Pandemic (19 page)

Melted crawlers … no rot … no growths in the brain …

The observations pointed to one obvious conclusion, a
glorious
conclusion.

“Candice was infected by crawlers, but
not
under their control,” Margaret said. “The hydras are clearly different, and we have to assume they stopped the crawlers from colonizing her brain.”

“Calm down, Red Hot Momma,” Tim said. “You look like you might pass out. Take it easy.”

She turned on him, so fast she almost stumbled.

“I
can’t
calm down, Tim. Don’t you see what this means?”

Margaret drew in a sharp breath, held it, tried to stop her body from shaking. For years she had dealt with the hard truth that there was no known method of preventing the alien infection from penetrating new hosts, from hijacking stem cells to make whatever bioparts it needed. If her new hypothesis about Candice Walker was right, there might finally be a way.

“Your engineered yeast,” she said. “You’ve taken genetic information out of the crawlers, put it into the yeast. You can get your yeast to produce the catalyst that kills the crawlers.”

“Sure,” Tim said. “But like I told you, the catalyst kills the yeast as well. So it’s a dead end.”

“
Was
a dead end. The hydras survive an environment that kills the crawlers, Tim. If we can figure out
how
they survive it—”

“Maybe we can put that survival trait in the yeast,” Tim finished, his eyes wide with renewed energy. “Then we could generate huge colonies of yeast that would produce the catalyst … an endless supply of something that kills crawlers dead.”

Margaret reached out, grabbed Tim’s shoulder. If they weren’t in the suits, she might have kissed the man.

“Tim, I think the hydras made Candice
immune
to the infection, to the crawlers, to all of it. We still don’t know what the hydras are, what else they can do to a host, but if we can figure out how they survive when crawlers die, and if we can reproduce that ability … maybe we can make
everyone
immune.”

Chief Petty Officer Orin Nagy didn’t know much about the original infection.

Like everyone else in the world, he’d been glued to the news when that disaster hit. He’d watched reports of Detroit’s blistering end and the aftermath that followed. He’d heard the endless public service announcements hammering home the acronym “T.E.A.M.S.” Like everyone else, he knew the methods of transmission: get infected by a spore, or get licked — yes, literally
licked —
by a host.

But since then, God had created new vectors.

Orin didn’t have to lick people. All he had to do was
touch
them. He didn’t know how he knew this, he just knew. Touch them, and a few days later, they would be his kind.

An even greater illustration of God’s perfection and power? He didn’t have to always touch people directly — if he touched a surface, then someone else touched it shortly after, that alone could be enough to spread God’s love.

Soon, the humans would come for him, try and make him take the cellulose test, but he wouldn’t be where they expected him to be. It was time to wander. Surrounded by a ship full of people who wanted to kill him, he would stay out of sight as best he could. He would avoid attracting attention.

The longer he went without being caught, the more people he could touch.

Before Tim could find out how the hydras survived when the crawlers melted, he had to identify what, exactly, melted those crawlers.

To solve this puzzle, he had to find the key differences between two human corpses. Both bodies had come from an identical environment: the
Los Angeles
. Although there were significant variables — one was male, the other female, with additional differences in size and genetic background — for all intents and purposes those two bodies were the same. One had suffered the infection’s final-stage brain modification, the other had not.

That made Tim’s job theoretically simple: all he had to do was identify something in Candice Walker that was not in Charlie Petrovsky.

He stood alone in the analysis module, running tests on blood, tissues, organs, even bone. Chemical breakdown, mass spectrometry, DNA analysis, any test he and Margaret could think of for which they had the equipment onboard — and they had a
lot
of equipment.

She checked in with him every fifteen to twenty minutes, a hyper Latina with the newfound energy of a chipmunk on meth. She was working with the hydras, trying to figure out what they were. Just another Orbital weapon? Or, possibly, something else.

Margaret wasn’t the same person who had arrived, what, just a scant fifteen
hours
earlier? She’d shown up ready to work, certainly, but not like this: now she had a nuclear reactor for a soul that made her tireless, unceasing.

Tim wanted her more than ever. He’d worshipped Margaret Montoya from afar, mesmerized by the intellect he’d seen reflected in the words and recordings of her Detroit research. The word
genius
didn’t do her justice.

His visor display started flashing an icon: the blinking, red exclamation point of an alert. Tim eye-tracked to it, called it up.

Four hours after he’d begun his comparative analysis between Petrovsky and Walker, the
Brashear
’s computer had identified a significant discrepancy in mass spectrometry. Walker’s blood showed a massive spike of an
unidentified chemical compound that wasn’t present in Petrovsky, not even in trace amounts.

Whatever it was, she had a
ton
of it in her system. Was this compound related to the hydras? Was it the reason the hydras lived and the crawlers died? Or was it why Walker didn’t suffer the black rot?

And why was this mystery chemical so concentrated in her blood?

Her blood …

Petrovsky’s tissue …

“Fuck,” Tim said. “Why didn’t I think of that before?”

He activated his comms. “Margo, you there?”

She answered immediately. “Yes, Tim. You okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Shittyballs, I’m way more than
fine
. I need you to find the least-rotted bit of Petrovsky.”

“Uh, sure,” she said. “You want to tell me why?”

“You’ll see soon enough.”

At least he
hoped
she would.

The stateroom felt ice cold, but Steve Stanton couldn’t stop sweating.

He sat at the tiny table, drinking Diet Coke and eating Doritos, hoping his two laptops would give some signal.
One hundred and ten million dollars …
was that investment sitting dead on the bottom of Lake Michigan?

Bo Pan spent his time either sleeping or on his cell phone. Steve didn’t know who Bo Pan was talking to, but the conversations revolved around more aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces than one man could possibly have. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Bo Pan was sharing information about Steve’s work, getting details about the activities of the nearby navy ships — Steve and the
Platypus
had their code; Bo Pan and his handlers obviously had theirs.

“Steve, it is late,” Bo Pan said. “You told me your machine would contact us an hour ago.” The old man lay in his bunk, spit cup in hand, bushy eyebrows framing black, emotionless eyes.

“Relax,” Steve said. He tried to sound confident. “It might be staying below because of high levels of navy activity. Sometimes this is more an art than a science.”

Bo Pan picked his nose. “I see,” he said as he wiped a booger on his jeans. “Then perhaps we should have spent all that money to get you an art degree.”

The coldness of Bo Pan’s voice made Steve swallow, which drove a flake of Dorito into his throat. Steve tried to wash it back with Diet Coke, but coughed before he could get it down. He managed to turn his head and spray caramel-colored foam onto the wall instead of onto his computers.

Bo Pan huffed. “Breakfast of champions. I can’t wait to see how you handle your dinner.”

Steve managed to flip the old man the bird as he brought his coughing under control.

Bo Pan seemed … different. He’d always acted like a beaten-down laborer, a man who’d spent his life taking shit from everyone. Since the
Mary Ellen
left the harbor, however, he seemed more self-assured, in control.

No, no … Steve was just stressing out, imagining things. Bo Pan was Bo Pan. Had to be. It was Steve who had changed. In all his years of work, pursuing whatever development he thought might add to the
Platypus’s
effectiveness, he’d felt invulnerable. He’d felt
brilliant
. None of that had been real. This, however, was reality: a boat that never sat still, an old man watching his every move, a machine that refused to respond, and a nation’s investment in him about to go bust.

He didn’t feel brilliant anymore. He felt incompetent.

Bo Pan pushed himself up on one arm.

“Steve, it seems you are telling me you don’t know where your creation is, but I know you cannot be telling me that.”

A coldness in that voice, and
steel
. No
sorry, sorry
this time. Steve shivered.

“The sensor algorithms determine where the
Platypus
goes, so it isn’t necessarily moving in a straight line,” he said. “If it has to go around or through anything, that causes delays, and if it sees any American UUVs or divers, it knows to swim away and come back later. Could be any minute now. Or it could be hours. The UUV is programmed to
not
be seen, Bo Pan. I can’t—”

A laptop let out a beep. Bo Pan sat up straighter. Steve put the chips aside, brushed his orange-dust-covered fingertips against his shirt, then pulled the laptop closer.

A tweet.

Steve sagged in his seat, felt the anxiety flood away in a crashing waterfall of relief.

“It’s the
Platypus
,” he said. “It’s signaling.”

He watched a string of tweets come pouring in. Seemingly normal language — mostly about “hot bitches” and “keg stands” — told him the story.

Bo Pan leaned in. “Is it working?”

Steve smiled. “Hell yeah, it is.” The
Platypus
had found the location. Steve read the tweets, trying to figure out what had taken so long. There it was:

Navy ROVs.

Holy
shit
, it was really happening.

It wasn’t just the ROVs … the
Platypus
had found a big object on the bottom.
Too
big.

“Something is off,” he said. “When the alien object came down, there was enough observed data to calculate its size as roughly equivalent to a small refrigerator, like the kind I had in my dorm. But the
Platypus
found something exponentially larger.”

Bo Pan nodded slowly. His eyes seemed electric.

“Do you have pictures?”

Steve huffed. “Does a bear shit in the woods?”

The old man’s forehead wrinkled with confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“Yes, I have pictures.”

“Show me,” Bo Pan said. “And prepare yourself. There is some other information I have not told you.”

Steve sighed. The old man was being cryptic. Whatever.

That feeling of failure faded away. Steve had done it — he felt strong once again, ready for the next step.

The
Platypus
couldn’t send straight video. That was too much bandwidth; even if his encryption held, the size of that signal and the location it came from could alert the navy ships to the
Platypus
’s presence. Instead, his machine took low-bandwidth snapshots — one frame every twenty seconds — and routed each one through a different secure server.

“Here we are,” Steve said, and called them up on the screen.

The first picture showed something green, blurry. That meant it was a pale color, brightly reflecting the low-light camera’s illumination.

“Can’t make that out,” Steve said. “Lemme get the next one.”

He called the image up, and froze: the face and torso of a corpse.

A sailor. A
navy
sailor.

Puffy face. Black sockets where the eyes had once been, eyes probably eaten by fish that had also picked at the skin, tearing holes and leaving strands of flesh dangling weightless in the water. Body bloated, so swollen it
had burst the zipper at the belly and neck, leaving only a bit near the collar still fastened. Pale skin glowed an obscene white-green.

“Bo Pan, what is this?”

“More pictures. Let me see.”

The next image showed a long shape. Gray, perhaps? The one after that, yes,
gray
, large, maybe ten feet tall or even taller, rising up at an angle. Definitely artificial.

When Steve saw the next picture, he felt his heart drop into his stomach. He realized, finally, just how dangerous this game was.

The gray image rose up at an angle. Flat, with slightly curved sides. At the top, a white, three-digit number glowed a bright green.

The number: 688.

“A submarine sail,” Steve said. “Is that … is that a
nuclear
sub?”

Bo Pan leaned in closer, so close Steve could smell his unwashed odor. The old man seemed … gleeful.

“The
Los Angeles
,” Bo Pan said. “There was a battle. It sank.”

Steve hadn’t asked questions, hadn’t tried to understand the situation; when Bo Pan said the word
location
, Steve had jumped. How naive. How
stupid
.

The next picture came up. The
Platypus
was moving closer to the sub. Another corpse. Some kind of bulbous, sausage-shaped metal construct behind the sail, bent and torn, a man-size round door still sealed but the construct itself ripped open. And there, stuck on that jagged metal, a leg — just a leg, no body. Inside the ruined construct, Steve saw an inner hatch sitting open.