SUB-ZERO Page 4

  “Working on it!” she shouted back—the storm was right on top of them now, getting there in what had to be record time. He could barely hear her over the rumble of the elements around him. The pods should survive the storm—should—without a hitch, but as far as those within them…he wasn’t sure.

  As soon as the thought crossed his mind, House was thrown backward, tossed like a ragdoll. Everyone except Donovan was cast aside, as well. Rubbing the back of his head, House sat up and noticed that the scientist was gripping the table with both hands, leaning over it when everyone else went down.

  Then, the lights within the surgical suite burst and showered the center of the room, Donovan and octopus included, in sparks.

  4

  The next thing that happened was nothing House could’ve predicted. As soon as the first spark hit the fileted specimen, it detonated into a bright blue fireball. What was just as shocking was that Donovan didn’t flinch. The scientist would’ve definitely lost the hair on his head if the man had any. He kept it smooth, completely clean shaven. Still, there was no possible way he could have avoided getting burned.

  Idiot!

  “Argh!” Donovan howled as he was showered in the steaming blue liquid.

  His hands went to his eyes, covering them as he screamed louder. He tried desperately to wipe the plasma away but he couldn’t. His gloved hands were slathered in the stuff, and for his effort, all he did was spread it in deeper.

  By now, House was already back on his feet and at the doors, yanking on them anew. The power within the pod flickered again, causing Gianna to shout a curse in his ear.

  “Shit! Come on, you twitchy bitch!”

  Something at the back of the lab caught fire.

  “What’s wrong?” House asked, trying to get a better look at the advancing blaze. “I need to get in there now!” As much as House despised Donovan, he needed to get inside and get the man to safety. The others in the room seemed to have been totally unaffected, having been tossed away from the scene before the explosion.

  Gianna growled, sounding exactly like her father. “Every time the power surges, I lose connection to the door locks. This ship is completely unique. The guts were installed before I got involved, remember? I’m still working out the kinks. Too much to do—not enough time in the day to do it. Sound familiar?” House agreed and had said the same thing several times over the last few months since he’d been aboard.

  She snarled. “Bastards should’ve hired me from the get-go! We wouldn’t be in this fucking mess if they had!”

  Even with everything going on, House couldn’t help but smile.

  A chorus of shrieks brought his attention back to the situation at hand and off of his brilliant, yet, foulmouthed child. Now, Donovan had his hands clutched around his skull and was bellowing at the ceiling above. In response to his cries, the three other people in the lab scurried away, huddling together and screaming in fright.

  Donovan was in agony.

  The room was alight, and the scientist’s people were terrified of what might be happening to their boss. Then, they scattered to the corners of the room when the overhead, non-water fire suppression system let loose with its gaseous payload.

  The compound worked quicker than water and was infinitely safer to deploy around electronics. It was also a lot easier to clean up afterward. Large amounts of water inside of a ship was never a good thing in any form, even with the Endeavor’s impressive drainage configuration.

  The foggy gas buffeted everything within the room, and the lights went out. Still clutching the door handles, House waited for them to turn back on, or, at least, for the red emergency lights to kick in. It was the emergency lights that bloomed to life, and when they did, House leaped away from the double doors, shocked at what he witnessed.

  Donovan was there, standing on the other side, still as the dead. The only thing that moved was his head, tilting back and forth as if he was a predator studying its prey. The last thing House saw before Donovan collapsed to the floor was the scientist’s eyes. They quickly flashed blue, looking eerily similar to the color the octopus had produced. Then, the irregularity was gone, and Donovan’s dark-brown eyes rolled into the back of his head, and he went down like a sack of potatoes.

  Must’ve been my imagination, House thought, shaking his head.

  CLICK.

  House’s right eyebrow raised, confused. He knew it was the doors unlocking, but he wasn’t sure why, or how, it happened. Gianna radioed him back and told him.

  “That was me, Dad. You should be all clear now.”

  “Uh,” he replied, throwing open the double doors, “thanks. How—”

  “I killed the power to the lab. When the system rebooted, the door locks disengaged.”

  “Huh…” he said, once again impressed, “smart girl.”

  “Technically, I’m a genius.” She laughed. “Good luck, Dad. I’m gonna go check on Trip, okay?”

  “Sure,” he replied, “let me know how he’s doing.” House knelt next to Donovan. “He didn’t sound so good a couple of minutes ago.”

  Donovan was unconscious, and parts of his face and head were swollen and welted from the flames. House checked for a pulse and found the scientist’s skin to be ice cold. His pulse, however, was steady, a little fast maybe, but solid, nevertheless. With the help of one of the science team members, House hauled Donovan to his feet and dragged him out of the ruined lab and back toward the medical bay.

  “What…the hell…happened in there?” House asked, grunting.

  “I’m not sure, sir,” Donovan’s assistant replied. “We did everything by the book up until the flash and fire.”

  Sir… ‘Now’ they show me respect.

  Backseating his anger at everyone involved, House and the other man pushed through the lab’s outer doors. As they moved, they continued into the corridor connecting the lab’s pod to the Endeavor’s greenhouse. While the other pods had solid walls and roofs, the greenhouse was encased in thick, impact glass. They used the greenhouse as an experiment to see if sailors could grow their own food while at sea.

  House knew the brass back home wanted nothing more than to cut costs. It stunned him that their food supply was on the list of potential cuts.

  “Speaking of what happened… The creature’s reaction?” House said, eyeing the technician.

  He shrugged. “No idea. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Neither had House, and that’s what worried him the most. He’d seen everything the ocean could throw at you, even a storm as bad as the one they were trying to survive—just not one of the Antarctic varieties.

  Navigating the rest of the corridors and subsequent pods went well. Only twice did they drop Donovan. It was mostly the other person’s fault, though. House had a firm grip on the scientist’s belt and had his left arm under Donovan’s right armpit.

  The other, smaller man couldn’t have gone toe-to-toe with Gianna for more than three seconds before tapping out. His daughter wasn’t big—far from it, actually. What she lacked in size and strength, she more than made up for in tenacity.

  Halfway to the next pod, two medics came rushing toward them. Gratefully, one held a collapsible gurney. House and the science assistant were relieved of Donovan’s dead weight, and the Chief Scientist was rushed back the way the medics had come.

  Two floors down, and in the center of the ship, was the medical bay. It, like everything else aboard the Endeavor, was state-of-the-art and experimental in design.

  “Sir?” the subordinate asked. “What about the lab?”

  House faced him. “Lock it down for now. We’ll worry about clean up after the storm subsides. No one goes in or out without my say-so. With Dr. Donovan out of commission, his team will now be reporting directly to XO Ferguson or me.”

  The shaken man nodded and headed back toward the front of the ship. House, left alone in the corridor between the greenhouse and the elevator, stopped and leaned against the closest wall. There, in the still air,
he took a series of deep inhalations and calmed his nerves. But as soon as he started to feel better, the lights above his head flickered and the ship was, once more, cast into darkness and buffeted by Mother Nature’s unmatchable, brute strength.

  No time for breaks, Sebastian, he thought.

  He took a step and paused as the lights came back to life, then winked on and off several more times before finally settling into the on position.

  If they lost power in a storm like this, it wouldn’t be Hell on Earth for everyone, it’d be Hell on Ship, including him. Comms would go down first because they were tied into the ship’s built-in Wi-Fi array. It needed power, of course, and the generators below decks could only pump out so much juice. One-by-one, they’d lose one system after the other until there was nothing left.

  Bypassing the elevator, House headed for the rear of the boat. There sat the bridge, and his station, the wheelhouse. It was House’s command center, his home away from his onboard home—his room—while also being away from his stateside home.

  He spent more time in the wheelhouse than anywhere else. House loved this ship—his command too—and he needed to get back to work and help his crew guide it, and whoever was within her womb, to safety.

  But can we make it to McMurdo?

  That was one of a hundred questions House needed answers to.

  5

  Eradication.

  This was a horrifying dream, for sure.

  “Eradication?” He shook with fear. “Why—who?”

  Devastation.

  “Stop,” he muttered, thrashing in his sleep. “Please, stop.” He sobbed. “Please…”

  Seth Donovan saw the world through another’s eyes—through warbling, tinted lenses of sapphire. Acts of chaos, death, and destruction—the worst kind of atrocities—flashed across his mind like a highlight reel from the abyss. While he knew what the voice in his head was saying and showing him was wrong…it felt right.

  The horrible images were easily translated, but the words weren’t. Yet, Donovan understood their meaning with ease. His mind was working on autopilot, deciphering the unfamiliar language all by itself—without the aid of a learned linguist.

  Annihilation.

  Getting to his feet, and killing everything in front of him, felt like the right thing to do—the only thing to do.

  Extermination.

  The only thing to do…

  The strangest occurrence, though, was that the voice in his head didn’t belong to some demon from another world. The entity speaking to him from deep within his own human heart was his. The words were being uttered by his voice—his own subconscious. They harmonized with another’s too.

  He had experienced some awful nightmares in the past, but nothing like the one he was being put through now. He was fully aware of what he was “dreaming” this time. In normal dreams, he’d lose most, if not all, recollection of what had actually happened while he was asleep.

  Eradication.

  “N-no.”

  Devastation. The words repeated over and over again.

  “Hello?”

  Annihilation.

  “Who…who are you?” Donovan was terrified by what he was being told to do—even more so because he could actually see himself slitting someone’s throat. He could feel his victim’s warm blood running over his hands, reveling in their gurgled gasps.

  Sebastian House’s blood.

  Extermination!

  His eyes snapped open, and he sucked in a deep breath, shaking. His skin broke out in goosebumps. Very little in the world could terrorize him, but the voice—his voice—the imagery—had done it.

  What the hell was that? he asked himself.

  His hand went to his forehead, and he rubbed it hard, trying desperately to knead away the intense throbbing behind his eyes. It felt like he’d been struck with Thor’s hammer and given a lightning-induced concussion. However, he didn’t remember hitting his head recently. Donovan carefully sat up, instantly being overcome with nausea. The discomfort forced him to pause his ascent.

  Feeling the acidic bile rise, he grabbed a nearby garbage pail and vomited. As soon as the vitriol left his stomach, throat, and mouth, Donovan laid back and took in several deep breaths. He’d definitely sustained some sort of horrible head injury. There was no other explanation.

  What…what happened to me?

  Donovan recalled the overhead lights in the lab flickering and then bursting from an energy surge. He also remembered the ship rocking from the torrent outside. He could still feel it now, telling him that his state of unconsciousness had been brief.

  Head trauma was bad enough, but add in the power of an Antarctic storm against the hull of their boat and—he retched into the pail again, wiping his mouth with his bare hand. Through dazed, tear-filled eyes, he saw something odd on the back of his right hand. Where he expected to see trace amounts of vomit, he saw something else mixed in with it.

  Something blue.

  His hand shivered. The only thing he’d seen that color in the last, well, ever, was the pulsating plasma within the octopus back in his containment lab. It seemed that both its blood and its venom strobed the color, not one or the other.

  They’re one and the same, he thought. Its blood IS its venom!

  It was fascinating to think about, but at the moment, Donovan was still frozen in abject terror. He could do nothing else but struggle to breathe and stare at the back of his tainted hand.

  A knock on the door was the blissful interruption he needed, a real Godsend for the comatose scientist. It woke him out of his funk and got him moving…sort of. Donovan was too woozy to do much else except hide his stained skin beneath the wool sheet of the uncomfortable hospital bed.

  “Come in,” he rasped, not recognizing his own voice. The fright he felt over his own health was still present, mostly on the inside—but he was afraid it showed on the outside too. He couldn’t let anyone know what was “possibly” happening, whether or not he was infected with some sort of previously undocumented contagion.

  The last person on the planet that he wanted a visit from opened the door and entered.

  Captain House.

  “Sebastian?” Donovan said, caught off guard. He and House would use their first names whenever they were together in private, or while talking one on one through their comms. Donovan didn’t like to, though. He didn’t want to be friendly with a man who enjoyed throwing his weight around.

  “How are you, Seth? You’ve been out for over an hour.”

  Is he actually concerned?

  With everything happening, Donovan decided to play the civil game. Plus, he wasn’t in the right frame of mind, or physical state, to put up a fight.

  “Okay, I guess.” He really didn’t know if he was. Besides the headache and the blue-tinted liquid inside his body, Donovan felt fine. “Honestly,” he laughed, “I have no idea how I feel.” He groaned, his stomach in knots. “How’s the storm?”

  The boat shook, and both men cringed because of it.

  “Bad,” House replied, laughing softly. “Real bad. Luckily, she’s a solid boat.”

  “Yeah, sure…” Donovan said, having trouble concentrating on both House and what was happening to him.

  “Quite the display of fireworks up there, huh?” House asked.

  Eradication.

  Donovan shook his head. “Fireworks?”

  Devastation.

  House squinted at him. “The lab, I mean.”

  Donovan sat up, much to the chagrin of his aching body. “What happened to my laboratory?”

  House looked confused. “You don’t remember, do you?”

  “Obviously not, Sebastian. Stop fucking around with me and tell me what happened to my lab!”

  House sat on the bed next to Donovan. “It’s gone, Seth.”

  “Gone?”

  Donovan heaved into the wastebasket again. As he retched, he saw more and more of the blue plasma exit his body. When he was finished, he slid the pail under his bed a
nd wiped his mouth with the inside of his thick blanket.

  No one could find out about his condition yet, especially House. The captain would pull the “Safety Card” and quarantine him for the remainder of their voyage. Donovan wasn’t sure he had that kind of time, and there wasn’t anyone on board he trusted to find the answers more than himself. His specialty was genetics, after all. He’d put his years of schooling to the test.

  Once you leave, he thought, looking back up at House.

  “What do you mean, ‘gone?’” He tried to picture it transpiring but couldn’t, not even a little. Donovan started hyperventilating, unable to breathe. “There were…millions of dollars…in equipment in there…and ten-times that in valuable research. It can’t be gone!”

  The stress was too much, and Donovan’s eyes danced. He flopped back onto his bed and covered his tear-filled eyes with his left arm. He shook again. This time, it was because his tears were not normal, they were ice cold, instead of that of his body temperature. Something awful was definitely going on inside of him.

  “Gone…” he repeated, his voice trailing off.

  “Are you—”

  “Go away, Sebastian. Leave me alone.” Donovan was distraught, yes, but he also needed House to leave.

  The captain growled but stood and headed for the door. “Just so you know, it wasn’t one of your lackeys that pulled you from that burning room—it was me.”

  What? Donovan thought. He knew he should’ve thanked House for saving his life, but he needed to be alone more. House had to get out.

  Annihilation.

  “I,” he winced, hearing the terrible words repeat again, “would’ve rather died with my work than go home empty-handed.”

  Without another rebuttal, House left, slamming the door on his way out. The force of the door banging into its frame rocked Donovan’s already abused mind. Biting his lip, he launched to his feet, stumbling for a few before gaining a shred of equilibrium. He immediately started gathering all the evidence of his “infection,” trying desperately to ignore the words booming in his mind.