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the ship.
    “ Markov,” Arkady said into
the speaker, “I think they are coming. You have to get the off-duty
guards and your men down here as soon as possible to keep them from
making it into the lab.”
    Only silence hummed from the speaker
in reply.
    “ Markov!” Arkady yelled to
the same reply. On the notification panel on the wall of the lab,
the first airlock, the vacuum room, was shown opening and then
closing. They must have found the guard’s access badge
    “ Begin the sterilization
procedures,” the professor said in a shaky voice to the two lab
assistants. Immediately the men started to pull vials of
experimental pathogens from the sealed medical cabinets and placed
them inside a short magnetron incinerator. With the beams of
radiation strong enough to cook a frozen turkey all the way through
to perfection in about five seconds, the magnetron would vaporize
the active viruses in half that time. It had worked in other labs
for Marburg, Ebola, and Nipah virus, so Arkady hoped it would work
on Chimera-44.
    In Greek and Roman mythology, the
chimera combined elements of lion, goat, and serpent into one
monstrous form. The modern day version had been under development
for decades. One strain had taken the common cold and mixed it with
polio, tweaking them at the molecular level to cause a new disease.
Another had merged smallpox and anthrax to make a hyperactive spore
capable of producing both viruses at once. Arkady’s project was
Chimera-44, and merged rabies and a little known transmissible
spongiform encephalopathy disease commonly known as kuru, often
found among the cannibalistic cultures of Papua New Guinea. The
projected outcome was to make a blood-borne pathogen that would
ramp up the infester’s level of Kryptopyrrole to the brain and
drive them to a destructive, manic fit. It could be very useful in
both warfare and covert operations.
    The second airlock notification door
showed red as it opened. Arkady hurriedly grabbed examination
trays, specimen slides, and petri dishes, and hustled them to the
incinerator.
    “ It’s full professor,”
argued one of the assistants.
    “ Go to the devil,” he said
and stacked the pieces on the table by the device. “Get these in
there somehow.”
    The speaker on the wall crackled in,
“Professor,” said Markov on the bridge, accompanied by the accent
of gunplay rattling in the background. Markov sounded like he had
his own issues to deal with. “The second airlock has been breached.
There are four pirates in the ultraviolet room trying to get into
the third airlock. I’ve got everyone not on the bridge headed down
there to you, but I don’t know if they will make it on
time.”
    “ If you see the fourth
airlock go red, follow your orders, Captain.”
    “ That was a
given.”
    Arkady gave his attention to the test
subjects. In a thick Lexan cube in the corner of the lab stood four
enclosures. Each held a macaque primate with his or her own
filtered air supply. The foul little monkeys had been carefully
chosen due to their being carriers of SFV. Some of the best bio war
theorists in Minsk believed that Simian Foamy Virus (SFV) was one
of the keys to the CIA’s development of HIV, and the best bet to
speed up the molecular clock of Chimera-44. All four of the
dreadful beasts had been in injected with chimera cells weeks ago
and were producing their own mutated versions of it in their
veins.
    They had to be killed.
    Arkady took a knee awkwardly in his
pressurized suit and reached under the monkeys’ enclosure. One by
one, he twisted the knobs that turned off the oxygen supply to
their self-contained bio space. Within minutes, they would
suffocate and die, taking their virus with them into death. The
professor hoped that they had that long to wait.
    The third airlock blinked red on the
notification board on the wall. The intruders were in the shower
room directly outside the lab itself. Next to the notification
board was a CCTV monitor that showed several