Stocky watched Chandna and Patterson remove the brain from the Fuller-creature. Tough sinews adhered it to the inside of the skull, which Chandna carefully scraped away. The brain was pale and had black spidery veins running through it. The cerebral spinal fluid that dripped from the cranium was more viscous than with the other bodies. They weighed the brain on a scale and then set it on a tray and began to separate its folds with a scalpel.
“Like your testing specimens? Los Tres Amigos?”
“Yes,” Patterson said. “This one is considerably altered.”
“The lobing is abnormal,” Chandna said. “And these fibers snaking through it are entirely alien in origin.”
Patterson nodded. “Uh-huh.”
Chandna continued to inspect the lobes for several seconds. He then took a set of tweezers and very slowly pulled out a small node of dark tissue which had many tiny fibers digging deeper into the brain. “See this? It’s just like with the animal subjects.”
She nodded.
“This one was the most altered?” Chandna asked, looking at them both.
“No,” Patterson said. “Soliman was the most transformed. That creature barely resembled human.”
Chandna looked at him. “Why did you have to turn that one into paste?”
Will you let it go? “I’m sorry, but the chemical attack hurt. I thought it was actively doing something – like a reflex mechanism. So I mauled it.”
“That may have been the right thing to do,” Patterson said. “I don’t think we need the other one anyways. This shows what we’ve found with our animals holds true for larger organisms too.”
“And how long does it take to transform a person?”
“Pazuzu works fast. It’s not just the replication of the alien microorganisms that changes you. They also mutate nearby host tissue, which becomes like a cancer. I’d say one to two days to get where Garvey and Qureshi were,” Patterson said. “Likely weeks to get where Fuller and Soliman were if the victim is left out in the open. I suspect Pazuzu placed those two in some kind of incubator to speed up the process.”
Chandna nodded. “Yes, that’s reasonable. It has to use some other means than sweating to remove the excess heat from the supercharged metabolism.”
“What makes you think that? Why can’t it do it faster?” He pointed at Fuller, “It benefits Pazuzu to get the Captain to this stage now.”
“Pazuzu’s not the deity,” she said. “It must obey the same physical rules that we do. Any work it does has to be performed at a slow enough rate so that the waste heat can be handled per the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It takes a lot of energy to reconfigure a human body like this. Breaking down and reassembling the tissues. To change the structure of a human body you must dissolve and then redeposit all the minerals in bone and also break the intermolecular bonds for the many fibrous layers of interlinked proteins which gives us our physical form and rearrange them.”
She picked up a set of tongs and pulled back one of the plate-like sections of skin on the Fuller-creature. “Just look at this leather. All the extra keratin processed and deposited within the epidermis. It had to make this. This required significant metabolic activity, as did the glands assembled to produce the nettle agent. Nutrients had to be rapidly consumed and metabolized, the intermolecular bonds between the structural proteins reformed, and the waste heat dissipated at a low enough rate to not cause harm to vital tissues.”
Then she picked at the arm that they had dissected with a scalpel and pulled the hurmerus bone partly out of the incision for a better view. “See these strands of connective tissue webbed around this and reinforcing it? This is an addition it made.” She pointed at the end of the bone (which they had cut into). “Here’s the sponge bone. In a normal human this is mostly fluid filled space, but this is dense like a chimpanzee. This creature was built to withstand massive physical forces. Soliman was even further along in hybridization – to where the skeleton didn’t even look like a man.”
She lay the arm back down and looked over the corpse while sighing. “These creatures burned through fat with a hyperactive metabolism. That’s why they were so lanky. They weren’t designed to last long. Pazuzu only intended for them to do away with us. The nettle agent they made was wrecking them too – probably worse than us. These were kamikaze troops.”
He looked in both their eyes and was glad to see neither appeared frightened. They all had a clear and level head, and they needed to use that. “If it’s going to take a day or so for Pazuzu to turn De Silva’s body into this then I think we should grab weapons and go find it in Aux Two.”
She shook her head. “We’re not in the shape to fight the Creature.”
Maybe and maybe not. But he didn’t think that mattered. “We don’t have to. We use our guns to keep it away and we find and burn where it is incubating these things.”
Patterson closed her eyes for a moment and seemed genuinely troubled. How had he hurt her? It was the most reasonable course of action.
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“Lord knows that I want to do that,” she said. “Because De Silva is likely still alive. Pazuzu favors senescent tissue over dead tissue. It likes when cells have lost their ability for proper genetic repair and protein synthesis, and then it comes in and kickstarts all of that cellular machinery into a new direction. That’s one of the reasons why it didn’t make a nerve agent. I wish I could save him from what I think it’s doing to him.”
“We should save him if he’s still alive. You told me you know how it copes with subzero temperatures and can now freeze it.”
She balled her fists. “We know the general concept of how Pazuzu does it. But we haven’t had the time to work around all of its defenses yet!”
He was genuinely shocked that she felt beaten. And that she would abandon the Captain. “You’re going to have a first patient to try it with anyways.”
She shook her head silently for several seconds. “He’s already as good as dead. I can’t save him just like I couldn’t save Zhu. It’s going to take all I can to keep us living. I have to battle any potential infection threatening us!”
He silently conceded her point, even though he hated it. Abandoning the Captain felt so wrong. Why didn’t they lie to him and tell him he was dead?
“There’s another problem that we need to solve first,” Chandna said.
“Make new drones for reconnaissance?” Stocky asked. “I know.”
“No,” Chandna said. “It’s unrelated to that. But I need to know that the conversation will remain just between us.”
“If it concerns the ship then it concerns the Captain.” You know this.
“We are within our authority to direct you to keep this from her,” Chandna said.
Stocky glared at him. “And you do keep secrets, don’t you?”
“It’s fine,” Patterson said to calm him down. She turned to Chandna and picked up a saw from the surgeon’s tray. “We’ll go to consultation and talk. But cut up these bodies with me first just in case they aren’t dead for good.”
Stocky watched as they methodically dismembered them. And they placed some tissue samples in Analysis for more information. Then they passed through decontamination, went down to the lower deck, and got out of their bubble suits. Patterson took a seat at the table, moving lethargically. Chandna chose to stand, and so did he.
“I believe we should establish a new quarantine,” Chandna said. “We won’t survive without one.”
“We need to talk with Holly if we’re going to alter the quarantine. Because we’ll need their help to modify the ship’s isolations.”
“I don’t so much want to isolate a Gate as I want to isolate people,” Chandna said.
“Go on.”
Chandna now took a seat, leaning back. “The three of us have been in close contact. We haven’t been with the others, and the infection has been circulating amongst them. We know it doesn’t pass through dry skin easily – it can’t process dead tissue fast. But if they’ve been exposing one another to bodily fluids by sharing a glass or sweating together on exercise equipment then those people are likely infected.”
“So you want to isolate each one of them?” Patterson asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“This is why you don’t want the Captain to hear of this. She would have to relinquish command.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
Stocky glared at him. Authority was to always be respected. Relieving her of command due to a hunch didn’t sit well with him.
“We don’t have any indication that any of Pazuzu’s contagions are airborne,” she reminded. “And nobody was likely doing the things you mention – although we can’t be certain we know all the ways that it can spread yet. The truth is…any of us could have been exposed, but it’s quite possible none of us have. I think we have no choice but to trust our testing regimen and use our time to learn more. For now.”
“We likely don’t know all the methods of transport,” Chandna said. “But we know Pazuzu is intelligent. It selects its victims. Zhu, Qureshi, Fuller, Garvey, Soliman – all among the weaker members of the crew. It’s thinning us out.”
“Pazuzu also favors senescence,” Patterson said. “And it knows it can find more of that in older people – Zhu, De Silva…you!”
Chandna made a sly grin. “Pazuzu does take many things into account. And I do admit that I’m probably the most vulnerable out of us.”
Stocky smirked as he carefully assessed Chandna. He was of no more than average height, thinly (weakly) built, and balding on top. He couldn’t tell what they pumped up with his splice job. And Chanda hid secret metabolic deficiencies. “Definitely so.”
Patterson laughed. “I don’t think he has much faith in you.” A thump sounded as if within the wall or behind it. She suddenly paused and tensed up while turning to the nearby vent.
Stocky also looked at the vent grille. He heard the low rumbling of the running blower. It had probably just sounded odd on startup. He wished he could smell.
After several seconds of silence, Chandna looked back at Patterson. “It’s probably nothing.”
Patterson nodded. “I say we shelve this idea for now. We’ll analyze another sample in four hours. I’ll reconsider your plan if we find something concerning, or if we see abnormal behavior from anyone. The important thing is to keep all open wounds dressed. I’ll stress that to them again.”
“You’re almost certainly going to have to reconsider a quarantine,” Chandna said. “It knows that Holly is the Captain.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ooh,” Patterson said. “You let the cat out of the bag. I told Stocky that we don’t keep secrets. Go ahead and tell him.”
Chandna waited for a few seconds. He couldn’t refuse, but it looked like he may have wanted to. “Pazuzu appears to learn from those it assimilates. It knows how the Nineveh is designed. It knows our security procedures. And it knows that Holly is now in command.”
“The only thing on the Nineveh that it doesn’t know about,” Patterson said while looking at Stocky, “is you. Its thralls were meant to overrun us. It didn’t know you could smash two of them all by yourself. It knew you’d be hard to take down but still underestimated.”
“Well, it’s going to do better next time if that’s true. It can make De Silva into a much bigger threat than Soliman. You need to take this information to Holly.”
“She knows that it’s intelligent,” Chandna said.
Stocky was horrified by his misplaced confidence. “You know that you can’t assume she knows what to do. She’s only a…normie human, and she’s the youngest person on the ship. If Pazuzu compromises Command then it might be able to jump to FTL. We need to tell Holly and Moussa, and then disable the drive.”
“Whoa,” Patterson said. “We die out here if we do that. I’m not giving up yet.”
He couldn’t blame her for not wanting to sacrifice herself. She had never met a challenge that was too much for her. And it might be that Pazuzu wasn’t either. “I know ways to do it that won’t strand us here. That will still give you a chance to find a solution to our problem.”
“That sounds good then,” Chandna said. “But we should do this ourselves. The less people who know the better.”
Patterson looked at them both and then nodded. “Lead on.”