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  Andy focused on the sounds in her earpiece and was able to detect some sort of growling sound and then her fellows in beta squad shouting back. Guns started blazing. Some kind of firefight? But with what?

  No one was talking to her. She needed to get to them, but she needed to take care of her squad first.

  “Here,” Anallin and Roxanna said in chorus, tinges of annoyance and fear mingled together in the word.

  Andy had to forget about beta team now and focus on her own people. Until she had her own situation under control and was able to talk to the other teams, she was going to have to accept the fact that she was, for all intents and purposes, on her own now.

  They came around a curve and found Dan huddled in a corner with his rifle on the floor and his hands over his head. It was odd to see a man of his size and age curled up on the floor like a child, rocking back and forth. He was making sounds and some of them seemed to be words, but it wasn’t anything that Andy could make out. The lights flickered again and as if on cue, he shouted at the ceiling.

  “Watch my back,” Andy ordered. She slung her rifle over her shoulder and held her hands up, unsure of what was going on in Dan’s mind. She wanted to seem as non-threatening as possible, just in case.

  She really didn’t feel like being attacked by her own man today. The day was going badly enough as it was, wasn’t it?

  Andy approached him as a friend, not as his squad leader. “Dan,” she said, keeping her voice level, even as she heard that rough breathing behind her that said Jade was on the verge of hyperventilating again. “Dan, it’s me. It’s Andy.” They had been serving together for a couple of years now, and she hoped he would remember that, amid whatever was going on in his head. “You know what I was thinking about the other day? Do you remember that time we docked at Starbase One-Ten and found that terrible dive bar down in the lower levels?”

  Pausing, she studied him to see if anything she said was getting through. He didn’t say anything, nor did he look at her, but the rocking seemed to be a little less...intense, so she was going to call that a good sign.

  “You hit on that Xattallian woman with the red beads in her hair until you realized that the beads were actually bugs?” Even in this dire a situation, the memory still made her smile a little. “I thought you were going to break your leg you tried to get away from her so fast.”

  Her words seemed to calm him so she kept taking slow steps closer and closer. Every time she put one foot down, she’d pause and wait to see if there was any adverse reaction. Her training in de-escalation tactics was paying off, although she’d never expected to have to use it on a member of her own squad.

  “Or how about the last time we were on Earth? You took me to meet your mother and she spent half of the meal not willing to believe that you and I weren’t dating? Although once I tasted her cooking, I was almost willing to let her keep believing it so she’d feed me that well,” Andy went on. She would have said that one could never go wrong bringing up mom, but she knew from her own experience that that wasn’t true. At least, it wouldn’t be as successful a tactic with herself, but she knew it had a better shot with Dan.

  She remembered his mother better than she remembered her own. The woman was almost as broad as her son, and one might say she was overbearing, but it was all with care. Andy probably gained five pounds on that one night visit, but she certainly hadn’t been complaining. Mrs. Thomas was an amazing cook, and had even sent Andy and Dan back to the ship with a storage-dried container of meals.

  Thinking of Dan’s mother was enough to soothe her, hopefully it would him too.

  “I also remember when we went rock climbing and there was that one point, where you had to trust me to hold you up?” Now she was almost to him. She was doing her best to drown out Jade’s heavy breathing, Anallin’s clicking, and Roxanna’s quiet murmuring. She just had to trust that they would watch her back, like she was about to try to get Dan to trust her. “You weren’t sure if I could, given that I’m smaller than you.” She kneeled slowly before him, her dark eyes studying him and trying to catch his eye. “But you trusted me, and it was all fine in the end.”

  He stopped rocking and the quiet stream of gibberish ceased, for the moment at least, but his arms were still over his head so she couldn’t see his face. She felt like if she could just get him to look at her, then she could get through to him. Not that she understood why she was so certain of that, but she was.

  Andy considered trying to reach out and touch him, but was far less certain about that idea. She didn’t want to undo whatever calm she had brought him by doing something rash.

  “Dan,” she went on soothingly, “you trusted me then and you can trust me now. I don’t know what’s going on with you, but I know that we are going to figure out what’s going on and get out of here. I can’t do that without you, though, so I need you to try to pull yourself back together and come with the rest of the team.”

  After a moment that probably wasn’t more than a heartbeat or two but felt like it might as well have been a year, she watched his arms slowly begin to shift away from his head...

  Then, Roxanna screamed.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE SOUND WAS NEARLY EARDRUM-PIERCING, and that was not figurative. The Selerid’s voice reached an inhuman pitch, but was fortunately short-lived.

  Andy spun around, forgetting Dan for an instant as she had clutched her hands over her ears against the auditory intrusion. Her dark eyes stared at Roxanna for an instant, but Roxanna wasn’t looking at her. She was looking down the corridor that they hadn’t explored yet.

  “Not...right...” Roxanna gasped, shaking her head almost violently. Her skin suddenly swirled with purple and pearl white. “Coming... They’re...”

  “Not right, I got that,” Andy said, lowering her hands.

  Now Roxanna focused on her, and her skin only swirled harder. Andy was almost motion sick from looking at it. “They’re coming...” she managed to say before she started speaking so fast that her translator couldn’t keep up and there was simply a steady stream of the Selerid tongue with barely a single breath. If there were separate words, Andy could never have guessed what they were.

  “Get it together!” Andy snapped, to no avail. If there were enemies incoming, she couldn’t be dealing with this. She surged forward and gave a short shove against Roxanna’s shoulders, driving her back a step. It had the desired effect, however, and the rolling stream of sounds came to a stop with a quiet gasp as Roxanna clamped her lips shut.

  Andy inhaled through her teeth and turned to see that Dan had gone back to exactly how he’d been when they first found him. She let out a frustrated grunt and turned to Anallin, who was watching Dan with an expression she couldn’t read. Of course, picking up on anything was impressive with a Hanaran, but she was picking up on something and didn’t know what it was because she hadn’t seen it from it before.

  “Anallin,” she said, trying to snap the Hanaran out of the moment. “Be prepared to pick him up if we have to. I don’t think we’re going to get him out of here under his own power.”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” Anallin replied in a flat voice.

  Andy had doubts she could count on her orders being followed. There wasn’t time to worry about that. She just had to trust that her directives were clear. “Stay near him in case it comes to that.”

  There was nothing else she could do so she turned back to Roxanna, who was thankfully still quiet. “Corporal,” she said sternly, “is that the direction they’re coming from?” She pointed down the corridor.

  The Selerid nodded in a jerky sort of way, but it was enough.

  “Weapons up, keep your eyes down that way but your ears behind us,” she ordered. “I don’t want to be snuck up on while focusing on this way. Don’t let yourself get boxed into that corner.” With Dan pressing himself into the aforementioned corner, of course, she worried that they wouldn’t have much of a choice without simply abandoning him, which she wasn’t going to do.

&
nbsp; They moved into formation, sort of, to wait for whatever was coming down the corridor.

  They waited...

  With Roxanna’s ability, she couldn’t always tell distances and sometimes sensed people further out and sometimes closer. There was no way to know for sure, and Andy for a moment even wondered if Roxanna’s empathic senses had been corrupted by whatever was driving everyone on this station insane.

  And they waited... Andy began wondering if there really was someone, or something, coming, but wouldn’t let them bring their guns down. She believed that what Roxanna had sensed was real. It was just further away than they expected.

  Eventually a new sound joined Jade’s shallow breathing, Anallin’s clicking, and Dan’s murmuring. It was a combination of heavy thuds, like indelicate footfalls. It started quiet, coming from just beyond the curve where even the light couldn’t show what was coming, and then grew steadily louder. As it did, other sounds mingled with it—more loud, heavy breathing and dull mumbling.

  Andy kept herself steady, body tense with readiness but loose enough to move as she needed to. “Steady,” she told the others, wanting to remind them that she was there and who they were.

  Finally, the source of the sound came around the curve and into the flickering light. She was able to count three of them, humanoid. They did not run but they did not move slowly either, their pace steady as they came on. All of them seemed to be in one piece, but with each step closer, Andy could make out more detail.

  All three of them had blood on them, in various places. Some even had it on their face, although she wasn’t sure she could pick out any obvious sign of injury. They all moved forward under their own power and all body parts seemed to be in place. Did that mean that the blood wasn’t their own?

  “Hold your fire,” she ordered. The three were moving toward them, but they hadn’t made any aggressive moves...yet. They simply were there, walking toward her squad, looking—in Roxanna’s words—“not right.”

  After a few more moments of examining the closest of them, she realized that beneath the uncertainty that hung around them like a fog and the blood, they were wearing uniforms. Once she made this connection, the dark blue and the gold patch over the left side of the chest jumped out at her in recognition. The uniforms were from Starbase Zenith.

  Of course they were. She didn’t know why that surprised her, but it did. Had she thought them some unknown intruder that just happened to be wandering through the halls?

  The group obviously saw them, moving straight for them at their unwavering pace.

  “Halt!” Andy called, wanting to give one chance for them to stop on their own. They hadn’t chosen to do so at the sight of four armed Marines with guns trained on them, but she had to try once more. Maybe if they could get through to them and get them to stop, they would have a shot at finding out what had happened here. These people were witnesses to the obvious decline of the station. She had to try.

  They just kept coming.

  “I’m not going to tell you again,” Andy said, knowing that this was their last chance. She would give them one more moment, but any more than that would put her and her team at risk and she wasn’t going to do that any more than she already had. This could only go so far. “I need you to stop right where you are. If you don’t, we will open fire. I don’t want to have to do that, folks, so I’ll say again, halt!”

  They did not stop. Andy was disappointed, but not surprised. Suddenly, one of them surged ahead and came straight at them with a burst of speed that far exceeded what they had been moving at before.

  No more warnings. “Fire,” Andy ordered.

  CHAPTER 8

  ANDY’S AIM WAS TRUE. The pulses from the other three weapons were slightly more haphazard. In the part of her mind beyond the task at hand, Andy knew that her people were better trained than that. She had been on the firing range with them many a time and their focus and aim were true.

  They were falling apart bit by bit. However, despite this, the field of fire was enough to cover all the marks.

  It was only a few moments before all three bodies were on the ground with faint traces of smoke rising from where each one had been hit. “Hold,” Andy ordered and the firing stopped, but no one lowered a rifle. At least they remembered that much, she thought cynically. They stood in silence for several moments, waiting to make sure that the three ahead of them wouldn’t somehow rise again.

  After that amount of weapons fire, it was nearly impossible that anyone could, but Andy wasn’t going to take any chances at this point.

  However, none of the three moved. They were all just piles upon the deck plates, the lights still flickering and buzzing as if in agreement—or protest—over what had just happened. She took a long breath and then nodded to herself. “Weapons down,” she ordered, lowering hers last among the four of them. “Move in slowly. I want as complete a scan as we can get. I want to know what the hell is going on here.”

  Anallin made a reply that Andy would’ve called a grunt. She hadn’t thought Hanalan vocal chords even capable of making a sound like that. Andy let the lack of protocol slide as Anallin slung her weapon over her shoulder and approached the bodies to scan them.

  She noted how slowly the Lance Corporal approached the bodies, but was glad her orders were still being followed, mostly.

  Anallin shuffled forward until the bodies were in range and began the scan. Andy watched for a moment and then turned to look at the rest of her team. Jade was pressed back against the wall, her eyes still wide and pupils dilated. There wasn’t much of their original green color left, or so it seemed to Andy. Roxanna seemed calmer than she had been earlier, at least, now that the “not right” minds were quieted.

  Andy glanced back at Dan and saw there was no change in his status, so she focused on Roxanna first.

  “Can you tell me anything about what you felt from them?” she asked, hoping that the quieter empathic atmosphere would help the other woman focus better and answer the question, rather than launching into another stream of incoherent Selerid.

  “I...don’t know there’s much,” Roxanna replied, at least confirming Andy’s hope for a start. She still didn’t sound like herself, but it was better than she’d been before. “I know ‘not right’ is not...It’s not much to go on, Sergeant, but I don’t know how else to describe what I felt. I have felt many minds from many races, and have felt insanity even, but this felt like something beyond that.” She paused, blinking at Andy. Her skin calmed again. “Or rather it was like madness, or madness that I have felt before, but something far beyond that. I...I don’t know how else to say it. It just... It was... I...” She stammered for a few moments before looking away and stopping.

  Madness? Was that indicative of what had happened to the entire station? If so, how? Could it have been some sort of virus? But wouldn’t the station’s environmental systems have detected that and filtered it out before it got to absolutely everyone on board?

  “Thank you, Corporal,” Andy said quietly. She wanted to ask more, but figured she already learned all she was going to.

  She glanced back at Anallin, who was still kneeling to scan but had moved onto another body. Although Andy knew they needed to move on, she wanted all the information they could get from the bodies. Hopefully, one of them would have some kind of clue as to what was going on.

  Leaving Anallin to it, Andy moved back to Dan’s side. She didn’t have the same time to pussyfoot around as she had before. With her rifle lowered to her side, she kneeled beside him again. It was clear that he wasn’t going to do anything to her, she determined, so she was just going to have to force the issue.

  “Dan,” she said, still angling for the ‘friend’ approach, “we don’t have time for this. It is all going to hell and we can’t sit here trying to talk ourselves off ledges. We have to get up on our feet and move.” She put her hand on his shoulder. His whole body jerked at the touch, but he didn’t move much otherwise or speak to her directly or get up. “Well, Tho
mas, are you a Marine or aren’t you?” she demanded, making her voice harsher. “Or aren’t you?!”

  Now he lifted his head just enough for his wild eyes to meet hers, and she was actually a little nervous for just a moment. She was not going to give into that feeling, however, and she steeled herself against it.

  She would not give in. If not for herself, then for her team. She owed it to them to see them back out of this mental melee.

  “All is ashes,” he whispered cryptically and then turned his face from her again.

  Andy suppressed a shiver and was about to try to draw more out of him when she heard Anallin calling her. For the moment, she had to forego this task and see what the Hanaran had found. She hoped the scans had been fruitful.

  “I have no idea, Sergeant,” Anallin said as Andy approached, eyes clicking rapidly now. “I ran every scan I am capable of, focusing on overall physiology, and more specifically, neurological, looking for any sign or hint at what might have caused them to become like this. I sought out all abnormalities that I am aware of.”

  “And?” Andy prompted after the pause went on too long.

  “Nothing.” The delivery was flat, but Andy thought she sensed a hint of frustration in Anallin’s voice. Or maybe she was projecting, because that answer certainly frustrated her.

  “What do you mean ‘nothing’?” she asked, barely suppressing most of her aggravation. “That wasn’t normal, even Roxanna could sense that, so how could you not find anything to explain it?”

  “If I had the answer to that, Sergeant, I would tell you,” Anallin said. “I am not saying that there are not abnormalities, there does not exist a human without them, but there are none that would explain what we saw here.”