[Galaxy Of Fear] - 03(26)

The blast shield slammed shut across the transparisteel viewport, and the Shi’ido was gone.

“What should we do?” Tash asked.

Kavafi shook his head. “There is nothing to do. We are trapped. You cannot avoid what you cannot see.”

Tash suddenly remembered the electroscope. She had carried it with her from the Infirmary. “I can see them.”

She checked the visor’s controls and reduced the magnification so that she could see both the virus particles and the room around her. She put the visor on.

Her heart froze.

The electroscope revealed clouds of tiny, wriggling red creatures all around her. Magnified a thousand times, they were still little more than specks in the air. Streams of them gushed from the air vents.

“Over there!” she yelled to Kavafi, pointing to one corner of the room as she ran to the other. Using the visor, she could see where the virus clouds were falling, and where the vents did not reach.

Kavafi ran where she pointed. But he was right under a virus cloud that slowly sank toward his head. “To your right! To your right!” she yelled.

He stepped to the right, and the virus wafted to the ground beside him.

Tash could see the tiny creatures, like eels with bulbous, jagged heads, swimming through the air, trying to get to her or Kavafi.

Tash turned in one direction, and then another, but the virus clouds had fallen like a curtain over her. She had nowhere to go.

“What is happening?” Kavafi yelled.

“I’m trapped,” Tash said. It was true. The virus was all around her. Sooner or later, one of the particles would touch her skin, and she would be infected. She could only wait in terror as the invisible death settled over her.

Tash remembered the Rodian turning into a blob in his cell, and shivered uncontrollably.

“Is there any way to fight this virus? Isn’t there a cure?” she yelled.

Kavafi replied wearily, “No. All I can tell you is that it depends on body temperature and chemistry.”

Tash watched the virus come closer. The urge to run was almost unbearable, but there was nowhere to go.

Kavafi went on. “Your body has a certain temperature, and usually it creates certain kinds of chemicals in your blood, your brain, and all the different parts of your body. But when your body changes-as when you are angry, or sad, or when you are sick-your body temperature changes, and your brain sends signals to produce different chemicals. Somehow this virus affects those signals and feeds off of them. But I don’t know how.”

The blood-red virus clouds were billowing closer. The doctor was still surrounded by a safe pocket of clean air, but the area around Tash was filling up with the virus by the second.

A moment later the last of the uninfected air vanished. The virus clouds descended upon Tash. She could see ‘her skin crawling with millions of virus particles, searching for ways into her body. She gagged.

“What is it?” Kavafi called.

“The virus,” she said. “It’s all over me!”

Tash stared at the millions upon millions of tiny red viruses landing lightly on her arms. She could not feel them. But with her enhanced vision she could see that her arms had become blood-red.

But a strange thing happened. None of the virus particles wriggled under her skin. The virus was on her, but it wasn’t getting inside.

It wasn’t infecting her!

She described what she saw to Kavafi. “It is possible,” he said. “Some species may be immune. But I thought all humans were affected.”

Tash shrugged. She knew what she saw. She wasn’t getting infected! Filled with sudden hope, she looked around the locked chamber. The blast shield made the control room unreachable. The ceiling vents were too high. But some of the wall vents looked low enough.

Tash plunged through a red wall of virus.

“What are you doing?” Kavafi yelled.

“Going for help!” Tash replied. She stretched and grabbed hold of the vent. Because it had been built into the old rock of the ziggurat, it came away easily in her hand.

She looked back at Kavafi. He was still safe in a little pocket of uninfected air. “Don’t move,” she said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Tash scrambled up the moss-covered stones and into the ventilator shaft.

It was like swimming through a sea of tiny sharks. The vents were still blowing the airborne virus, and wave after wave of the deadly creatures poured over her.

Not long after she’d begun her crawl, Tash heard a loud throbbing sound. She reached a point where the vent branched off in two directions. One branch was open, and virus clouds poured out of it.

The other branch was blocked by a small energy screen, probably, Tash thought, to keep the virus from spreading into other areas of the ziggurat. The field was strong enough to hold back electroscopic creatures, but not nearly powerful enough to stop her. She pushed her way into the energy field, ignoring the tingling she felt as she passed through it.