“You okay, Z?” Vera asked.

“Yes,” I responded automatically. “The rogue nanites were doing something different this time. It may be the small sample size affecting my assumptions, but I did not expect it. They were eating into a high power transfer bus-”

“That’s on Ileane’s pod,” Sam interrupted. “Yeah, we saw that through the scopes. It looked like it was decaying decades in seconds, then it slowed.”

“But not a smooth deceleration. It was like the flow was cut off briefly, stuttering to an eventual stop. Was that you?” Vera asked.

“Yes. Ileane entering the pod was the only thing that seemed plausible to explain why there were so few rogues in the cluster itself. There are a few nodes still around that I have not captured. They seem to be more spread out here.”

I paused for a moment. Not yet. The other nodes and pods would have to endure a bit longer. We had to help Ileane now. We were slowly getting closer to saving the rest of them. This was just another step on that path.

“How is the pod?”

“Not completely fucked. With that power leak it won’t be lasting decades though. Or weeks, even. The best thing we can do is get her out of that thing and fix her up.”

“We should not do that here. It is not safe.”

“Or sanitary,” Doctor Delveccio added.

“Is it safe to transfer the pod with the damage it has?”

Sam furrowed his brow and looked at the deck for a moment. Vera tapped him on the elbow, nodding.

“With a few modifications it can be. It would need an external power source attached just in case though,” she said.

“Makes sense. What’re you thinking?”

“Rig up a cradle for the combat suit and run a power tap from the suit’s core. We’d have to ditch the ammo pack for a bit, but I can fab up something.” Vera’s smile flickered to life once and then faded quickly.

She looked worried. Everyone did, even Quenton who’d been quiet so far.

“It sounds like we’ve got a plan then, boys and girls. Quenton, if you could go back to keeping watch that would be good. Z, you’re starting to look pale again. I can fashion you another IV, but I worry that it will run out where we are not able to replace it. If you can rest for a bit, the rest of us will get everything ready.”

“Sure thing, Del,” Quenton said over his shoulder as he turned to get back to his post at the door.

My rest was not to be, as Raspberry had finally awoken. She began climbing all over my face in agitation, batting at my visor to get me to take off the helmet again. At Doctor Delveccio’s urging I let her out to explore for a bit.

While the others worked or watched I spent my time trying to keep the little fuzzball out of any corpses or gore splatter as she leapt from pod to the deck and bounced off me and the other people.

The little wampus cat still managed to miss her targets more often than not. She often put too much energy into her leaps and needed to be caught before she crashed into something or someone at high speed. Several times she spun herself dizzy and had to pause for a few seconds before springing away again. Her antics seemed to provide a welcome release from the tension that hung over everyone’s heads.

“This doesn’t look like resting.”

Doctor Delveccio had her arms crossed and looked to be fighting a smile. Raspberry was recovering from her most recent spin, her fuzzy little head still looping about slowly.

“It is less stressful than fighting. Or node capturing.”

“I still don’t get how you do that.”

That made me stop to think.

“Node capturing?”

“Yeah. Everyone has nanites. They help keep us healthy and allow medical professionals to treat patients with much more precision.” She glanced back at me with a raised eyebrow. Raspberry sprang away again, aiming at the deck this time.

“Well, most patients. Is your colony’s resistance to scans related to how you use them to drain zombies and capture the nodes?”

“No.” I stopped myself. That was not completely correct.

“Or rather, not in a direct fashion. The latter two are based on nanite sensing, which involves precise control of one’s colony and the ability to process the information gathered into coherent form. Nanites do not perceive things as we do with our eyes.

“They can be photosensitive, depending on programming. This is one of the functions that medical nanite scans use, I believe.”

Doctor Delveccio nodded, gesturing for me to go on. I had to pause a moment to catch a flying wampus cat before she smacked into a pod first, though.

“The way I use them to sense microenvironments is more closely related to echolocation and gravimetrics than light sensing. It is less power intensive that way. I wrote about the mechanics of the process in my first thesis on the topic if you’d like more detail.”

“Maybe later. How did you ever figure out how to, well, direct your colony to do all that?”

I may have grimaced a bit.

“I was trying to learn how to pick electronic locks.”

“Wait, what? You? Picking locks?” Doctor Delveccio said with laughter in her voice.

“So what? Doc Z’s got a past as a troublemaker. I bet you got into worse trouble when you were a teenager,” Sam called out with a grin from where he and Vera had already unmounted the combat suit’s external ammunition storage. They were currently welding together the cargo mount that would go in its place.

“I was seven at the time. Not a teenager yet.”

“What were you doing trying to pick locks in primary school, Z?” The catgirl was the one to catch Raspberry this time as she went sailing head over paws.

“I did not go to primary school. The lock was on a cargo elevator.”

“That sounds a lot more interesting than trying to hack into a vending machine that stole your last credit,” Quenton said from the doorway.

“You still got caught doing that,” Vera added.

“It was the principle of the thing!”

“Anyway, what were you trying to get into a cargo elevator for? Don’t tell me you were boosting grav bikes at seven.”

“No. The cargo elevator was decommissioned and the controls locked to prevent vandals and thieves. I used the shaft to get down to the freight tunnels below City Four.”

“So you did manage to pick the lock. I see. What was so important that you wanted to get into the freight tunnels for? Knowing you, it was probably something nerdy.”

Doctor Delveccio let Raspberry launch herself away. This time she jumped right at me, and would have landed perfectly if she hadn’t started to tumble halfway through her leap.

“It was the quickest and safest way to get to the open school that the monks operated on the other side of the City.”

“By ‘monks’ you mean the Heretics of the Book? The ones that used to preach that the way to find God is through study of the natural world and science?” Sam asked.

“The very same. I do not know if any survive that follow their creed, however.”

“Doubt it,” Vera commented from beneath Ileane’s stasis pod. “The Heretics didn’t maintain much presence off Earth itself, far as I know. Even major religions got a little shaky during the first days of the collapse.”

“So let me get this straight, you started school at seven. And you had to break into a cargo elevator and traverse the freight tunnels to get there. You know those maglev freighters aren’t designed for humans, right?”

“I did not ride the freight cars. None of them stopped at the terminal closest to the school.”

“So you walked?”

“Walking would have been too slow. I ran.”

“Along the maglev tracks. Where the freighters run at just a frog’s hair below Mach 1.”

“The freighters were uncommon during the times I needed to use the tunnel system.”

“You’re insane, Z. You know what would have happened to you if one of those freighters caught you, right?”

Sam looked like he was halfway between impressed and incredulous. The two women looked to be firmly of the latter opinion.

“I am aware. It would have been a swift death, should it have occurred. But it did not. The freighters ran on schedule.”

Raspberry squirmed out of my hands and into my open helmet where she began enthusiastically applying herself to the bottle.

“And speaking of schedules, we’re about ready to mount this pod. Doctors, if you would,” Vera nodded at the end opposite of where she and Sam stood ready.

The stasis pod had more mass than the four of us combined, so required careful maneuvering to position it in the makeshift cradle. The two engineers managed to direct us well enough that we managed it on the second try, after the first overcorrection.

“Alright. Everyone check your gear. Z, you up to taking the lead again?”

Doctor Delveccio was putting her own words into practice, checking her seated magazine patting her spares while Sam was carefully bending and twisting at Vera’s direction to ensure the pod remained secure.

“Yes.”

“Very well. Let’s get a move on, people.”

Once again I was leaving the poor souls in the pods behind, delaying their revival in the hopes that we could find some way to help them.

The corridor outside was silent. No zombies had wandered away from the guaranteed food sources in the warehouses. There was a layer of ashen gray outside the pod room, if one knew where to look. Doctor Delveccio told me that she wasn’t afraid of me doing to her the same thing I did to the zombies that I drained.

The fact that I hadn’t meant to do it those first few times still worried me. The catgirl veterinarian did not know that part yet. The slightly euphoric feeling was still there, but it might be that it became muted in the presence of adrenaline. Perhaps I was building up a tolerance to it, like a drug.

If so, there did not appear to be any side effects thus far.

The cafeteria outside the Hospital foyer was still littered with body parts, but the gore cloud was beginning to settle. I could see down the broad corridor across the way, only slightly obscured by the mess.

A few zombies looked to be floating much farther down, asleep by all appearances. Bits of blood and gore once again stuck to our suits. We would probably be sorely missing the decontamination cycle from Security Medical tonight.

Other than a fresh coating of filth we remained unmolested. The food service elevator clanked as it lurched into motion and we were on our way down.

“Any change in the pod’s status?” Sam asked. He could not see it himself.

“As good as we could expect so far. The field is still stable, but it’s deteriorating. We will need to get her out of there sooner rather than later.”

The levity of earlier may have helped some, as Vera’s voice sounded determined rather than worried this time.

“Then let’s not jinx it by saying everything’s cool,” Quenton, on the other hand, sounded stressed.

Sam muttered something about blocking off the shaft here while it wasn’t in use completely, rather than relying on a simple chain barrier as we got off the elevator. It was a good idea to add to the list. The ever expanding list of things we needed to do to save the station and make it safe.

“Sometimes soon we need to sit down and discuss priorities, figure out what needs to happen next instead of running from crisis to crisis,” Doctor Delveccio said.

“Soon, but not now. There’s something in the cafeteria ahead of us.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s a zombie, of course,” Sam replied with some of his usual humor. “Is it a big one? Fast one? Normal? Augmented?”

“Strange one.” The zombie had its back turned to me, but one feature was easily recognizable.

“How so?”

“It has wings.”

“That wasn’t a common body mod back in the day, but there were a few folks that had it done. More useful on places with low gravity and an atmosphere that didn’t require a full suit. You could fly with them.” Doctor Delveccio provided.

“Anything else common with that? Super speed, extra durable? Can we just shoot it a bunch of times and make it die?”

“First we should check and see if those hasty welds are still holding. We don’t want to pull a horde,” Vera said.

“So if the barriers are still up, then we can shoot it?”

“Yes Sam, we can shoot it then. Z, if you would?” I could almost physically feel the eye roll that she put into her tone.

The zombie remained where it was as we entered. It floated silently over the remains of a food cart that looked to have been struck by gunfire, the flimsy metal sheeting pockmarked with holes. A small bubble of something yellow dribbled out of it as I watched. A moment later, the zombie quickly ducked down and gobbled it up.

I entered the cafeteria while it was distracted. The barriers looked to be a bit dented, but intact.

“The welds look to have held with a few dents-”

Gunfire interrupted me. The winged zombie was nearly cut in half, everyone seeming to have individually decided to aim for center mass. No howls greeted our explosive entry into the cafeteria.

“Alright, let’s get this pod into the lab! Move it, people!” Doctor Delveccio called out.

We made it through the Security gates in record time, flying nearly the whole way. Doctor Sorle’s lab had another alert up, but I did not take the time to read it.

“Suits off! No unnecessary people in the treatment room, and try not to touch the outside of the suits when you doff them,” Doctor Delveccio put action to her words and Vera started detaching the stasis pod.

Unmounting the stasis pod took much less time than it had to mount it. Moments later we were guiding it in with gentle pressure to keep it from jostling. Not that jostling could harm a person inside a stasis field, but as damaged as the pod was no one was willing to take a chance.

“Alright Z, I need a standard F type power hookup for the pod. Where do you want it?”

The grav plating may have been off in my lab, but the physical locks were still there. I directed her to my usual treatment and diagnostic station.

“There is an F type here. Some of my patients arrived in stasis pods from time to time.”

Some of those patients were children. Most of them weren’t, though.

I noticed Doctor Delveccio hesitate briefly as she took things out of her bag. The universal blood was familiar to me, as were a few of the surgical tools. Others were utterly unknown to me.

“What is it?”

She looked up with a strange look on her face, but did not stop assembling her instruments.

“It’s just what Quenton said earlier. Doesn’t this feel a bit too easy to you?”

I shook my head, connecting to my lab’s diagnostic and treatment tools. Manipulator arms descended and the imaging system snapped into place on my HUD.

“It does not. We planned well, and took advantage of the situation as it unfolded as best we could.”

“Yeah I know. But it just seems like everything we do keeps running into roadblocks, over and over. I can’t help feeling like there’s another shoe waiting to be dropped.”

“Shoe?”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t heard the expression. Waiting for the other shoe to drop?”

“I have not.”

“Sometimes I wonder what kind of life you had before we met you, Doctor Zolnikov. Ready on your end?”

She raised her gloved hands.

“Ready.”

“Stasis field dropping in three. Two! One! Off field!”

Three things happened at once. Doctor Delveccio attempted to move Ileane’s arm so she could get a look at the wound while telling her she was going to be alright. The wounded woman began to scream and thrash.

Doctor Delveccio was knocked away. Ileane continued to thrash, kicking and swiping her arms around aggressively. Her eyes remained shut.

“Doctor! Do you have some kind of restraints? We need to hold her down so we can start treating her!”

I did. It turned out the stasis pod did as well, as the clear bindings reached out from inside the pod to encircle her limbs and cinch them down. Ileane continued to scream.

“Temperature rising rapidly. Applying sedative. Temp still rising. Abdominal wound appears not to be a bite. Narrow cuts, deep. Stomach wall largely intact.”

I let Doctor Delveccio’s voice fade from my conscious mind. My lab’s imaging had told me where the zombie nanites were the moment the field dropped. A moment later, my colony had entered Ileane’s body.

Some were present in the upper small intestines, similar to the others. But a larger number of them had congregated in her neck. Some around the lymph nodes. Others near the brain stem. Neither could be left alone.

Before, I had teased the zombie nanites away with thin strands to collect them piece by piece. This time, my colony forced their way between the zombie nanites and their targets. Predictably, they fought back at this intrusion, trying to get back to their targets.

They failed utterly.

My colony had been fighting zombie nanites for quite a while now. The instruction set they followed was refined. Draining zombies and capturing rogue nodes was nearly all I had done with them lately.

Some of my threads degraded while the zombie nanites were annihilated. That was acceptable. There were more where those came from.

My nanites carefully retrieved the broken remains of the zombie nanites instead of drawing them out slowly. No surge of energy accompanied their return.

I turned my attention to the other zombie nanites. It looked like there were more than it first appeared. A few tiny packets of them had spread throughout her body, everywhere but her brain. There were still some left over in the intestines. These I scooped up into a waiting receptacle.

Catching all of the others took time. Recklessly sending nanite threads through a human body could cause complications. I’d begun training my colony by working with rats. Several had died before I learned the dangers.

Sending threads through muscle tissue was safe. Stomach and liver were usually fine as well. Lungs, heart, and deep into the brain were completely off limits. The spine was dangerous, but I had done it before. Reasonably safely.

Time and again I withdrew my colony to reposition, drawing the zombie nanites away bit by bit. A small concentration of zombie nanites looked to be trying to make their way into the lung tissue from the liver.

That would not do.

Scant moments later, those zombie nanites were gone. I continued to monitor the invading nanites as they fell prey to my colony. Some groups were so small in number that it did not appear possible that they could have a workable instruction set.

Yet they continued to exist as coherent units. Proceeding off on who knew what specific purpose. Maybe they were waiting for the ones at the brain stem and the lymph node to finish their job. That would not be happening. Ever, if I had anything to say with it.

“Z?”

I ran the scan again. I examined the body in front of me micrometer by micrometer. There hadn’t been any indications of zombie nanites for a while, but there still might be some that I had missed. And I couldn’t miss any.

“Z!”

Someone grabbed my arm and shook it. That broke my concentration. I bit back a reflexive snarl. Everyone knew not to interrupt me while I was working.

“Z, you’ve been at this for four hours. The imaging system hasn’t found any evidence of foreign nanites for the last nearly ninety minutes.”

I blinked blearily. It had not seemed like hours. Ileane looked to be sleeping. Her upper abdomen was covered in synskin and stitches. She looked healthier, her skin less pale where it wasn’t bruised. My focus wandered. Was I forgetting something?

“You got them all, Z. She’s resting. It’s time for you to get some rest, too.”

“She was screaming when she came out of stasis, violently thrashing about. I do not think the zombie nanites were far enough along to affect her mental state but-”

“That was probably fear. Well, fear and pain. And shock. I think she’s going to be a bit fragile for a while once she wakes up, but she’s alive. And thanks to you, with a little help from me, she gets the chance to stay that way.”

I had my doubts. But interpreting the emotions and psychological state of other human beings had long been opaque to me. That very well might be the case.

“Come on. Time for you to get some rest, Z.”

My usual sleeping spot was obvious. I’d lashed a sleeping pallet to a bulkhead near the vid panel pickup. It was always set to a view of the planet below. Usually, a wide angle shot. Zoomed out so one could see the curvature of the Earth, but the continents and even large terrain features were still visible.

I lay down and tied myself to the bed. In the beginning, I’d watched the lights go out all over the planet. One by one. Some in wide bands. Others flickering out like fireflies.

A shadow was growing over Earth as I drifted off to sleep. The coming of night for whatever life still existed below. I dreamed.

A mountain stood before me. I had to get to the top. Every step of the climb, rotting vultures would swoop down to try and pluck me off. Zombies appeared, trying to snatch bits of my flesh to eat.

Not just zombie people. Zombie sheep. Zombie wolves. Even a zombie mountain lion. I’d read about mountain lions once. They were something like wampus cats, only wild, with four limbs not six, and less intelligent. The zombie mountain lion tried to eat my face. I ended up crushing its spine with a rock.

At some point on the climb I realized the ground under my feet was not dirt and rock, but compacted corpses. Faces I once knew looked up at me, judging as I stepped on or over them.

I never reached the top of the mountain. Zombies ate bits of my flesh, but I kept climbing, stepping on faces and necks. They seemed to be telling me I would never reach the top.

They were right.