Project MINA Gen version

by Kei

An experiment releases a great evil onboard Seaview.

3. 3

7



The Seaview had become a plague ship...of that there was no longer any doubt. Despite the fact that her crew still worked to repair her, their brows damp from effort and anxiety, a sense of impending doom had settled upon them; the fear of who would succumb next or if on their minds every waking moment. They had fought many battles, known dangers of which few could imagine, but none so great as that which they could not see. It was easy to flex one's muscles and act the part of the macho warrior when one's enemy stood as a solid, tangible being, but how could one duke it out with a disease? The answer was terribly simple -one couldn't.

Sparks sighed heavily as he caught sight of the black arm band of mourning, that everyone wore, out of the corner of his eye as he directed a needle-thin beam of laser light against hair-like wires, one by one, within the radio console within the Conn's Radio Shack. He was tired -several times, he was certain, he had seen double-images and mental ghosts that disappeared with a shake of his head as he pressed himself to make this contentious unit work -but he didn't want to give in to sleep... Nightmares dwelt in that realm...and hard work allowed him to ignore the fact that he was afraid...afraid of a growing unknown.

Glass fibres melted and fused in their appropriate spots as the needle-thin laser beam bored in on them, guided by his hand, his brow furrowing as he tried another dial or pressed another button, adjusting frequencies, expecting as little to come from this effort as had come from countless others. "What..?" Sparks pressed a hand to the earphone of the headset he wore, eyes widening with disbelief. "Mr. Morton!"

A puzzled frown creased Chip Morton's brow as he was about to sign one more in a seemingly endless progression of repair detail reports...frowning not because the repair details were not making any headway in getting this downed vessel a little closer to being ship-shape -they were- but because he was not entirely certain that his name had been called at all, so deeply in his private world of thought had he been...but... "Mr. Morton!" came the voice of the agitated radio operator. "I think I'm getting something!"

Morton strode over to the Radio Shack amidst the low buzz of crewmen's voices, barely aware of the sound. Sparks was sitting at his console, hand still pressed against the earpiece of his headset, his expression wavering between excitement and anxiety or wonder and frustration as he made some adjustments to various dials and buttons on the radio console with his free hand. "The reception's pretty...garbled, sir," he said uneasily, seeing Morton's approach out of the corner of his eye. "We can only receive, not send, and I think we're actually getting two signals overlapping into one, but...ah..." He made a final adjustment. "Skimmers...icebreakers -the S.S. Wodenkind from Germany and the S.S. Gandreid from Norway...civilian research ships. They were both sent to investigate what they figure were three massive earthquakes or volcanic eruptions in the south polar regions."

"The explosions..." Morton murmured, his voice low. "Voyageur's, Delta's, and ours..."

"Yes, sir," Sparks said, concurring, his eyebrows knitting together with frustration as the signals were suddenly swamped by electronic noise, fading in and out before they became steady and almost clear again. "Could be, sir, but their skippers are being instructed to break off their surveys... to scrub their missions."

"What!" Morton snapped, his face blank with disbelief. "By whom?"

Sparks mirrored his executive officer's incredulity as he listened to the now weak, overlapping signals that traveled through a wall of static before they reached his console. He pressed the earphone closer to his ear, listening, but not believing what he was hearing. "By... InterAllied Fleet Commander Carter James Thomas, sir. The Wodenkind's skipper is radioing his government for further instructions before he makes a move one way or another and the skipper of the Gandreid is about to do the same."

"I see." The ballpoint pen with which Morton was to sign the progress report snapped cleanly between Morton's fingers, staining the digits with blue ink -he didn't notice ...wouldn't have cared if he had. In the instant it had taken for him to digest the new information, incredulity had metamorphosed into seething anger; an anger which he held in check by force of will alone. Orders were orders -he knew that- and the naval officer that he was accepted that. That was his training... his way. For the most part, there was usually some wisdom behind a superior's orders, but human man that he was, the order left him feeling...betrayed. He knew that for once and for all that he and his crew were actually on their own for the duration -by InterAllied's orders.

By and by, the tide of all too human anger receded, and the Executive Officer saw that the radio operator was waiting, disbelieving like himself, for any further orders. "Sparks... you've got to get that transmitter working again. Use whatever stores we have -cannibalize whatever works in the Flying Sub if you must- but get that radio operational!"

"Aye, sir!" Sparks responded smartly and then hesitated, suddenly uncertain. "Uh... Mister Morton, sir, what about InterAllied's orders -the radio-silence and all?"

"Orders..." Morton muttered. "InterAllied can go-" The Executive Officer caught himself, closing his eyes for a moment against the tide of anger that once again threatened to overwhelm him -it remained behind his carefully constructed mental walls, unseen and unheard. He sighed aloud and again met the young radio operator's eyes. "Just...follow the orders I gave you. I'll deal with InterAllied's upper echelons of command later."




Perhaps there was still time.

A thin film of sweat beaded up on corpsman Thibideau's brow as he quickly ducked into the shadowy recess of the corridor in which he stood waiting as a group of Seaview's crewmen walked past without noticing his presence -a repair detail whose members talked with low, almost nervous tones as though whispering might allow a grim fate to pass them by unnoticed. The best of luck to them, Thibideau thought wryly and then grimaced slightly as his hand brushed against the inactivated incendiary device he had stolen from the ship's stores, now laying in the bottom of a pocket of the general-issue crewman's uniform he had stolen from a Sick Bay locker...or borrowed. It all depended on what happened next...and he had to work fast. Seaview's medical corps members had been distracted, by some sort of medical emergency as far as he knew, at the time that he had slipped away, but it wouldn't be long before they noticed that he was gone -if they hadn't already.

A man in a coma didn't usually just get up and walk away. Or did he? That was a possibility that he hadn't explored. Thibideau's free hand bunched into a fist, tightening until his fingertips imbedded themselves against the soft flesh of his palm, pressing further and deeper until welts of purple and blue appeared and spread on the bunched skin. The corpsman's lips tightened into a grimace. The pain was real. The blood was real. He was real...and alive. With a job, a duty to perform.

The map of Seaview's interior appeared before Thibideau's mental sight, providing him with a guide to where he had to go. In silence, he had listened to scuttlebutt whispered between Seaview's corpsmen -of how the bodies of the Seaview's fallen men were to be cremated, their ashes cast to the waters. In silence, he had finally decided that he could no longer take any chances. A cremation was not part of the naval way and chances were good that the powers-that-be on this ship would change their minds...and if they did that, the Sickness -and worse- would continue to spread. He had witnessed that progression before -he didn't want to again.

Thibideau fingered the hidden incendiary device. Fire -white plasma fire- was the only way to be certain it didn't. Thibideau dismissed the mental image. Whispered rumors had told him where to go. The map showed him the way.




"You have to be kidding! We're almost finished here!"

"I know. I'm sorry. I-I just have to get some air."

The hatch to the containment room slammed shut, its dog wheel being spun from outside until there was familiar click and the sound of fading footsteps. Corpsman Roderiguez stared at the hatchway door as the anger in his young visage faded, slowly replaced by an expression of sympathy. He understood. Despite what Gill might have been thinking right now, he did understand. They had been friends for far too long not to know when the other one was hurting -a friendship that he had decided was too precious to lose over a girl that had told each of them that he was the only one. He would tell Gill that once he returned. Life was too tenuous to waste in anger -his present duty served only to remind him of that truth.

Roderiguez walked through the doorway that led to the containment room's inner chamber. There, large refrigerated cubicles usually meant for keeping samples of larger marine life specimens were temporarily being employed for another purpose. This room had become a sepulcher and the cubicles contained the dead. A soft electronic hum permeated the bulkheads here; a sound that indicated that the units were functioning; a cold ether automatically pumping into each cubicle to protect their contents from cellular breakdown -in this case, until they were consumed by fire.

There was only one body left to finish preparing...the others already having been attended. Roderiguez saw the logic in his being assigned this grim duty -as a civilian, he had once worked in a mortuary, but that made the task no more pleasant or easy...especially as a queasy Gill had finally succumbed to vertigo. There was to be no embalming, no surgical cosmetic procedures -the chance of infection or contamination made that an impossibility, but Seaview's fallen would be attended properly. He would see to that.

Roderiguez hesitated and then pressed himself to continue forward as he came upon his last "patient", aware as he did that he had been trying to avoid this moment himself -when this part was complete, it was all done...finished with a frightening sense of finality. The corpsman shook his head slightly and studied the body laid out on the palate before him with a mixture of grim fascination and regret. The Sickness, whatever it was, seemed to have performed a macabre work of cosmetic magic on this one...on all of the Sickness' victims. Kowalski, Riley, Tomàs, Clarke, the Captain, the others -it was the same.

The Captain's serene, apparently sleeping visage was pale, that was true, but only a little paler than in life -the skin an almost uniform living hue with the slightest flush at the lips and cheeks. There was no livid pallor of corruption upon the body and rigor had somehow yet to set in -the limbs were still flexile and the skin supple to the touch; cooler than in life, also true, but nearly warm. It was that way with all of the victims...unlike those who had died for other reasons. The final effect was one of mannequin-like perfection and beauty...a damned cruel illusion. The phantom virus had left no marks.

Corpsman Roderiguez sighed heavily as he finished buttoning the jacket of the Captain's finest dress uniform, completing the illusion that his late commanding officer was merely in some kind of deep sleep and, as carefully as he was able, placed the body back into the preservation chamber where it was to stay...in this mausoleum. It seemed that with the Captain's death, an even deeper pall had settled over the Seaview and her crew. Roderiguez's assignment to Seaview had been a recent one and he had not known Captain Crane before that except by reputation, but he had found himself supposing, like the rest of the crew, that their almost legendary young commanding officer would have been somehow immune...somehow impervious to this phantom illness that was sweeping them. Would that it had been so...for if even a living legend could be killed, what about an average crewman like himself?

Roderiguez frowned at the small, sharp sound of metal hitting the deck and saw the small reflection of the room's ceiling lamps glinting off shimmering gold...the Captain's signet ring. According to anyone he had spoken to on Seaview, Crane was never seen without it. Roderiguez retrieved the ring and slipped it back onto the Captain's finger. He was a practical, non-superstitious man and didn't recognize the belief that the dead would not rest well if their treasured possessions were not interred with them, but at the same time- "Jesus!" Roderiguez cried out as the Captain's hand suddenly clenched, grasping his own in a vise of iron and then relaxed, releasing him just as quickly. The corpsman staggered back a step, his chest heaving with deep, ragged breaths. Post... Post mortem muscle contraction...that's what it had been.

The corpsman chided himself silently as his racing heart gradually resumed its normal rhythm. What was with him? He had been taught of such...he had seen such things before, and he should have known better than to react this way. Roderiguez shook his head wearily. Then again ...few were quite themselves lately.

Scuttlebutt had it that Admiral Nelson himself wasn't acting normally either and that he had taken the Captain's death far worse than any of the other victims. Why else would the Admiral have gone completely against traditional naval protocol and (scuttlebutt had it) presidential orders and ordered that all of Seaview's dead be given a funeral and then cremated? He didn't know. He didn't want to know.

Roderiguez shut the cubicle and then tagged it -Crane, Captain Lee B.- glad, in a way, to have finally completed the unenviable task, and walked from the inner chamber to the ante-room where a report was waiting to be filled. Though he was an atheist among a family of staunch Roman Catholics, a definite unease had laid a heavy hand upon his shoulder...an unease that amazingly had precious little to do with plagues or sicknesses of any kind and everything to do with simply being surrounded by the dead; a ridiculous unease that left him troubled enough to drop report and clipboard to the deck at his feet when he heard a dull thump and the shuffling of feet.

"Gill?" Why his partner had used the other hatch to the containment room, he had no idea. Roderiguez strode towards the entrance to the containment room proper. "Quit screwing around, man! We've got a report to fill and Doc's gonna be pissed if we don't-" The corpsman stopped in mid-sentence, incredulous. "What the- Who are you! What are you-" The red-haired stranger in a Seaview crewman's uniform looked up sharply, a cornered rat, holding some sort of small metal box that dangled wires in his hand. Roderiguez was not a munitions expert, but he knew an incendiary device when he saw one, and as the startled stranger moved from the shadows that masked his face, Roderiguez realized that he knew the man's identity, when he saw it, too. "All right, Captain Canuck...hand over the device and you won't get yourself hurt..."

Thibideau's eyes darted nervously to the incendiary device in his hand -an idea poorly conceived and badly executed by a panicked man -what had he been thinking? And yet, he had been so close... A small, weak smile touched his lips as he regarded his would-be captor. Escape or capture -those were the choices...and capture always seemed to be the least acceptable of the two. "Comprendez-vous 'catch'?" The small unit of wires and metal flew from the corpsman's hand towards the waiting Roderiguez just as Thibideau had thrown it just before he took to his feet in the opposite direction...but though escape, even a temporary one, was his present goal, it was a goal that he wasn't likely to attain. Though his catatonia had been grossly exaggerated, the weakness of his limbs betrayed how long he had been out of action. The spirit was indeed willing, but the flesh was- Thibideau cried out as he felt himself grabbed around the legs, held in a football tackle, as the cold deck suddenly loomed up before him and he felt a sudden, crashing pain before he saw the stars...and blackness.

Roderiguez pushed himself to his feet, his chest heaving, his eyes all but glued to the unmoving figure of the intruder sprawled on the deck before him. He knew the man -he knew his face, at least- but he neither knew nor cared how a coma patient had suddenly gotten up, walked, and tried to -what- sabotage the ship? Set the whole containment room ablaze? And for what? Didn't know. Didn't care. All that mattered was that now it wouldn't happen.

Roderiguez picked up the incendiary device, regarding it with suspicion -this thing could have taken out the whole bulkhead, and maybe more, if the man hadn't been stopped -a buddy in munitions had told him about such possibilities often enough for him to know that much. What had the man been thinking? Roderiguez set the unit down and stumbled towards the open hatchway and signaled to the two crewmen he saw at the end of the corridor. "Yo! Bingham! March! Fore and center, you two!" The two crewmen hesitated, glanced at each other, and obeyed with no little reluctance as they approached the hatchway door. No-one really believed that the containment procedures were of any real worth, did they? If there was a disease aboard, surely everyone had been exposed by now... But there was some comfort in feeling that the phantom illness everyone knew was on board could be contained in this room...and this was too close. Much too close. All of this Roderiguez could read in his crewmates' faces, but he found had little time or patience for any of it at the moment. "Get this joker down to the lock-up in the Sick Bay! And keep an eye on him!" Blank looks answered the order. "On the double!"

Bingham and March bent to their job with barely muted grumbles about someone throwing his weight around, as they lifted the dead weight that was the unconscious corpsman Thibideau, Roderiguez staring after them as they disappeared around a bend in the corridor. He was not unaware of the resentment, he thought as he made his way back to the ante-room, switching off the light as he went. An ensign didn't really have all that much more authority than a seaman first-class, but this ensign had ordered two seamen to come in contact with someone who could have been carrying...something. Never did like bossing people around. If being in the military -the Navy especially- hadn't been a family tradition... Screw tradition. If he survived this cruise, he wasn't going to renew his commission. Better to take a safer job -teaching perhaps, or selling cars...

A puzzled scowl furrowed Roderiguez's brow as the sharp sound of shattering glass reached his ears. Or had it? Perhaps his nerves were- The pen in Roderiguez's hand fell to the deck as the sound repeated itself, louder this time, coming from the containment room proper. Who..? That officer from the Voyageur again? "Must have escaped..." the corpsman muttered to the air.

His hand fell to his side and he found himself wishing that he was bearing arms as he had seen Bingham and March were doing due to Seaview's alert status -a pointless order, he had thought at the time it had been issued, made only to follow rules and to give the crew a small sense of comfort. As a member of the medical corps, he hadn't been obligated at the time to wear his service weapon, but all at once, he wished he had taken up the option. If that Canadian had been able to escape his keepers and head back here so soon, he was a potentially dangerous and definitely determined man, whether insane or sane. Roderiguez fished a surgical scalpel out of the supply cabinet nearest to himself -as a corpsman, he was better than average at wielding a knife.

"All right..." he called out as he walked into the darkness. "I know you're in there. Come out and you won't get hurt." The sound of more shattering glass was the only response and Roderiguez was suddenly aware of the lack of wisdom in his present course of action. Alone and potentially facing a violent madman... Roderiguez began to cautiously back out of the room when the door behind him suddenly slammed shut, sealing him in near blackness. With a hand that trembled despite himself, he felt for a light switch he knew to be nearby -and found it. As light, stinging and somehow too bright, flooded the area, it created new shadows...strange dark shapes against the bulkhead...shadows that moved.

It was the last thing Roderiguez saw.




The dull sound of clip-clopping feet resounded against the deck of the corridor as corpsman Gill made his way back to the containment room, not striding, but determined not to appear as unwilling as he actually felt. He was glad he was alone. It was difficult to mask the fact that he didn't want to be part of this assignment -he had always had a strong stomach for the types of things that a medical man was often obligated to see in the course of his duties, but for some reason that he had yet to fathom, his nerves had taken leave of him a short while ago. All he had been able to think about was getting out of that room...that room whose walls had seemed to close in on him all of a sudden, choking off his air.

As he approached the hatch to the containment room, he felt the same sense of panic beginning to inch its way up his spine...but he wouldn't bolt. He had promised himself as such. If Roderiguez could handle it, so could he...besides which, if Fate was going to be as cruel to him as it had been to his fellow crewmen, he was determined that he and Roderiguez should talk -he didn't want to die bitter. With a steeling breath, Gill grasped the wheel of the hatchway door and started with surprise as he realized that the hatch, though shut-to, was undogged. Strange... Gill pulled the hatch open and slowly stepped inside, a little voice of caution whispering in his ear. "Enriqué..?"

As the shadows moved in to greet him, he realized that he should have listened.




The metal door of the locker shut with a loud, hollow note of finality.

For the longest time, Patterson could only stare at the small pile of personal effects he had placed beside the neatly folded, clean red tunic uniforms of Seaview's engineering corps -Kowalski's uniforms. More from a matter of convenience than a rule, an ordinary seaman rarely carried much in the way of personal effects aboard a submarine -even on one as massive as Seaview. One could be transferred with little notice or if a ship got shot out from underneath one, one didn't need the worrisome hassle of leaving a lot of personal mementos aboard. Perhaps for those reasons, the items that comprised his late friend's personal gear were few...and somehow...each thing bore Kowalski's stamp.

Patterson angrily ground the warm saline that welled up in his eyes away with the heel of his fist. None of this made any sense. He had seen comrades fall and knew that danger was always there...waiting for them...but he had never expected -never dreamed- that anyone he cared for personally might fall victim to that danger...especially not Kowalski.

And yet, he had...to a disease that had no name and for all this seaman knew might claim him next. At the moment, he felt too numb to care one way or another...and he had a duty to perform.

Sharkey hadn't had to have asked -he would have volunteered anyway. Patterson stared at the thin, hinged box in his hand -a sleek, delicately inlaid black case- before opening it. From within, the sharp glitter of cold metal met his eyes -Kowalski's silver dolphin...the emblem that proved that a sailor had become a submariner. Though Seaview's crew did not wear the emblem on their uniforms due to the ParaNavy's "official" non-Navy status, each man aboard had earned and possessed one -from the silver dolphins of the enlisted men to the gold dolphins of the officers. Why hadn't it been placed on Kowalski's uniform for burial..? But no, he remembered now -Kowalski had always said that if anything was to happen to him, that he wanted his elder brother, Stan, to have it...proof that a rough-edged kid like him had stuck with it and had made it in the Navy and the ParaNavy. Patterson closed the case -he would make sure of it.

Just then, the corner of a photograph that stuck out from the pile caught Patterson's eye. It was a four-by-six taken on a liberty taken during a two-day lay-over in Trinidad and Tobago last year after Seaview had undergone some much needed emergency repairs. He remembered the place -some old non-descript tourist trap- and the hideously garish shirt that some shopkeeper had conned his late friend into buying...and had been wearing at the time of the picture's taking. Man... Old memories- "Geez..!"

Patterson found himself staring, his brow furrowed, fascinated despite himself, as a thin line of bright red blood welled up on the tip of his thumb; the pain of the papercut fading amongst a background of thoughts as a single sanguine droplet fell onto the already red-smeared picture. "Damn..." The seaman's already haggard countenance twisted with frustration as he tried to flick away the obscuring drop and succeeded only in causing the small stain to spread, further obscuring the image.

"Pat..."

"Just a minute, 'Ski. I-" Patterson's voice died in his throat as he realized what he had said and why. He glanced around himself sharply, eyes darting from side to side as his hands automatically continued to mop the static image with his handkerchief, and finally accepted the reassurance of his senses that he was still alone and that no-one had actually spoken to him -especially not his late shipmate no matter how much he wished otherwise. He had heard of things like this -of how a grieving person's longing to see someone again...to resist the reality of one's grief...could have the mind fashion whatever one wanted to see...and hear -as if the person was actually there. Grief... His mother had often said that she could feel his father's presence just after he had been killed...but that was a long time ago and she didn't say it anymore. How long would it be before he stopped saying it? He didn't know.

A small smile twitched at the corners of Patterson's mouth as he brought the picture before his eyes once more. Good as new. "What the-"

It had happened in the space of a breath. One moment, the photograph was in his hand and the next... Patterson blinked rapidly, hoping to exorcise his eyes of some kind of optical delusion, but nothing changed. Where there had been substance, there was now none. His hand was empty and the picture was gone...gone as if snatched from his fingers -assuming that he had ever been holding it. The possibility that Delta's madness-inducing phantom sickness might have been on board the sunken Voyageur as well was something that was never far from his thoughts. Whatever it was, it had escaped detection...had killed...would kill again? It was in that moment that seaman Patterson found himself more inclined to say that he did not want to die...no matter how much he was hurting right now. He could almost imagine Kowalski standing there, telling him -ordering him- to get a hold of himself...to stop wallowing in his personal misery and to make a decision one way or another.

Patterson took a deep breath, squaring his shoulders. All right then, he thought -time to make a decision. Trust his senses or not... He decided that he would trust place his trust in them for now...or, at least, until he had a good reason to do otherwise. He had been holding that picture and he had dropped it. It was as simple as that. And if he had dropped it, the image had to be around here somewhere. Patterson dropped to his knees, searching, hands feeling under small crevices, under any space where a small thin object might land after falling from his hand in a moment of weariness-induced stupor. "I don't know what's funnier -this picture or the sight of you on your knees searching for something that isn't there."

The voice stopped the seaman in mid-movement; on his hands and knees save for the one hand that remained outstretched as the seconds ticked off in a slow crawl as he struggled with himself over the decision of whether he should or shouldn't look up. Finally, the need to know -and the growing crick in his neck- triumphed over the dread. Patterson swallowed deeply, moistening a tongue and throat that had both gone inexplicably dry, as he raised his head and then his eyes...and saw what he could not possibly be seeing.

Kowalski, resplendent in his best dress uniform of navy-blue, stood there, his back propped against the bulkhead as he apparently continued to stare at the photograph in his hands -the lost photograph- seemingly studying it with diligent intensity before he looked away from it, perhaps distracted by the sound of Patterson's sharp intake of breath, and regarded the stooped, incredulous seaman with a faint smile of amusement. "I can't believe that I actually kept this picture," he said, glancing again at the static image. "But then again, I still can't believe that I got conned into buying that hideous shirt -especially for the price they were charging." He shrugged lightly and let the image fall from his hand to flutter to the deck. "Live and learn, I guess."

It seemed that he had lost the ability to move...or perhaps he just no longer had the nerve. Patterson stared at what had to be a phantasm created within the recesses of his fevered mind...stared and did not move. The apparition wore his dead friend's face -he looked like him...sounded like him...but could not have even possibly been him...and yet...ghost of mind or supernature, this image looked so very solid...so very real even to the way that a single lock of hair had drifted over his friend's brow the way it always had...always did? Could a delusion be that real? And was it his doubt that gave the image a slightly skewed twist -the odd pallor of the skin...the faintly cruel harshness to the grin...and something else... "No!"

Kowalski -or what seemed to be Kowalski- stopped in mid-movement, his hand still outstretched, his expression one of innocent puzzlement, as Patterson recoiled violently from his touch, trying to scramble backwards only to find himself backed up against a bulkhead, his chest heaving violently with some unnamable terror as the impossible apparition walked slowly, inexorably, towards him, his hands spread against his own chest as if stricken by his friend's reaction. "Pat... Don't you recognize me? It's me -Kowalski. We've been friends for years." A pleading tone entered Kowalski's voice. "Don't you... Don't you know me?"

Patterson could back up no further and, finally, felt himself obligated to look up...to study the apparition who stood before him. Everything his senses relayed to him, told him that what he saw was the friend he had known for so long...but his memory told him otherwise. There was something so very wrong... "You died, 'Ski."

"Death..." Kowalski muttered, his lips pulled into a small, almost mocking grin. "Death is often a matter of opinion, Pat. You ought to know that by now after all the things we've seen and experienced. As for me...I am...I'm-" The grin became a grimace, the seaman's eyes closing for a long moment as if he had suddenly been overcome by an inner pain, sweat trickling down his temples...but the instance passed quickly, a mask of quiet amusement replacing...something. Something ugly. "Trust me." He extended his hand again. "Please."

More by force of habit than conscious effort, Patterson felt himself slowly, hesitantly, extend his own hand to grasp Kowalski's, expecting to touch nothing but empty air...but the flesh that met his skin was solid. Solid and real...and strangely hot to the touch as he was pulled to his shaky feet. Patterson's mouth moved, but, at first, no sound came out. "You..." he whispered weakly. "You are real! But...how?"

"How..?" Kowalski's pale countenance fell blank as if the question had never entered his mind and now that it had, he had no idea of how to answer it because he simply didn't know. He regarded Patterson helplessly, his eyes searching for a memory that he didn't have. "I don't know... I woke up. It...it was dark...cold... I was... I was thirsty..." Kowalski stared at his hands, seemingly struggling with...something...and for the first time, Patterson saw the dark stain on the sleeve of Kowalski's uniform...dark, brownish, and wet...the color of gradually drying blood that stretched from the cuff to the elbow.

At that moment, the confusion fled from the seaman's eyes, his expression hard and fixed as he caught sight of the small wound on the tip of Patterson's thumb and how it had begun to bleed again, carmine welling up to the surface of his skin...and by degrees, like an old reel to reel theater film, there was a change in him -an almost physical change as the already strained aspect to his countenance gave way to an expression that was feral...angry in a way that Patterson had never seen, the irises of Kowalski's eyes reflecting the glow of the halogen lights as blood-red orbs. Perhaps this was the wrongness he had sensed, but this time, instead of fear, Patterson felt the need to help. His friend was alive, yes, but also obviously still very, very ill -that was what it had to be. Sickness. "'Ski... Let's get you to Sick Bay. Doc can help you."

Kowalski continued to stare at Patterson's outstretched hand...at the blood, his shoulders and chest beginning to inhale and exhale with ragged breaths, his tongue darting out to wet his tightened lips as if- "No." The word came out as a whisper...almost a cry as Kowalski slowly backed off several steps, his eyes still locked on the small crimson stain before he turned away with a visible effort, the mask of horror fading or hidden for now. "I won't do it," he whispered to the voice in his head; to the thirst that hissed like an angry viper within him. "I...won't!"

"'Ski-"

"Don't!" Kowalski shrank away from his friend's touch, faster than Patterson had seen him or any man, move before. "Get away from me, Pat! Get away now or I'll kill you! Please go!"

What actually had the better hand in getting him to break out of his stupor of disbelief, Patterson could not say -whether fear from within or the sudden tortured pleading in his friend's contorted face, he did not know- but whatever it was, the seaman found himself on his feet and running...running hard into the corridor. The corpsmen... Doc... They had all been wrong, terribly wrong. He had been wrong too. Kowalski was alive! But still sick...so very, very sick and he needed help. Had to find someone -anyone- that would listen to him! Had to- "Oh!"

Chief Sharkey stumbled backwards, barely maintaining his balance, as a blur of a seaman piled heavily into him, rousing him from the solitude of his own thoughts, and roughly pulled the seaman to his feet from the deck on which he had become sprawled. "Jesus, Patterson! What's with you, hah!"

"He's alive, Chief! Alive!"

Confusion furrowed Francis Sharkey's brow, his eyes searching the contorted face of the seaman who would almost certainly have crumpled to the deck again had he not been grasping him by the arms, so violently was he trembling. "Who, Patterson! Who's alive!"

"Kowalski!" Patterson finally gasped, his eyes wide and staring with a jumbled mixture of confusion and fear. "I saw him -talked to him!"

"Kowalski..." Sharkey repeated the name as a ghost of inner pain darkened his rough, expressive visage. He had been that seaman's superior, but he had also been his friend, and Kowalski the younger brother that Fate had decided not to allow him...and for just a little while, he had almost forgotten his passing...almost. But as badly as he felt, Patterson was obviously suffering far more, the pain of grief pressing on his mind. Poor, uncomplicated Patterson... It had been the worst mistake of this chief petty officer's career to have ordered him to stow his best friend's gear when his personal agony was so overwhelming. He wished he had recognized that at the time. "Pat..." the Chief said with deliberate care and with nearly more effort than of which he was capable. "Kowalski... was my friend too. I loved him like a brother. But no matter how it hurts, you have t' accept this -he is dead."

"No!" Patterson exploded, frantically looking back towards the locker room, his face pale and damp with sweat. "He's alive -real! It was him -but...but something's wrong with him! I-I said I'd get help!"

Sharkey regarded the agitated seaman, struggling silently over what to do or say next -he was no psychiatrist and what Patterson needed right now was...a friend? "All right... I'll come an' see," the Chief said with an effort. "Take me to him."

Patterson all but dragged the Chief Petty Officer toward the locker room where the door stood open just as the seaman had left it, pulling him into the room where- Patterson stopped short, his wan, haggard countenance suddenly blank. The room was also exactly as he had left it -Kowalski's gear and clothing in their two neat piles, waiting to be properly stowed; a wrinkled duffel bag, empty and draped over a long faux-wood bench; the glossy photograph left carelessly on the deck- but there was no-one there. No-one. Patterson shook his head slowly, all of the frantic energy seeming to bleed out of his body even as his chief petty officer watched with an expression that was profoundly sad. "I..." Patterson's mouth was slack, working loosely, mutely, for a long moment before he was able to speak again. "I saw... He was here. He was..." The seaman regarded the Chief with a pleading bewilderment in his eyes. "You...believe me...don't you?"

Sharkey nodded slowly, tiredly. "Yeah, Pat. I do." The Chief took the defeated seaman by the arm, gently guiding him out of the deserted locker room and into the corridor, leading him in the direction of Sick Bay, Patterson no longer seeming to have the will to resist anymore. "Let's just get you out of here for awhile, okay?" Patterson nodded dumbly and allowed himself to be led, neither of them seeing that behind the now closed door, on the farmost bulkhead, was a ventilation grate that was not exactly where it should have been. It had recently been pried off and then very hastily replaced, and hanging from one of the slightly bent corners was a tiny scrap of blood-sodden navy-blue fabric torn off from a seaman's dress uniform where it had been caught...
...only moments ago.




In the dark inhospitable depths where Seaview rested, there was more shadow than light ...even the mighty submersible's external lighting array could not change that. She was hidden, and alone from without -though not from within. Within the metal womb of the grey lady was her crew...a crew that was itself no longer alone.

It was as if the shadows of the depths beyond the submarine's hull had chosen to join those who moved and worked within; dark recesses and indistinct after-images that one could see only out of the corner of his eyes -or didn't see at all...until it was too late. Something dwelt in those shadows now -something that shunned the light- as crewman Bechler learned while using an inspection passage as a short-cut between the Reactor Room and the Missile Room which had been his destination...or as seaman Davidovitch discovered while searching the electrician's stores for just that right part. By mid-watch, the fourteen crewmen reported missing had, unknown to most, had their ranks increased by five. Unseen and unnoticed, the Sick Bay's supply of whole blood units had been reduced by another three.

The shadows were thirsty.




What time was it?

Admiral Nelson rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand and glanced at his watch, eyes blinking at the invisible grit within them, as that ephemeral thought passed through his mind. The Navy timepiece indicated that he had only slept for four hours -he felt as though he had slumbered four years...a restless sleep punctuated by confused dreams and twisted nightmares that had made no sense then and just as little now...and had seemed to go on forever...until he had stood straight up from his crumpled bunk with no idea of how he had gotten to his feet, no memory of having dressed, and no desire to return to Morpheus' embrace. The world of his subconscious had become a battleground and he had no desire to visit it until there was no other choice.

The image of Seaview's late captain, his friend, had been prominent in almost every episode of his nocturnal journey; sometimes angry for what his admiral had allowed to happen...sometimes encouraging him not to let the horror go on any further. Lee... Was it grief that he felt? Or guilt? True, he had had his orders, but he had been well within his authority to countermand them when the clear and present danger had made itself known to him. Or could he have?

Damn... Didn't know what to think lately. The logic and reason that had guided this admiral throughout his naval career did not come easily to him right now. Still...one decision that was clear enough was that he had in no way changed his mind about the planned funeral and cremation -they would go on...whether he was in his right mind or not...and regardless of what it cost him.

Nelson hesitated as he rounded a turn in the corridor and saw the closed door of the Sick Bay and pressed himself to continue forward.




The soft creaking of the door to the Sick Bay caused Seaview's chief medical officer to look up sharply from the eyepiece of the stereoscopic electronic microscope before him, his eyes darting to the holstered side-arm he had placed on a nearby table. He had decided at the time that Seaview had been placed on official security alert, that the weapon had felt unnatural in his hands; as alien to him as the biological specimen before the lens of his microscope looked. Doc took a shuddering breath, his heart pounding with all the force of a triphammer -nerves ragged; not sure why- but while he did not know why the sight of the weapon comforted him now as much as it repelled him, he was well aware that he was a crack shot...and would use it if necessary.

"Doc?"

Doc sighed with a relief he could not explain at the sound of his admiral's voice. "Be right there, Admiral." The medical man placed the biological sample in a secure receptacle and, taking a hopeful glance at the sealed vials that sat in an upright container, doffed his latex gloves and entered the Sick Bay's ante-room. He was immediately taken aback by his superior officer's haggard appearance. Admiral Nelson looked like he had gone through Hell; his eyes reddened, his countenance lined, grey and haunted as if the spirit had gone out of him. "I...thought that you'd turned in, Admiral."

"I had," Nelson replied wearily, running a hand through the slightly rumpled red hair. "I couldn't sleep any longer."

Doc studied the man a moment longer. "If you wish, I could give you something -to help you to rest."

"I'd rather not."

"Sir-"

"I said no... Thank you." Nelson shook his head tiredly. "I appreciate the offer, and it may not make much sense at this point, but the last thing I want right now is to have my mind...my feelings numbed. If I am to suffer the tumult of my own emotions, then I want to feel it -all of it. I... I'll sleep when I need to...and not before. I'll rest when the Seaview is safe."

"Aye, sir..." Doc waited, silent and patient, as his admiral stared at nothing in particular, lost in his own thoughts. Though Nelson was a man known for his vitality, and for the almost zealous energy with which he tackled almost any duty or assignment, the man now looked old in a way that had nothing to do with age...and tired too. Very, very tired. Doc did not consider himself an insensitive man -he was all too aware of his superior officer's personal pain...his loss...but there was little he could do to help and words of sympathy recently repeated over and over again had begun to ring hollow and false. A small sigh escaped Doc's lips. Perhaps this wasn't the right time...but hope, even if it turned out to be false, was often better than nothing. "Seaview had a little excitement while you were resting, Admiral."

"'Excitement'?" Nelson's expression sharpened immediately and a questioning glint formed in his pale eyes. "What kind of excitement?"

"Our guest made a temporary escape-" Doc hesitated and corrected himself, remembering that the Canadian officer was no prisoner "-an unannounced excursion from Sick Bay."

"Guest? Thibideau, you mean." Nelson glanced sharply in the direction of Sick Bay proper. "He's conscious then?"

"Was conscious, sir."

"Did he say anything? Anything at all about what happened at Delta?"

"Unfortunately not," Doc admitted ruefully. "He...somehow slipped away while most of the medical corps was preoccupied in the engineering section -apparently tried to set the containment room on fire, but he was knocked out while being caught. Whatever was going through his psyche at the time, he seems to have returned to his catatonic state."

"V2..." Nelson muttered sourly at the apparent realization of the inevitable. His fist crashed against the lacquered surface of the table nearest to him. "The maddened state... He has the virus too, doesn't he?"

"No, sir."

Nelson's visage creased with bewilderment. "What do you mean? How can you possibly know for sure?"

Doc folded and unfolded his fingers in an uneasy gesture. "I was hesitant to mention it, sir, because it isn't a cure -not yet, at least."

"What isn't a cure!"

The Chief Medical Officer flinched despite himself as his admiral's voice rose with pent up emotion. "Formula number thirteen in Dr. Bergman's personal journal -we found the reagent...and it works with amazing accuracy. I'll show you."
Nelson followed the medical man to the testing area where a self-contained see-through cubicle had been set up and within it, in front of a pair of mechanical, robot-like arms and hands used to handle sensitive biological materials, were samples of bacterial cultures humanity knew too well -Swine Flu, A-Streptococcus, HIV, and Bubonic Plague; live cultures still so very necessary even these days to create serums should the unlikely occur. A stereoscopic electronic microscope was also encased within it though the eyepiece and controls protruded outside of the cubicle. Doc glanced at several thin vials of some purplish fluid mounted in secure see-through containers and nodded with an expression that could only be described as tentatively hopeful. "Could you give me your hand, Admiral?"

Automatically, not really thinking about what he was doing, Nelson extended his hand to Doc. "Jesus!"

"Sorry, sir..." Doc murmured apologetically, an auto-lance now stained with blood from one of Nelson's fingers in his hand. As his superior looked on in mute, mounting curiosity, the doctor took a tube of some unknown clear blue fluid from a rack of several tubes of the same, and from the auto-lance, very carefully released a single drop of Nelson's blood over the tube's mouth, allowing the droplet to fall into the now unsealed vial -the fluid within immediately turned purple. Doc offered a small smile. "Your blood shows no sign of infection, Admiral. You're clear."

"Then that-"

"Batch thirteen -the reagent." Doc gestured to the cubicle and its contents within it. With experienced hands, his fingers danced over the keys on the control board and the mechanical hands within the cubicle began to move, compelled by their pre-programmed commands. "These vials with the purple fluid contain the reagent into which has been introduced samples of blood from eight uninfected crewmen. As you can see, the formula turns purple when the introduced blood sample is uninfected by V2. However..." There was a low, electronic hum as the robotic hands deftly, almost gently, removed a blood sample from one of the vials within the cubicle and placed it into a tube of the clear blue uncontaminated reagent. This time, the result was dramatically different. For several seconds, the curious formula actually seemed to churn, its color shifting ...becoming an insidious dark green...and then, finally, it turned solid black. "That was a sample of Stuart Riley's blood... It was the same for every member of the crew who died from our phantom virus -the reagent turned black."

Nelson shook his head with aghast amazement. "My...God..."

"There's more, sir."

"More?"

"Look at what happens when I introduce a mere 1cc of a victim's blood into this sample of A-Streptococcus." Again, the robotic hands followed the keyed-in commands of Seaview's doctor, placing a drop of the blackened blood into a sample of the live culture and then placed a smear of the resulting sample before the powerful lens of the electronic microscope. Behind the protective screen, Doc studied the image through the visor-like eyepiece, his visage twisting with grim satisfaction, before he gestured for Nelson to do the same as he stood aside. Nelson looked through the eyepiece. Almost at once, his ruddy complexion blanched a sickly white even though he forced himself to continue to study what he saw. "Merciful God..." he whispered under his breath before he drew away from the visor and met Doc's eyes. "A-Streptococcus... The virus is gone. It... It's just not there anymore!"

Doc nodded and rubbed his bleary eyes with the back of his hand. "I know. Whatever it is that's in the blood -whatever the phantom virus is ultimately- it seems to literally consume its competition, not leaving so much as a trace element. I've tried other live cultures -even cancer cells taken from those fish samples we took from the site of that massive chemical spill off of the coast of Florida three months ago... The reaction is still the same." Doc shrugged wearily. "I would have to say that Project M.I.N.A. was a partial success. They may not have found a preventative vaccine, but they found a cure all right -a cursed cure."

"It cures...and then it kills." Nelson glanced at the cubicle, almost wishing that he had the power to by force of will alone make the medical instrumentation to go beyond their present capabilities and tell them what they needed to know. Foolish notion, of course, but he wished it nonetheless. "But why... Why can't our instrumentation pick it up? Why were the decontamination units unable to detect it or even begin to cleanse it?"

Doc grimaced inwardly. "I wish I-"

"Doc! Doc, you in here?"

The sharp, familiar voice of Chief Sharkey sundered the moment of oppressive tension, allowing an uneasy reprieve from having to scramble for answers that just didn't seem to exist. Nelson followed Doc into the Sick Bay's ante-room where their chief appeared to be half-supporting a bewildered and distraught seaman Patterson by the arm. "Patterson -he needs help bad, sir," Sharkey began, casting a nervous look in the crewman's direction.

Doc nodded uncertainly, but quickly donned his mask of medical professionalism. "Now, what seems to be the problem?"

"Patterson thinks he saw-"

"I did see Kowalski, Chief!" Patterson snapped, suddenly agitated. "I did! I spoke with him...and - and he talked to me!"

A shadow of dismay darkened the physician's already grim visage in a way that Nelson could read all too clearly -things had been too quiet for a while...much too quiet...and now, it was starting again. After a brief lull, the second wave was upon them. "I see," Doc said carefully as he gently took the troubled seaman aside by the arm, leading him to one of the other rooms within the Sick Bay. "Let's talk about this, shall we?"

The door shut behind the two men, leaving Nelson and Sharkey alone. "Poor Patterson..." Sharkey muttered with a rueful shake of his head. "I-I think he really actually believes he was speaking t' Kowalski. He must be hurtin' real bad inside." The Chief's thick eyebrows suddenly knit together as an ugly thought formed within his psyche. "You don't suppose, sir, that he's -you know- that he's-"

"Contracted the virus?" Nelson said, finishing the question. Sharkey nodded solemnly in response. "I don't know, Francis...but we will know in a few minutes, I suppose."

"Er...how's that, sir?"

"The reagent, Chief," Nelson muttered, wearily slumping down into the nearest available seat. "We've... Doc's found the reagent that can tell us who is and who isn't ill with V2."

Sharkey studied Nelson uncertainly, not at all sure how he ought to take this bit of information...at least, in Nelson's presence. "That is good news, isn't it, sir?"

"It is."

"I-I mean, a cure can't be far behind. We'll be able to go home when the repairs have been completed, won't we?"

Nelson regarded the Chief, himself uncertain how to answer. As a scientist, he knew how frustrating the quest for much desired knowledge could be. A piece of the puzzle here. A piece of the puzzle there. Scraps of information followed by a torrent of new discovery... and then, nothing. For a long time. Maybe forever. He didn't want to destroy the fragile spark of hope that he could see in Francis Sharkey's eyes, but that was the reality of it. Nelson was relieved when Doc chose that moment to return to their company, freeing him from the obligation of deciding whether to tell an ugly truth or to lie through his teeth...for now, anyway.

"Patterson's clear," Doc announced with quiet relief, his countenance not quite as grim as it had been a very short while ago. "No sign of infection. No sign of V2 at all."

A faint smile animated the Admiral's haggard visage. "I'm glad to hear of it," he said quietly. "How is he feeling now?"

"Resting. I gave him something to help him sleep...he's a very exhausted man, Admiral."

"Now wait a minute!" Both officers glanced in the direction of the Chief Petty Officer whose presence they had admittedly all but forgotten, as he slowly paced a short length back and forth, his hands gesturing in a familiar flurry of nervous activity. "I don't get none of this," he protested, his frustration all to evident. "What about what Patterson was saying? What about how he said he was supposed to be talkin' to Kowalski an' all? Are you saying that he's gone an' lost it all on his own?"

"Profound grief can twist a sane man's perceptions, Chief," Doc explained patiently. "I can assure you that Patterson is as sane as he has always been...but he is also in a great deal of personal pain and for a short while, his senses told him exactly what he desperately wanted to hear...and showed him what he wanted to see." The Chief's shoulders slumped with relief. "I can swear to that on my Hippocratic Oath. Now..." Doc reached over to the medical tray he had brought with him from the other room -on it were a sterile auto-lance and a tube of the reagent. "With this reagent, here, we should be able to prove your good health as well. If you would be so kind as to give me your hand, Chief-"

A small puzzled frown creased Sharkey's brow as he automatically did as he was bidden. "Yes, sir, but what- Hey!"

"There," Doc murmured, a small thoroughly unnecessary grin flickering on his lips as he quickly removed the sharp instrument from the tip of the Chief's bleeding finger, "that wasn't so bad."

Colorful language that would have made any Navy man that he knew blush flitted through Francis Sharkey's brain as the tiny wound began to throb, the injured digit pulsing as though it had been run through by a red-hot poker. Not too bad, he had said. Not too bad indeed! "Well?" he asked through tightened lips, sucking on the wound. "What's the verdict?"

"You're clear, Chief."

"Yeah...good..." Sharkey muttered sourly, ill humor belying the relief that he actually felt. He removed the digit from his mouth, noting with a grunt of satisfaction that the bleeding had already stopped. The Chief turned in the Admiral's direction. "Ah, Admiral...with your permission, I'll be returnin' to my duties now. Mr. Morton's gonna be wondering where I got myself to."

"Of course, Francis..." Just then, a spark of memory tickled at the back of Nelson's mind -a nagging itch that refused to be ignored. "Chief-" he said suddenly. "Those missing crewmen -did you locate them?"

"Er...no, sir," Sharkey replied glumly, his hand on the metal knob of the now open door. "Mr. Morton's been looking into the possibility that he may have...'miscalculated' the first time 'round."

"I see." The Admiral nodded wearily. "Carry on."




The still, quiet corridor stretched on before Francis Sharkey as he made his way to the Control Room -it was somehow very much longer than he last remembered it; longer and darker with crazy shadows that reminded him of a house of horrors that he had visited one summer as a smart-assed kid growing up on Coney Island. Strange shadows...and shapes that seemed to reach out to grab one only to disappear just before they touched one's skin.

A physical chill traveled down the length of Sharkey's spine as he dismissed thoughts of a youth that somehow seemed to belong to the memories of someone who couldn't possibly be him. The monsters that that Francis Ethelbert Sharkey had known had been the fanciful machinations of man or imagination, and the horrors had been the kind that went away with the dousing of the last light on the carnival grounds or the moment one opened one's eyes. To the Chief of the Boat Francis Sharkey that he had become, though, monsters and horrors had both been and could be very, very real...and they didn't just disappear when one wanted them to. They stayed...either in reality or memory...or when the nightmare was the reality. Like now.

Shadows... A frown furrowed the Chief's brow as the shadows against the pale bulkhead of the intersecting corridor up ahead seemed to shift...moving...convulsing ever so slightly like a dark, opaque mist troubled by an errant breeze. Sharkey's lips pressed into a thin line as he wrestled with himself over whether to react to or to ignore little things that his wired nerves were making out to be more significant than they actually were.

"Anybody there!" he demanded finally. Silence answered the Chief Petty Officer -silence and then, a sound...soft and low like an intake of a breath or a hiss between one's teeth. Almost automatically, Sharkey's fingers brushed against the smooth butt of the side-arm in the holster strapped against his side, its presence offering him some small comfort by the simple fact that it was there. "Anybody there!" Again the dead silence. Again the sound.

Sharkey took a tentative step forward as the shadows again began to move...definitely this time...and among them, a human shape...a shape he recognized as it moved into the light by its navy-blue dress uniform and the wild shock of strawberry-blonde hair upon its head. The Chief's voice issued from his slackened mouth as a feeble squeak. "Riley..?"

No... This could not be... Sharkey dashed angrily at his eyes with the back of his hand and when he looked again, eyes blinking away the resultant distortion, the image was gone. Stuart Riley was not there...but then again, he had never been there in the first place. Couldn't have been. He was dead. Sharkey removed his hand from the gun butt and studied the tiny, aching wound on his finger where Doc had drawn blood. If the medical officer had not assured him that he was all clear... The fingers bunched into a fist and then fell to his side with deliberate, though false, nonchalance. His nerves, drawn tight as they were, had begun to tell him lies. Cruel lies. Lies to which he had no time to listen anymore.

Chief Sharkey squared his shoulders with an effort and continued on to his intended destination.




"Sections one through eight -check!"

The small check mark of red marker ink brought a small smile to the lips of seaman Butler as he jotted it down on the repair duty list he carried, pinned to a plastic clipboard over several just like it. For the first time since Seaview had been sent to the bottom, the list of completed repairs was longer than the list of duties to be performed and Seaview -well, Seaview was finally beginning to look like Seaview again. Thoughts of actually being able to go home no longer seemed quite as far-fetched as they had a short while ago...or did they?

Damn...always the pessimist, wasn't he? For every hopeful sign he could find another that brought lofty notions tumbling straight back down to Earth...or in this case, to the bottom of the sea. A troubled frown darkened Butler's brow as memory whispered at the back of his mind and he was forced to remember the grim fact that Seaview was dealing with something that could prove far worse than mechanical failure...something that had killed several good men and might appear again to kill again, even though an uneasy quiet had settled upon the great grey vessel and her crew. The seaman mopped the sweat that had begun to bead up on his upper lip with a heavily crumpled tissue. No...not as far-fetched as once before, but...far from out of the woods just yet. Butler returned his attention to the list and then, to the ventilation grates which were next on his inspection list. Better to keep his mind on his duties -he had less time to think when he did...less time to sink into pessimistic worrying that- "What the..."

Butler's frown deepened all the more at the sight of the ventilation grate just ahead; a grate just like any of the others that he had inspected along other sections on his watch...except that the fabric pendant which indicated airflow was disturbingly still

Immediately, Butler glanced sharply back and forth, taking in each grate in its turn -all functioning, all with pendants fluttering gently against their metal grids...except for this one. Had the others been in the same condition, he would have suspected that the air revitalization system had quit -death to them all- but that wasn't the case. Damn twice... Butler felt relieved and annoyed at the same time -relieved that things were obviously not as bad as they could have been, and annoyed that the repair detail that had worked in this section only hours ago had missed the blockage in this area. One of the panels in the vent itself had to have fallen down, cutting off the flow of air -not dangerous, but when one's executive officer said that he wanted this vessel ship-shape, he usually meant ship-shape.

Muttering choice obscenities under his breath, Butler took a small screwdriver from out of his uniform's hip pocket and began to work the thin, flat plane between the bulkhead and the edge of the metal ventilation grate. There was a dull pop and a low, scraping groan as the metal screen swung away from the bulkhead, sending a light shower of dust to the deck and onto his shoes. Butler wrinkled his nose as he immediately caught wind of a smell...a cold, musty odor emanating from within the vent which told him that this part of the air duct had neither been opened nor cleaned in a while...demerits for whoever was responsible.

Sniffling against the tickling within his nostrils, Butler reached into the opening, searching for the fallen panel, but his outstretched fingers met nothing but air. Dead, stale air untroubled by the usual push and flow of Seaview's recirculated atmosphere. "Shit..." The seaman placed his clipboard on the deck, propped it against the bulkhead, and clambered in through the man-sized opening, reaching ahead of him into the darkness of the vent...a darkness which was waiting for him.

Crewman Butler went in...but he didn't come out.




A sharp hiss of breath escaped between his tightly clenched teeth; a sharp gasp of wonder...of disgust...of pleasure...and pain. Yes...the pain that had come upon waking and wouldn't go away. It was everywhere -in every shuddering breath, in every enflamed cell that made up the physical stuff that was his flesh and blood, in every fractured thought that tumbled through his maddened brain -and it would not leave him alone. The hiss became a muffled moan as he pressed himself against the darkest recess of his secret hiding place -away from the light which was just another source of pain and a brilliance that blinded his newly light sensitive eyes.

The darkness was cool and comforting in a way that he didn't understand though some distant part of his mind told him that he ought to know. He felt safer here...could see here without struggling against that awful glare outside...and he had seen things. Terrible things. He had seen others like himself take that young crewman. A faint whisper of human pity echoed through his confused mind -poor...poor crewman hadn't even had time to scream, to cry out, or to beg for his life. Not that it would have helped had he been able -they wouldn't have listened. The thirst...the need controlled them and had almost compelled him to join in the bloody frenzy...almost, but quite. Not yet, but...soon, probably. God... Some part of him hoped that they had destroyed the man and not just drained him. That way, at least, he wouldn't be condemned to the hell to which he himself had been consigned.

An animal-like whimper issued from between his lips as he wrapped his arms around his body, drawing his knees up to his chest as another wave of pain -worse than anything he had experienced before- enveloped him because of thirst denied, but how long he could go on like this, he did not know. The humanity in him was growing weaker and the beast within was growing stronger -the monster he was becoming shadowing every thought, every action now...making him want and hunger for things that revolted him...making him agonize in this self-imposed prison rather than let him seek help...making him suffer rather than allow him to kill himself...or to let himself be killed. If he could be killed...he no longer knew if that was possible -wasn't he already dead?

Long-fingered hands bunched into tight fists, the newly sharper nails biting into the soft skin and flesh until rivulets of blood trickled from his hands onto the metal plating of his hiding place as the awful need reached an impossible pitch, crested, and then...gradually...slowly waned, the very sight of his own sickly-looking sanguine fluid inciting nothing but sheer physical revulsion now. That was the way it was -they all sensed it as certainly as they instinctively sensed what their hunger craved...had to have. The blood of the changed was the one kind of blood they found intolerable -for with rebirth, it became foul ...bitter...and could no longer feed them. They -he- needed something better... something...

He sniffed the air, his senses ferrally acute as the ungodly thirst suddenly reared up within his breast again, no longer pleading or asking, but demanding to be sated. His new senses were still nascent in comparison to those who had been reborn before him -especially to those who had already fed- but they still served well. Too well.

His tongue washed over the newly-emerged secondary incisors, feeling their fang-like sharpness, as he moved through the darkness of the inspection passage with ease, his eyes piercing the blackness as though it was the brilliance of mid-day, pulled by the need to feed. He noted only in passing that the wounds in his palms had already healed completely. In life...in his humanity...he had commanded this ship, but in rebirth, he was the lowest among the changed, the omega-male among a pack of demon-wolves because he was the last to be reborn and had yet to feed...but...some part of him still remembered every part of this vessel...every room and every area -and the need used that knowledge. He was lowly, but even as he neared his goal, he sensed that that might -would- change.

The passage grate fell to the deck with a low metallic thud as he hesitated and then struggled from the confining passageway, dropping heavily into -where? He remembered almost immediately. Scraps of memory -some vague and some vivid- filtered through his brain as he studied his new surroundings, rubine eyes squinting against the painful light. A...medical lab. One of several. The one that was rarely used. There were cages here and in each metal enclosure, two white male rabbits. The last resort in medical testing -he remembered that- due to the Animal Rights' Act at the beginning of the century...animals not to be used unless cell cultures failed to give needed answers. Even had he not known that, he would still have sensed their warm, living collective presence...just as they were all obviously instinctively aware of the unnaturalness of his own. Tiny pink eyes widened...and little furry white bodies trembled. They knew. Somehow...they knew.

Once, he had known each of these creatures by name, but that part of his powers of recollection failed him...probably just as well...but his hands still trembled ever so slightly as he reached into one of the cages and lifted out one of the wriggling bodies and held it against his shoulder; a part of him wanting to assure the gentle creature that it would all be over quickly, that it wouldn't hurt all that much...a part of him wanting to put off the inevitable for as long as he could. He knew that humans would have struggled with all they had in them at this point, but animals rarely did, as if they knew there was no point in fighting when it was time to die -instead, the plump, white rabbit had become and remained terribly still, though it was still alive, resigned to its fate...as the ravenous need reared up within him again.

It was over in less than a minute -the flash of retractable fangs...the splatter and taste of warm blood from one creature and then others- and he let the drained, lifeless body clutched in his hand fall to the deck beside the bodies of his brothers, his free hand wiping at the slick, dark, bloody stain around his mouth in a grotesque parody of human habit. The thirst, the need, was quieter now, but it was in no way gone. It lurked there, making itself known, telling the shrinking human part of him things that it didn't want to hear -that the rabbits hadn't been enough, that he still needed more, that even if he drained those that remained that it still wouldn't help for long. He needed more.

And he would have it...take it, the little voice in his head told him with vicious glee as a nearby mirror reflected his image and the gory horror of which he had become a part. He would have it.

Sharpened senses pricked then at the impossibly familiar scent of something...no...some
one close by and coming closer. The recessed fangs automatically extended with instinctive anticipation. He knew that scent -he didn't know how- but he knew it...and the metallic tang behind it. Yes... No! His human self screamed mutely and beat its ephemeral fists against the invisible walls of its mental prison. No! No! NO!!! But the need wasn't listening and he was no longer master of himself...

...and all that mattered was the thirst.




Somehow...at some point during the watch, he had forgotten himself.

Time had ceased to exist for him and he had begun to perform his duties in a fog of non-awareness; an insulating balloon of emotional and mental numbness that had finally popped as though pierced by a needle when his acting second-in-command, Lieutenant O'Brien, had discreetly taken him aside to inform him that he had been on watch for almost eighteen hours straight...and his only response had been a bewildered: "What?"

Chip Morton rubbed eyes that felt as though they had been packed tight with invisible gravel. He hadn't felt the tiredness before, but he was beginning to feel it now. His limbs were leaden, his most basic reactions increasingly sluggish, and faint ghosts of imagination had begun to play at the edges of his perceptions -he barely felt the repetitive slap-slap of the holstered service weapon against his thigh as he walked the few metres between himself and his quarters -a distance that felt oddly long and seemed to grow greater with each step.

He supposed that deep down, he had been avoiding sleep. Many of those to whom he had spoken -everyone of a mind to be honest about it- admitted to doing the same thing for reasons that were sometimes as unique as the individual. Grown men who had encountered real monsters had become afraid of their own personal bogeymen. Others were afraid that to sleep was to never awaken...that the illness of which they had heard would take them when their guards were down. Still others dreaded something both simpler and more sublime -nightmares. There had been a rash of them lately, if he had heard right; especially since the accident -and usually about the same thing. Images of those who had been lost to the sea because of the accident and mates who had been claimed by the nebulous illness would haunt their dreams and some would beg Doc for something to keep them awake only to be turned away or confined to Sick Bay while a dose of something from a hypodermic needle or pill bottle sent them, for a while, to where dreams could not reach them.

Morton ran his wearily fingers through his fine, blonde hair, carelessly sweeping aside a stray lock that had drifted into his eyes. He couldn't help but wonder what nocturnal demon of the subconscious would visit him when he had no choice but to close his own eyes, sensing somehow that he already knew.

He dared say that anyone from the psychiatric corps would call what he felt "survivor's guilt". As a lieutenant commander, he had known, respected, and cared for a fine commanding officer by the name of John Phillips, Seaview's first captain, and had grieved deeply with the rest of the crew upon learning of his being murdered. Rumor had had it then that he would be taking up command of the Seaview, but he had known then that he had lacked the qualifications to take command of the great prototype vessel in Captain Phillips' stead. Very practical attitude...and yet, he had been thoroughly prepared to resent anyone who had been assigned to take his late captain's place among Admiral Nelson's select group -an officer who had turned out to be a man who was younger than himself by a couple of years...Commander Lee B. Crane.

Chip Morton had not been prepared to learn that Fate had decreed that he and Lee Crane would become close friends...and thus, he mourned again -for a friend that had died too young, and for the realization that he was no longer certain that he actually still wanted the command that he was now qualified to assume...a command that was increasingly beginning to appear as though it came with a curse.

Morton shook his head slightly as the door to his cabin came into view. Tired...he was almost too tired to think straight anymore. Perhaps in the morning he would- Morton's brow furrowed as he grasped the metal door knob...and the door swung open at his touch though he could have sworn that he had closed it as was his habit when he left his cabin. Emotions confused. Now memory too? It was hard to think. Morton entered the cabin and felt for the light switch.

"Don't."

At the sound of a voice that he could not possibly be hearing, Chip Morton's hand froze, his fingers just a hair's breadth from the light switch. As a naval man -as a person in general- he had always prided himself on his rationality...on his ability to think clearly...sanely. Though the missions on which he had been, and the phenomena which Seaview had encountered, had forced him to expand his range of perceptions of what was ordered and right, no-one could have convinced that he would one day hear what could not be heard.

Morton's fingers curled, drawing away from the light switch...slowly...the rhythm of his heart a thunder in his ears as his pupils widened, straining against the limits of normal human sight to pierce a darkness he could have sundered with a stab of his thumb...except that a quiet, dreadfully familiar voice had said: "Don't." Get out. Stay in. Call for help. Remain silent. For the first time in a long time, Seaview's executive officer found his power of decision curiously paralyzed as he strained to the pierce the blackness and found only varying degrees of darkness...shadows against shadows... Again, his hand, as if with a will apart from his own, reached for the switch.

"I said -don't. Please...don't." Morton turned sharply in the direction of the voice and realized for the first time that he could hear breathing other than his own -and while the muted illumination of the corridor lights did not reach far within his quarters, barely at all, he saw, also for the first time, two small discs of reflected light almost like the mirrored glow of the moon from the eyes of a dog or cat. The two dots blinked, rubine and somehow hard, as a new sound met Chip Morton's ears. There was a small click and the soft illumination of his desk lamp on its lowest setting lessened the deep just a little...enough for his eyes to further confirm the seemingly impossible evidence of his ears. He could not see the shadow-masked face, but he recognized that form, cloaked by darkness though it was. "Lee..?" Morton whispered at last. "Lee... That is you, isn't it?"

There was no immediate response and then: "The light...hurts," the darkness-shrouded form said, ignoring the question, its voice a hoarse whisper as it slowly, seemingly awkwardly, rose from the swivel chair on which it had been sitting, and stood there...waiting...perhaps just staring at the Executive Officer. There was a soft, nearly feral laugh. "You...look like you've seen a ghost...Chip."

"Maybe... Maybe I have..." For what seemed to be an eternity, Morton's voice failed him just as his power of decision had only moments before -it was as though his tongue had suddenly swollen and would not be moved. Was it possible that survivor's guilt had fashioned his own private demon of the mind; a personal punishment for what ambition he had dared to possess -or was it something else? Something that he was afraid to believe. Something worse. Seaview's on-going log had recorded at least four incidents of the spirits of those who had died, returning and walking her corridors, haunting and sometimes possessing the living -he hadn't wanted to accept it then...and despite his grief, he wasn't certain that he wanted to accept it now. "Lee..." Morton croaked at last, prying his tongue loose, his throat and mouth suddenly far too dry. "You're...not real."

The feral laugh was heard again; a little crazed this time...nearly an anguished sob. "What am I then, Chip? Tell me...what am I?"

"I don't know..." Morton found himself waging a silent battle with himself -what he knew against what he feared- searching for some rational explanation for all of this...something that he could analyze and quantify and put in a neat mental box like the pragmatic man that he was. "You cannot be-"

"Cannot be what, Chip?" the dark figure asked, its voice thick with mocking amusement. "Dead? Alive?" He paused, seemingly lost in his own thoughts. "How about living dead -was that what you were grasping for? Wouldn't that be a kick in the head -living dead?"

As the maniacally cackled question faded into silence, the logical, reasoning portion of Chip Morton's brain worked at a fevered pace, compelled as much by a need to make sense of the insane as by the panic which had begun to crawl up his back like a thousand tiny, sharp fingernails. Somewhere in the back of his mind was a recollection -trivia hearsay actually- of people presumed dead and buried though alive...the stuff of nightmarish legends that had endured from the time that humanity had first conceived of them. Buried alive to awaken in terror-induced madness...

This Chip Morton's ordered sense of reality could accept. "Lee..." he said, taking a hesitant step forward. "Listen to me... You were sick -do you remember that? You were very sick -and you still are. We...we thought you had died." Morton tentatively...carefully reached out to the shadowy form. "I can get you help-"

"Stay away from me!" The voice of Chip Morton's visitor had risen from a mere rough whisper to all but a shriek, a cry of rage and terror...a terrible, terrible fear -but for whom? Despite what had been demanded of him -despite the innate, almost instinctive fear of what he might see, the Executive Officer's hand darted out and slammed its palm against the recessed light switch mounted on the bulkhead. Almost at once, a strong brilliance -startling even to him- sundered the semi-darkness and a piercing, animal-like howl of agony split the air.

It took ten seconds, less perhaps, for Morton's eyes to reaccustom themselves to the light. Pale eyes, stinging and watering, widened with recognition...and shock. It was one thing to believe and another entirely to know... Morton stepped forward, hesitantly, glancing despite himself at the service weapon strapped to his side as he drew nearer to the form -that of a man- who pressed himself against the farmost bulkhead, huddling there, his face buried in the small refuge of shadow in the corner as though struggling in vain to hide -but from what? Him? The...light? Whatever the case, Morton found that he could not mistake the identity of that trembling being for any other. From the shock of hair that seemed blacker than he remembered it, half-hidden by the man's shaking hands, to the soiled dress uniform -he knew that man. Morton haltingly extended his hand. "Lee...it is you..." The huddled figure began to stir and turn his head.

Once, as a child, Chip Morton had encountered a maddened dog, a stray that had been afflicted with rabies. Even now, he remembered the look in that animal's eyes -how they had been glazed with a mindless rage- and how the thin black lips had been pulled back, foaming spittle dripping from its mouth, as a low constant growl had issued from between its bared canines...just before a local policeman had shot it in the head...and as the being he knew as Lee Crane slowly met his eyes, Morton saw that same maddened beast...except...that this beast was still or was once a man.

It was no trick of the light that the irises of Crane's once eben eyes were now red -two dark, hard, glaring rubies that remained unblinkingly trained on the Executive Officer, leaking reddish tears on cadaverous skin as Crane pushed himself to his feet, his chest heaving visibly with ragged breaths, his blood-smeared lips pulled tight against bared teeth... Morton's mouth moved with a mime of "Oh My God", his eyes widening in horror as he took in the drying bloodstains on his comrade's torn uniform shirt and the smear of red on his cheek and around his mouth. His teeth... Despite the training that would have insisted that he hold his ground and take his prisoner, Morton felt himself take a step backwards as he searched blindly for the service weapon he knew had to be at his side, unable to look away from what he saw.

Unclean -Crane's last message had said unclean! The XO was no stranger to the classics, but even he had not remembered the significance of that word or why his friend would have written it...until now. It was a quote from an old novel Crane had shown him recently...a word of warning against a bloodthirsty nocturnal evil. Project M.I.N.A....blood-hungry attacks...reports of blood missing... God in Heaven! The scientists at Delta had created the living dead!

The Executive Officer's sudden inspiration wasn't enough to give him time to react as the demon that wore his friend's face leaped from his semi-crouched position with a guttural roar, and connected, throwing them both clear across the cabin.

The landing came in an explosion of pain as the Seaview's XO felt the back of his head hit the deck...but he didn't see stars and he did not lose consciousness as much as he might have wished it. This was a nightmare in the world of the waking and Fate, in its vindictiveness, was not about to allow him to sleep and avoid it.

Morton had always known Lee Crane to be his superior in hand-to-hand combat and he had suffered more bruises than he cared to admit at his friend's hands, but even their most brutal martial arts' matches bore no comparison to this. Whatever this thing was -whatever Crane had become- his strength was several-fold that of any man. Only sheer terror was allowing this executive officer to come close to holding his attacker at bay -and he knew it. He could also feel himself weakening ...the fear-induced adrenaline that burned in his veins would not last much longer and when it was gone, he knew that he would die at the hands of this "beast" who pressed its gnashing fang-like teeth closer to the warm human flesh of its intended victim and the blood beneath it. Even as Morton struggled, razor-like fingernails slashed at him, drawing blood from his cheek, and raked his arms, slitting the fabric of his sleeves, gouging the skin of his arms until blood dripped from the jagged wounds.

There was an agonized scream which Morton only vaguely recognized as his own and a tearing pain in his left shoulder blade as fangs broke the skin, gouging the flesh...and warmth as blood poured from the open wound. He did not know how he did it, and perhaps he would never know, but the next thing of which the Executive Officer was consciously aware was that the fingers of his free hand had somehow closed around the butt of his service weapon, that he had yanked it out of the holster...and that he was pulling the trigger. There was a deafening explosion and his maddened attacker was literally thrown backwards, hurtling through the air which reaked of blood and gun powder, until he landed in an unmoving heap on the deck.

All was silent.

Ragged breaths escaped Chip Morton's heaving chest as he weakly pushed himself to his unsteady feet, only vaguely aware of the blood dripping from his wounds to the deck, the pain that wracked his sanguine-stained body a distant second in importance in his mind in comparison to the horror that attended every thought. He did not know whether he should have been laughing or crying -in either case, he could effect neither. Grasping the semi-automatic in both of his slick, carmine-stained hands, he took a tentative step toward the crumpled heap that had once been his friend.

All at once, there was a stirring in the fallen form and even as Morton watched in paralyzed disbelief, Lee Crane stood up. There was a smattering of blood and gore on the bulkhead behind him and a cruel grin twisted his lips as the gaping wound in his stomach, of torn flesh and blood, appeared to flow like quicksilver, healing before the horrified XO's eyes. "Tsk, tsk...Chip. You were always a terrible shot." The thin-lipped grin revealed fully the sharpened incisors as the Captain moved slowly, almost languidly, forward.

"No..." The second shot was fired and the dreadful apparition recoiled -but only for a moment- and kept on coming as the new wound healed just as quickly as the first. A third shot was fired -the reaction was the same. The fourth. Fifth. Sixth. Seventh. The eighth. Morton looked at the now useless weapon as though it was something alien as the hammer fell repeatedly on an empty chamber, the magazine completely spent...and still Crane kept on coming ...closer ...slowly...and then, with a movement that was so fast that Morton did not see it coming, knocked the useless semi-automatic out of his grip with a swipe of his hand and raised the XO off the floor, his feet dangling, grasping him by the throat. As blackness began to envelope him, air cut off and disappearing, words formed in Morton's gradually suffocating brain and came out as a feeble, strangled croak: "Lee...I-I...beg you... Don't...do...this!! "

A minute stretched into an eternity, blackness reaching, and then Morton felt pain and finally breath as the constricting grip around his throat relaxed and he fell to the deck. As fresh air rushed into his starved lungs, he dared to look up and saw Crane glancing around himself, panicked and disoriented, a whimper building in his throat before he locked eyes with Morton again. An expression of horror etched itself into his sallow face as he backed off a few steps, his hands spread out before him as though to deny what he had done and had tried to do. "Chip... Tell them... Tell them...all... Get...get out of here...or I swear I'll kill you... Get out NOW!"

Self-preservation -a brute unreasoning instinct- pushed Chip Morton to plumb what little physical strength he still possessed and propelled him through the unbarred, open door into the corridor beyond. There was...an intercom near here...a wall-mike...there was- As the last of Morton's strength finally gave out, his legs collapsed beneath him, sending him down to the deck in a limp heap. From somewhere at the edges of his senses, he heard a noise and saw with blurred eyes a dark form sweeping towards him. He would have screamed...but it seemed that he no longer had a mouth...and the blackness was now complete.

Lieutenant O'Brien kneeled beside the crumpled, bloodied form of his superior officer, his mouth open in horrified disbelief, and found a weak, thready pulse. An irrational impulse had taken control of him only moments before; a sudden concern for the executive officer he had insisted take his rest before he collapsed from exhaustion. The loud whine of laser welding torches had masked the sounds of an attack he hadn't heard...and there was no way he could have known that he would have discovered this. The young lieutenant leaped up and grabbed the wall-mike, clicking it rapidly as he clutched it with a shaking hand. "Sick Bay! Officer down! Send a medical team to Mr. Morton's cabin -on the double, Goddammit! On the double!"

Lieutenant O'Brien grasped the hand-mike tightly, knuckles blanching, as his dark widening eyes scanned his familiar surroundings with a new fear.




"I know what I saw!"

"Yes, sir, Mr. Morton, but please lie back!"

The gurney was pushed through the long corridor of B-Deck at near break-neck speed; corpsmen that had only moments before been enjoying what had appeared to be a period of relative peace now either guiding the mobile bed or tending to their stricken executive officer as they headed toward Sick Bay. This was a part of their particular training; to respond to a call quickly, to react professionally because they were, after all, doctors as well as sailors...but when they had actually arrived at A-Deck, as a frantic Lieutenant O'Brien had bidden over the ship's intercom, they had not -could not have- expected to see what they had seen.

Several among them had borne witness to the grim remains of seamen Clarke and Tomàs -somehow, their personal horror was not nearly as great- but the others had stopped, just for a second or two, upon seeing their patient's condition. The lot of a corpsman rarely amounted to much more these days than setting the occasional broken bone, the patching of a burn (or rarely a bullet wound), or dealing with a sailor who had somehow swallowed a little too much water -but this was uniquely...horribly...different. For all intents and purposes, their executive officer had been mauled by a wild animal...and as far as they knew, the only animal on board Seaview capable of what they had seen, was of the variety that called itself sentient and walked on two legs.

That was then. This was now. In the small space of time and distance between A-Deck and the Sick Bay, the thin white mattress and the pale sheets that covered the gurney had become saturated in parts by the red paint of human blood -Mr. Morton's blood- in spite of their best efforts to staunch the deep claw-marks on his arms and what appeared to be -and yet, surely could not be- a gaping, ragged bite mark deep in his shoulder -such as might have been made by a wild dog. Only the scratches on his cheek were relatively superficial and even they pulsed with fresh warm carmine with every beat of the Executive Officer's heart.

Halfway between where they had started and Sick Bay itself, Doc had met the medical team with special trauma equipment, the Admiral trailing close behind, both men wearing the collective expressions of those who had recognized the physical manifestation of a personal dread that was as inevitable as it was terrible -a horror that had disappeared behind the noncommittal masks of military and medical professionalism even as Doc had stepped forward and taken over the detail.

Sick Bay doors were thrown open, hitting the bulkhead with a loud, violent slam as the gurney was pulled through the opening. "Chip -I must ask you to hold still!" A strand of Doc's thinning hair drifted limply over his damp forehead, ignored, as practiced hands were forced to fumble with the long sliver-thin needle attached to a clear, pliable tube which in turn led to the bag of plasma which one of the corpsmen held in his hand over the medical bed. Dazed, semi-conscious stupor had given way to frantic delirium, his patient seemingly as determined not to allow him to continue with the procedure as he was to perform it.

Besides the severity of the wounds themselves, Chip Morton had lost an enormous amount of blood...almost, perhaps more than almost what could be accounted for despite his injuries. According to one of the shakier members of his medical corps who had followed the trail of Morton's blood on the deck of the corridor to his cabin, despite the horrific bloody scene, there was yet too little blood and gore splattered on the bulkheads and deck of the XO's cabin to explain why their executive officer was missing so much- "There." The needle pierced the flesh and life-giving plasma began to drip down the tube and into the Executive Officer's veins as little by little, the delirium gave way to unconsciousness once again. "All right, get him into Treatment #1 -stat!"

There was the crash of Sick Bay doors to one of the inner sanctums as corpsmen, doctor, and patient disappeared through the doorway, a second crash as the doors closed, and then resounding echoes followed by silence...dead silence...even the low buzz of electricity humming through inert medical equipment -hooked up, but not in use- did not break the stillness...swallowed up by the quietude of contemplation.

Harriman Nelson sank down into a nearby chair and waited. There was time now...more time than there had been only a short while ago. By degrees, Seaview was getting closer to being seaworthy -at least enough for her to crawl home, wounded and limping...were they able to go home at all. This most recent and horrible event had brought home the reality of that unlikelihood in one violent thrust. They -his ship, his crew, himself- could not go home even if the mighty submersible were able to race the waves at flank speed. Seaview was a plague ship; a vessel possessed by a murderous, madness-producing disease that had, with almost human sentience and perversity, chosen to remind him of its presence at the moment that he had had the sheer audacity to hope that like the Black Plague of old, the disease had run its course -simply appearing and disappearing...as if it had never happened...except for the corpses of its victims left in its grim wake.

Nelson fingered the pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket, a whisper of physical longing in his mind...but...his hands dropped to his lap. He had promised. In no way would he dull his mind and senses in any way as long as his ship and crew were in peril...but a mind undulled was a mind that could not stop thinking...could not free itself from the fetters of guilt and the need to go over the same path of thought over and over again. What kind of perversity was it that he should almost...almost...wish that the mysterious and terrible assault on his executive officer had been one of pure human evil rather than the mindless compulsions created by a phantom plague? "Human corruption would be the lesser of evils, Admiral...wouldn't it?"

Nelson looked up, slowly, and despite the sight that met his eyes, he felt no real surprise. "I thought that you'd be here sooner or later."

A faint smile lit Lee Crane's thin lips. "Yes, sir. I suppose you would." The tall young captain slid off the examining table on which he had been languidly sitting, his attention momentarily taken by a small piece of medical bric-a-brac which he picked up, examined, and then set down again. "And you didn't answer my question."

"I don't know if there's a real answer, Lee. Perhaps it's a question best left to theologians and those of a more spiritual bent of mind." Nelson regarded the Commanding Officer almost quizzically. "Why are you here, Lee?"

Lee Crane's grin grew just a shade wider. "'Why', Admiral? Are you sure you don't mean how?" He shook his head and shrugged slightly at the Admiral's lack of response. "In either case, I don't know. Shouldn't I be?"

"You're dead...or had you forgotten?"

"Oh...that." Crane's eyes rolled at the bringing up of a subject that was quickly becoming old and tired. "Being dead and staying dead are two entirely different things, Admiral -and if, as I was once told, a man is only supposed to truly die once a lifetime..." Crane hesitated, apparently puzzled, before he met his admiral's eyes once again. "Could this be something worse..?" The small smile faded, the Captain's countenance suddenly profoundly sad. "I'm...'trapped', Admiral ...neither dead nor alive, just...in between."

Nelson reached out, extending his hand to offer what feeble comfort that he could, but despite himself, withdrew it just as quickly, inwardly recoiling from the cadaverous cold that emanated from his late friend. "Lee, I... Is there anything I can do? There must be something..."

"Yes..." Crane nodded slightly. "Yes. There is." The pale commanding officer's hand slid to his side and when he raised it again, he extended to Nelson a gun -a fully charged, high-range plasma gun- its thick, black barrel pointed towards himself. A ghost of a smile animated Crane's face. "You can free me."

"Lee..."

"I can't do it myself!" Sanguinous tears began to roll down Crane's sallow cheeks. "I want to -I would if I could...but I can't!" Crane saw the haunted hesitation in Nelson's eyes. "Please..."

Nelson grasped the cold, heavy plasma-charged automatic and hefted it, balancing its weight in his hands, before he sighted the weapon and braced himself against the expected recoil as his finger tightened, pressing against the trigger- "Admiral?"

Nelson blinked rapidly, eyes clearing, as reality flooded into his brain once more at the sound of Doc's troubled-sounding voice. "Uh... Yes, Doc?" he said, mentally scrambling for a façade of dignity as he pushed himself from the slumped-over position in which he had awoken. Sleep...yes, sleep came readily -occasionally unexpectedly- but when it came, it came without peace while presenting imagery of such clarity that even now, he could almost feel the cold kiss of metal in his hands, his finger depressing the trigger of a plasma gun, and he could nearly smell the vaguest hint of the aftershave Lee Crane had favored. Just dreams though... "What is it?" The Admiral caught the physician's grim expression. "It's...that bad."

Doc answered with a slight tilt of his furrowed brow, shook his head ruefully, and reluctantly handed Nelson the sealed vial of reagent into which a sample of blood had been introduced -Chip Morton's blood by the label on it... The solution had turned an insidious and familiar black. Nelson's lips moved in a mime of "Oh, Jesus... Jesus... Jesus..." as he handed the vial back to Doc who set it aside. "There's definite evidence of the virus in Chip's blood. We can't see it, but by his physical reactions, it's there all right...and following a somewhat unusual course in comparison to the others. So far, we've been able to keep Chip's condition fairly stable -but for how long, I don't know."

"But how!" Nelson shook his head in anger and frustration, his strongest efforts failing to disguise the tremor in his voice. This couldn't be happening. Not another one. Not Chip too. "But...how could it have happened!" The nightmare was unfolding all over again -he couldn't deny that anymore. "How could he have been infected!"

"He was attacked... It seems to confirm the theory that the virus is contracted through the exchange of bodily fluids...blood, saliva, and the like."

"Yes - yes..." Nelson muttered with a dismissive gesture of his hand. "I know all that, but we both deduced that V2 can only infect a victim whose immune system has been adequately compromised. Morton has been healthy up until now -exceptionally healthy. Your tests proved that -Chip confirmed it." Nelson slammed the palm of his hand down on the lacquered surface of the physician's private desk, the pain of contact that traveled up his arm almost as bad as the gnawing ache at the back of his skull -it was becoming hard to think. "We've missed something -must have- or the scientists at Delta missed something."

"Perhaps, sir..." Doc stared for a moment at nothing in particular. "But there's more."

"More?"

"Yes, sir. Chip is fairly lucid -for the moment- but..." Doc shook his head wearily, the hours beginning to tell on him. He hunched his shoulders tiredly. "To tell the truth, sir, I have no idea what to make of his account of the attack. I think...I think you had better hear it for yourself. He wants to talk to you."

The note of unease in the medical man's voice echoed in the back of Harriman Nelson's mind as he slowly turned and headed toward the area that Doc had indicated -the words mentally logged and filed for later...for when matters other than verbal semantics weren't pressing on his brain as hard as they were. As Nelson approached his executive officer's bunkside, he was struck by an overwhelming sense of déjà-vu. Morton, fair-skinned by nature, had blanched a sickly, almost greyish hue which stood out starkly against the purplish bruises or the livid scratches and welts that the many bandages could not hide...and like Crane before him, the XO had been physically bound to the Sick Bay bunk by a series of medical restraints. But why..? "Chip..."

For a time, the Executive Officer did not stir and Nelson began to believe that he had fallen into a deep sleep or worse, but then, the young officer moaned slightly, his eyelids flickering and then opening slowly, apprehensively. "The light... I can't..."

"Oh." Nelson glanced back at Doc who stood off to one corner -the physician nodded with immediate understanding and turned the dial on the bulkhead light switch...almost at once, the sterile white light from the ceiling lamps dimmed, leaving Nelson and Morton in an area of semi-shadow. "Better..?"

Morton nodded slowly. "Yes..." He swallowed painfully. "Thank you...Admiral..."

"Chip," Nelson said quietly, "Doc said that you had something to tell me about the attack."

"Y-yes, sir..." Morton closed his eyes, pausing as if to gather his flagging strength, and then opened them again. "I know... I know who attacked me...sir...but... But you won't believe me... It...nobody does. Doc doesn't..."

Nelson leaned a little closer -Morton's voice had faded to little more than a whisper. "Who, Chip?"

Morton paused again, a vague near-smile forming on his lips only to disappear almost as suddenly. "It... It was Lee, sir... He attacked me."

It was nothing that Nelson could have expected to hear and yet, as he mentally digested Morton's words, memory reminded him of a grief-addled Patterson's state of mind only a short while ago and the situation seemed all too familiar. Was it that -an anguish-confounded mind all over again? Had to have been. There was no other logical answer. "Chip...you know that's not possible. Lee died yesterday -and it could not have been him. Who attacked you?"

"It was Lee, I tell you!" Morton struggled against his restraints, possessed by a new, frenzied strength. Immediately, Doc stepped forward, a filled hypodermic that had just been handed to him by a corpsman, in his own hands. Nelson gestured and shook his head as Morton sank back against his heavily-creased pillow, depleted once more. "It was Lee..." Morton whispered. "I saw him...talked to him...touched him...but at the same time... At the same time...it wasn't Lee at all. He was...different somehow...all wrong ...crazed...and his eyes... Oh God, his eyes..."

"What about his eyes, Chip?"

"They were...red. Demonic...blood-red rubies...glowing in the night..." A small, shaky laugh escaped Morton's lips and just for a moment -a trick of imagination and the light surely- his pale eyes seemed to reflect the dim brilliance of the muted halogen light overhead as discs of red themselves. But the moment passed so quickly that Nelson was uncertain that he had actually seen it...and perhaps because of this...perhaps because the disbelief in his face was so obvious and open...the XO locked eyes with him for a long moment before whispering: "You... don't believe me."

"Chip, I never said-"

"Why don't you believe me?"

Nelson passed a hand over his weariness-sore eyes. How could he be expected to believe...and how could he admit that he didn't believe when Morton's state of mind was evidently so precarious that he would likely be pushed over the proverbial edge by the speaking of a single word that didn't fit in with the delusion? "Chip..." Nelson said carefully. "I know that you think you saw-"

"Damn you! Damn you, Nelson!" Nelson flinched at the vile, uncharacteristic retort. "I didn't imagine what he did to me -anymore than I imagined this!" At that moment, two corpsmen rushed in and pressed the wildly struggling executive officer against the saturated bunk mattress as Doc emptied the contents of the hypodermic into Morton's veins and...almost instantly...the struggle stopped, the Executive Officer sinking into a drugged sleep...for now.

Doc drew up to the Admiral's side. "I'm sorry you had to see that, Admiral."

"Yes..." Nelson nodded slowly, sadly. "So am I, Doc. This...madness -was it like this before? Was that why Lee was confined...the way he was?"

"More or less... It seems to be part of the disease -the victims have no control over it ...when it happens."

"Like at Delta -Good Lord..." Nelson's fists tightened involuntarily and he grimaced as a small sharp pain stabbed in the flesh of his palm. The Admiral lifted the stinging hand to his eyes, squinting with a silent curse on his lips that he had failed to pocket his reading glasses...but he could see more than well enough to know what it was that he'd not initially realized that Morton had passed to him before once again sinking into delirium; something that he had grasped and held automatically. He stared harder. "What the Devil..?"

A tiny bubble of blood had welled up from where the small sharp object had pierced the soft flesh, staining the thing, but in no ways disguising it. He knew what the object was...but he did not believe it...even as the cold white ceiling lights reflected off the silvery metal. It was one of the collar pins of a naval officer...but not just any officer -it was part of what made up the pips of a captain. But how?

Nelson noticed that Doc was studying him, silent and questioning. "A...captain's clusters..." Doc murmured, equally puzzled as Nelson continued to study the small object. "Chip had that?" Nelson nodded silently. "But how did he keep it hidden?" the physician demanded more of himself than his superior officer as he tried to recall whether his patient had been struggling with his hands open -or closed. "Admiral -I didn't see it...and neither did any of my corpsmen. I'm certain of that much!"

"The question is not how Chip kept it hidden, but from where did he get it in the first place." A whisper of inspiration echoed in the back of Nelson's mind; so faint and so impossible that he refused to listen to it. "I imagine that he must've gone in Lee's cabin or, perhaps, entered the containment chamber, but when and for what purpose..." Nelson shook his head, frustrated by uncertainty and the realization that he was grasping at straws for an explanation. He sighed aloud. "At any rate, what we have to find out now is how Chip was infected with the virus -and by whom." Nelson regarded the physician, almost daring him to answer. "Unless you accept his delusion that Lee attacked him?"

"No... No, I don't, but there may have been other victims we knew nothing about -latent, malingering cases perhaps..." Doc met Nelson's hard though questioning stare. "...and bodies have been known to have remained infectious for quite a long time after death...disease vectors... There was no indication or evidence that this was the case, but..."

"The two corpsmen..?" Nelson muttered as he slipped the naval pin into his own breast pocket. "Roderiguez and Gill..?"

Doc nodded solemnly. "Possibly."

Nelson's eyes narrowed. "Where are they now?"

"I...I'm not certain..." Doc confessed almost helplessly, suddenly embarrassed as he realized that he had no real idea. "As far as I know, they should still be on the funeral preparation detail..." The doctor's brow furrowed further than it had been moments ago when the conversation had turned in a direction he was now sure that he did not really want it to go though he had no real choice...as he felt himself forced to add: "I hope."

Nelson frowned with suspicion. "You...'hope'?"

"I hope," the medical officer repeated, all the more uneasy.

Nelson was no longer listening. The doubt in the Chief Medical Officer's subdued voice was now enough to awaken that disposition for action for which he was known; a tendency that his years of naval service had honed to a level that was considered by some to be on par with instinct...or so he had been told. He grabbed the wall mike and clicked it impatiently, piping the signal throughout the ship. "Corpsmen Gill and Roderiguez -report to Admiral Nelson in the Sick Bay. Immediately!" A pause. "Corpsmen Gill and Roderiguez, this is Nelson. Acknowledge!" Another pause. Nothing. Nelson shook his head worriedly and clicked the mike once more. "Chief Sharkey, this is Nelson. Acknowledge."

There was yet another silence -a silence that seemed somehow too long...long enough for Nelson to glance back at Doc with open, mounting concern and then: "Aye, sir! Sharkey reporting!"

Nelson's shoulders heaved with his tentative sigh of relief. "I want you to locate corpsmen Gill and Roderiguez. Last known location was in the-" Nelson hesitated, suddenly unwilling to say more -having very few options besides the one that he presently faced. To mention -even to remember- the containment room in which the bodies of Seaview's fallen remained was to lance a terrible wound that had yet to even begin to heal and hurt more with each mentioning -at least, the members of his crew could show their individual pain more openly.

Jaw set with a determination that was not as strong as it appeared, Nelson nodded to his unseen chief of the boat. "Last known location -the containment area. If you are unable to locate them there, I want you to mount a search party and scour this ship from keel to Conn..." There was another pause -much longer this time. "And, Francis...I must stress this: take all manner of top level anti-contamination precautions -they may be gravely ill...infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Delta virus. No-one's safe from this one. Avoid any fluid to fluid bodily contact."

There was a thinly disguised sigh on the other end of the line. "Aye, sir..."




The dull clip-clop of the rubberized soles of Francis Sharkey's shod feet against the cold deck beneath them echoed against the bulkhead of the empty corridor most directly leading to the containment room... Empty... No-one had actually issued any order to steer absolutely clear of the are -odd...and not to his knowledge anyway- but no-one had needed to do so. With one accord, enlisted men and officers alike avoided the area unless they had no choice but to be here...like himself. All the bluster in the world could not change the fact that he didn't want to be here...in this area...any longer than he had to.

As he approached the somehow imposing hatch, the troubled chief petty officer found himself automatically making a final check on the seals of his protective suit -stress points secure, fabric unbreached, all in order- and softly muttered an unholy oath in pure disgust, regarding his gloved hands before dropping them to his sides in resignation. The effort had been a useless one born of countless training drills, not out of logic. He was no scientist, but he knew full well when something didn't work.

All of the precautions...all of the procedures that the crew had followed to the letter to stay healthy and alive hadn't been worth shit. The virus had spread -was likely still spreading- and good men had died and would probably continue to do so...unless the Admiral figured out a way to save their skins as he and the Skipper had so many times before.

Sharkey reached for the hatch wheel and hesitated, the movement causing the synthetic cloth of the anti-contamination suit to shift and press the golden crucifix he wore beneath it against the skin of his chest, sharp and cold. He couldn't say for certain when exactly he had again begun to wear it -a strong Catholic upbringing had failed to wax him as religious as his devout parents had hoped- but wearing it now gave him some small comfort -in the form of hope...and protection? Against what? Sharkey uttered a small, nervous laugh. Protection from what indeed. With a steeling breath, the Chief grasped the hatch dog -and started with surprise when the wheel immediately moved loosely beneath his gloved hands. "Undogged..? What kind of lead-brained swab-jockey would..?" He frowned again as he realized that the palm and fingers of his gloves had come away stained with some sort of sticky red-brown matter smeared on the metal ring. Paint..?

Sharkey shook his head in frustrated puzzlement, his lips drawn tight, his free hand shadowing his service weapon as he entered through the now unbarred hatch. It was now or never... "Roderiguez? Gill? You guys in here?" Silence answered him...but then, it was possible that they were in the ante-room, wasn't it? Perhaps they hadn't heard him...or weren't listening. "Roderiguez! Gill! Come on, you guys -fore and center on the Admiral's orders!"

Nothing.

Just faint echoes of his own voice and then silence shrouded by darkness. Darkness..? Sharkey's brow furrowed slightly as he realized that whatever the reason for there being no active lighting in this area, he should have been able to have seen some light from the ante-room itself even if the door was closed. Certain rooms in the ship were never to be left in total darkness -he didn't know why. He supposed that he didn't really care. That was just the way it was. Usually...and especially since he had personally seen to it that the electrical systems were sending plenty of juice to Seaview's bio-medical research areas.

The Chief Petty Officer moved forward slowly, feeling around himself like a man newly blind, for the light switch he knew to be nearby. As his hand came in contact with the recessed panel, a stinging brilliance sundered the blackness, startling him for a moment though he had known it was coming, until his watering eyes adjusted, reaccustoming themselves to the illumination.

The color bled from Sharkey's face.

A mouth that was usually active with orders or a ready answer fell open, mute with horror, the jaw slack and the pallid skin slick with cold sweat. As though instinct had taken over from conscious decision, the Chief felt himself take a step backwards -first one, then two, and more after that- until he had backed all the way out of the room and into the corridor, the pounding of his heart like repeated explosions in his brain as he stumbled towards an intercom unit that somehow seemed far too distant.

Sharkey's hands trembled as he grasped the mike, almost dropping it twice, his mouth working silently for a moment longer before he was able to speak at all. "This is... This is Chief Sharkey... Get a security detail down to...Get someone down to the containment room...on the double! This...this is an emergency!" Sharkey let the mike fall from his hand as he sank against the bulkhead, eyes pressed shut against the mounting sense of horror within him. "Mother of God..." The worst wasn't over.

It had just begun.




It had been a vague order at best...a few confused words half-bellowed and half-cried by the oddly shaky voice of a chief of the boat who had failed to acknowledge his presence upon command -but those few words had brought immediate action. At least, there had been that. The collective nerves of Seaview's crew were drawn tight...so taut that a single word or act out of place triggered some reaction, whether of dread or something akin to anger that some new trouble had befallen them when Seaview had been through enough already in such a short time. The number of the latter far outstripped the former, and by the time that Admiral Nelson had arrived in the corridor just before the containment room, he had already been preceded by several security detail teams hastily thrown together, each man bearing the expression of one not so much eager to face greater horror, but determined to face whatever had compelled them to be here...and to get it over with.

Also there, however, compelled by something other than duty, were a milling group of crewmen...most likely bound to remain by the same morbid sense of curiosity present to some degree in every human being. Nelson knew that had he not, for whatever nebulous reason or instinct, hesitated at the door to his cabin -had he taken those mysterious white oblong pills that Doc had finally pressed upon him- he would not have heard Sharkey's frantic call over the intercom. He didn't know whether he should have been grateful...or not. It didn't really matter -he was here...and despite himself, he too, wanted to see this thing through.

Seaview's admiral silently regarded the half-closed hatchway door, the guard blocking the partial opening from within the corridor, the vague half-seen shadows of movement within the containment room itself, and then the crowd of curiosity seekers before gesturing curtly to three openly uneasy members of the security detail nearest to him -they all snapped to attention immediately. "Johnson! Raye! Brown! Get everyone who is not specifically supposed to be here out of here -on the double!"

Three voices answered in unison. "Aye, sir!"

"Jackson!" A crewman who appeared far too young to be serving on any submarine, let alone Seaview, approached Nelson, carrying a conventional high-powered rifle, grasping it -perhaps unconsciously- as though it was a life-preserver and somehow...Nelson could not find it within himself to blame the lad or to reprimand him for not holding his service weapon in the prescribed naval manner. In true military habit, his own fingers had strayed, brushing the metal butt of his own personal side-arm, drawing whatever meager comfort he could from the fact that it was there at all -which, in truth, wasn't all that much really.

What remained behind that partially closed hatchway -though he had yet to actually see it- had summoned a deep and terrible dread from within his breast; an almost primal fear of what he knew not...of something he did not want to see and yet...and yet, he had to -whatever was there. Nelson turned in the direction of the alternate hatchway and then hesitated, a question on his lips -Sharkey had summoned them all here, so where was- "Where's the Chief?"

Francis Sharkey was not the only member of Seaview's compliment that bore the rank of C.P.O., but he was easily the only one of them who could be mentioned by rank alone and be recognized as though spoken of by his given name -and for that reason, if for no other, young crewman Jackson found that despite his desire to do so, he could not feign ignorance of whom Nelson was speaking. "He's..." Jackson paused, his personal discomfiture evident for anyone to see as he glanced to one side and gestured uneasily to the door of a common-usage Head. "He's...indisposed...sir."

The openly puzzled frown that creased Nelson's brow was quickly replaced by one of understanding as he gradually became aware of the muffled sounds of retching -violent, almost uncontrollable physical heaving- coming from behind the closed door. The C.P.O. Sharkey that Nelson had come to know through the years was a blunt, plain-speaking experience-toughened man -one with whom this crew had seen horrors of the like which few should ever know- and as such, was not an individual to be shaken easily. What had he seen in there? Nelson's shoulders heaved as he drew a deep breath, effecting an image that more untroubled in form than in fact, as he pressed himself to walk forward and grasp the dog-wheel of the alternate hatch...to enter a place that instinct said was best left unseen.

The stench hit him as he entered the containment room's ante-room -it hit him certainly and fully as if he had walked face-first into an invisible brick wall. Nelson did not consider himself a weak-willed man -one given to timidity or an easily unsettled stomach- but as he entered that room fully, he felt the gorge rise up in his throat and the horribly familiar bitter foretaste of bile at the back of his tongue as mind and body joined in a battle over whether he would follow the dictates of personal pride and resist the urge to vomit or to just give in and do it. Somehow...he did not give in.

Nelson's hands clenched and unclenched involuntarily as he stepped forward, the foul odor thickening, it seemed, with every second that passed -the odor was familiar, metallic, and decidedly raw like the stink of an old-fashioned charnel house he had visited as a boy with his grandfather. The nauseating smell was like that -foul ...a place where the blood of a thousand slaughtered animals had seeped beneath the floorboards and had saturated every inch of porous paneling...and had stained the walls. No matter how much disinfectant was used. Nelson dismissed the old mental imagery and continued forward through the ante-room of the containment area to where he knew Doc and his team would be -the main section.

It would have been a simpler matter to have entered through the opposite hatchway, but something...some little instinctive warning klaxon had sounded in his brain...warning, no, more like insisting that he delay the grim inevitable...but there was longer any time for such self-indulgent-

The Admiral glanced down sharply towards his feet at the minuscule sound of crackling ...a low, harsh snapping...his eyes widening at the sight of the scattered, irregular shards of bluish glass stained with some kind of sticky-looking red fluid, sticking out from a smeared, patchy trail of the same liquid which had begun, it seemed, to dry -a trail that thickened, almost solidifying, the closer it came to the entrance to the main area.
Cold sweat beaded on both Nelson's upper lip and suddenly pallid countenance as he crossed the threshold between the two rooms, his unwilling body pressed by the impetus of his equally unwilling mind.

Doc, the medical detail, and the security detail looked in Nelson's direction, grimly silent, as he entered the main section of the containment room, but he did not see them. Not really. Pale eyes peered out from an even paler face and locked on the carmine trail -sometimes solid, sometimes not- that stretched on before them; a long, liquid stain that led to the opposite end of the room ...just across from the oddly silent cubicles. Nelson's voice came to him slowly. "God in Heaven..." He had seen many battles and knew what men could do to each other in a moment of rage or of sheer cruelty and had come to the belief that he was far too jaded a man to be surprised by anything...but in that instant, Harriman Nelson, knew that he had been proven wrong.

Even had they been, corpsmen Roderiguez and Gill would not be carrying any strange illness any longer -they would not be doing anything any longer. Mental images of the two crewmen found dead in their cell only a relatively short while ago burst before his mind's eye in response to the grisly tableau before him. Roderiguez and Gill were dead -just as the two crewmen were. It was so easy to say it, so numb had he become. They were dead. Someone had somehow scaled the bulkhead and had crawled along a steel cross-beam along the ceiling from where he (they?) had hung Roderiguez and Gill, binding them there by their ankles with their own belts. Their eyes were wide, staring at nothing anymore, and their throats...

Nelson tried, but could not suppress a shudder of utter physical revulsion that traveled the length of his frame. What kind of animals would have... The flesh of the men's throats had been literally torn away, creating grotesque, ragged, upside-down grins of raw meat and blood...blood which dripped and pooled ever so slowly beneath their limp, grey lifeless bodies, their uniforms hanging in sanguine-stained tatters where numberless claws or teeth had rended them.

"They couldn't have been dead for very long," Doc murmured quietly, his visage pale and strained...but the Admiral was not listening. He didn't hear Doc say that blood-loss was the actual cause of death -though despite the wounds, he couldn't account for the fact that there wasn't nearly enough of it on the deck or against any of the bulkheads to account for the loss as far as the doctor could tell. Nelson certainly didn't hear Doc report that a lab technician had discovered that one of the medical labs had been broken into and had discovered a scene not unlike this -that several of the lab animals were dead...mauled, their heads literally torn off, their bodies exsanguined- just moments before this ghastly discovery. He didn't hear any of it.

More shards of glass, some sparkling and some dull, scattered on the containment room's deck, crunched under the hard heels of Nelson's shoes as he turned...slowly and unwillingly...as if some unseen powers compelling him; a puppet bound by the tug of invisible tethers to turn his head in the direction of the containment chambers and see what he did not want to see...and was ultimately afraid that he would.

There had been an active containment chamber to each of the Seaview's fallen and twenty-one either inactivated or yet to be fully assembled...and of the twenty-nine that had been activated, fifteen had been brutally breached, the entry panel to each of the fifteen shattered. The doubly-thick tempered-glass door on each unit had been completely destroyed, only a shard or two of shielding still clinging to the rended metal frames, and each of those units was quiet...and empty.

Nelson's eyes widened, his face nearly chalk-white, as his mouth moved with mimed words of horror...and disbelief. "Desecration!" he finally hissed through clenched teeth. "What...What kind of monsters would..." He turned sharply to Doc who could only look on helplessly. "Who... Who would steal the bodies of the plague victims! What kind of sick, perverted, madness could possess a man to steal the bodies!"

"I..." Doc shook his head slowly, his mind and emotions still numb. "I don't know, Admiral. This is...inhuman. You'd think that they'd suffered enough. If this is because of the virus, I don't know what-" the Seaview's physician stopped mid-sentence, his attention distracted despite the horror by the sudden appearance of corpsman Taylor. How long the young corpsman had actually been there -whether he just arrived or had been waiting there silently- he knew not, but the young medico wore the same expression as any man who had entered this chamber, and the hand with which he grasped the print-out sheet that he carried was slick with cold sweat... However long, he had been here long enough. "What is it, Taylor?"

Taylor continued to stare for a moment or two longer at the ghoulish scene before he came back to himself, his voice and manner still shaky. "The...rest of the medical equipment came back on-line...sir. At...at least...for now. We - we did standard D.N.A. tests on Mr. Morton's bite wounds... There was some blood there...that wasn't his..." He proffered the creased, dampened paper with a trembling hand. "You'd better read this, sir."

Casting a puzzled glance at the troubled corpsman and then the Admiral, Doc took the paper, his eyes moving rapidly along the computer-printed words. "Blood work-up...genetic factors...an identity confirmation-" At that precise moment, the medical officer's mouth fell slack and open, his voice trailing off to nothing as he read, re-read, and re-read again the words on the printed page. "Can't be..." He regarded the corpsman sharply. "There must be some mistake."

"No, sir."

"But this variation here..."

Taylor shrugged helplessly. "The medical computers can't make head nor tails of it -it was as if the sample was sometimes somehow fuzzy or confused even though it wasn't- but it is a 98.99% match-up to known D.N.A...."

Doc shook his head in growing frustration "Are you certain!"

Taylor nodded slightly, his eyes downcast, his voice small. "Yes, sir."

"What is it, Doc!" Nelson snapped finally. All this while, he had listened. All this while, he had learned next to nothing...except that a simple piece of paper had his chief medical officer on the verge of fainting. "Is it about Chip, Doc?"

"No, sir..." Doc murmured, disbelieving still. His medical corps was exceptional and computers did not lie... "Sir, as you know, Seaview's computer mainframe has an enormous database on the biological sciences, including an equally extensive file on the D.N.A. codes of known lifeforms."

"I know that-"

"Sir!" Doc cut in before the Admiral could go any further -Nelson fell silent. "That file includes D.N.A. profiles on every crew member who is serving or who has served on Seaview. The medical corps did some D.N.A. tests on some foreign blood...and saliva...in and around Chip's shoulder wound...enough to know right away that the sample was created by a hominid and enough to try for a match with Seaview's active D.N.A. profiles. Sir..." Doc hesitated again. "There were some variables -the match was only 98.99%- but we...we know who attacked him now."

It was Nelson who hesitated this time. "Who..?"

"Impossible... It must be..." Doc glanced at the paper again, steeling himself. "Captain Crane, sir. All the tests confirm it."

He should have said something; a denial, a loud, bombastic show of disbelief, words -a long oratory pointing out how medical computers could fail and foul up like a common gumball machine -something! But the words wouldn't come. Instead, Nelson felt himself once again compelled to turn his gaze toward the silent, breached containment units.

More glass crunched sharply underfoot as the Admiral hesitantly stepped forward, his eyes narrowing at the faint whisper of macabre imagination in the back of his mind; a whisper that was becoming a mental shout as he stared at the twisted metal remains, the glass on the deck...and something else. Among the bits of glittering crystal, something else sparkled...a bit of reflected yellow light. He reached toward it and his fingers closed around a small circlet of gold ...a familiar signet ring that was now stained with blood.

Again, Nelson's head snapped in the direction of the cubicles, his eyes irresistibly drawn to one in particular. The ID tag was also stained, smeared with drying blood, but Nelson could still read the partially obscured name: Crane, Captain Lee B. above the cubicle, but the sorrow he had felt -and the rage over this unspeakable desecration- were gradually giving way to something his mind found difficult to accept. The unit had been breached and was as empty as the others...but...there was almost no broken glass within the unit; all, or most, of the shards littering the deck beneath his feet. His almost panicked stare darted from breached cubicle to breached cubicle -it was the same. Glass outside. Little or none inside.

Horror tightened like a vise around Nelson's chest as he was forced to remember the entries in Captain Hudson's journals and Dr. Bergman's notes...those mad, mad rantings that no longer sounded so terribly insane -ravings of dead comrades that came back to haunt...to hurt. Nelson pressed a hand against his breast pocket and felt the small, hard lump of metal beneath the fabric.
A captain's clusters... That special ring... Lee... It was true then. All of it. What had been said to have happened before, was happening now...to his crew. Nelson took in the scene of horror and destruction. Nothing had broken into the temporary resting places of his dead crew members. No-one had broken in at all.

Something had broken out.



8



"But, Admiral -it's useless! We've been trying and we've not been able to get a single response!"
"We'll soon see about that."

Harriman Nelson was a man obsessed -a man pressed by a compulsion born of unholy inspiration and a confounding rage with no real direction, no true focus save for one thing. The corridor resounded with the low thunder of footsteps -his own and those of the others hard-pressed to keep up with his feet, determined pace, as members of work details along the way looked up from their appointed tasks with troubled, questioning surprise which quickly metamorphosed into silent concern. They had heard Chief Sharkey over the intercom only a short while ago and not a man among them could claim to be either deaf or ignorant. Whatever had happened, could not have been anything but bad -of that one thing they were very sure.

The silent, questioning glances in his direction went unnoticed by the Admiral of the Seaview. Perhaps "Obsessed" wasn't strong enough a word to describe his state of mind at the moment... "Possessed" was definitely a better and far more accurate word to describe that dark emotion which seemed to have almost taken on a ungodly life of its own. He was indeed a man possessed by an idea that stood out beyond any other he had entertained or dared to consider no matter how mad it had to be...but then again, what was madness to one who had been witness to things that no sane mind would have fashioned for entertainment or imagination's sake?

Doc followed at Nelson's side as deeply troubled as his admiral -perhaps more so in some ways- and a somewhat recovered Chief Sharkey followed at the rear with a number of security crewmen whose presence Nelson no longer bothered to note -as anyone who was with him now had noted several times before, he was a man possessed.

Nelson's pace slowed as the group approached the main door to the Sick Bay, and he stopped before them, an outstretched hand flat against the cold smooth bulkhead, his eyes seemingly closed in concentration as he steeled himself against his own fears before he opened them again and regarded the entourage. "Bailey, Simpson, Miller, Dale -take your watches here. Doc..." The physician returned the steady gaze. "I'll need your co-operation in there."

Doc's brow furrowed. "Admiral..?"

"No matter what happens in there," Nelson said flatly, "and no matter what I say or do, I have to insist that you refrain from interfering."

A low, troubled murmur passed amongst the gathered crewmen who in turn regarded the Chief Medical Officer who shook his head slowly; his brow furrowed even more deeply. "Admiral..." he said slowly and carefully. "I'm a doctor and I took an oath to heal and protect my patients. If you intend to do anything that will threaten the well-being of any of them, I am ethically bound to put a stop to it. You know that."

Nelson's grim, lined countenance twisted with a mirthless smile. "And as admiral of this ship I am bound by my own sworn duty to do all that I can to see to the safe return of my ship and crew." He paused as he grasped the steel handle to the door. "And if that should come to occasionally require that I use force or intimidation to achieve that effect, I shall do it -and, mayhap, enjoy it. Is that understood?"

"As chief medical officer, I could countermand your authority on that matter," Doc shot back, locking eyes with his superior officer, the silent tension surrounding them an almost tangible thing as everyone else waited for one officer or the other to give ground.

Nelson finally broke the stillness. "Not this time."

There was another lengthy silence, a battle of wills without words, as neither officer appeared willing to give an inch...but in the end, it was Doc's will that faltered first as he found himself unable to answer. He was the Chief Medical Officer and in the Sick Bay, he was admiral and fleet commander no matter what his actual rank, but he was also a man without answers, standing before an impregnable, invisible wall of confusion, and despite himself, his oath weighed unfavorably against the need for those answers. Doc sighed heavily and stepped aside.

Sick Bay was quiet; quieter than it had been in a long time -at least, since this mission had gone on the skewed path on which both ship and crew found themselves right now...an almost unearthly stillness despite the softly humming monitoring equipment and the like. There were no new patients and those that remained were in no condition to make much noise were they of a mind to do so.

As Nelson's almost militarily determined pace led him in the direction of the area of the Sick Bay where the least serious of the cases were being kept, he felt his gaze turn in the direction of the high-security section where Commander Morton was being kept and the crewman who had drawn security detail this watch, his young face studiously impassive despite the likelihood that he either did not want to be there so close to a source of some nebulous danger (indeed, who did?) or that he was wondering what good it was being there at all? There were times when Harriman Nelson wished that he didn't know his crew so well.

Nelson suppressed a shudder that would have revealed his own unease and pressed himself to remain focused on the grim task he had set for himself, deciding that no matter how ugly the situation might become or how much of a waste of time he feared the effort might yet turn out to be, he could hardly turn back now. The suspicions that whispered in the darker recesses of this troubled admiral's mind were of the sort that gave birth to nightmares or madness, but they would no longer be denied or silenced by accepted logic. Perhaps he was dancing on that thin line between insanity and reason....but he had to know for once and for all. He had to know if he had actually stumbled on the unthinkable.

Nelson gestured with a slight tilt of his head and everyone but Doc fell back, waiting with ill-suppressed unease, as he approached the medical bunk. Corpsman Thibideau was alone in this small section of the Sick Bay, unchanged it seemed, from when he had been brought aboard Seaview -a ghostly pale, painfully thin, staring and seemingly mindless being who could have easily been mistaken for one of those pseudo-human department store mannequins save for the slight rise and fall of his chest beneath the sterile white sheet and the heartbeat that Doc could hear through his stethoscope. Doc removed the earpieces from his ears and pocketed the stethoscope as he reluctantly stepped back, leaving the playing field to the Admiral.

"I think that it is about time that we had a little talk, Lieutenant Thibideau." Nelson paused, waiting, but there was no response; not so much as intake of breath out of rhythm or a twitch of an eyebrow that would indicate that he had been heard let alone understood. Doc shook his head slightly. Nelson ignored him. "Lieutenant Thibideau...I somehow doubt that I need to apprise you of our situation -some, you likely know yourself and some things, no doubt, passed through loose lips- but I suspect that you know things of which we know precious little...such as what we are dealing with...this thing that boarded my ship from Delta with my crew." Still no response...as Thibideau remained silent and immobile.

Doc sighed heavily, his opinion confirmed. "It's as I told you, Admiral. He-"

The Admiral's movements were almost faster than his tense following's ability to follow. It appeared that in the space of time that it had taken one to blink, he had unholstered his personal side-arm -and was now pointing the thick black barrel directly in between the insensate corpsman's eyes, his finger on the trigger. "I'm growing quite weary of this game of silence, Lieutenant. I know that you can hear me -I've suspected it for quite awhile- and I am well aware that Canadian servicemen can speak English as well as French, so understand this: Delta produced a madness-inducing plague that's now aboard this vessel. It has caused my best men to profane, kill, and die -and you know what it is! So, unless you wish to join the ranks of the dead a little sooner than the rest of us, you are going to start talking!" Nelson's finger tightened ever so slightly on the trigger. "You have ten seconds -and if you can understand anything at all, read my expression and you'll know that I am not bluffing. Ten..."

Doc glanced sharply from patient to admiral, his face etched with mounting horror. "Admiral, no! You can't!"

"Nine..." Nelson's expression grew harder, the finger tightening further still. "Eight..."

"Admiral!"

"Seven..."

"You didn't burn them." For a moment, there was no noise. Nelson's finger involuntarily relaxed its dangerous grip on the trigger of his service weapon as Doc stood there, his mouth an "o" of disbelief as the pale, gaunt figure beneath the sheets of the bunk stirred slightly, his eyes blinking and then turning to focus on Nelson...fully aware. "You didn't burn the bodies -I'd heard that you hadn't," Thibideau stated in a nearly mechanical monotone, but the dull mask lifted just for a moment, his eyes flashing. "You were supposed to incinerate them -why didn't you?"

Nelson winced inwardly, Thibideau's words reminding him of the order he had not really forgotten, but had put out of his mind as other things had come to press upon him and difficulty upon difficulty had made a delay of execution of that order unavoidable...but the moment passed, personal anguish hidden once again behind a military mask, as he icily regarded the corpsman whose pale eyes remained trained on him, wide like those of an accusing child. Nelson re-sheathed his side-arm. "Would it have made a difference, Lieutenant?"

"Maybe...I don't know for sure -just maybe." Thibideau sank back against his heavily creased pillows, his expression once again dull and passionless, his eyes focused on personal visions of the mind that only he could see before uttering a small, mirthless laugh and again met Nelson's eyes. "It would have killed them. At least, I think it would have."

"Killed..." The word came from between Nelson's tightly pressed lips as a low hiss, his temples reddening as his hands darted out and he roughly grabbed the corpsman by the arms, forcing him to sit. "Are you a madman as well as a prevaricator? Those crewmen...the - the commanding officer of this ship...are already dead!"

Thibideau's pinched, pallid face suddenly flushed a dark, angry red, his eyes almost blazing as the words suddenly exploded from his mouth: "Are you dense! They weren't dead! They were never dead! Mon Dieu -they are NOT dead!"

Dead silence. An overwhelming stillness seemed to envelope all of those gathered...not a breath seemingly drawn...not even the soft murmur of voices muttering in derision or simple disbelief. Nelson took a step back from the Canadian corpsman, releasing him, as the words echoed in his brain. More proof of things he had at once suspected, denied, and feared, but did not dare believe even now. Not dead. "What..." Nelson questioned weakly, a last, dying ember of doubt in his voice. "What...the Devil...do you mean?"

The haggard corpsman pushed himself up into a hunched-over sitting position, his thin figure trembling as he dashed aside the matted, stringy strands of carrot-colored hair that had pasted themselves over his brow as he began to...laugh. It was a low, disjointed sound that went on as his small audience regarded each other as if one or the other should be able to divine the reason behind it.
Thibideau looked up at that moment, the weak, crazed laugh dying in his throat as he met Nelson's penetrating stare, his own young countenance suddenly hard; a pale mask full of bitterness. "You don't get, do you? Any of you. You really don't get it. The virus doesn't kill. Le mort..." Thibideau shook his head frustratedly, recalling his English. "The death...the death is an incubative state of some sort-"

"-with vital signs so low that our compromised equipment could not detect them." Thibideau nodded, eyes downcast, at the Admiral's tentative conclusion. "My... My God in Heaven..." Nelson's hand went to the back of his head, the fingers massaging a stabbing pulse at the juncture between skull and spinal column. To suspect...to fear the worst impossibility was one thing -a terrible thing- but to learn that a forgotten nightmare was bursting into waking reality was infinitely worse.
Bits and pieces of gore-soaked dreams had begun to swirl in this admiral's mind, no longer hidden by the obscuring cloak of wakeful consciousness -fractured images of gnashing teeth and ruby eyes...a Seaview crippled seemingly beyond all hope...a ghostly warning...and Lee- Nelson's eyes flashed with rage at the cruel deception that this ashen-faced deceiver had helped to perpetuate. "You are saying that...my crewmen, my...the Captain of this ship...are still alive!"

Thibideau peered at the Admiral through obscuring, limp strands of ginger hair, a thin humorless smile on his lips. "Oui... Alive... If you can call it 'living'." He uttered a feeble laugh. "Damn... I need a cigarette."

Automatically, Nelson reached for the secreted pack in his breast pocket and the disposable lighter with it, regarding the items clenched within his fingers for a moment or two before he tossed both to the corpsman who caught them easily. Thibideau greedily pulled one stick out, lit it, and then dragged on it with open relief, the embers in the lit-end glowing brightly before he exhaled a bluish-grey cloud through his nostrils, not apparently troubled by the ugly scowl that Doc cast in his direction, and proffered the pack and the lighter to the Admiral. Nelson shook his head slightly. "Keep them. I...don't need them anymore." Thibideau shrugged in response. "And now, Lieutenant -the rest of it."

Thibideau sighed heavily. "What do you want me to tell you?" he asked quietly. "About when things started to go wrong? The project was probably wrong from the start -my captain seemed to think so...but by that time, he wasn't exactly himself. He was probably right though...never could figure out how so many things could go wrong so specifically. I can tell you about how everyone believed that the pain, anorexia, and death were all that we had to face when dealing with Project M.I.N.A's awful creation...or when the first of the victims...the first we knew not to actually be dead...was seen up and around...walking...hungry."

Thibideau paused and studied the burning opposite end of his cigarette, staring at the dull red glow for a time as if mesmerized. "One of Delta's technicians was the first to see someone that had died and been put into cold storage...alive. I don't know why the victims of the V2 strain of the virus hadn't been incinerated like the victims of the first experiments...mais...but Dr. Ionescu had ordered the cremations to be discontinued and at the time, he still had the authority ...stupid rules. Either way, this technician saw a guy he himself had put into cold storage. No-one believed him, of course."

"Who would?" Sharkey muttered sourly.

"Indeed." Thibideau stared at the cigarette and at the thin column of cinders which had begun to curl downwards, and then slowly, deliberately, crushed the already almost spent tobacco stick between his fingers, hot grey ash staining the digits as he grimaced silently, lips drawn tight against his teeth. "It was the first report...but it was not the last. Others followed, made by men under pressure -true- but sound-minded men and women...and then, staff members started to go missing -all explainable occurrences...or so we all convinced ourselves -or allowed ourselves to be convinced, but then, two of the animal labs were found broken into-"

Nelson glanced at Doc sharply. "Delta was not under the same constraints as most conventional facilities against the use of animals in experimentation...and there were quite a few test-subject animals. All together, maybe fifty rabbits...a hundred mice...sixty guinea pigs...a dozen monkeys..." Thibideau sighed aloud. "Almost every one of them in those two labs had been torn apart...and exsanguined. Then medical stores were found sacked of blood -plasma and whole, no particular type..." A small, crazed laugh escaped from Thibideau's mouth. "But even that wasn't the worst of it. Ironically, it was Dr. Ionescu who caught one of our 'victims' in the act of feeding...by security camera, I think...attacking and feeding on some poor lab assistant who had had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time -she was the first attack victim. Exsanguination..."

Thibideau's grey young countenance twisted with a scowl of disgust. "Ionescu put a bullet through his brain not an hour later -cowardly son of a bitch. He knew what he'd created and when he actually saw what he'd done, he took the easy way out...and left us to deal with it."

"Exsanguination! I know that word!" Sharkey snapped, cutting in before anyone could say or add another word. "I read it somewheres. It's just a big word for blood-drinking, ain't it? You're tryin' to say that this disease is creating vampires, for Chris'sakes! Vampires!"

There was a new silence, Thibideau's audience waiting for him to deny what Seaview's chief of the boat had said, but instead, the corpsman paused, staring for a moment at the fresh cigarette he had pulled out of the foil and paper pack, before regarding the Chief with a faint, almost pleasant smile. "Give the man a prize -he got it."

No-one else said a word.




A low hiss issued from between clenched teeth as a pallid face pressed unseen against the hard, cold metal of a ventilation grate...listening...slow, ragged breath drawn from a heaving chest as sensitive eyes blinked against the stinging glare beyond the perforated metal barrier.

He didn't like the light...avoided it whenever and where ever he could. It was an anathema to him, blinding his eyes and burning his skin, leaving tender wheals of red and purple when exposed for more than a few minutes -only to disappear when safely surrounded by the cool cocoon of darkness...but voices -familiar voices- that had stirred a terrible longing he no longer really understood, had drawn him here...and somehow, the instinctive needs that confounded his fevered brain, hadn't tried to stop him. The need was quiet right now -sleeping because it had been sated...for a time...allowing the trapped human part of him to peep beyond the impregnable confines of its mental prison while not really allowing it to be free. He could long for comfort...but he could not seek it.

Rubine eyes blinked rapidly against saltless tears as he forced himself to continue to remain where he was, hidden, in the face of the light. Some part of him remembered the owners of those voices; mental scraps fluttering briefly before internal sight. Sharkey was there, and so were Doc and that stranger...and the Admiral. As his eyes were drawn to the shimmering gold stars on the Admiral's shirt collar, blood-stained fingers instinctively, tentatively, reached toward the torn, ragged place on his own collar where part of a captain's clusters belonged...but was not. Where..? His brow furrowed as a little memory came -an image, vague, of bright gold. Chip... Chip had torn it off when he had tried to-

A low cry, muffled by the fist he crammed against his mouth, escaped unbidden as the trickle became a torrent and memory suddenly exploded within his brain -images of tearing, biting, and the taste of human blood thick with terror- and just as suddenly began to disintegrate, falling between proverbial fingers even as he tried to grasp at them. Like an angry viper whose rest had been disturbed, the need had begun to stir and hiss within him, his secondary incisors already beginning to extend in perverse anticipation of the continuation of the chase and the kill.

But not yet.

The need was not fully awake and he had a little time before he could no longer resist the compulsion to hunt and feed...and so, he stayed. But for what? That was the question. He had become two beings in one flesh -as certainly as one wanted to beg for help and release at the hands of those beyond his small, dark sanctum, the other would have attacked, rending flesh from bone and feeding from the resulting red flood. God...

He leaned against the metal grate, the cold steel pressing against the burning sallow skin of his cheek as he drew what physical comfort he could from the metal's chilled kiss, eyes closing and then snapping open as his new senses automatically reached out beyond the tight confines of this darkened crawlspace. Another like him was close-by and coming closer -he could sense him as certainly as if they were in fleshly contact...and the other could certainly sense him.

Almost at once, the partially recessed secondary incisors extended in full and a brief half-smile crossed his thin lips, his eyes darting from the grate to the shaft's dark recesses and turns that stretched on into the distance.

The need could wait a little longer.




"Admiral?"

Nelson blinked, momentarily bewildered, as the Chief Medical Officer's voice filtered through the invisible fog that had surrounded his brain for a moment, and slowly looked away from the bulkhead-mounted ventilation grate that had somehow, however briefly, bound his attention.

Why he had suddenly focused his entire attention on such an ordinary object, he could not presently fathom -there was nothing there of particular interest, the cloth pendant that indicated the rush and flow of recirculated air still flapped gently against the perforated metal barrier and the dark recesses within...and he had far more important things on which to dwell at the present time. Whatever the reason, whatever the transient fancy, he had little time to meditate on it.

Nelson nodded sheepishly in Doc's direction as the Chief Medical Officer led the troubled retinue towards the high security area of the Sick Bay.

The group's number had been reduced to four -the security detail silently waited at its post and the corpsmen that had followed waited in the Sick Bay's ante-room on Doc's orders
...but the reasons had much more to do with a need for privacy than any actual consideration for any of the Sick Bay's other patients in the sections nearby. Save for one, this closed-off section of the Sick Bay was empty...and Nelson realized that despite what he knew, and how important it was for the rest of the crew to eventually know, it was important, also, to gain a complete understanding of what he thought he knew before that knowledge could be fully revealed.

As horrible and threatening as this admiral's partial wisdom was, he was fully aware that a fractured truth carried by the loose lips of a frightened sailor was infinitely worse -panic could do to his crew what their deadly biohazardous enemy could not. Until a plan could be made -if it could be made- the less said, the better...at least, for now.

Doc accepted Commander Morton's medical chart from an ashen-faced corpsman who made his exit from the area with scarcely hidden relief, released finally from a watch no-one really wanted, medical corps or no, leaving the group alone with the lone patient.

"Well, Doc?" Nelson demanded.

The Chief Medical Officer's lined brow creased all the more as he scanned both the written pages and computer print-outs that were clipped together, his lips pressed with consternation. "I'll be quite frank, Admiral... I've never seen readings like these -heart rate, blood pressure, metabolism- none of them are following any normal human guidelines of which I am aware. Even though Commander Morton is unconscious, his nervous and endocrine systems in particular appear to be under some kind of extensive stimulation...cellular regeneration is off-scale..."

Doc flipped one page and then, another. "The administration of sedating agents has had to be increased twice to maintain any effect at all -the levels are at a point that should be toxic for a man of Chip's height and weight, and Chip has had three units of whole blood transfused to combat what seems to be some kind of anemia-like condition in the last two hours...but there's no evidence of where the blood is going." Doc let the hard report cover fall shut. "It's...it's as if the Commander is...well...just drinking it, absorbing it like a sponge!"

"He is."

"Don't start that again!" Chief Sharkey had turned on corpsman Thibideau, his face an angry red, his fists clenched as though ready to strike. "One more crack like that and I'll-"

"Easy, Francis, easy...let him speak his piece." Sharkey locked eyes with his admiral for a long moment and for a time, it appeared as if he might direct his anger -and fear- on the superior officer instead...but by and by, the moment passed and the Chief Petty Officer relented, his shoulders slumping with the release of tension as he nodded slowly and backed off, standing aside with no little difficulty.

Situation diffused...for the time anyway...and Nelson found that he didn't have it in him to blame his friend for his actions -Sharkey had only expressed the feelings he himself felt and felt obligated now to keep hidden for the sake of the crew. Though Harriman Nelson would admit it to no-one but God and himself, he had come very close to truly losing control with Thibideau a short while ago -the act with the threats and the gun had come too close to not being an act.

Nelson regarded the Canadian corpsman, his eyes narrow with a mixture of his own anger and an equal measure of suspicion thrown in. There was no point, he knew, in directing the bulk of his anger towards the young medical officer who stood there with apparent unconcern, an unlit cigarette perched between his lips -information had to be gathered and the lack of truth drugs (notoriously unreliable at best) made gaining his willful cooperation a necessity- but this admiral was as human as the next man and Thibideau was proving a better target than most -but not right now. Not even though he had to know the full truth...about the commanding officer of this ship...about all of the victims. "Well, Lieutenant, you said that you had a great deal more to tell us -I suggest that you get on with it...or I will let my chief petty officer here convince you in whatever manner he might desire."

Thibideau glanced at the Chief, who stood rubbing his fists as if in impatient anticipation, and then at Nelson, and nodded, cowed for the moment by the threat which he did not doubt he would carry out. For now, the mask of insolence with which he hid his own fears was gone, and in its place, morose silence. He regarded the still, quiet figure bound to the medical bunk. If it was at all possible, Commander Morton was paler than when his comrades had last seen him -as if the color was slowly bleeding out of him drop by drop, leaving his skin sallow and waxen with only the slightest flush at the lips and cheeks ...unmarred now by the bruises and scratches that had been there only hours before, as if their viral enemy was a conscious and vain thing that would not countenance living in anything that was anything but perfectly physically whole.

"He's not really asleep, y'know," Thibideau said quietly, observing the nearly indiscernible rise and fall of Morton's chest. "At least, it's not what we would know as sleep. Doc Laurier, our... Voyageur's chief medical officer called it a...'resting' state -I don't doubt that he can hear everything that we are saying right now."

Nelson studied the seemingly insensate executive officer uneasily. "But does he actually understand any of it?"

"Yes." Memories -still fresh, still painful- washed over Thibideau's mind, his eyes momentarily closed against them as though the effort would banish the grim mental images forever -but it didn't...and he knew then as he had always known that they would be with him for a lifetime -perhaps longer. When the corpsman opened his eyes, his troubled audience was still there...still waiting.

Once again, the non-committal mask dropped over his own grey features. "Tests were done at Delta and on Voyageur on the few active plague victims we were able to capture. When fed...and heavily drugged, they were -at times- quite lucid and able to tell us things we might not have been able to find out on our own." Thibideau stared at the ghosts of sanguine stains on his hands. "The chief of my boat was one -he told us most of what we came to know about their psychological make-up...and then begged me to put him out of his misery -which I did."

Thibideau closed his eyes again, feeling once more the handle of a fire-axe in his hands, its arcing swing past his shoulders, hot blood splattering him from head to toe, the thump of dead flesh hitting the floor at his feet... "It was the only way -the nervous system must be completely cut-off for..." He shuddered visibly. "The sickness leaves its victim sentient...a thinking creature ...but twists the ability to respond. Instinct is all -they're drawn to friends, seeking help, by scraps of memory, but the Sickness makes them kill instead."

"And now we have we have two viruses instead of one," Doc stated grimly. "One more virulent than the other."

"Not so," Thibideau countered quickly. "Non... There's only one disease, but there are three distinct stages -V1, V2, and V3. No-one realized that at first. There was no mutation ...just three natural stages of the one disease. A person afflicted with V1 will suffer V2 and V3 eventually. Persons infected by a victim suffering V3 will themselves suffer V3. No coma state, just gradual and inevitable transformation...and the thirst." Thibideau noted the immediate silence. "You don't believe me -even after all you have seen- do you?"

"The reality of a pica-like condition is not unknown to the medical sciences, Lieutenant, as you yourself would know," Doc shot back, "but by and large, the condition is...wholly psychological and not some physical Dracula-virus. What you've described is an actual need to sustain oneself on blood -true vampirism- which is scientifically impossible."

"Is it?" Thibideau retorted, his expression hardening all the further. "Don't female mosquitoes feed blood to their larval young? The Vampire Finch supplements its diet with the blood of other fowl -is that an impossibility? Don't we maintain a parasitic existence for the nine months preceding our own births, feeding on our own mother's blood ? Don't we?" No answer. Thibideau shook his head wearily and uttered a low, mirthless cackle. The non-response was no more than he had really expected -and dreaded- but even when he had been keeping his silence, he had hoped for so much more -especially from the crew of the Seaview.

There was no solid proof -certainly none that an ordinary seaman could access- that the American research submarine had encountered even half of the things that scuttlebutt said that she had, but every InterAllied Navy man (or woman for that matter) that he knew would swear that when there was talk or reports of some far-reaching paranormal phenomena at sea, the S.S.R.N. Seaview almost always seemed to come into the picture...and yet, he had to prove what he knew even to them. "All right..." the weary corpsman muttered, his voice flat and without expression. "It's obvious you want proof that can't be denied -solid proof. You shall have it." A small glint of cold silver metal caught Thibideau's eyes as he visually scanned the medical room. "Ah, Docteur... I'll have to borrow this scalpel, if you don't mind..."

The flip comment caught the Seaview's chief medical officer unawares and his brow lined with open puzzlement as he saw the young corpsman reach for a portable surgical instrument tray near them. "What do you-" Before the words were spoken and completed, to the incredulity of those present, the medical instrument was in the Canadian corpsman's outstretched hand and just as quickly was turned in his grasp so that the micro-fine blade was pointed down, his hand moving in a small quick arc that had the silver blade stained with wet red as the razor-like edge bit into his extended finger and warm sanguine fluid bubbled to the surface of the breached flesh.

Thibideau grimaced and dropped the stained instrument into a contaminated-waste container as Doc rushed forward, determined to deal with the results of an obviously botched suicide attempt, but Thibideau extended his uninjured, unstained hand in the manner of a traffic cop calling for a halt and said quietly and simply: "Wait. Look."

Everyone present could already smell the rank, metallic odor of fresh human blood and pulled by what instinct they knew not, followed Thibideau's unblinking train of vision...and reacted with disbelief, each glancing at the other as if to ask for confirmation of what his senses were telling him. Shackled though he was...deeply and heavily drugged though he was...the insensate executive officer had begun to stir in his strange deep sleep like a man fighting to waken from a bad dream, his unconscious expression one of emotional confusion or pain, his freshly bitten, bruised lips pulled back in a grimace. Doc's own mouth worked silently and then with a whisper: "Oh...my...God..."

Hidden no longer by wan facial flesh, just above the normal tooth-line, two tiny and clearly wickedly sharp nascent secondary incisors not unlike small serpentine fangs had broken through the thin sheath of livid flesh and were beginning to extend further, protruding now down and over the teeth of the upper gums...and there also, just before the teeth of the lower jaw, smaller fangs began to break through the bleeding flesh in Chip Morton's mouth -upper and lower fangs.
His demonstration done, Thibideau quickly stepped back as Doc came back to himself and promptly wrapped a bandage around the bloody wound on the corpsman's finger...and as he did, as the stench of antiseptic replaced the metallic stink of human blood, the unconscious executive officer once again seemed to relax, the nascent incisors retreating into hidden recesses within the gums out of sight...and slept.

"He's in an advanced stage of the disease," Thibideau stated as Doc studiously attended the wound that the enigmatic corpsman had inflicted upon himself, "but I don't think he's anywhere nearly as far along as the others must be by now. Transfusing the blood that he needs, instead of allowing him to ingest it, will help to keep him that way...for a little while, at least."

"Can you tell for how long?" Doc asked in strained tones as he finished binding the bloody cut. "Can you give us some idea?"

Thibideau stared at the insensate form of Chip Morton for a long moment before answering in a tired voice. "No. Not really -there seems no one incubation period for this illness." He paused again, seemingly steeling himself. "I also cannot say for how long these present restraints will be able to bind him once the transformation is complete. We...my crew and I could not for very long either...and the presence of the secondary fangs indicate that he has entered a phase when it is especially expedient that you do so."

"Especially expedient?" Nelson said, matching Thibideau's grim tone. "Why especially expedient?"

"The fangs -they are self-regenerating...and hollow." Thibideau explained with open impatience, forgetting for a moment that though he had explained all this several times, it had not been to the crew of the Seaview. He sighed aloud, prudently adopting a more conciliatory tone of voice. "By the time that your commander's transformation is complete, the fangs will lead to what Delta's biologists had deduced are primary and secondary venom sacs. At this point, the sacs are probably too small and unformed to be seen easily if at all, but when they are mature, they will carry and be able to discharge a viscous fluid heavily contaminated with the living virus...a concentration far greater than that in a carrier's blood or bodily fluids." Thibideau's voice dropped further. "There was some conjecture amongst the scientists of Delta that it might be the primary way this new species would procreate."

"How..?" Nelson stared at his executive officer, his own normally ruddy visage blanching a sickly white with horror over things that the primal part of his psyche had always suspected and his logical, reasoning self could no longer deny. "What is this? A deal with the Devil himself! Some perverse magic! What manner of madness could possess men and women of science to-"

"-the quest for knowledge and power, Admiral." Thibideau stuffed his hands into the pockets of his medical robe. "Pure science has no heart...no soul...and its pursuit has often been known to have had little to do with moral inhibitions, allowing it the limitations only of human imagination -and Dr. Ionescu's imagination went much farther than most.
"My captain learned that the vampiric nature of the disease was no accident. Dr. Bergman told him that whatever Dr. Ionescu's original intent, he had come to realize the value of a superhuman killer...one that consumes his enemy...and cannot himself be killed ...and Dr. Ionescu had been known to joke that a vampire, under proper control, would be an efficient soldier/killing machine..."

"Hence the name Project M.I.N.A.?" Nelson demanded through tightened lips, understanding all too much at once.

Thibideau uttered a small, bitter laugh. "Quite creative actually, don't you think? Ionescu loved the old classics -Dracula most of all. M.I.N.A. may be an acronym, but the project has always really been named after that girl in the book -Mina Murray-Harker -the victim and intended bride of the king of vampires..." A weak smile animated the young corpsman's haggard face. "But all the jokes aside -his creation couldn't...can't ultimately be controlled for very long. Denying a victim their nourishment only slows the progression of the disease -it can't stop it. And they... they can't, no, they won't be taught to run and fetch, and obey like some ordinary kind of pet."

Doc slumped against the bulkhead, his grey countenance drawn with weariness as he struggled to absorb and accept what he had just learned and seen...so much of it flying in the face of what he had been taught. "How...how can we fight this? How can we fight a disease that can do all this and yet remain invisible?"

Thibideau regarded the exhausted physician with some sympathy. "Your microscopes -what is their present maximum magnification?"

Doc thought for a moment, searching his memory. "Normally, fifty million times normal magnification...but I wouldn't swear to that presently. Why?"

"But they should have the capacity to go higher, non?"

"When the repairs are complete," Doc admitted, intrigued despite himself, "and with some modifications possibly."

Thibideau hesitated, his expression haunted. "Then, if you are able, magnify any samples that you have by no less than five billion times and you will find this Project M.I.N.A. virus -just as we did...but too late to help."

"So small... So very small and alien that our decontamination units and tests could not find it. So small that the body can't fight it because it doesn't really realize that its even there until..." Nelson regarded the young corpsman, his pale eyes narrowing with a loathing that he couldn't bother denying to himself that he felt and was hard-pressed to cloak. Crane...Kowalski...Riley...all of the others... Alive still, but in some kind of Earth-bound hell... "You...knew all of this. All along, you had this information -information that we could have used. In God's name, why didn't you tell us all this before now!"

"I had my orders, Admiral," Thibideau murmured, eyes downcast. "There are groups outside of any government -small, secret, powerful groups that have the immovable conviction that bio-weaponry must remain a viable alternative to conventional warfare and nuclear arms. One such group requested that when I arrived at Delta that I should observe and report whether I felt that the monies they had invested in Dr. Ionescu's private venture were being well used -and whether he was on the original tangent on which he had started when he had approached them for their investment; something they themselves had begun to doubt...

"They gave me only the information they felt that I need to know to complete the assignment, but they would not tell me exactly what they feared -however, they did make very clear the crippling 'accident' I would have if I refused or revealed their request." Thibideau drew a heavy breath. "All things considered, their threats mean very little to me anymore."

"Admiral...sir..." Sharkey interjected, a tremor of growing unease in his gruff voice. "If...
If our men are still alive -we've gotta save them, don't we? So's we can help them?"

"You're right, Francis," Nelson concurred cautiously. But the question remained -how could the victims of this plague be helped...if they could be helped at all? And if they couldn't -something that he did not even want to consider- how could they possibly be kept in check...incarcerated...when they had proven that they could punch their way through something as tough as super-tempered heavily alloyed plexi-glass? But he had to find a way. If there was a single chance, he had to take it -for all their sakes. They were his men. "At least, we have some idea of their numbers...that could be of some help."

"Are you sure, Admiral?" Thibideau interrupted, his damp brow bathed in a small circle of golden light as he lit the new cigarette perched between his lips. "What about crew members missing or presumed dead or not even known as missing? As I understand it, there are still some areas of the ship flooded and sealed off, crewmen still within -are you so sure that there is no way that anyone could get from those areas back into the rest of the ship unnoticed? Are you so certain about them?"

"For God's sake, man..." Doc said, almost choking on the words."Those poor souls drowned..."

"Drowned..." Thibideau muttered sourly. "And the first known victims among this crew were sealed in chambers filled with a freezing atmosphere that they should not have been able to breath...but they're out there, aren't they?"

Harriman Nelson did not answer -nor did anyone else- because, in truth, there was no certainty anymore...and they knew it if they knew nothing else. Just then, before confused thought could become confused action, a familiar electronic tone sounded from the bulkhead-mounted speaker. "This is corpsman Taylor to Sick Bay -please respond!"

Doc started and grabbed the wall mike, clicking it rapidly. "This is Doc, Taylor -what is it?"

"Sir..." came the tinny voice, obviously shaky even over the low crackling of the compromised communications' device. "I-I just arrived at the containment area...to bag Gill and Roderiguez. Sir... They're gone!"

The medical officer's countenance went blank and white, a mirror of those who stood in his company. "You mean -someone else bagged them?"

"No, sir. I checked. They... They're just not here!"

The mike remained in Doc's hand, but he did not speak as a new, dread-filled silence reigned over all of them -complete until Thibideau broke the stillness, his own voice small. "They'll be coming out in force soon."




Water.

Cold, dark, rushing and pressing against the hard, metal eggshell that was the hull of this giant submersible -he could smell the dank odor of it even from here even though the doubly-thick steel/titanium barrier was unbreached and intact here and the flooded areas securely sealed off -mostly anyway- the smell of it permeating the two layers of super-stressed alloy, the bulkheads, everything...and he could feel it somehow though the bitter liquid could not actually touch his fevered skin...could hear it even above the low and constant hum of opening and closing circuitry, the mechanisms that had recently come on-line, above human voices that spoke in mostly fearful hushed tones...above the constant, rapid rhythm of his own heart...

...and for a while, he remembered who he was, the name he had been given upon his natural birth, and where he was only to lose all but a few of those poor recollections among a maelstrom of twisted mental images and instincts that made as little sense as the overwhelming drive to follow them.

Still... He remembered a little, at least -enough to know he was in a situation that he had not expected and was unlikely to win no matter how much the perverse whispers in his brain told him that he needed to. The instinctive drives within his reborn body -those of hunting, feeding, surviving- had drawn him to this place along the dark passages within the great inert submarine ...needs further enflamed by the strong metallic scent of human blood recently shed, perhaps by those beings who presence had attracted his attention in the first place.

He hadn't wanted to come, but neither wit nor will could ultimately defy what the need told him to do. Sharkey... Nelson... The names were vaguely familiar to him -familiar enough to evoke a low moan of anguish at the thought of what he had to do...as familiar as the sound of their voices. But he could not reach them.

He had sensed the presence of another in this shaft long before his sensitive eyes had pierced the darkness to actually see him, but until now, he had had no perception of danger. That had changed. The reborn did not attack their own to feed off each other -their own blood was intolerably bitter- but nothing forbade them to challenge for food and territory. This presence he had sensed before as a lowly and lesser being among the reborn, one who until now might have been easily cowed and driven from his hunting grounds with little more than a silent challenge... the locking of eyes, but this was no longer so...and somehow, he was not all that surprised.

As nocturnal eyes met nocturnal eyes, he saw the face of one he seemed to have known a lifetime ago, twisted as his feverish brain imagined his own to be...but the face of his captain nonetheless. A low growl issued from the shadow-shrouded figure as it remained crouched, barring the way to the area of painful light and the living source of nourishment within it...still...fangs extended in full and then...as certainly as if it had been spoken aloud, he heard his name.

//'Ski...//The dark figure's eyes darted in the direction of the grate and then back, unwavering and harsh. //Admiral...mine//

An instant stretched into an eternity as they remained locked in mental challenge, neither willing to give ground, his own fractured memories vying with the brutally ravenous instinctive compulsions of his new body; odd bits of recorded thought reminding him of one thing if nothing else -in his humanity, he had never been able to best the man he knew as his captain in physical combat. Certainly not alone. And certainly not now. Both challenger and challenged knew it as they stared at each other in stony silence, speaking words without sound...

The endless instant finally passed as time seemed to suddenly resume its normal rhythm, a soft growl inching up his heaving diaphragm and finally issuing from between his clenched fangs as he reluctantly ceded, slowly -cautiously- backing away from his adversary and into the darkness of the long ventilation shaft ...aware of those dark, rubine eyes upon him all the while until his adversary turned aside, no longer interested in a challenge that no longer existed.

But for this once and former seaman, there was no distraction. The fact was that he was still hungry -that much had not changed- and the thirst was a thunder in his brain, gradually crushing what little sense of personal identity that he still possessed. He needed to feed.

Now.

Little else mattered.

Somewhere at the edges of his still-new perceptions, he sensed the presence of other changelings -some only newly reborn and others restless because what nourishment came their way or what they could snatch in areas of half-light were proving no longer enough to satisfy their needs which grew with each new rebirth. There were one or two others shadowing him -not for challenge...no, he could sense that that wasn't their intent...just following him...curious to see what he would find as he began to track the lure of another familiar scent to where he knew it would lead.

The annoyance over lost prey had faded -he barely remembered it at all now- leaving unfettered instinct and little more than the memory of a name that he had once known so well.

Patterson.




Stiff pages were turned by an unsteady hand.

A troubled frown darkened seaman Patterson's already creased brow all the further, a fine mottling of common dust that settled onto the page from the still slightly polluted recirculated atmosphere still clinging to the tips of his fingers, as he studied his hand, digits outstretched, noting the slight tremor in them...and then bunched them into a tight fist as he willed the transient anxiety back into a little invisible box deep within his mind...almost succeeding.

But not quite.

He let the hand drop limply to his side and reacted dully at the small sharp pain as his knuckles hit the long hard metal body of the emergency electronic torch which sat dumbly beside him. The flashlight was a precaution -probably, likely, a thoroughly unnecessary one- against the shadows that seemed far too many since someone in the engineering corps -didn't know who and didn't care- had suggested a reduction in power use to Seaview's internal lighting array, leaving it burning much too darkly for his tastes. Though he could see well enough to read without the flashlight, he kept the torch within reach at all times -just in case. In case of what, he was still not entirely certain, but "in case" any way.

As of late, the darkness made him very nervous.

A wince crossed Patterson's quietly troubled features as the page turned beneath his fingers, the soft crinkling sound of it somehow too loud, almost as loud it seemed, as the creaking of box-springs against mattress as he slowly shifted his weight slightly on the bunk on which he reclined in this section of the crew's quarters.

The seaman froze in mid-movement for a moment, eyes searching shadows, ears straining to differentiate between the familiar sounds of distant repair details and...nothing. Nothing unusual. And why would there have been? Going off the deep-end...losing what sanity you had, Pat... Patterson shook his head slightly, exorcising the mocking tones of his id and relaxed a little...barely.
Nerves on edge.
Could not sleep.

Doc had released the young enlisted man from Sick Bay -after his apparent, brief, grief-induced dementia had passed- on the understanding that this seaman would try to get some decent rest...but that was a thing easier said than done. His brain, subconscious and otherwise, was still too active with thoughts and ideas he knew that no sane man should have been thinking -but he was thinking them anyway. Maybe he was going mad...despite what Doc had said.

Doc had been very patient, explaining to him with great detail and understanding how an emotional shock could trick the human brain, forcing the eyes to see and the ears to hear what didn't exist, and he had prudently made the pretense of complete comprehension and agreement with the learned medical officer -for no-one actually wanted to be fitted for a jacket with eight-foot wrap-around sleeves. Perhaps he had made a mistake... He just wasn't sure anymore. Unlike most nocturnal fantasies that passed into nothing with the passage of time, he could not shake a certain memory which was now indelibly printed on his brain -that of a friend...of Kowalski...speaking to him -dead and yet...alive.

Patterson sighed aloud, the sound of it loud to his ears, as his dark eyes moved left to right rapidly along the printed pages of the hard-bound book resting in his hands -this was truly madness, wasn't it? As close a pair of friends as he and Kowalski had always been, Kowalski had never been able to fathom his fascination with things spiritual, the strange...matters of the occult.

The book he held was just one of the hundreds he had collected over the years -most of which remained hidden in sundry boxes in his old room at his family's farm in Kansas, and as he re-read the title silently, Patterson found his private belief in a cosmically ordered universe where no such thing as mere coincidence existed all the more confirmed: The Vampire: His Kith and Kin by Montague Summers -65th reprint. On a simple whim, he had brought this book on vampires along with him to help wile away the few off-duty hours when he couldn't sleep, and now, he thought...feared...knew that he had seen something he had never expected to see save on a theater screen or in the pages of some cheap novel. God...this was truly madness.

Yet...yet, it was the truth -maybe not exactly like the stuff described within these printed pages, but hideously similar. There were things, little details, he recalled now of his so-called demential experience; tiny bits of memory that would no longer be squelched or forgotten. He knew better than most the difference between a hallucination and solid reality, and what he had seen, heard, and felt had been real.

Kowalski had died -he did not deny that- but he also knew that he had spoken to a live, solid being that bore that man's face and form only a short while ago...but not the same man he Kowalski had always been -a Kowalski whose skin had blanched as pale as alabaster though it had been hot with fever; a Kowalski whose eyes were the color of blood and whose dress uniform had been sodden in places by that same dark fluid; a Kowalski...whose newly vulpine smile had revealed fangs like the impossible creatures within this beaten book and yet, had tried to warn him to stay away, to get away while he had the chance.

And so, this seaman was truly afraid. If he had lost his sanity, he could be healed in time...cured in a sterile white place with constantly smiling, unnaturally patient doctors and nurses -there was that- but if he was right...where did that leave him and the crew of the Seaview? What did it all mean to the other who had died -to Riley, the Captain, the others..? If Seaview was dealing with something other than phenomena of the natural world, did that mean that they were all cursed? Patterson shook his head slightly and held the now closed book tightly against his chest as though the tome had become a life-preserver. Confusion had become the order of the day...and he was no longer certain what to think.

He...

Patterson looked up sharply, eyes squinting slightly as his solitude was abruptly sundered as the door to the crew's quarters was all but flung open, the comparatively strong light of the dim corridor surrounding the stocky shadow-shrouded figure that appeared in the opening like an all-encompassing halo.
Almost automatically, the startled seaman grabbed the rod-like metal body of the electronic torch to his side, wishing that a man relieved of duty could still bear arms for whatever meager comfort he might draw from them, but just as quickly stopped...and released the would-be weapon as his eyes adjusted and the dark form drew closer. "Chief..." he whispered, the relief in his voice evident for his superior to hear, as he pushed the book he had been studying aside, surreptitiously obscuring its cover with a loose fold of the blanket covering his bunk.

"Patterson..." Chief Sharkey raised an eyebrow quizzically, noting the poorly concealed expression of guilt on the seaman's pale countenance and the title of the hard-covered book Patterson was obviously attempting to hide. Vampires, eh? If only Patterson realized the ironic truth... Sharkey checked himself mentally -no, if only he didn't have to tell him the truth. No choice in that now. None at all. "Patterson... Pat, I...was sent t' tell you that you're back on duty as of now -Admiral's orders."

"What..?" A shadow of puzzlement darkened Patterson's brow as he studied the curiously strained visage of his chief petty officer. "But Doc said I was-"

"I don't give a shit what Doc said-" Sharkey gasped slightly and caught himself even as he snapped the ugly-sounding words as Patterson regarded him in shocked silence. A minute passed -perhaps two at the most- all in a dead quietude that seemed far too complete for this giant submarine, before the tension gradually left the Chief's shoulders as he took a seat at the opposite end of the slightly rumpled bunk...and then studied his hands for no particular reason before he could will himself to meet the puzzled seaman's eyes again. "Pat... You know that I have a habit of talkin' before my brain's had the chance t' tell me t' keep my yap shut-"

"It's...it's okay, Chief-"

"No... No, it ain't, kid...no, it ain't," Sharkey countered as he searched his brain for the right words, his eyes narrowing at the sound of...nothing. At least, he hoped not. "Especially not now. Look, Pat, there's this possibility you were right."

"About what?"

"About Kowalski."

Patterson shook his head slowly, uncomprehending. "I don't understand..."

"There's a better n' average chance that he's alive...somewheres on this ship." Across from the grim chief petty officer, seaman Patterson's face fell almost completely blank, a waxen mask devoid of expression or comprehension as the troubled N.C.O. pressed himself to complete his confession. "Some o' the eggheads at Delta had started workin' on some real nasty stuff that went outta control almost right away -it...it doesn't kill people, Pat, it changes 'em...screws 'em up inside -mind and body -Kowalski, Riley, the Skipper, all the others maybe ...and now, Mr. Morton too. Pat, the victims -they...they need blood like-"

"-vampires." The word escaped from Patterson's mouth like a sigh; a soft exhalation of an almost perverse sort of relief that he strongly doubted that the uneasy chief of the boat would understand any better than he did -which wasn't really all that well. He wasn't crazy after all. He wasn't. There was some small comfort in that thought...but the moment of relief proved transient as a new dread formed in Patterson's psyche as he met Sharkey's haunted eyes and quietly said: "They...our men...they're not where they should be, are they? I've been hearing scuttlebutt ...really weird rumors about the containment room-"

"They're not where they should be."

"Then where are they?"

"On a ship the size of Seaview, they could be God-knows-where...and God-knows how many of 'em. We got people missing -the dead and the living. I dunno...the numbers could be as high as-" Sharkey frowned, his brow furrowing. "As high as..."

"As high as what, Chief?"

Francis Sharkey held up a hand, wordlessly begging for silence as his voice faltered and faded to nothing, his eyes wide as he strained against the half-light, seeking the source...of a sound. He had heard it before, this sound, or he had thought he had heard it -a low scratching...almost scraping noise like that of fingernails against something hard and smooth. He had dismissed it before as merely one of the hundred or so odd mutterings or groans uttered by the stricken submarine's damaged structure, but now... Sharkey regarded an equally uneasy Patterson. "Kid...please tell me you got a gun on you too."

Patterson stood up slowly, his own eyes searching his surroundings, his fingers grasping the cold rod-like metal body of his trouble light. "You know I don't, Chief. Mr. O'Brien took it when I was relieved of-"

"Shit." The expletive came from the Chief Petty Officer's mouth as a low sharp hiss. He was suddenly very afraid -more so than he had been for the longest time- and perhaps with little actual reason...but more likely than not with every reason. All at once, everything he had learned -and had struggled to deny- about the virus birthed at Station Delta, was rushing to the front of his brain, his thoughts, and though he had fought aberrations of nature and supernature several times before...if everything he had been told was true...he was no longer certain that he was in a position to do so now.

Sharkey caught sight of Patterson's own anxious expression and glanced down at the now unsheathed service weapon strapped to his side -a standard-use semi-automatic handgun with a magazine containing eight armor-piercing-type caliber rounds... Was it really necessary -or more to the point: would it be enough? "Kid... I think we'd better get int' the corridor where there's more room," Sharkey half-whispered, glancing towards the partially open doorway, adding very quietly: "Move."

A slow nod was Patterson's only answer as his hand closed, tighter, around the trouble light -hurting him- as his own ears confirmed what his chief petty officer had heard -was hearing even now- the sound of scratching and shuffling against hollow metal...and below that, this hiss of labored breathing that seemed to issue from nowhere and everywhere at the same time...and was obviously drawing inexorably closer.

Just then, the light died.

Both chief petty officer and seaman stopped as a low shudder traveled the length of the stricken vessel and sections of the lighting array in this area of the ship dimmed or failed all together, leaving the sector in a sickly sort of dull red glow and the quarters in which they still where, in almost total blackness.
"Jesus... Jesus... Jesus..." Hands slick with sweat, Patterson frantically fumbled with the electronic torch he held, shakily pushing the switch on its side to half-power just as he and the Chief heard new sounds -the sudden loud clanking noise of metal hitting the hard deck by which they stood and the muffled thump of something solid, but definitely non-metallic following it several times over...and, again, the sound of breathing. Paterson swung the dully glowing electronic torch in the direction of the new noise. "Jesus Christ!"

Rubine eyes peered out from a drawn, pallid face, reflecting the cold artificial glow -the face of a friend whose last spark of humanity had died. A slow, almost leering vulpine grin formed on Kowalski's cadaverous countenance, a gross parody of the warm smiles he had been known to have often worn as he eyed his former comrades who could still only look on in horrified wonder. "Pat..." The voice, low, came from between Kowalski's cracked lips roughly as if it pained him to speak. "...didn't know...you had company..." He uttered a low, growling chuckle. "Chief... Not happy to see me?"

"Doesn't matter..." Patterson, his hand shaking, unwillingly turned the light slightly to one side as the owner of the new and yet dreadfully familiar voice was caught by its glow. Sharkey's own eyes widened all the more at the sight of the familiar strawberry-blonde hair -all matted and tangled now- and the contorted face that had once enjoyed smiling more than anyone he had chanced to meet. Stuart Riley ran his tongue languidly over the sharply defined tips of his extended secondary incisors. "More...food...all that matters." Behind him, from the shadows, two other dark forms followed -as perversely restored as he...as twisted as he -seamen whose wounds had healed as if they had never been injured at all -Clarke and Tomàs raised from the dead...and hungry. Their eyes all but shined with the sheer intensity of the need.

"Stay back!" The service gun was in Sharkey's hand in a single, quick movement of which he did not know himself capable; the weapon trembling all too obviously as he trained it alternatively on either of the faces of the men whose deaths he had mourned and over whose rebirths he could not rejoice. He had always been taught that to each human, death came only once, followed by a hoped-for resurrection on some higher plane -but not like this...not like this. This was an abomination in every sense of the word regardless of the scientific babble which had been offered to explain these dreadful apparitions' collective existence. "'Ski -you know I'll use this if I have to."

For a moment, there seemed to be hesitation in the reflective eyes of the macabre pack as each of them paused, studied the shaking weapon, and then regarded each other, speaking without words. "Then please..." The grossly transformed thing that Kowalski had become smiled again and roughly grabbed the stained fabric of what had been his finest dress uniform and then pulled -hard- ripping the cloth, baring his emaciated chest and the ribs that now jutted sharply against cadaverous skin as he stepped forward. "If you will...Chief... SHOOT! "

The semi-dark room was momentarily lit by lightning and resounded with a mechanical crack of thunder as the Chief's service weapon discharged. Kowalski recoiled violently with the impact -blood exploding from the wound- and triumphantly laughed aloud as he righted himself almost immediately, the open wound healing before his horrified human audience's disbelieving eyes. Again, the gun discharged. Again, there was the same impossible reaction -and again, several times over...until the small steel hammer fell on an empty chamber -the weapon now as useless as a small child's toy as the grisly pack took this as their cue to step forward, moving almost leisurely to surround seaman and chief petty officer, teeth gnashing in anticipation.

"No!" All at once, the darkness was brutally sundered, jets of white light blanching the artificial night-time into day, as the beam from Patterson's electronic torch -pushed up to full power and almost beyond- bounced off the bulkhead-mounted mirrors, reflecting off steel bars and glossy paint -and the walls of the crew's quarters soon resounded with the agonized screams of his and the Chief's would-be attackers. Panic had finally reminded the seaman of a belief held since ages past and of the particular potential weapon he had been holding in his hands all along -vampires hated light...all light.

One after the other, searching blindly, struggling against the intolerable glow, their would-be attackers found their way to the ventilation grate through which the had originally come and disappeared into it, leaving a frightened chief and seaman alone.

"Mother of God..." Sharkey's eyes, wide and widening, stared at the breach in the bulkhead, new understanding dawning. "They're in the vents. They're in the godamned vents!"

Patterson, silent, could only nod.




"-all vital and sensitive areas are to be secured, including Control, Missile, Engine, and Reactor rooms as well as primary and auxiliary cores, all medical and lab facilities, air revitalization, arms lockers, and powder lockers. The Master-at-Arms will see to the collection of conventional weaponry in exchange for medium-wattage plasma side-arms which are to be worn by all hands at all times. While it cannot be denied -and must not be denied- that our targets are fellow crewmen, we must bear in mind that because of their collective condition, they are in all ways extremely dangerous. Avoid all fleshly contact...and lethal force is to be exercised only when and only if necessary. You will be kept abreast of developments as they arise -Nelson out."

Nelson stared dumbly for a long drawn-out moment at the microphone in his hand, the echoes of his own voice ringing off the bulkheads before fading and echoes of what he had been told still ringing in his mind...everything...of the names and faces of deadmen come to life. Patterson, for the most part had always seemed to be the sort of person too basically honest to be capable of willful deceit and Sharkey -he had come to know through the years that the straight-talking chief of the boat was one in whom he could trust almost anything.

They had been attacked by four good crewmen who had died and yet, were not dead any longer -Kowalski, Riley, Clarke, and Tomàs...and worldly man of the twenty-first century and its sciences though he was, he believed it.
All of it.

Enough to issue plasma-charged weaponry in place of the conventional side-arms which by his own men's account bore no effect. Enough to issue an alert all the while wracking his troubled brain for ways to give his men the details to which they had always had a right and while yet avoiding the infamous "v" word...vampire...though he knew that his was an intelligent crew and that they had likely already made that little deduction on their own already...even if, like himself for too long, they did not wish to believe it. Hadn't he overhead Ensign Mendez use a word that sounded like "vampiros" in hushed conversation? And that word...penanggalan...that he had heard seaman Sung mutter... This Admiral knew a smattering of several oriental languages -and, if he remembered correctly, the penanggalan was a grotesque vampiric creature of oriental lore.

But enough reverie... The fact remained was that all the orders he had just issued were defensive moves on his part and he still had no idea if they were of any real use. What next? That was the question -what next? The last census of the Seaview's crew had indicated a grimly disturbing trend -the number of the missing was increasing. Men seemed to be simply disappearing from their watches without so much as a trace -in all, forty-one. So far. And if what Harriman Nelson knew was correct, he knew where they were.

Sharkey and Patterson's attackers had escaped into a ventilation shaft...and this great submersible was literally riddled with areas just like that -inspection tubes, air ducts, areas remembered only if one happened to be looking at Seaview's blueprints, and numerous other dark spaces where a nocturnal mutant creature could find refuge and -if he kept moving- hide for a long, long time without being found. For now and until a solution to this situation could be found -if it could be found- no-one was to venture into those areas for any reason. The darkness was the domain of the changed and the light remained that of his uninfected crew...the only real advantage that they had right now.

He needed answers...and not of the sort that he had gotten from young Lieutenant Thibideau right now. Some of the information that the Canadian corpsman had finally imparted to him was not so much fantastic as it was ultimately useless. The disease sweeping them had a literal origin -that he now knew. Several years ago (a vague date at best), an expedition had been sent to the northern-most regions of Europe in response to bio-research charting what had seemed to have been, in the Middle Ages, a plague of vampirism to learn what had actually afflicted the people of the time.
There had been discovered a perfectly intact mass burial site of the last known victims, hidden beneath permafrost. Given the custom and superstition of the time, each of the eleven frozen bodies lacked a head, local records indicating some kind of hush-hush decapitation, and their hearts had been removed, but there had been enough intact genetic material to prove the widely-held belief that the "vampire-plague" had, in fact, been a mass outbreak of rabies...in eight of the bodies. It was what remained in the other three corpses, in broken fragments of DNA mostly, that had intrigued the secret scientific body the most -a virus so similar at first sight to common rabies and yet not that disease at all, something that had to have ridden along with the outbreak, but had not been a part of it. Only a mere two or three complete strands of the disease had remained, but as with many viral lifeforms, that tiny sample had been sufficient to grow enough of the pathogen for testing...enough to learn of the almost mythically vampiric nature of their discovery.

But not enough to discourage its discoverers from believing the pathogen might have some use.

Nelson ran a hand over his grim countenance, exhaustion and sorrow tightening within his chest like a clenched fist. A great deal of information. All of it useless presently. None of it telling him what he wanted, no, needed, to know. Now. Now was the time to find out. Nelson cast a side-long glance over to where Doc and his medical team were still questioning Lieutenant Thibideau, not believing as he did presently, that the young lieutenant junior-grade had little more to tell; poring over him and poking and prodding as only doctors did, hoping to learn whether his not being afflicted by Project M.I.N.A's deadly mutant brainchild was a mere matter of luck or whether he had something entirely unique in his favor; a thing any person who had any knowledge of disease vectors might fear -whether he was a carrier...a Typhoid Mary of the modern age. No proof of that yet, but...

Nelson hunched his shoulders slightly, his lips drawn into an open scowl, as he headed towards the high-security area of the Sick Bay. As he had decided, they all needed answers that they didn't have...and despite their guest's apparent, new, willingness to co-operate, to say that he completely trusted the man would have been an utter fallacy...besides which, there were questions for which Thibideau would unlikely possess any answers...questions that were themselves a personal plague.

The crewman on the guard detail stepped aside at his superior's approach, allowing the Admiral to pass, very nearly as expressionless as the ceremonial guards at Buckingham Palace were said to be -which was fine with him. The less asked, the better -what he planned to do was hardly standard procedure.

No matter...

Nelson paused in his tracks momentarily as he allowed his eyes to adjust to the grim, grey darkness of the half-light within this room, certain that the false glow had been reduced in intensity since he had last looked in on his stricken executive officer -he wasn't entirely surprised. Doc had mentioned that Chip had begun to display photosensitivity beyond the visual -it was physical now; wheals like patches of minor sunburn would begin to form on the XO's skin were he exposed to strong light for more than a very short time and it was bound to get worse.

Whatever V3 was, it was progressing faster, but to what end, he had no idea...and neither did Thibideau who had personally witnessed its insidious progression until that time he had locked himself in that vault on his ailing captain's orders.

Nelson sighed aloud and pressed himself to continue forward. At Chip Morton's bedside, corpsman Taylor was readying a hypodermic needle with some kind of medication, squinting despite the glow of the penlight tacked to his collar that illuminated the immediate area in front of him as he prepared to give the restlessly sleeping man the shot. "Taylor?" The corpsman looked up in mild surprise, the hypo still in his hand, as Nelson approached the side of the long, covered security-type of medical bunk. "Tranquilizer?" Nelson asked, the query nearly a statement.

"Yes, sir," Taylor responded uncertainly, casting an uneasy glance at the restless semi-conscious, bound executive officer. "On Doc's orders," he added quickly and unnecessarily. "Mr. Morton seems to throw them off quickly."

"Uh...huh..." Nelson murmured more to himself than to the young medical officer who had again bent over his patient. "Corpsman..."

Taylor paused and rose again, openly and increasingly puzzled. "Yes, sir?"

"I want you to delay giving Mr. Morton that injection." There -it had been said. Nelson noted the open look of mute astonishment on the young corpsman's face, understanding it completely. Were their positions reversed, he would have been just as incredulous. "I want you to wake him up. Now."

"Sir..?" Taylor blinked as if he could not believe what he had just heard and didn't know exactly what he was supposed to do -which was exactly the case. He didn't know what he ought to do -Doc was his immediate superior and his were the orders he was supposed to obey as did any corpsman, but the Admiral...well...the Admiral was the Admiral, only officially retired and recently granted authority given only to those rare generals that sported five stars on their collars -that was a lot of authority to this lowly lieutenant. The corpsman slowly placed the filled syringe onto the medical tray. Still...he had to try again... "Sir...are you sure? In his present condition, the XO is liable to-"

"Must I explain every order that I..." Nelson grimaced slightly, willing the temper that seemed to be part and parcel of being born of Irish stock and having flaming-red hair, to remain at bay as he regarded the bewildered corpsman's face -he was just a decent man and a dedicated physician trying to do his duty while caught in an awkward spot. "Just... Taylor...just do it."

Taylor's voice came out as a sigh of resignation. "Yes, sir... Aye, sir."

A new hypodermic was filled with a solution that had been sitting in a medical bottle on the same tray, set aside for a potential emergency that no-one had actually expected to come, and its contents injected into Morton's veins, the corpsman dutifully checking his executive officer's reaction to the new drug before he slipped away -no doubt to inform Doc of his admiral's aberrant behavior and odd orders, Nelson decided with a sardonic half-smile.

Again...no matter...

The corpsman had his duty to perform -he expected no less- but by that same token, so did he...even if it was because of personal vows unwritten, but as unyielding and real as though they had been laser-etched into titanium-steel. As the chemical began to take full effect, Morton began to stir even more fitfully and then, suddenly, fell very still as his eyes gradually opened, blank and bewildered. Nelson approached tentatively. "Chip..?"

The Executive Officer slowly turned his head in the direction of his admiral's voice, his expression uncertain as he seemed to struggle to focus...to remember...and then...awkwardly... "Ad...miral..?"

"Yes, Chip." Nelson forced what he hoped was an encouraging smile to appear on his lips, belying the nearly horrified disbelief he actually felt. By...all that was holy...how the man had changed -and in such a short time. Chip Morton had all the appearance of a man who had been ill for a lifetime; his face painfully drawn, his eyes large, sunken and hollow, his skin the sallow hue of some ungodly sickness -nearly the look of a dead man. Morton had never been a heavy man, tending more towards a fit slimness, but in the time since he had become infected, he had become gaunt...terribly, terribly gaunt -almost appearing like the images his admiral had once seen, while reviewing old medical news' reels, of those patients who had once been condemned to gradually waste away, almost literally consumed from within by that virus which attacked the immune system of its host.

If only it had been that.

AIDS was no longer incurable...but this disease still was.

It truly made Nelson's heart ache to see the young officer in this condition -especially when there was so little he could do about it. Nelson pulled a seat to where he could sit beside the medical bunk. "Chip..." he said carefully. "I need your help. Do you...do you think you'd be able to talk for a short while?"

Morton swallowed deeply and gave a slight nod. "...try..."

"Good man..." Nelson paused, steeling himself against an already unpleasant task. Chip had been his student -he cared for and respected him- and it galled him to make the man suffer any more than he already obviously was. "Chip... You were right...about Lee." Morton's gaze seemed to sharpen. "We know that now. We also know that you contracted the virus from him."

Morton grimaced visibly. "...told you..."

"I know," Nelson admitted ruefully, the knife of guilt twisting deep within his gut. If only he had listened... What had made that so impossible? "You did...but, Chip, I have to learn what else you know."

A frown crossed Morton's pallid features, his upper lip pulling back to reveal the partially extended fangs within his mouth, before he relaxed again...a little...eyes blinking against the muted light. He studied the Admiral, searching his haggard countenance. "The...the virus works just like we suspected...learned. My...senses are...almost too sharp to stand..." He uttered a weak, shaky laugh. "I can hear your heartbeat, Admiral -did you know that? I can also hear the rush and flow of blood...through your veins. It's...like a thunder to me." A small cry escaped the Executive Officer's lips, cutting off his words, his knuckles whitening further as he grasped a part of the sheet covering him between his tightening fingers...and then...the moment passed.

"I...can hear them too -all of them..." Morton seemed to puzzle for a moment. "Don't... don't know exactly where they are...but they're all over the ship -that I can tell...the reborn... But more than that...I can almost sense them...intermittently...almost hear their thoughts...like there's some kind of intricate link forming between all of us...a great colony of ants..." Morton laughed vaguely as he sank back against the damp, heavily creased pillow. "Lee too," he added suddenly. " I can feel his presense -better than all the others..."

Nelson leaned a little closer. "Is he...close to us now?"

"No..." For a moment, Morton's expression fell blank, his hollow, newly scarlet eyes unfocussed and staring as though he was listening to sound so subtle that no human ear could perceive them as he could. He blinked and then regarded the Admiral whose gnawing anxiety was all but a tattoo on his countenance. "He shadows you more than anyone else." Nelson reacted with troubled surprise. "He's been close several times...even though he doesn't know why...but not right now. He knows you...Admiral...but he no longer remembers you."

So...that was the answer, wasn't it? The response to the question that had tasked this admiral since he had come to accept the reality of the disease's possessed victims. Lee Crane...the captain of this submarine was alive still, but now little more than a crazed beast controlled by the instinctive compulsions created by a mutating virus.

There had been a small part of Nelson's mind that had clung to the notion that, above all, he might have been able to somehow get through to -and perhaps reason with- his friend if the chance were to present itself, but now...
While hope had not disappeared entirely, it was not as great -and in that instant, Harriman Nelson came to a decision. Project M.I.N.A.'s virus didn't kill, but it carried a curse -it created killers- and the Lee Crane that he knew would find the horror of which he had become a part intolerable and unconscionable...and as Nelson considered the plasma side-arm strapped to his side -the power and the heft of it- he knew that if the only release possible from V3 was death, Lee Crane would find it at his hands and no-one else's -that much he swore.

Nelson regarded his wan, stricken executive officer who seemed to have drifted among his own thoughts and exhaled heavily before rising from his seat to turn towards Sick Bay's ante-room. "I...I'll get Doc...to give you something to help you to rest."

"Wait!" Though Morton's voice was little more than a hoarse whisper and despite his restraints, his hand -free enough to move- grasped Nelson by his hand with a crushing, vise-like strength, the nails drawing blood. "I...have to tell you..."

"What, Chip?" Wincing despite himself, Nelson gently pried the pale hand from his own. "What do you have to tell me?"

"I...don't know...how long I have...before this thing takes me...completely. You have no idea of the monstrous...thoughts...running through my brain -the things it made me say to you before...and the things it would make me do..." Morton paused, his chest heaving with ragged breathes as a shadow of something...something bestial crossed his drawn visage -but then was gone- leaving him almost as Nelson had always known him...were it not for the ghost of something...something decidedly unpleasant behind his staring eyes. "Admiral ...I'd kill you if I could -Lee would too...no choice. Admiral...promise me..."

"Promise you what?"

For an instant, the Executive Officer's pale countenance was so studious and utterly human that Nelson could almost fool himself into believing that the XO was merely ill with something that would go away in time -almost. "You...won't let me...you won't let me do what they've done...will you? You'll kill me first."

Nelson considered the grim, desperate plea and then, reluctantly, nodded solemnly. "I promise, Chip. If it comes to that, I'll make sure of it...and it'll be quick."

"Admiral?" Nelson turned to see Doc, corpsman Taylor, and Lieutenant Thibideau waiting there, Seaview's physician wearing a deeply troubled frown as he approached his superior. "Taylor -if you would give the XO his medication. Admiral -would you come this way?"

Casting a last glance at the Executive Officer, Nelson followed Doc to the First-Aid station of Sick Bay. He needed no psychic powers to know that the reserved chief medical officer was angry -had he not countermanded his orders again? But he didn't regret his actions and nothing would make this admiral say that he did -he had found out what he needed to know ...what had to be found out. "Your hand, Admiral." Doc examined the superficial wounds on his superior officer's hand, a soft, beleaguered sigh escaping his lips as he took a swab and then retrieved a small bottle of some foul-smelling antiseptic. "That," Doc said, finally breaking the tense silence as he tended to the bloody scratches, "was a very dangerous thing you did ...Admiral."

Nelson's haggard countenance creased with a wince of pain as the sterilizing chemical began to burn within the wounds. "It was necessary."

"Necessary enough to chance contracting a virus that we have no idea of how to cure or control? Mr. Morton broke the skin of your hand, Admiral -what if he had had an open scratch on his fingers...or if he had broken free? He shrugs off the effects of the tranquilizers faster every time and he's growing stronger -we may not be able to hold him for much longer as is." Doc stepped back. "There. You're clear. Just keep the wounds dry."

"It was necessary," Nelson muttered almost petulantly, flexing the fingers of the injured hand. He shot Doc a hard glance. "It's not something I would expect you to understand."

"I do understand, Admiral," Doc shot back and then, his expression softening: "Look... I understand that you and the Captain are especially close...that you're particularly concerned for his well-being, but how can you help him by-"

Nelson whirled around in his seat, his face suddenly burning with the hot red of anger. "I'll thank you never to question me in that regard, Doctor!" For several seconds, there was dead silence, both officers' eyes locked on each other...but then...slowly...the Admiral's shoulder's slumped as he sank further into the cushioned chair, drained in a way that he had never known. "I'm sorry, Doc... You are right -and I..." He cursed under his breath. "I am not acting professionally or rationally." Doc nodded with understanding and pity. "For all we've learned, the answers remain out of reach ...and all I have to show for all of it are nightmares."

"What kind of nightmares?" Unaware until now, that their private conversation had been entertainment for an audience of one, both officers looked up in startlement and annoyance at the sound of Thibideau's voice as he approached them. "Please," he said insistently, "what kind of nightmares? It could be important!"

The Admiral's eyes narrowed as he studied their presently less-than-welcome guest with open suspicion as if staring would allow him to read behind the man's pale, haunted eyes and to divine whatever he felt he was not telling them. He wasn't a suspicious man by nature -not normally at any rate- but he simply did not trust this man...even if there was no rational reason beyond needing a focus for the anger he was feeling; an anger which threatened to spill over his carefully contrived mental barriers.

"All right..." Nelson hissed finally through tightened lips. "I'll tell you. I'll tell you about my nightmares. I'll tell you about things that no sane man would envision -about blood, and dismembered human remains; about a submarine turning into a charred hulk right before my eyes; about my crew tearing each other apart with their teeth and bare hands-" Thibideau backed off several steps, eyes widening with horror -and fear- as the Admiral's voice rose in volume, his ruddy face reddening all the further. "And I'll tell you about how the commanding officer of this submarine features in just about each and every one of those goddamned night terrors! So tell me, Lieutenant, did I tell you what you needed to know!"

"Yes." Thibideau sighed heavily, staring into the distance at nothing at all before he again met the Admiral's own haunted eyes with a deeply sympathetic smile. "It was the same for me in that vault at Delta...and it happened to some of Delta's people -and crew members of the Voyageur. We thought that the virus had gotten to us -but it wasn't that simple." Nelson looked on in puzzlement, his ire momentarily forgotten at Thibideau's words, as the Canadian corpsman felt in the breast pocket of his borrowed officer's uniform, searching for some tobacco-inspired comfort, and uttered an unholy oath in disgust when he realized that he had smoked the last of the cigarettes only a few minutes ago. "It has to do with the presense of the virus, but it has nothing to do with actually being infected with it."

"What do you mean?"

Thibideau answered with a defeated hunch of his shoulders. "Some of Delta's scientists had a theory -hard to prove as you can imagine- that this V3 enhanced the...paranormal senses in the same way that it does the ordinary ones -les yeux...I mean sight, sound, and the like...and that its victims were 'transmitting' mental imagery -literally sending their own nightmares ...especially those who already had a high 'psi-quotient' before infection. Did your captain have-"

Nelson held up a single finger for silence. "What I told the Chief Medical Officer of this ship applies especially to you." The corpsman nodded, prudently chastened for the moment as the flag officer began to pace, rubbing an unshaven chin contemplatively over this bit of information. "So, the virus affects all areas of the brain and reaction...even latent ones?"

"Yes, sir."

As often happened when he was presented with matters of intellectual wonder, Nelson felt himself torn between two extreme poles of thought; divided between the wonder of the knowledge-hungry scientist and the moral outrage and horror of a man who believed that the pursuit of knowledge had gone too far. The potential of Project M.I.N.A.'s creation was clear -a super human who had nothing to fear of illness and injury...who possessed mental talents that could potentially be used in espionage and, perhaps, as a weapon- but clear also, and far more immediate and real, was this new horror -the threat of madness to the uninfected...and the simple fact that the project wasn't working the way it supposedly should have. It seemed that they would all be touched by this disease one way or another...but there was still something that he had to know... "The sending -was it deliberate? An attack?"

Thibideau seemed to struggle with the question for a moment before answering. "It is difficult to say -given the general psychological states of the victims- but I can tell you this much: not everyone who went mad did so because they were sick with the virus."

Because of Seaview's suspicious habit of finding itself in situations that were far from normal -far more than any ship or crew in the entire Navy or ParaNavy- InterAllied high command had had the whole fleet tested (surreptitiously and under the guise of psychological tests) for psychic tendencies under the old contention that the strange attracted the strange. Nelson and Doc knew the scores because they had helped to administer the tests -and on average, the crew of the Seaview had scored very high in the area of random psychic ability; higher than average for the entire ParaNavy and regular Navy combined...and, as Nelson grimly recalled it, Crane's scores had been especially high -high enough to interest the Remote Viewing section of several Black Ops groups...high enough for Nelson to gently dissuade his captain from pursuing the matter. Black Ops held too many secrets for his taste. Crane had not argued.

There was a grimly suspicious pattern here that had nothing to do with stress-induced paranoia -of that the Admiral of the Seaview was quite certain. No...simple coincidence could not have been more specific in its choice of a group on which to test the full nature of this awful man-made body-altering-mind-twisting disease. The late Captain Hudson seemed to believe such of the incidents he had witnessed -at least, that was the impression that Nelson found he had gathered of the man.

What the hell had really happened at Delta? What- Nelson's head snapped upwards. "What the Devil-"

Even as Nelson spoke aloud, all other heads snapped upwards as well, eyes widening with instinctive fear, as the lights in the Sick Bay and the corridor beyond flickered and then dimmed, fading to dark brown and then brightening again, but only barely and then, not nearly as steadily as emergency neons automatically snapped on, filling the area with a sanguine glow. Casting a sharp glance at the now openly troubled Thibideau, Nelson darted over to the bulkhead-mounted intercom, grabbing the wall-mike roughly. "Circuitry Room!" he barked, clicking the microphone rapidly. "Circuitry Room -report!"

As the Admiral of the Seaview waited for a response that did not seem to be coming, Mathieu Thibideau slowly sank down onto a nearby chair and continued to stare around himself at his surroundings, squinting because of the poorer light. He was afraid...but nowhere nearly as frightened as he supposed he should have been -he was far too numb inside for that. Too little said and too late.

Base self-preservation had finally given way to the duty to which he had once pledged himself...too late to be of much help to this crew -or himself...and in some vague way, he had expected what was happening right now...hell, he was resigned to it. But Nelson... Nelson seemed to have forgotten -as had everyone else it seemed- that the virus-altered victims of Project M.I.N.A., maddened by bloodthirst though they were, were nonetheless sentient...intelligent killing machines that could rise above their confusion and do whatever it took to facilitate the kill and ease their thirst. Strange happenings, odd silences, power failures -it was all a part of an instinctive plan.

It had begun.