Page 137 of Stars

He was wrong.

Gas burners threw weak blue and cherry light around the dark hold, hugging the shadows and sending a sickly glow curling around a dozen large vats, kept at a perfect ninety-eight degrees… the temperature of a human body. Snakes of bubbling pipes rose from the sealed vats like Medusa’s hair and crawled down to hundreds of glass collection jars scattered across the hold’s deck. Thick hoses pumped crimson sludge into each vat.Blood. Fuck, that’s blood.The air stank of copper and rot, iron and mildew and death.

Steam rose from the vats to the top of the hold, to circles of gray light that haloed the overhead decking and gave the hold a haunted pallor.

Vents. You need vents in a biological laboratory. Which makes these…

Vats of virus.

Vats of death.

They’d found Lazarus, and his lair.

This was a hot zone, the corvette a bioreactor filled to the brim with homemade virus incubators. The blood Lazarus fed to the incubators helped the virus reproduce by the millions as it hijacked the molecular machinery of each blood cell.

How much death had he already created?

“Luke. Get everyone out of here.”

“Ethan—”

“Luke,now!”

Welby didn’t argue again. Gear clanged behind Ethan. Rubber squeaked on the damp deck, then faded away.

Kilaqqi appeared at his side. “I am staying.”

He didn’t have time to argue.

“Who are you?” a voice in the darkness called. Ethan couldn’t see him, couldn’t track the voice. Echoes off the hull played havoc with his hearing, and he spun away, flattening himself on the starboard bulkhead.

“My name is Ethan. And you’re Lazarus.”

“I am. Have the Americans come to kill me again?”

“I don’t want to kill you. I want to talk to you.”

“There is nothing to talk about.”

“That’s not true. I want to know more about this virus you created. The one you’re trying to remake, the one General Sevastyanov blasted into orbit.”

“Igor betrayed me,” Lazarus snapped. “But in the end, I won. I always do. He has fed my reactors wonderfully.”

Ethan’s gaze skittered to the hoses of blood. The Soviet Union’s decorated general in charge of their blackest projects reduced to food for a virus reactor. “I’ve heard what your virus can do. How did you develop it?”

Lazarus laughed, the dry, rasping sound filling the hold. The laugh wasn’t human. It set Ethan’s teeth on edge, made his vertebrae shiver. His animal mind shrieked, screamed at him to run, to get the fuck away from this place and order an air strike, wipe Lazarus and his virus reactors and the whole corvette, the whole of Bolshevik Island, off the planet.

“Have you ever heard of the corpse flower? My darling is like that delicate beauty. A rare treasure, impossible to cultivate, impossible to care for unless you devote everything you have to its survival. My creation, my child, was that way. I teased her into existence, fed her different genomes and RNA sequences until she was whole. I brought her out of the darkness and into the light. Into our world. She was a thing of beauty. I gave my child my whole life, and how was I repaid? She was taken from me!”

He’s fucking insane.Finally, Ethan spotted movement in the far corner. An arm passing through vapor, through the light from one of the vent holes. Ethan slid silently down the starboard bulkhead. “Is that what all this is?”

Ethan held his breath as he slipped past the first virus reactor.

“I cannot replace my first child. My perfect creation—I need her back from orbit! Nothing can compare to her brutality”

“What’s all this down here, then? Stepchildren?”

Lazarus laughed again. “These are what make her so special to begin with. Each component, each perfect specimen of death, brought to its most beautiful, deadly potential. Smallpox. The original strain, not the garbage the Soviets locked away in their freezers. No, this is from freshly dug out Siberian corpses that were in permafrost for a thousand years. Hemorrhagic fevers. Rabies. Kyasanur Forest disease. Lassa Fever. Coronavirus. Rift Valley fever. Blended together, components combined and recombined into a prism of perfection. Death so total, so complete, there is no stopping it.”