Outpost

Rye joined the party. She didn’t wear a toga. She sat near the door and watched the action. She sipped tequila from a paper cup. Jane brought her a plate of food.

‘Margarita?’

‘I don’t like the salt.’

‘But you’re holding up okay?’

‘You know,’ said Rye, ‘everyone else on this rig may be desperate to explain themselves, to be understood, but I deal with my own shit.’

Rye crouched behind a snowdrift. She hunted by moonlight. She watched dim shadow-shapes of Hyperion passengers standing motionless on the ice. She used infrared binoculars. Distance- to-target calibrations, like a sniper-scope. The landscape in negative. Pale, luminescent figures on a black landscape. Body temperature was way down. The figures had barely any heat signature. Rye couldn’t understand how they were still walking around. They should be frozen. They should be starved. There were a dozen different ways they should be dead.

She circled a crowd of passengers gathered at the waterline, mesmerised by the installation lights of the rig. She stalked a man in a dark suit who seemed to have strayed from the herd

She stepped from behind a snowdrift.

‘Hey,’ she called. ‘Wanna buy a Rolex?’

The man turned. He took a couple of stumbling steps towards her, arms outstretched. She zapped him with the Taser. He fell in an epileptic spasm.

Rye threw a sleeping bag over the prostrate man and bound him with rope.

She gave the guy another jolt of current. She lashed him tight to a stepladder and dragged him to the zodiac.

She laid him in the boat. She pulled back the sleeping bag and shone a flashlight in the man’s face. Metal erupting from flesh. A dog-collar. The man was a priest.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ asked Jane. Rye had been spending a lot of time on C deck. Jane had tracked her to a vacant storeroom.

‘These freaks rule the world now. They are the dominant species. We better find out exactly what makes them tick.’

Four tables. Four passengers strapped down.

‘There are dozens of them out there on the ice,’ said Rye. She was wearing a lab coat, gloves and a heavy rubber apron. ‘They’ve been there a while. Minus forty and they are walking around in ball gowns and tuxedos. The average guy would succumb to hypothermia in a couple of minutes. These folks have lasted days. Something pretty fundamental has happened to their metabolism.’

‘You brought these fuckers on board without telling anyone? I’ll help you put them over the side. We’ll do it now, do it quick. If the guys in the canteen find out about this they’ll break your fucking legs.’

‘These creatures were adrift aboard Hyperion for weeks,’ said Rye. ‘No sign that they ate or drank. What the hell makes these things tick? Aren’t you curious? Do they run on air, or what?’

‘Damn. This guy’s a priest.’

The priest’s eyeballs were black. He stared up at her. He didn’t blink.

A Bible on a nearby chair.

‘It was in his pocket,’ said Rye.

‘King James. Good choice.’

An inscription on the flyleaf.

‘David. Is that you? You used to be David.’

Jane recited the Lord’s Prayer.

‘Our Father, who art in heaven…’

The priest slowly lowered his head and closed his eyes.

‘Doc, have you any idea how bad it smells down here? It smells like ammonia. My eyes are watering.’

‘Let me show you something.’

Rye put on goggles and a mouth mask. She picked up a scalpel.

‘Hey,’ said Jane. ‘This guy’s still alive, all right? He’s still breathing.’

Rye paid no attention. She stabbed Father David in the shoulder. She twisted the blade, dug it in.

‘Whoa. Hold the fuck on.’

The priest lay, unconcerned, as the knife ground bone.

‘Is he even alive?’ asked Rye, talking to herself. ‘Undead? Nosferatu? Is that what we are dealing with? I think he still has sensation. He can feel the knife. He just doesn’t care.’

Rye twisted the knife some more.

‘Less blood than I would expect,’ she said. ‘Look at his face. See his skin? Frost damage. His skin cells are turning to putty. He’s slowly rotting. Those Hyperion passengers out on the ice aren’t immortal. The cold is killing them sure enough. But it’s taking a long while.’

Rye leaned over the priest’s chest, leaving the scalpel imbedded in the man’s shoulder.

‘He seems to take a breath every couple of minutes. Can’t get close enough to hear his heartbeat, but it must be way down. Basically, he’s a vehicle. A chassis. A lump of meat steered left and right. Core body temperature doesn’t seem to matter.’

She stood back and contemplated the priest.

‘Is this what waits for us when we get home? Cities full of walking dead?’

Jane crossed the room. A table draped with a sheet.

‘What’s this?’

Rye pulled back the sheet.

‘Fucking hell,’ said Jane, covering her mouth.

A flayed body. Jane couldn’t tell if it had been male or female. Skin and muscle stripped away. A skeletal frame of bone and sinew. The body was still strapped to the table. Hands grasped. It twisted and squirmed like it was trying to sit up.

‘My God. How can it be alive?’