Chapter 3

Nano-life

The engineering deck was dark, as nearly everything was shut down, except for the hyperdrive core and control systems. Around the room, unlike every other room on the Destroyer, consoles were black, shutdown. And on the floor was something they had expected to see everywhere, but had so far been nowhere- bodies. Two of them.

"Check them out Ryan," Guinevere ordered.

Ryan walked up to them, turning on his palm light. He checked first one, and then the other.

"The first one's dead," he declared. The other one's alive- barely."

Suddenly, the living man shot up.

"Close the door!" he shouted. "If you want to live, close the shabbin' door!"

"Close it!" Guinevere ordered.

Ryan's MACO complied immediately, and what little light was in the room vanished, save for the blue glow of the hyperdrive core and Ryan's palm light. The other MACOs turned their own lights on, and the two regular starfleeters pulled theirs off of their belts. They pointed their lights at the man who had spoken, who was again lying down.

"Water," he said in a dry voice. Ryan pulled out his canteen, marked with a MACO patch with a picture of a castle in the center representing the Camelot. He lifted the man's head and gave him a few sips. The man wore a ragged imperial uniform with a Major's rank cylinders.

"Who are you, and why did you tell us to close the door?" Ryan asked him after he had drunk some.

"I'm Major Tor Zanta," he replied, his voice returning to normal. "I'm a scientist attached to the Nano-life project."

"The what?" Guinevere asked.

"Wait," the Imp said, squinting in the light. "You're Alliance!"

"Yes, and we just saved your but," Lance replied.

Zanta chuckled. "I suppose it doesn't matter anymore. We're all dead anyway."

"What do you mean?" Guinevere asked.

"Let me start from the beginning," he said as he sat up. "I was sent to this ship, the Excellence, about a year ago to serve as an assistant to General Evir Derricote, the stupidest genius I've ever met- and the most sadistic. He and his team were studying methods of creating various forms of biological weapon not covered by the New Khitomer accords. We were told that they'd only be used in defense as a last resort weapon, not that we believed that, what with Muertos running things.

"Anyway, he wasn't having much luck, after all, the Khitomer accords were pretty thorough, and he was being closely monitored. Then, about a month after I arrived, he hit upon a breakthrough. While he was working with Borg nanotechnology, we made an astonishing discovery: an entire world made up of living subatomic particles!

"We were astonished, of course, and then a more important event occurred. They spoke to us."

"How can something that small communicate?" Guinevere asked.

"I'm getting to that," Zanta replied, annoyed by the interruption. "Evidently, they already were a relatively advanced "culture," so they found a way to communicate. Evidently, they aren't really subatomic particles; they're visitors from another realm, according to them. They had been studying us for some time, apparently, and were familiar with our efforts to create a bio weapon, and our limitations. They offered their help, and we were too excited to ask why, fools that we were.

"So they showed us how to manipulate other particles to create more "life," of an artificial sort. These would function as subatomic assassins, and since they were artificial, they fell under the category of assassin droids- not covered by Khitomer, in other words.

"We had full control, at first. We thanked the sub-life, as we called the "visitors," and they congratulated us, and then just, well, died."

"Died?" Lance said incredulously.

"Yes, evidently their lives were very short, and they'd gone through thousands of generations since we last spoke to them. Apparently, they underwent some extinction level event. It was around that time that we realized the nano-mechs were their "children," and would live much longer than they had on our level. Don't ask me to explain, Mercen was the nano scientist, not me."

"Mercen?"

"The guy lying next to me, unfortunately. Anyhow, we had control, and programmed them first to go after droids, to test them out. They worked perfectly in most situations. For some reason, though, they didn't work well in the dark, or when we put signal interference tech around them. Mercen said something about how it affected their artificial "brains" or something, I don't remember. I do remember that the original sub life had no such limitations.

"At first, we all congratulated one another on a job well done. Then things started to go missing. First it was the MouSE droids. There's so many of them, we didn't notice till they were all gone. Then the protocol and maintenance droids went missing. When we realized AI was being targeted, we checked the artificial sub life, or "nano-life." The computer did an inventory, and said they were all there.

"We were perplexed, and started looking for another cause, when people started disappearing. First some techs didn't show up for duty, and it was dismissed. Then the XO disappeared, and the Captain ordered a search. No bodies were found. It was then that I realized the flaw in our system.

"You see, not realizing what the nano-life we made were capable of, we made a specific amount- three hundred, six groups of fifty. And we set the computer that monitored them to scan for three hundred. As soon as I realized this, I set the computer to check for four hundred. Then five hundred. Then a thousand, then ten thousand."

"How many were there?"Guinevere asked as a sense of dread permeated the room.

"The computer eventually stopped at one million seven hundred fifty thousand nine hundred and fifty in the containers. It also eventually detected a leak in all three containers, once we programmed it to search for it."

"So you had no way of knowing how many had escaped," Lance observed.

"It didn't matter- they could replicate themselves, and we had no way to stop them. Of course, General Derricote ordered them all destroyed, but as the laser fired at them, they had a "mass exodus" and left the container. Once they joined those already out, there were so many, we could actually see them in the form of occasional red flashes. And the flashes were strongest while they consumed their prey- us. Derricote was the first to go. Mercer and I fled the lab along with three others while the rest dissolved, and ordered the room sealed. But evidently the primary swarm could communicate with others, because another swarm appeared and attacked us. Two of the techs were killed, but the other three of us escaped. Evidently, the swarm can't just eat through solid doors and walls, I still don't know why. So we sent the tech to the bridge to let the Captain know what was going on while we came down here to activate some sensor blocking devices, which the engineer helped us modify. But just as we were about to activate it, a swarm attacked. The engineer was hit first, then his crew. It was then that Mercer realized two of their other vulnerabilities- darkness you know of, but as it turns out, in hyperspace they go dormant. So Mercen activated the hyperdrive while I went for the lights. Unfortunately, at that point, the swarm had finished eating the engineers and moved into the next room- ours.

"They attacked Mercen as he made a final adjustment to the hyperdrive, and he couldn't punch it. So I grabbed a blaster off the wall and fired at the swarm, not realizing that it'd have no effect of them. But it did affect the drive. It lit up and sparks flew as it activated, but went wild. I don't know what specific affect it had, but as soon as we entered hyperspace, the swarm just… disappeared. I suppose they went dormant. I looked out a viewport to make sure we were in hyperspace, and we were… sort of. Where it's normally blue, it was red. I checked the instruments, and what it said scared me. It said "time to emergency shutdown two minutes." So I did the only thing I could think of to prepare for our arrival-and the swarm's awakening.

"I turned out the lights. By this point, Mercen was dead, so I just, well, left him there. After we dropped out of hyperspace, I realized that the jamming device was ready, just not activated. So I went into engineering and activated it. Of course, that cut the deck off completely, and I had no way to get food or water. So I resigned myself to a slow death. Until I saw your shuttle out the window, and the rest you know.

"And now we're stuck here, and when you're rations run out, we'll all die the same slow death you stopped me from."