Patterson and Chandna stepped out of the elevator on the lowest deck in Sci-Med after preparing the bodies for further study in the Isolab. They passed through the decontamination station and then removed their biosuits. Patterson winced from the fiery pain breaking out over large patches of her skin. She made careful movements, trying not to disturb the worst areas.
“You alright?” Chandna asked.
“I’ll be alright. It’s just pain.”
He gently rubbed his bandaged hands. “That was a nasty chemical, but I was only exposed to a little bit of it. I’ll do the coming autopsies. Give you time to rest.”
“Thanks.” She really was glad he wanted to take the lead.
They walked down the main hall to the reception lounge to join the others, and she heard crying from the shower station that they had all used to scrub their skin. She opened the door. Nieves was hunched over on a small bench in the shower amid the puddles of water, sobbing.
She looked at Chandna, “Join the others and I’ll be with you shortly.”
He nodded and left and then she went inside and sat beside her. “Are you okay? Can I help you to the eye wash?”
She shook her head. “My eyes don’t hurt that bad.”
“Can I help with anything?”
“No, I just want to be alone for a while.”
“You sure you don’t want to talk?” She already had a suspicion about what was bothering Nieves. And she didn’t want her blaming herself for things beyond her control.
Nieves wiped her eyes and shook her head.
She silently listened for a moment in case Nieves had anything to say, but it soon became apparent there was nothing. “Okay. Let me know if you need anything. Don’t bother cleaning up the water.” She slowly went to the exit. She glanced back as the door opened and stepped out, still looking in.
“Can I ask you something personal?” Nieves asked.
“Sure.” The question would reveal her thoughts.
“Have you ever been truly afraid? Not just apprehensive, but to where it paralyzes you?” Her voice had a whimper to it.
She thought about her recent experience in Berthing. She vividly remembered Stocky’s possessed stare and hot breath. And monstrous strength. She remembered the hopelessness and her heart pounding so hard she could hear its beat. She cleared her throat and muttered, “Yes, I have.”
Nieves turned toward her. “When? I’ve never seen you shaken. Even on the Mess…you fought those creatures so brilliantly. Gracefully. You were almost angelic…swift and precise.”
“You fought them too. You got Holly and I out.”
“No,” she said, burying her head into her hands. “I ran away. I was scared and I ran. They were stronger and faster than me. And I felt pain all over. And now Ginting is dead, and you and Holly almost died too.” She shook her head. “I did want to help. But I kept making excuses for waiting. I just couldn’t think of a way. It’s only when Holly started to wake up and I saw that you were still fighting that I could push myself.”
She sighed and shook her head again. “I almost didn’t. I didn’t want to! It took so much effort to tell myself that we could win.”
Patterson walked back over to the bench and sat down. “You don’t need to feel ashamed. You fought with us. You did what you could.”
“No, I didn’t. You can say that you did your best. I can’t. I could have been stronger…and maybe De Silva and Ginting wouldn’t have died.”
She now knew why she was so despondent, and it was as she suspected. Nieves had an old wound. She was conceived with Klinefelter Syndrome – a male – and so doctors recommended splicing out a chromosome to correct the abnormality. It should have been an easy fix while she – then a he – was in the early embryonic stage. But her parents waited for weeks before deciding to clip the Y and then named her Claudia at birth.
The splicing job was thought to have been a success at the time. Nieves needed touch up genital surgery post birth and was at first thought to be able to live a normal life with no further treatment. But while other girls went through puberty, she didn’t. And she later had her ovaries replaced with new ones grown in a lab.
She didn’t want Nieves to beat herself up over what might have been and gently squeezed her shoulder. “You can say that I put you in this position. We would all be alive if I hadn’t agreed to this assignment. But I know that I can’t fault myself over an unknown, and neither can you. You can’t know whether the extra muscle mass from being male would have made any difference. And in any rate, that was decided before you were born.”
Nieves nodded and sat silently for a few seconds. “But it may have. And I might have had more courage.”
“They easily killed Ginting. Holly was knocked out in seconds. Those things were faster and stronger than a man, and they afflicted us with poison gas. They were made to kill us.”
“They wouldn’t have had to fight them by themselves.”
It was useless to argue hypotheticals. “You wouldn’t have made the same choices in life as a male. You probably would never have been here to help us – on any of our assignments. And think about the Word. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father.” She paused to let Scripture set in her mind. “God is still in command of all existence – even now. It hurts to lose them. But He has a plan and He called them and they’ll never be hurt again.”
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She gently pulled Nieves into her. “We must stand for those still here. And for our families back home. Especially the surviving relatives of those we lost.” They couldn’t explicitly tell them what happened. But they needed to make them understand what they saved others from.
Nieves spoke after a long pause. “You’re right. But I don’t know if I can do it. I’ll probably run again. I’ll get scared…do something awful.” She looked toward Patterson. “I want you to know that I love you all.”
“We all love one another. Now especially is the time to show it.”
“I just want you to know it…in case I lose my mind like they did.”
Patterson nodded. She worried about Pazuzu’s ability to alter a person’s mind too. They were all caught in a catch-22. They couldn’t survive against Pazuzu without working together, but they also couldn’t coordinate against Pazuzu if one or more of them were compromised by it. She inwardly prayed that Nieves wouldn’t succumb to the terror of it all. “I know it.”
Nieves looked down at the deck again. She spoke, starting with a stutter and then found her voice. “But I was with Qureshi more than anyone else. I need you to keep watch over me. And I know that if you have to do something in the future that it is the best for all of us.”
She hugged Nieves, not knowing what to say. She wanted Nieves to know that none of them condemned her, and nor was it certain that she would turn into what Qureshi did. Pazuzu had weaknesses. They would find them.
They eventually got up and walked out into Reception. The crew were talking about the Creature – the big main one. They were speculating on how dangerous it was, imagining it to be far worse than the thralls they killed. And it probably was. And they were scared that they knew so little about it. None had got a good look at it. Samoylova described what she could see as like a red sprite. She described it as having an eldritch appearance. It had not been stopped by Moussa’s and Samoylova’s gunfire.
She looked around the room and saw their suffering. Stocky looked worst since he had been fighting the creatures the longest. He held a rag to his face to catch the snot and the phlegm he coughed up, and his nictitating membranes – still covering his eyes – were greatly streaked with inflamed blood vessels. He had hive like patches all over his body since he had been almost naked.
Stocky was designed for harsh environments through. The three outermost layers of his epidermis were substantially thicker, and so was his skin’s basal lamina. He was holding up remarkably well for how long he had been exposed to the agent. A normal human would be fully out of action. (But those creatures would have killed a normal human.)
Chandna and Samoylova, were both largely unaffected by the creature’s chemical attack. They attended to the rest. She was thankful for that. They would have to rely on them for a greater portion of the ship’s operations.
“This burning just don’t go away,” Moussa mumbled, changing the subject, as he sat down and rubbed one of the large patches of hives on his forearms. “I don’t think that cream you gave us is providing much relief.”
“It might not,” Chandna said. “I’m sorry, that’s the best of what we can safely use. But you can apply more.”
“What is this that they used on us?” Holly asked in a raspy voice. She held a rag to her nose to catch a perpetual drip. Tears ran out of her bloodshot eyes, which she kept shut more than open, and her skin was covered in large patch like bumps. Her symptoms were severe.
Patterson saw her condition and worried about it affecting her command.
“Phosgene oxime,” Chandna said. “It’s a type of chemical warfare agent called an urticant. It’s usually not deadly. We’ll all recover. It’s instead designed to incapacitate by causing intense pain.”
“Tell us what we don’t know,” Moussa said while wrapping a cold towel over his arms. “How long are we going to be feeling like this?”
“Most of the irritation will subside in the next twenty-four hours,” Patterson said. “However, there will be lingering effects throughout the healing process. That will happen over several days. And we’re going to have to work harder and more cautiously to live that long. Drink plenty of water to help flush it out of your systems and find the inner strength to push on. We die if we don’t work.
I do have more powerful drugs if necessary. I prefer to avoid using them. They will either affect the mind and impair judgment, or they will compromise immunity. And we need all those things.”
“Then let’s get to work,” Moussa said. “The first thing to do is figure out how those things got into Habitation without any warning.”
“A flaw in the quarantine on your end.”
“No way,” Moussa said. “We had so many layers.”
“We haven’t performed the autopsies yet. But I can already tell from the physiological changes in the bodies and the behavior that I saw on the Mess that Qureshi’s mental condition was completely altered by Pazuzu. She likely failed to implement certain aspects of your defensive strategy or outright sabotaged them. And I think Garvey was succumbing to the infection too. The two of them were likely making mistakes over the last several hours.”
“We don’t know if it can control our minds,” Holly said.
“I’ll learn more with the autopsy. But I suspect that it wasn’t their minds anymore.”
“Then how do we know if we have the infection?” Nieves asked. She trembled in her seat. She looked the most frightened, but each showed concern.
“Yeah,” Samoylova said, “we need to identify those who are compromised or we’ll soon all be.”
“You were there,” Patterson said. “Did you notice any unusual symptoms that Qureshi was experiencing?”
Samoylova glared defensively at her and then relaxed. “She was quite feverish and complained of aches. She had a wet cough too.”
“Diarrhea too,” Moussa said. “But how is this supposed to help us? Look at us. Pretty much all of us are coughing and aching.”
“Well, we have a fever and diarrhea as unique symptoms. That’s not much, but it’s a start.”
“We should be able to use aches too,” Holly said, finally opening her terrifying, bloodshot eyes. “Qureshi had a headache and body aches. We don’t have that, it just feels like my skin is on fire.” She coughed again and then composed herself. “But my chest may start to hurt from coughing.”
“It will be hard to tell the difference by looking. If Qureshi compromised the security measures then the infected will almost certainly try to conceal their condition. They won’t be upfront about where they ache.”
“You’re the doctor,” Holly said. “You figure it out.”
“The only way I can do that and be certain of my methods is if we all stay together down here.”
Holly shook her head and was about to answer when Stocky spoke. “Did Qureshi appear to have any delusions?” he asked.
“Why do you ask?”
“Fuller mentioned he was seeing and hearing things in Sci-Med,” Stocky said. “Remember when I called you about that? He had an intense fear that he was being stalked. He retained that paranoia when he went into Systems Access.”
“Very interesting,” Chandna said, “he was coughing and feverish too.”
“Are you saying that your team had an infection spreading down here since the boarding party’s return and you didn’t even know it?” Holly asked, looking at Patterson and Chandna.
If only some on the boarding party had taken my warnings seriously.
“This isn’t good,” Samoylova said. “How can we trust anyone?”
“Let’s keep calm,” Chandna said. “It’s possible that none of us have been exposed to the Pazuzu infection. However, we have several unique symptoms, including paranoia, to make a rational determination. If we allow ourselves to go all John Carpenter’s The Thing, then we aren’t going to be able to properly utilize paranoia.
I suggest we perform a full blood and lymph analysis on everyone now, and we remain observant for symptoms that we know are unique. If someone displays symptoms not associated with the nettle agent attack, we can test again. Do you have anything to add, Patterson?”
She looked at him and briefly considered what to say. She had doubts. The original Pazuzu organisms had evolved into so many new types that they couldn’t be completely certain of its effectiveness. And he knew that. She reasoned that he was trying to keep them calm and united. She would play along. Besides, it was worth a try.
“No, get the equipment and we’ll begin.”