Then a splash of colour on the ground caught her attention, and she pulled up, causing Adam and Ellen to bump into her, sending her reeling. A body lay in the ruins ahead of them, its limbs twisted into strange shapes. The bacteria on the planet were slowly consuming the corpse, causing its skin to sag. Its eyes seemed to bulge as the lids shrank back around the eyeballs, and the mouth was pulled unnaturally wide, showing its teeth in a gruesome smile. It looked like a wax figure that had been put in a hot oven.

Adam swore, and Ellen gasped. Mitzi turned to the right and tried to usher her team away from the body, but they gathered around it, captivated by the macabre spectacle.

“Did a Cymic kill it?” Mir asked. Her voice was low and anxious, but it had lost the panicky tone she’d had in the ship.

Mitzi shook her head. “They’ll always convert their victims, if they can. They see death as a waste. Most likely, she was killed by accident—either friendly fire or a building collapsed on her. Let’s keep moving.”

The team hesitated, riveted by the sight in front of them, and Mitzi sighed. Be patient. You’re used to this sort of stuff, but death is new to most of them. “Come on. I doubt this will be the last body we find.”

She was right. Barely twenty paces on, they found another corpse lying over a collapsed signpost, strangely bubbled. The eyes had disappeared entirely, and in their places were pools of thick black goop. Dark froth had dribbled from the open mouth and dried on the brickwork below. A small black hole in his temple, also filled with black, was the only other mark on the dead man’s face. Mitzi poked at him with her gun, and his head lolled. “This was one killed during conversion.”

“You mean—”

“Yeah. Look at that black stuff. A parasite had gotten him, so one of his colleagues shot him before he could turn completely. Trust me, it was a merciful thing to do.”

Again, the crew seemed to want to linger, but Mitzi set off at a brisk walk, forcing them to jog to catch up to her. She didn’t want them spending any more time in the area than they had to.

“The stairwell’s about twenty paces ahead of you,” Nic said. “It’ll take you on the most direct route to the reactor.”

Mitzi wasn’t looking forward to leaving the surface of the planet. Its sickly grey light and the broken remains of the buildings weren’t welcoming in any sense, but they were at least safer than what lurked in the darkness below her feet.

Her team seemed to feel the same way. They huddled more closely together as Mitzi led them through the hollowed-out shell of a tower. When they came out the other side, she saw the stairs they’d been aiming for.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

The structure opened out of the ground like a yawning mouth, several meters wide and with a concrete roof that had mostly survived the attack. A dirty sign tacked to the lip of its roof read West Fifth Quadrant. There were still lights fixed to its walls and ceiling, but without power, the stairs disappeared into the darkness after the fifth step.