“Fine with me. Been a long time since I was at the wheel of one of these beasts. It’s been fun taking to the surface for a while.”

• • •

“Morning, old boy. How are things looking?” Coote asked, his tone less upbeat than usual.

“Not good. The virus is spreading throughout the ship, and my entire regular medical team are down. Is Vardy about?”

“He’s been working on those blood samples of yours all night. He won’t leave his lab until he has something. I’ll come with you.”

“I was rather hoping you would. I can never find my way around this thing on my own.”

Coote led Jake through the submarine to the doctor’s lab. Jake had made use of the medical bay the first time he had been aboard, but the lab was new to him. His first impression was that calling it a ‘lab’ was somewhat misleading. With space at such a premium, Vardy’s equipment was located in the corner of a tiny maintenance workshop towards the front end of the submarine. He had a series of technical-looking machines stacked one upon the other. One such device was filled with tiny vials of blood, much smaller than those Jake had brought over the previous night. They rotated and jiggled about slowly. Other instruments had digital readouts, dials labelled with indecipherable scales, and pulsing screens. The only thing Jake recognised was a good old-fashioned microscope, although a very powerful-looking one. It was over this microscope that Vardy was hunched. He looked up when he heard the two captains approach. His eyes were bloodshot, and Jake suspected that wasn’t from having them pressed to the eyepiece. Mandy wasn’t the only one to have pulled an all-nighter.

“Coote, Jake.” he nodded to them both.

“Anything?” Coote asked simply.

“Maybe. I think so. I mean, possibly. I don’t want to get our hopes up. The deceased man—”

“Scott,” Jake interjected.

“Yes, Scott. He was suffering from leukaemia. That’s the good news.”

“How exactly is that good?” Coote scratched his head.

“I understand he died within about twenty-four hours of contracting the virus? Messily?”

“Yes. At least, he died within twenty-four hours of being brought to medical,” Jake agreed.

“Right. And that’s because his body was already weakened from the leukaemia. That suggests the other patients may not go downhill quite so quickly.”

“Could it be non-fatal in the other patients?” Jake asked hopefully.

“I wondered that too. But on further analysis, I fear the answer is no. This is a particularly vicious little virus, I’ve never seen anything like it. As far as I can tell it appears to cause massive damage to the blood cells, rupturing them, popping them like balloons. I haven’t yet discovered the mechanism by which it does so, but its rate of destruction is remarkable. Scott died quickly, but I suspect other patients will only have a few hours more than him. Twelve, perhaps twenty-four hours more, but nobody who gets this is going to live more than forty-eight hours, it’s just not possible.”

“And the girl’s blood? Why is she not infected? What’s different about her?”

“The girl is also unwell. She is carrying the influenza virus.”

“Erica has flu? She seems fine to me,” Jake said.

“Most likely. She has only a very mild strain of the flu and her young immune system has managed to beat it off. The virus is almost gone. She probably had a bit of a high temperature, some aches and pains, maybe a headache for an afternoon, but nothing serious.”

“And you think that her having the flu is protecting her?”

“It is my hypothesis that the virus which killed Scott, and that is spreading throughout the ship, is a mutation of Erica’s mild flu. The relationship is clear to see; there are certain markers in the virus itself that show a link back to the flu. It’s like tracing ancestors through common markers in DNA,” Vardy added.

“Let me get this straight,” Coote said. “You think the girl caught the flu, got over it, but the virus in her body somehow spontaneously mutated and turned into something nasty that then killed her father?”

“That’s more or less it, yes.”

“I don’t understand.” Jake was drumming his fingers on the work bench, frowning. “If it mutated, that means it’s a different virus now, right?”

“Right,” Vardy nodded.

“So why isn’t she sick with this new virus?”

“Because her immune system already learnt to fight the flu virus that this is based on. The new virus has enough similarities that her body’s defences can fight it off. They already learnt how when it was just a simple influenza.”

“Is there something special about her? Something that made this mutation happen?”

“No, I don’t think so. I have a theory about that too, though.”

“Go on?”

“Jake, when you were at Longyearbyen, you lost people to the toxic ash?”

“Yes. It sort of…ate them. Dissolved them. You’ve seen Dante’s hands, you saw what it did.”

“Yes. And now I think that Erica came into contact with the ash, and that it is that ash which has mutated her flu virus.”

“This is all well and good,” Coote said, growing impatient, “but how does it help? Can you cure it, is what I want to know?”

Vardy looked at the two captains and weighed his words before speaking, as if he didn’t want to create false hope, but at the same time was eager to share an idea. “I think we can fabricate a vaccine.”

“You think?”

“Erica’s flu virus is a common kind. We have vaccine kits on board the Ambush, normal operating procedure; we can’t risk an outbreak of anything contagious in a confined space. The kits contains a flu jab that can easily take on Erica’s mild virus. My theory is that if we can combine the vaccine with some of that toxic ash, we could create something that will tackle the new virus.”

“You mean you want to mutate the vaccine, like the ash mutated the flu?” Jake asked.

“Yes, essentially. There’s a bit more to it than that, but yes, that’s the idea.”

“Do it,” Coote said simply.

“Ah, and therein lies the problem. We don’t have everything we need.”

“You just said we have the vaccine kit?”

“He means the ash, don’t you, Russell?” Jake’s face fell. “We have to go and try and collect some of that ash and bring it back here.”

“It’s more complicated even than that. I can’t just throw the vaccine and the ash into a test tube and wait for them to do their thing; they have to be combined in a certain way. There’s a machine that can do it. We don’t have one, but there is one at Faslane. At least, there was. I don’t know if it’s still there. It was all a bit hush-hush. You see, it was in the biological warfare lab.”

“How do you know about that lab?” Coote snorted. “That’s highly classified. Officially it doesn’t even exist!”

“I was seconded there for six months a few years back. Sorry, it’s not on my record, it showed up as shore leave. Like you said, officially it doesn’t exist.”

Fifteen

AN EFFORT WAS made to arrange a committee meeting, but the idea was quickly abandoned. Ella Rose, Amanda Jackson, and Grau were all down with the virus. Lucya was on the bridge, accompanied by Erica, and Max hadn’t been seen by anyone. Jake and Coote understood full well that the responsibility for decision making was now theirs alone.

Whilst Coote remained on the Ambush and briefed his men on what was to be done, Jake brought his own bridge crew up to date with the developments. Martin had been called to the bridge too; his team had an important role to play.

“Disconnecting the Ambush isn’t just a case of pulling out the plug, Jake,” he said, a look of concern crossing his face. “There’s rather more to it than that. I mean, the diesel generator has been off line for about ten days; we don’t even know if we can start it. And even if we can, there’s at least half a day’s work to get it connected back up to the electrical system. When we wired ourselves up to the sub it was a rush job.”