The Primus Labyrinth

by Scott Overton

  Sanity.

  Coherence.

  Stability.

  Survival?

  Need to do something? What is it?

  Breathe, yes. Swallow, yes. Fight down nausea. Open eyes? Not good. Ugly reddish blur—dark and menacing. Brain in a fog. World in a fog. Red fog, dark . . . .

  What was that? Hitting something. A wall? Yes. Vein wall. No, artery wall. Outward from the heart—that makes it an artery. Shouldn’t be hitting the wall. Should move: move arms and legs, head, hands. Move the ship. Move the ship!

  Groggy as hell. Arms feel like wood—marionette’s arms on strings. Hands have no grip. Got to stop Primus spinning and try to slow down again. What’s next anyway? The lungs? Nowhere to be extracted there. Better to run in forward orientation and ride it out. Turn around later.

  How long has it been? An eternity? Or only half?

  Is this real? Or only a dream . . . a nightmare.

  Horrible thought: what if that other life was the dream, and this the only reality?

  The thought of performing an experimental medical procedure on a woman without her knowledge was utterly repugnant to Hunter, but the faces of the others in the room made it clear they agreed with their leader. Their course of action was the lesser of two evils.

  Hunter couldn’t claim to be unbiased. He’d been violated by psychiatrists paid by his former employers, trusting that they were trying to cure him when they were only searching for evidence against him. Thankfully, he’d always had a clean bill of health, and the bastards had come across with the money. But he was still a victim.

  And so was she: this woman, their patient. Except she had people busting their asses trying to help.

  He sighed and sat up straight, but couldn’t look at Kierkegaard.

  “How strong is this . . . protein shell you were talking about?” he asked.

  Tyson gave a look toward his chief, received a nod, then cleared his throat.

  “Strong enough to hold together for most purposes, but nowhere near as strong as the ship itself. It can be damaged. The manipulator arms have to be able to poke through the coating, and then retract within it again. So the shell is able to heal itself to a point. However, hard contact with other objects is quite capable of tearing it, possibly beyond its ability to self-repair. Primus would be left with patches of exposed hull.”

  “And if that happens?”

  “If that happens . . . it’s only a matter of time. The white cells will attack.”

  The dull redness seems to be a bit brighter. Is that actual outside light coming in through the patient’s lungs, or is it only imagination? Why would there be light? Are they shining a probe, trying to find the ship?

  Ridiculous. Primus is the size of a virus—they’d never see it, never even try. Must be imagination. Or some kind of chemical reaction.

  Chemical reaction in the lungs. Oxygenation? Who knows what it looks like on a molecular scale?

  No way to be sure. Still too much speed. No visual resolution. Maybe the computer has packed it in.

  No, just going too fast. Is it time to slow down? What’s after the lungs . . . the legs . . . arms?

  Shit, no. Doesn’t work that way. Remember dive school—the classes on the circulatory system. After the lungs the blood needs another boost to carry it around the body, which means . . .

  Through the frigging heart again.

  Oh God.

  There it is again—the drumbeat, the sixty-times-a-minute cataclysm coming closer. Closer. Make it stop. Make it stop.

  Wrenching, twisting, shearing . . . no escaping it. The chair shaking, kicking . . . teeth-shattering vibrations building, growing . . . the worst torment still to come. Vibrating becoming bucking becoming hammering, jolting, jarring, concussion after concussion . . . mounting, swelling grotesquely like . . . feedback. That must be it: haptic stimulus feeding back on itself, growing terrifyingly out of control. Shaking like a straw in a tornado.

  Can’t stand it . . . can’t . . .

  Blackness . . . .

  . . . becoming grey. Dim. Dull.

  Where is this? What happened? The world has gone dark, blurred . . . tinged with red.

  The heart. Where is the heart?

  Gone through it. Must have blacked out and passed through the worst of it. Be thankful for small mercies. The haptic feedback was murderous. Kick somebody’s ass over that.

  How long ago? Seconds? Minutes? Hours?

  Assume only minutes.

  Why didn’t they break the connection and pull him out of here? Aren’t they monitoring? No way to know. Can’t think about that now. Time to turn the ship around again and slow it down. Could be the only chance to get out of the main trunk of the bloodstream. With ocean currents, a slower object near the edges stands a better chance of being drawn off into a side current or eddy. Here, that would be a lesser artery in an arm, or even a finger—somewhere the Primus could be found and possibly removed. Slim chance.

  Only chance.

  Shit. Hit the wall. Too tired for this. Bounced off a blood cell, then the wall again. Slam the thrusters to full. Stop the spin. Ignore the shuddering.

  Can see some definition now. Several huge red blood cells keeping pace, and something bigger. Pale. A white blood cell?

  It’s not going away.

  What’s that other movement? Something flickering, or flapping. Hard to make out. Something small and close . . . something peeling away from the ship.

  Oh shit. Big trouble. Very big trouble.

  6

  Two hundred miles to the north of Langley AFB a man made his way through the lower floors of the White House complex in Washington, DC.

  Behind his back, many of the inner circle called Gerard Mannis “The Silent Man” because, although always present at high-level meetings, he never spoke. Most of the people at those meetings didn’t know his real name, they only thought they did. The regular White House Staff could never have described him, they saw him so rarely.

  Mannis waited for a retinal scan to give him access, then entered a dark room and flicked on the light. It was not a large office, and spartan by some standards, but the few furnishings were good ones. He rarely used anything but the computer desk anyway. He did not have visitors here. The room was in one of the most remote sections of the complex and he liked it that way. It reinforced his sense of security to be surrounded by layers of rock and steel, with no windows that might permit someone to watch him or record his conversations with laser equipment. He was a creature of the hidden places, even when he walked in the light.

  He tried to sort through the events of the past few days in his mind while he waited for the computer to boot up. He keyed in a password. The machine accepted it, then asked for a second one. He typed that in. It returned a screen that warned the operator about the punishments for accessing government information without authorization, then it asked for a third password. He made a mistake typing it in, but the computer gave him a second chance. This time he gave the correct response, and the menu screen for his personal files began to appear. This final sequence, error included, was deliberate. If anyone provided the third password correctly on the first attempt, the machine would deny access and begin to erase all of its files.

  The subterfuge was typical of the man. His habits were a product of many years of working for some of the world’s most prominent men, both public and private, and operating invisibly within the circles of the most powerful. His few friends joked that he would order roast pork at a restaurant just so the waiter wouldn’t know he really wanted steak.

  When the computer was up and running, he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out what looked like a straight pin, the kind that manufacturers of dress shirts for men used too enthusiastically when packaging their shirts for sale. The likeness was intentional, but this wasn’t a pin he’d missed when unwrapping a fresh shirt. Ordinary pins didn’t include thousands of dollars worth of micro-circuitry and the
capability of recording sixty minutes of conversation.

  Mannis let the pin drop into a small circular tray connected to his computer. There was the mere hint of a hum as data was transferred. He could pluck the devices from the fabric of a chair, a curtain, a jacket sleeve, and within minutes be listening to the most sensitive secrets revealed in startling fidelity.

  He’d developed pretty good sleight-of-hand in placing and retrieving the things. This one had come from the office of the White House Chief of Staff and included a meeting Mannis had just attended, about the current crisis. He felt the irony in using such a marvel of micro-miniaturization to record a debate over deadly nanotechnology.

  Sometimes the smallest of things could pose the greatest of threats.

  The itch in his chest resolved itself into a powerful craving for a cigarette. He had quit ten years earlier, once he’d discovered how much you could learn about a person from their discarded tobacco, but the craving returned often. It had little to do with nicotine—it was simply the tangible form of a stronger inner craving: a craving for answers.

  He worked directly for the president of the United States, ostensibly as a secret security advisor, but in reality as a covert operative within the wheels of government. He reported to the president alone. Top staff tolerated his presence, but they didn’t like it. He knew that. It gave him no satisfaction, nor did it bother him in the slightest. He had been the only ‘unbribable’ in a special U.S./Mexican anti-drug unit, the only $500 suit in mega-corporate boardrooms, and the only infidel among multi-billionaire Arabs. He had grown a thick skin.

  Now he was beginning to regret how little he knew of the man he worked for. The relationship was only two months old. Before he accepted the position, he had done exhaustive research about his future employer; but facts could not reveal the depths of a man’s character, especially not a man in politics. That took time. That took living: day after day, through successes and failures, triumphs and tears, the former often revealing more than the latter. He didn’t have that kind of history with the president, and now he needed it.

  He peeled off his dark sports jacket, put it on a hanger, hung it on a rack in the far corner of the office, loosened his tie, and sat in front of the screen.

  He also knew frustratingly little about the bizarre situation the president now faced. Nothing that told him how to proceed. Earlier events had shaped the current crisis, no doubt, but it officially began when the president received a threatening message via the internet. Threat Day. Call it “T”. On T-Minus-One everything had been calm, or as calm as it ever got at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. By T-Plus-Three all hell had broken loose.

  The threat had arrived through White House servers, but so far had proved completely untraceable. It had come from more than two dozen separate, unconnected sources in seemingly random chunks of data that only pieced themselves into a coherent whole when all of them had been received in a proper time sequence.

  FBI computers had cracked nine of the sources so far, only to find more encrypted layers behind them, and every indication of a long such chain, including a half-dozen brilliant samples of misdirection. Eventually they would find the origin. Eventually was too long.

  At first the chief executive had dismissed the message—it was too fantastic. Bomb threats, trained snipers, or anthrax-tainted letters he could understand. A battery of deadly devices in an unsuspecting victim’s bloodstream was the stuff of science fiction. Not to be taken seriously. The few top-level people brought into the secret all agreed.

  Then they saw a woman’s little finger suffused with blood in a small, dark bruise. It had not been caught in a car door—she herself had no idea what had caused it, and they hoped she would never be told. It was a signal: a harmless, but undeniable proof that the preposterous scenario was not so preposterous after all.

  The bruise had appeared on the same day as the message, but she hadn’t told anyone about it right away. No-one made the connection until two days later—a whole forty-eight hours had been lost—and the president went ballistic, though not in her hearing. Then had come the nearly impossible task of mobilizing the resources of a chief executive without ringing alarm bells across a nation.

  But what resources? Who was equipped to deal with something so exotic?

  For the very first time, the Silent Man broke his silence, in a gathering of the most trusted few. He knew of a top secret project as incredible as the threat itself, and not on the radar of any of the nation’s press. The president had apparently heard of it but was still the hardest to convince, perhaps because he had the most at stake. He hadn’t even wanted Mannis involved in the case, suddenly acting like the parent of a kidnapped child who refuses to call the police. But the situation argued for itself: there was simply no other choice. Four days after the arrival of the threat the head of the project was briefing his team and hunting for a pilot.

  A sharp tone from the computer made him jump. He punched in a coded command. It was a transmission from Langley AFB about the project itself.

  The word Failure leaped from the screen.

  He slammed his hand on the desk and spun away.

  The technology was too damned new. It was maddening to have to risk so much on something so wholly untested, but there’d been no other choice. He knew little of science, but he did know about extortion. The government could never capitulate, which meant the only other option was to capture the perpetrators, interrogate them, and break them.

  The demands that had come with the threat could not be met until the upcoming G20 summit in just over two weeks. That span of time was a gift they must use to the fullest. But two weeks to find and crack a terrorist bloc no one had ever heard of? The FBI stood a better chance of stopping the drug trade.

  The project had to work. It wasn’t just the only way to thwart the extortion, it was also the only way to save the victim’s life. There was no guarantee the extortionists would destroy their lethal devices even if their demands were met. It was all too likely they didn’t even have the technology to do so, which meant this very special woman would continue to bear the seeds of a death that could be awakened at any time.

  He turned and looked again at the damning message on the screen.

  No, this failure could not be the end. The project team was a collection of geniuses. They would find a way.

  If they survived to complete their work.

  A sour burn in his gut told him the project was no longer a secret, and attempts would be made to stop it.

  A threat such as this could not be carried out without special assistance. Inside assistance at the highest level.

  With a shake of his head he realized that one of the many directions the evidence pointed was at the president himself. A bizarre idea, like pointing a gun at one’s own head and demanding a ransom. Yet, how many others had the means to pull off such a fantastic plan, including the necessary access to the victim herself? And there was the president’s reluctance to let Mannis become involved.

  Someone within the White House was dirty. All of his instincts said so. He had only days before the poison would take a heavy toll.

  # # #

  “You said the Primus has weapons.” Hunter’s stomach had been queasy at the thought of ravenous blood cells the size of buildings.

  “No, no! You can’t think in those terms,” Tyson had replied. “Remember that the Primus was created with medical purposes in mind. It has a very limited capacity for carrying cargo, either for taking samples or for delivering a payload of medication to a precise location. The ship only carries a payload of anticoagulant chemicals and plasmin to counteract the ADP deployed by the bombs—a weapon to prevent the formation of a blood clot. But of no use at all against the bombs themselves, nor against the defenses of the body.”

  “Then how else am I supposed to attack a bomb? Ram it with the sub?” Hunter asked.

  “I’m sure you could, and with enough force you might indeed be able to crack open t
he casing. However, that would allow it to fulfill its mission by spilling its cargo of ADP.”

  “OK, sorry. I’m still new at this.” He felt like an idiot for missing something so obvious. “So what, then? Almost anything we could use to attack the bombs would allow their chemicals to escape.”

  “You may yet be right,” Tyson acknowledged. “However, our team chose a method we believe has the best chance of success. Incineration.”

  Hunter's reaction was a stunned silence. Tyson had expected nothing else.

  “If you’ll look closely at this enlargement of the manipulator arms you’ll see that the one on the left is equipped with a special tip: twin electrodes a small space apart. The Primus' power system includes a device that acts like a microscopic capacitor. It is able to store up a powerful electrical charge that it can release in one quick burst, which will produce a white-hot spark between those electrodes. We hope it will be able to ignite the bomb and incinerate its cargo before it can do any harm.”

  “And not burn a hole through the patient’s blood vessel?” Hunter’s eyes were wide.

  “We believe the resulting heat would be contained by the surrounding plasma, especially if the bomb has already been swarmed by macrophages. If you have a better idea, Mr. Hunter, please let us know.”

  “No . . . no, I . . . I’m just having a hard time absorbing all this.” Hunter rubbed his face. “Are you sure it will work? Have you tested it?”

  “Only on a scale model, larger by several orders of magnitude,” Tyson reluctantly admitted. “The results were encouraging. Our real misgiving is not about the effectiveness of the burn or its danger to the patient, but something else I mentioned earlier: the behavior of electricity on a nano scale. Since it doesn’t flow like a current at that level, it may produce no spark.” He gave an embarrassed shake of his head.