The messy cabin was all cleaned up. Every article of clothing had been cleaned and folded, tucked away in drawers below the bed. The dust and mold that had collected and grown were gone as well, casualties of the cleaning and scrubbing that we’d done to prepare for the guests that would be arriving soon.

The family from the Pride might not be staying long, but the evidence of zombies and seven years worth of neglect were not things that Sam and Doctor Delveccio seemed comfortable with showing.

The terminal on the desk had been frozen on the time-out screen of an testing program. Whoever the too-tight shirts had belonged to had been a spacer. Of course. But they’d also been studying to improve themselves when the collapse occurred.

There was no name anywhere on the articles of clothing. Not on the terminal itself, the pad, or anything else left in the room.

If that person had been one of the zombies we’d killed when we first arrived on the ship there was no way to know. He could have been eaten by the zombies, one of the shattered bone piles that I had gathered up and sealed away in a storeroom. Or escaped, somehow.

The ship’s log had that information in it somewhere. But there hadn’t been time to worry with that as we hurried to get the ship running again.

Perhaps that time would never come.

By now there were far too many dead to ever give a proper burial to. Some of those were still walking around, deceased in all matters that counted save one.

“Our visitors are almost at the lock, Z. Be a dear and go and fetch them for me, please.” Doctor Delveccio asked in an absent sounding voice over the intercom. She’d been up and cooking for some time now in the mess hall. It sounded like she still wasn’t done.

Gatherings of this sort were unfamiliar to me. I patted down the now clean and unbloodied clothing, trying on the idea that I could treat this newest event as an opportunity to observe such things. Social sciences were never of much interest to me, but there had to be some value in them.

Predictably, that line of thinking failed to convince me.

The forward airlock was where the guests would be arriving. A crowd of suited figures approached, jets flaring as they decelerated gently. They appeared a bit more graceful in microgravity than my two reawakened companions.

Of course, they’d lived through the collapse, just as I had. There probably had been plenty of time to grow used to maneuvering in micro for them, as well.

“Permission to board, Hog Mauler? We’ve a party of twelve plus four little ones.”

“I’m not little! I’m nearly six!” An indignant voice popped into the channel, high pitched and young.

“Hush over the com, Riley, or playtime gets revoked.”

The voice did not reappear.

“Granted, and welcome. I am Doctor Zolnikov. It is a pleasure to greet you.”

“No need to be so formal lad. We’ll greet you properly in a moment.”

The lock began to cycle as the intercom became silent. I could feel thumps from the deck as suit boots found gravity once again.

The inner hatch opened to reveal several people peeling themselves out of suits and racking them in the lockers with what looked like practiced ease.

“I’m Conner, good to meet you in person.” A large man with a trim beard seized my hand and pulled me into a rough hug before I could react. After pounding me on the back twice he released me, waving to the others now entering the ship.

“This is my wife Meita, she’s our pilot when we actually have working engines.”

“Nice to meet you in person, Doctor. These three little monsters are ours,” she indicated the smaller forms still hanging up their suits.

“Jolly and Vivy and Uriah,” pointing to a coltishly awkward boy, a skinny dark haired girl, and a shorter boy currently bouncing up and down in the corridor as his father shut the inner hatch so the next group could enter.

“Hello Doctor Zolnikov!” the three chorused. I nodded back at them, responding to their greeting.

The crowd grew as more people entered, cycling the lock twice more to admit them all. The crew of the Maggie’s Pride was not small.

In number, that is. Some of the crew members were quite small, even other than the children. One of the women was quite short.

I recognized the calm woman with the auburn hair that I’d spoken to first. She introduced herself with a firm handshake.

“Doctor Zolnikov, a pleasure to finally meet you in the flesh. I’m Ileane, the other daughter,” she said. There had been another daughter, but I’d already forgotten the name.

“A pleasure to meet you as well, Ileane. Is this everyone?” It certainly looked like a lot of people. Fifteen, by my quick count.

Entirely too many people.

“It is, yes.”

“Very good. I believe Doctor Delveccio is still preparing, but we can go and check on her now and see how it is going.”

The look of excitement on all the children’s faces did not escape me, nor did the whispering.

“That is an excellent idea,” commented the older woman that I’d seen on the screen before. She had probably already told me her name. I had definitely already forgotten it.

I led the group back to the mess hall, where Doctor Delveccio was busily doing something involving a bowl and a lot of grimacing. She looked up on hearing the group following me up the stairs.

“Ah! Welcome, all of you. I’m still working on the feast. It will be just a little while longer, though if you’d like to see the ship it’s mostly the empty cargo hold. We cleaned up what we could, but some areas of the ship are still a mess.”

The group with me made noises of agreement, looking around. The zombie nests were gone and the blood and mold cleaned up so the place no longer looked like some seedy back door alley. It made me appreciate the cleaner bots on Walker all the more.

“It looks like you might could use a hand,” the older woman said, walking up beside me.

“I couldn’t impose.”

“Oh don’t be silly, I cook for this lot all the time and have to make the same boring old dishes. You’d be doing me a favor.”

“We’ll help too!” The youngest girl piped up, pulling her two brothers along. The third boy followed as well, a big smile on his face.

“I guess that means we’ll come along to keep the horrible foursome tame,” and two other women appeared. One was Conner’s wife and was another one whose name I’d since forgotten. Curvy but short, she’d been hidden by all the taller people.

“Well, who could deny such wonderful help? Thank you all, truly,” the catgirl doctor-turned-cook said, smiling at them.

That cut the group nearly in half, leaving all the men and two of the women adults left. I took them to the bridge next. The group made appreciative noises over the space. I could not answer any of their questions though.

The older man in the group made the suggestion that we go to engineering next and meet the final member of the crew. That was also the place that the majority of the remaining people were interested in.

Not Ileane, though.

“So you’re not a cook or a pilot in addition to being a researcher and a zombie fighter?” she asked as we walked down the stairs into the main cargo area.

“I am not, no. The latter being an occupation more of necessity than a true vocation, I prefer to think of myself as just a researcher.”

“But surely one finds little time for study when every day is a struggle for survival?” she asked. The other men in the group remained conspicuously absent from the conversation, I noted.

“Most of my days were spent safely hidden in my lab up until the power began to fail a few days ago. Sam, the engineer you’ll be meeting soon has suggested that the main power on Walker could be restored. He would know better than I if such a thing is possible.”

I attempted to deflect this line of questioning. Zombie fighting was necessary, of course. But there were other, more important issues to immediate survival.

“The swarms prevented us from retaking ships and stations that were infected. I remember the first days after the collapse.”

“The military would assault a station or board a ship and things would go well, at least initially. But zombies would keep popping up as they went. Then people started to get infected, and turn on their friends.”

“There was no way to keep a perimeter when your buddies could turn on you at any moment,” one of the men said soberly. Others in the group nodded as well.

“That has been one of the main issues I’ve been studying since the collapse, actually. My current theory is that the nanite component is the key. Three times now I’ve found the rogue nanites buried in either the ships or the station.”

“How did you find them?”

“He’s a nanite researcher, Vera. It’s his job.” Ileane replied to the other woman in the group. I nodded.

“Yes. The way I use my colony to investigate technology I can get a sense of what is there. It took some years of training, but I can recognize certain hardware structures and manipulate them directly to a certain degree.”

This caused a few raised eyebrows. Outside of the niche culture of cutting edge nanite research, it always had.

“Every time I’ve come into contact with these rogue nanites, they’ve tried to invade my body immediately. From what Doctor Delveccio tells me, most people do not have any natural defense against nanite intrusion.”

“That is certainly true,” Ileane commented. “There would be no way for us to use certain therapies and procedures if the patient’s colony rejected every attempt to help them.”

“Our girl here is training to be a surgeon,” Magnus made to muss her hair but she dodged his hand gracefully by putting me between them.

“I still have my practical and residency to finish first. Until then, I’m just a nurse and student.”

“That is good news,” I said. She looked back at me curiously.

“There are people still stuck in the Hospital stasis pods aboard Walker. Doctor Delveccio, while she’s been a great help and has saved my life at least once, was trained as a veterinarian. I would appreciate if you could help us assess which of those people can be safely woken up once we return.

“That is assuming, of course, that you will visit Walker itself once we return. I can understand if you want to simply repair your ship and leave, of course.”

“We’ll be discussing that later.” The others nodded at Magnus’ statement. They probably wanted to get a better picture of what they were walking into. I could respect that.

“Back to what you were discussing before, about these rogue nanites. Just how do they relate?” Ileane said.

“Think of it like an infection present on surfaces. Once a person comes into contact with the surface with an open wound, or touches their face or the like, the infection has a path to enter the body. Nanites don’t need this step.

“Once the rogues enter your body they begin to kill off your colony. Then they suppress the immune system, allowing the biological infection to not just attack, but to take over the body and change it rapidly.”

“So people that are infected by the nanites lose their protection and become vulnerable to the biological virus? What happens if they’ve never been infected by the latter?”

“That is an obvious flaw in the theory that I am unable to rectify at this point. I have observed the process of zombification remotely many times from my lab aboard Walker as I observed the Earth below. The process seems to begin immediately and take somewhere between ten seconds and two minutes to complete the change.

“The easily observable changes lag behind the behavioral changes, as infected individuals seem to lose reason faster than the physical form. As I have been bitten before and not changed, I believe the nanite component is essential to the process.”

Ileane fell silent, a thinking expression on her face.

We reached the stacked cargo units at the back of the hold. The other woman in the group perked up at seeing these, and Magnus chuckled.

“Are those what I think they are?” she asked.

“If you think they’re Star Standard Supply crates, I’d say you’re correct,” Magnus supplied.

“Is that good? I must confess that in matters of ships, piloting, and engineering I am of little use.”

“Nonsense!” Sam walked out from behind the crate stack.

“He’s been plenty of help in getting this old girl back in shape. Didn’t even complain about the smell when we flushed the septic and primed the bacterial vats.”

“In that case we might steal him from you,” the other woman replied with a smile. She was on the tall side with a runner’s build, towering over Sam’s short bulk.

“Not happenin’ there Miss. I saw him first!”

“Vera, general ship maintenance and systems engineer.”

“Sam, formerly PO3 on Adelaide Beta. Engines, thrusters, motors, and pumps are my game, the bigger the better.”

This caused several grins to spring out as the other men introduced themselves as well. Ileane captured my sleeve as they crowded around my shorter crewmate.

“They’ll be at it for a while, that lot. All of them are engineer crazy to at least some extent.”

“Engineer crazy?”

“You know the type. Talk about their big metal babies for as long as you’ll let them. They get pouty when they can’t do that every now and again. As soon as they find someone else with the same disease they have to interrogate them.”

“Ah.”

“So, going back to these nanites of yours. Could you explain this draining phenomenon you mentioned before in more detail?”

I explained what I could. It took longer than expected, and before I knew it Doctor Delveccio was calling us all back to the mess hall to eat. The engineering discussion had since disappeared into the bowels of the ship at some point. I had not noticed when they left.