Welcome to the serialized audiobook Pandemic, Book 3 of the Infected Trilogy,

written by No. York Times bestselling novelist Scott Sigler, performed by Phil Gigante.

Pandemic is also available in print, e-book, and unabridged audiobook.

For links to purchase any version, visit scottisgler.com slash pandemic.

How it began.

For a hundred thousand years, the machine traveled in a straight line.

The creators had launched it into space along with many others, countless others.

The others also traveled in a straight line, but each one in a different direction.

It wasn't long, relatively speaking, before the machine could no longer detect the others,

before it could no longer detect the place from which it had come, before it could no longer detect the others, before it could no longer detect the place from

which it had come, before it could no longer detect the creators themselves. Alone, the

machine traveled through the void. It would have flown in that same straight line for

all eternity, were it not for a faint trace of electromagnetic radiation, known as a radio wave. Analysis was instant and

definitive. The radio wave was not naturally occurring. It was artificial, proof of existence

of a sentient race other than the creators. For the first time, the machine changed direction.

It moved toward the source of this signal, so it could

fulfill its sole purpose, find the species that generated the signal, then assist the creators

in wiping that species from the face of existence. As it traveled, the machine detected more

and more transmissions. It studied the signals, learned the languages, assigned meaning to the images.

In doing so, the machine defined its target, a race of small hairless bipeds that lived on a blue planet orbiting a yellow star.

Some 25 years ago, the machine reached Earth. Stored inside the machine were 18 small probes.

Each probe was about the size of a soda can, and each probe could cast over a billion tiny seeds adrift on the winds.

...