Virus

A South Pacific typhoon batters the salvage tugboat Sea Star, captained by the drunken, debt-ridden Robert Everton. After the storm tears their tow loose and strands them, they spot a derelict Russian science vessel — the Akademik Vladislav Volkov — drifting nearby. With Everton calculating salvage rights, his crew, including chief engineer Kit Foster and navigator Steve Baker, board the ship to investigate.

The Volkov is a charnel house. Empty stations, dried blood, scattered corpses — but the engines and the lights are still on. They find a single survivor: a terrified Russian officer named Nadia, hiding in the hold. She tells them an alien electrical intelligence boarded the ship by traveling down a transmission cable from the Mir space station. The Russian crew tried to fight it and lost.

The intelligence regards humans as a virus and is building itself a body. It harvests dead crew members and ship machinery, fusing flesh and steel into murderous cyborg constructs. Smaller drone machines skitter through the corridors; severed limbs and eyes are wired into ship systems. The Volkov is no longer a ship — it is a weapon being assembled to wipe out humanity.

The cyborgs come for the salvagers. Several of the tug's crew are killed, dragged into the dark, or absorbed into the growing organism. Everton, greedy and unraveling, tries to bargain with the intelligence and is impaled by it for his trouble. The largest construct — a towering, half-skeletal patchwork built from the Russian captain — pursues Foster, Baker, and Nadia through the ship.

Foster realizes the intelligence is fused into the Volkov itself; the only way to kill it is to take the ship down. They rig the engine room to overload. Cornered in the engineering deck, Baker uses an industrial crane to impale the lead construct on a steel beam. Foster, Baker, and Nadia escape into a small craft as the Volkov detonates behind them, the alien dying with the wreck. The film closes on the three survivors drifting in the dark Pacific, the ocean lit orange by the burning ship.