Virus by S. D. Perry

of order. Squeaky started reconnecting the sliced cords with practiced ease as Steve moved around the massive turbine, checking switches and opening panels.
    Everything was fine, no apparent damage to anything he could see. The saboteur obviously didn’t know much about engines, had only severed a few connecting wires that could be fixed in minutes. It was better than they could have hoped.
    “Almost done,” said Squeaky, and Steve moved back to the starter as his partner connected the last wire, twisting the fibers together and pulling down the rubber sheath.
    “Try it now.”
    Steve pressed the button and the rotor spun into action, filled the room with the rising hum of a well-maintained, powerful engine. Lights flickered on and he and Squeaky grinned at each other, squinting at the sudden brightness.
    The Volkov had power.

    The bridge suddenly surged to activity, undamaged monitors and instruments blinking on, consoles clicking and fans revving, overhead lights snapping away the gloom.
    Everton smiled, feeling the Volkov come to life all around them. There was movement by the door and a video surveillance camera rose on its mount and swiveled in his direction.
    “That’s more like it,” he said, glad that he’d had the foresight to hire such competent engineers. The bridge felt different suddenly, had gone from a dead room on a dead ship to the center of power for a sophisticated vessel; he could actually hear the decks beneath his feet switch on, the hum of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment reactivating—
    —and there was a sound rising above the surging hum, like nothing he’d ever heard before—a strange, high-pitched squeal that seemed to grow in strength, swelling up from somewhere deep in the ship. Like a bird, screaming, like the howl of a machine in pain. Or rage . . .
    What the devil—
    Everton looked at Foster as the sound surged into the bridge, watched her cover her ears as the bizarre squeal became deafening, overwhelming—and then stopped, cut off abruptly as if it had never been.
    “What the hell was that?” Foster asked, but Everton ignored her; obviously some damaged circuitry somewhere. The return of power had overloaded it and it had burnt out. An unusual sound, but no great mystery.
    And apparently that’s too vast a concept for our navigator to comprehend; what a surprise.
    Everton picked up his walkie-talkie and clicked it on. “Good job, Baker. We’re lit up like a pinball machine.”
    Baker didn’t answer him directly, but he heard the engineer speak to his partner with the transmit button held. “Let’s get the main engines running—” He cut off.
    Everton walked to the port windows and looked down on the Sea Star as it moved into position to push the Volkov’s bow. Everything was going smoothly, perfectly—even the fog had thinned a bit. Richie had thrown down a line to Hiko and was directing Woods over the walkie while the Maori tied the hawser to the towing bit, just as they’d been ordered; Baker and his man had performed admirably, quickly. Foster, who had done nothing but poke at a few circuit boards and then declare the radio transmitter broken, was at least keeping her rather large mouth shut; he supposed it was the best he could hope for from her . . .
    There was a rhythmic clicking hum from one of the consoles and Everton turned, wondering if the girl had actually managed to do something useful after all—but she was still digging through the charts, nowhere near the three screens that had booted themselves up in the center of the room.
    She glanced at him, frowning, and walked across to the console. He joined her, not sure why he suddenly felt a bit—uncomfortable. The computers hadn’t been on when the power had come back, he was sure of it. Now they were flipping through lines of data like slot machines, running through their programs at lightning speed.
    “What the hell is going on?” Everton mumbled. The Cyrillic letters flashed past