Pandemic (26 page)

“Twice,” Clarence said.

“The vaccine on its way to Black Manitou?”

“It’s not a vaccine,” Clarence said. “But yeah, it’s on the way.”

“Good. I’ve seen reports from Yasaka and Tubberville. The task force is compromised. I want to hear it from you, Otto — what are the odds of this thing being fully contained?”

Clarence closed his eyes. He felt for the chair, sat back down. Murray was the hangman, and he was giving Clarence just enough rope to make the noose. Murray did not play games. He wouldn’t hesitate to put the entire task force on the bottom if it meant stopping the infection’s spread. That Murray asked him — not Tubberville, not Yasaka, but
him —
was a high honor, a mark of ultimate trust; trust that Clarence Otto would tell the truth no matter what the cost.

“The odds are zero,” he said. “Margaret and Doctor Feely both think the genie is out of the bottle and we can’t put it back in. Even if their inoculant works, there’s no way they can make enough in time to stem the tide.”

Clarence didn’t have to see Murray to know the old man’s head dropped, that he probably rubbed at his eyes as he tried to deal with the news.

“Damn,” the director said. “I was truly hoping it wouldn’t come to that.”

That was as close as Murray Longworth would come to an apology. And why should he apologize? He’d made the right call. Command meant that you put people at risk. Sometimes, you sent them out knowing full well they wouldn’t come back.

“Had to be done, sir,” Clarence said. “Yasaka and Tubberville might surprise us, but you need to prepare for the worst.”

“I’ll make arrangements,” Murray said quickly, which meant he’d already mapped out a contingency plan. He’d likely had that plan in place before he’d ever sat in the living room and asked for Margaret’s help.

“Now the hard question,” Murray said. “How about you and Margaret? Are you …”

That was a first: Murray didn’t know what to say. The almost expression of actual sentiment was almost touching.

“Negative so far,” Clarence said. “So’s Feely. If the shit hits the fan, we
must
get them out of here so they can continue their work.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Murray said sharply, an automatic rebuke. Then, softer: “You know I can’t let anyone who’s been exposed fly back to the mainland.”

“Then keep her at sea,” Clarence said. “Has the
Coronado
followed orders to steer clear of any other task force ships and personnel?”

Murray fell silent. The lack of response answered Clarence’s question: the
Coronado
remained an infection-free place to stash Margo and Feely.

Finally, the director spoke. “SEAL Team Two isn’t a taxi service for your wife, Otto. The SEALs are my insurance policy. If the command structure of any ship becomes infected, their mission is kill those people. You think I’m going to take a chance that they could become compromised just to keep Margaret alive?”

Clarence closed his eyes. All this talk of life and death — at least he was no longer in danger of falling asleep.

“Sir, Margaret is too great an asset to waste. She’s working on more than just the inoculant. If you don’t want to lose her, then give me direct contact with the
Coronado
. If things go bad, I can get her off the
Brashear
.”

“And what if she’s infected and doesn’t know it? Better yet, what if
you’re
infected, and you use the
Coronado
to shit all over the mainland?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to gamble.”

Murray huffed, a sound that turned into a laugh of disgust. “Gamble.”
Gamble
with a disease that can make us extinct?”

“That’s right,” Clarence said. “You know Margaret is worth the risk.”

He waited through a long pause.

“All right, Otto. I’ll get you in contact with the
Coronado
. But the ride is for a
clean
Margaret Montoya. If you find out she’s infected …”

Clarence licked his suddenly dry lips.
For better or for worse
.

“Director, if it comes to that, I’ll do us both.”

“Good man,” Murray said. “I’ll be in touch.”

Margaret double-checked the time in her visor’s HUD, just to confirm what she already knew; yes, it had been only eight hours since she’d injected
two
microscopic hydras into the body of Eric Edmund.

They had multiplied.

Samples taken from his spinal column showed a few hydras, as was to be expected. What surprised her was Edmund’s blood: there were already
thousands
of them in his circulatory system. They thrived in there, reproducing at a rate that defied logic, even strained the limits of her imagination. The hydras reprogrammed stem cells to make more hydras, which then reprogrammed additional stem cells, creating an exponential population increase. If he had thousands inside of eight hours, within twenty-four he would have
millions
.

Then what? Would they keep reproducing until there were billions?
Trillions
? Would the hydra population in his body expand until it overwhelmed him, until it started to damage him?

She had no way of knowing, other than to just watch Edmund.

What
were
the hydras? Were they friend? Foe? Or were they neither, just a parasite that used the human body? And if she dared to hope, what if they weren’t a parasite at all — what if they were symbiotic, something that could live inside the human body without harming it while at the same time protecting against the infection?

The hydras had kept Candice Walker from becoming one of the infected, from becoming
converted
, but that didn’t mean the new microorganisms were harmless, purely beneficial things. They found their way into the host’s brain — the human brain hadn’t exactly evolved with room for passengers.

Charlie Petrovsky had finally been consumed by the black rot. Other than a pitted skeleton, there was nothing left of him to study. Complete liquefaction just three days after death.

Candice Walker, on the other hand, still showed no sign of the infection’s rapid decomposition.

Margaret eye-tracked through her HUD menus. She directed a microscope to lock onto one of the hydras in Edmund’s blood sample. Its waving tendrils reached out, blindly feeling for something to grab, to pull itself forward.

Walker’s stem cell therapy had introduced something new, something the Orbital hadn’t encountered before. Her infection had modified some of her normal stem cells, which probably produced the crawlers Margaret had seen so many times before. But some of the hacked stem cells must have had that artificial chromosome — was that what produced the hydras? A variant so different that it didn’t recognize the original crawlers as “self”?

The new hydra strain reproduced at a phenomenal rate, but so far didn’t seem to damage the host in any way. Walker had only had the hydras for three or four days, at most — there was no telling what might have happened had they continued to grow inside of her.

So many unknowns, but there was one fact that Margaret couldn’t deny: the hydras secreted a catalyst that killed off earlier strains of the infection — strains that damaged the human host, even killed it.

“You’re protecting your environment,” she said to the microscopic image on the HUD, as if it could hear her, as if it could think about her words. “Walker was your world … when she died, most of your kind died as well. You’re something
new
. You aren’t a means to the Orbital’s ends at all, are you?”

The hydra didn’t answer. It kept reaching, kept pulling.

Margaret felt her stomach churning. One too many of Tim’s Adderalls? The excitement at discovering a new form of life? Or was it that the hydras’ potential went
way
beyond Tim’s yeast? Walker’s pustules had contained hydras, hydras that might become an airborne contagion spreading from person to person, all across the globe, promising permanent immunity to the Orbital’s infection.

A different kind of pandemic.

Margaret shook her head. Too risky. Too many unknowns for something that had been created, after all, by the Orbital’s alien technology.

An alert popped up in her HUD: Tim Feely was calling her. She eye-tracked to the icon and connected. His face appeared in a small window in the upper-left corner of her visor.

“Margaret, I’m finished processing the samples taken from the three new victims. Can you join me in the analysis module? I think you better take a look.”

“On my way,” she said.

Tim’s face blinked out.

So little time …

Tim knew that if he made it out of this alive, he was changing careers. Janitor, maybe. At a grade school. Mopping floors, scrubbing out toilets, cleaning up puke — he’d be the happiest employee around.

Two doctorates. A lifetime of advanced learning. His work on Black Manitou had been a part of one of the most revolutionary projects in human history, and now here he was neck-deep in another. And where did all that put him? Right in the crosshairs of disaster.

“Tim? Hello?”

His head snapped right, toward Margaret. Clarence was with her; he’d suited up for once, decided to join the party.

Margaret smiled at him. “Tim, you okay?”

He wasn’t. He never would be again.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” He wanted to rub the crust from his eyes, but the goddamn suit meant he couldn’t touch them.

“Looks like our three new hosts give us a mixed bag of infections,” he said. “Brain biopsy shows crawler material in Nagy. He’s already converted, obviously. The samples from Chappas show signs of those dandelion seeds you documented in Detroit, so it looks like he’s on his way to becoming a puffball.”

Margaret nodded slowly. “All right. And what about Austin?”

Conroy Austin, the boy who had cried right up until he’d been gassed.

“His body is changing on a scale unlike anything you documented before,” Tim said. “Your earlier research showed the infection seems to concentrate on specific areas of the host’s body, so the altered stem cells are packed in tight. Like a supply chain — the closer the factories are together, the faster and easier it is to combine the parts, right?”

Margaret nodded.

Tim called up an image and shared it with both Margaret’s and Clarence’s headsets.

“The infection is hitting Austin
everywhere
, and all at once. The poor bastard. It isn’t just rewriting his stem cells … it’s rewriting
him
.”

“To make what?” Clarence asked. “Maybe that encased man that Walker drew, could that be happening to Austin? We saw a man like that in the
Los Angeles
’s nose cone, too. We’ve got video of it.”

Margaret reached out, started grabbing and poking at the air. She fumbled her way through a directory that only she could see, then she made a tossing gesture Tim’s way. The video popped up on his helmet screen. Tim recognized it: the encased man from the sub’s lab.

“We already watched this,” Tim said. “There’s no way to figure out what that covering material is, not from video of this quality.”

“Don’t look at the cocoon,” Margaret said. “Look at the temporomandibular joint.”

Clarence leaned in. “The
what
?”

“His jaw hinge,” Tim said as he reached out, zoomed in on that part of the video. With the poor lighting, the glowing bits of particulate floating in the way, at first the body looked perfectly normal. But … something was off. He adjusted the contrast, making the dark areas absolutely black, the brighter areas varying shades of light gray.

Tim saw what Margaret had seen. “Holy
shit
. The TMJ, his mandible, they’re
massive —
they look too damn big for his head. And the masseter … it’s at least four times normal size.”

The man’s entire skull looked
distorted
, like a sculpture more finished on one side than on the other.

Margaret reached out again, adjusting what she saw. “This sailor, he was getting bigger.”

“Impossible,” Tim said. “He can’t get visibly
bigger
if he’s not ingesting massive amounts of food. Even if the infection is hot-wiring his system somehow, it can’t make something out of nothing.”

“He doesn’t have to eat, at least not in the way one usually does … he’s not alone in there.” Margaret again shared what she was seeing.

Tim looked at the new image. She had zoomed in on the torso. Tim saw her focal point: two left hands. There was another body under the membrane. Was Margaret saying that one person was
absorbing
the other?

“Fuck this,” Tim said. “Honestly? I don’t even want to know what’s going on in there.”

Margaret turned to Clarence — she, apparently,
did
want to know.

“Clarence, from a military perspective, what do you think it could be? Clark has triangles, which turn into hatchlings that can build gates. Crawlers turn people into killers that can protect the hatchlings. Puffballs are for mass infection. What role would could this new thing play?”

Clarence shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you.”

Margaret sneered. “Then
guess
, goddamit. You’re the
soldier
, remember?”

Tim leaned back, stayed quiet. There was so much emphasis on the word
soldier
it clearly had a special meaning for the two of them.

Clarence raised his eyebrows, nodded, an expression that said
you got me there
.

“Okay, let me think this through out loud,” he said. “Believe it or not, I’m not that worried about a new gate. A dozen satellites have been launched since Detroit, and their only job is to scan for gate signatures. If the infection gets out and the hatchlings try to build one, we’ll know in plenty of time to blow the hell out of it. Besides, Murray is pretty sure they
can’t
build one without the Orbital. It acted as some kind of telepathy hub, letting them work together like ants in a colony.”

Tim focused on the image of the two left hands. Did one of them look … shriveled?

“So you think whatever is forming under that membrane might act as a new communication device,” he said. “A walking cell-phone tower or something?”