arm.

It howled. Then it threw an entire workbench at me.

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