The Primus Labyrinth

by Scott Overton

  “There. Two small channels that loop back around toward where the Primus went off course. If you follow them along a bit farther, this lower one leads to a small vein, then continues right alongside the artery we were using. Can you zoom in just a bit more?” He leaned into the screen and traced a finger over it. “Yes, you see? I’m sure those are tiny capillary connections with the artery, ahead . . . uh, upstream of the turn that Hunter missed. We could use that, couldn’t we?”

  Tamiko looked thoughtful.

  “It could work,” she muttered softly, rubbing a knuckle along her lower lip, “if Primus can go against the current.”

  “The arterial current?” Hunter asked doubtfully.

  “No, nothing that strong.” She shook her head and looked up. “The lymphatic system collects excess fluids and waste products, along with producing some specialized white cells. It’s somewhat like a second circulatory system, but with nowhere near the same velocity. Very small capillaries run from the arteries to the lymphatic vessels—a one-way flow, but not high-pressure.”

  She traced the faint lines showing on the screen. “As Kenneth said, you’d have to take the Primus out of the artery into one of these lymphatic vessels, and double back . . . this way, to the area of the artery before the turnoff that you missed. I don’t know which way the lymph current will be flowing, but it shouldn’t be very strong. The heavier going would be here, where you’d have to follow a capillary like this one against the current, back out into the artery. That might be tougher.” She searched their faces to see if they understood.

  “I follow you,” Hunter said. “Just how small would these capillaries be?”

  “A lot smaller than you’ve been using up to this point,” Tamiko replied, “But still with lots of room for Primus. More like . . . ”

  “A rat running up a sewer tunnel,” Gage finished for her. He drew a sour look from the others, and shrugged. “Except running uphill.”

  The pilot of the craft shook his head. “The question of current doesn’t bother me as much as just finding my way. Navigation looks like a nightmare. There aren’t any signposts to tell me if I’ve even turned into the right lymph channel, and from there it’s pure guesswork . . . calculations of speed and distance that might all be based on the wrong location. I could get the Primus so lost we’ll never get her out.”

  “No fear of that,” Kierkegaard interrupted. “We could remove a large-enough section of tissue surgically, without leaving much of a mark. Still, it does seem to involve rather large margins of error at every turn. Is there no other way?”

  Gage looked serious. “No other way except to extract the Primus with a needle and try to start over again. But . . .” He held up a hand for emphasis. “Once the extraction needle goes in, the route changes. Suddenly you’ve got a gaping hole punched through the artery wall, with fluids leaking out in every direction, probably impossible to navigate through. That’s unless we drive the ship well downstream of the bomb’s location, first. Of course, in both scenarios, with every minute it travels, its location becomes less and less certain. It’s your decision, Devon. Either way will be a bitch.”

  “Succinctly put, Kenneth.” The older man nodded. He folded his fingers together behind his back and stared hard at the screen, as if to persuade it to unlock its secrets. Then he turned away and took several slow steps away from them, toward the door. Before he reached it, he stopped and said, “Take the lymphatic system. Successful or not, it might teach us things that could prove useful in the future.” Then he allowed a trace of a smile to show on his face. “If this were going to be easy, they could have got anyone to do it.”

  # # #

  Hunter had been right: the navigation was a nightmare.

  Still steering by Tamiko’s verbal commands, his nerves were on edge within minutes. The capillaries were large in comparison to the Primus, but terribly small compared to the artery itself. Like trying to spot a manhole cover on a twelve-lane freeway at sixty miles an hour. Then, with no other references to guide them, they’d had to take the first one they found.

  It was a bad choice, leading forty-five degrees away from the direction they’d intended, an unfortunate fact they only determined later. The detour led to a fruitless two hours—ship’s time—of nearly aimless circling. The only bright note had been the ease of travel through the lymphatic vessels. There were occasional white cells, lymphocytes, big enough to nearly block the way, and the odd loose string of protein or other matter to avoid. But the current, even when contrary, was manageable.

  The visibility reminded Hunter of scuba diving in the Great Lakes after a spring storm: lots of particulate matter suspended in the liquid, creating conditions like a thin fog. It could have felt confining. Instead it was almost comforting in its familiarity.

  Good visibility or poor made no difference. In the end, the computer simply could not tell them where Primus was. The programming used a starting point in one particular lymphatic vessel, but the ship immediately went astray. Every step from then on was a false one. A roll of the dice would have been as effective.

  Finally, soaked with sweat, Hunter stabbed the kill switch, lifted the helmet from his head, and acknowledged defeat. No one said anything. Gage and Tamiko were uncharacteristically contrite. After a moment, she left to ask Kierkegaard to arrange another scan of the patient’s face to find the lost ship. It was an admission of failure that felt more like a betrayal of trust.

  Hunter felt a surge of sympathy for the unknown woman. Did she submit gracefully to all of these mysterious procedures, with no clue as to the real reason behind them?

  Who was she? His desire to know was becoming a powerful need, as if the fact of his traveling through her body created empathy that grew with each contact, each . . . violation. Was that it? Did he want to know who she was so he could apologize? Or was it more like a kind of kinship: he was working in her body, with her body, to try to cure it. How could he do that without knowing who she was?

  He wasn’t simply navigating a thing of struts and circuits through a foreign landscape. His mind was moving through flesh, the very essence of another human being. Could it be an invasion and a symbiosis at the same time?

  It was this possibility that made him insist on trying again with the Primus.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Gage stormed. “We just put the patient through another scan so we could find the Primus and remove it. Now you want to just get it lost again? Why in the world do you think this time would be any different?”

  Hunter had to lay all of his collateral on the line.

  “Look, the patient is still under sedation,” he said. “Keep her under for another ten minutes. Give me that long, and if I haven’t made any progress, we can take another scan and still get the ship out of there. That’s all I’m asking.

  “And . . . let me do this on my own. Without advice from out here.” He forced the last words out in a rush, and tried to ignore the look of venom from Tamiko. “If I get nowhere, then . . . write me off as a decision maker. Don’t trust my judgment anymore.”

  Gage’s face clearly showed that he never had. Yet, somehow, Kierkegaard had been convinced. Or perhaps it was simple desperation.

  So, Hunter went back in. He cleared his mind of distractions, trying to invoke a state of near-trance.

  And he found the way.

  Within four minutes, lab time, he had re-entered an artery. After another six, he’d brought the ship to rest in front of his destination: an almighty mammoth globe of manufactured death.

  14

  Mannis had been at the White House for nearly a day-and-a-half straight. He’d caught four restless hours of sleep sprawled in a thinly padded chair against the side wall of his office. Apart from unavoidable meetings, and an occasional change into a cleaner shirt, he’d spent almost all of his time at the computer or on the phone. He’d even taken his only two actual meals at his desk—submarine sandwiches brought over from the commissary.
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  The search had been fruitless. Searches, he corrected himself. He’d tried several angles. First, the technology. Who could’ve developed micro-miniature bombs with the necessary sophistication? An enemy nation? Several had technology industries, but had always focused their efforts on more traditional nuclear and biological technologies. There had been no indications of cutting-edge science like this. It wasn’t something many countries could have kept secret—their leaders could never have resisted crowing about it.

  There were still a handful of African countries that wavered in their attitude toward America, depending on the warlord-of-the week. None could have sustained sophisticated research. The two or three former Soviet republics with unfriendly dictatorships simply didn’t have the money. Cuba . . . well he, himself, had vacationed in Cuba last year, now that sanctions had been lifted. It was hardly ever considered a threat anymore.

  That left the freelance terrorists, most of them small and scattered. Even the last remnants of Al-Qaeda had fallen to bickering amongst themselves in the ten years since their last success of any significance. There were cells that still had some rich backers, and they might have been able to buy high-tech weaponry, but such weapons had to exist in the first place.

  His contacts within the CIA and the military—and his contacts were the best—said that neither the Russians nor the Chinese had succeeded in developing nanotechnology weapons of any kind. The Russian program had just lost its funding because of its lack of progress.

  His second approach had been to “follow the money”, a tried and true method of counter-espionage. Nanoscience of this caliber would take big money.

  He’d tapped into as many resources as possible to search for shell companies with the required connections: backers of dubious affiliation, shadow-links to prominent western research universities or possibly pharmaceutical companies. There were many. Most were known to the government, and tolerated, but none seemed to fit the profile he was looking for.

  The kind of weapons technology involved in this threat screamed of the military. Any private corporation with such abilities would have found a dozen ways of making profits from them that would far outweigh what a terrorist organization could pay.

  At least, that’s the way he saw it. Most of the president’s other advisors disagreed. They favored treating this event as a terrorist threat, in spite of Mannis’ objections. He had stopped objecting, and had gone to work on his own.

  What he had learned left him with a distasteful conclusion: the technology they were facing was most likely American. The financing behind it, almost certainly American as well.

  Which led to his third field of scrutiny: finding the bad apple.

  He searched for big money connections to the biggest players in White House circles. The result shamed him. All of them had secret bank accounts. Every one had questionable ties to corporations, lobby groups, rich eccentrics, or all of those. The search had been a challenge because all of the really powerful had learned how to cover their tracks well. His best efforts to pierce the veil any further had failed. He’d have had better luck penetrating the databanks of the former KGB.

  The numbers on his screen were blurring, becoming meaningless. It was time to go home. The long walk through the corridors to the parking garage felt like a defeat.

  The interior of his dark blue Impala sedan was a piece of home. In truth, he spent more waking time in the car than in his Arlington apartment. It had served him faithfully and faultlessly for eight years.

  Which was why he was caught so utterly off-guard when it left his control and became a hurtling projectile.

  He was trying to divert his mind from the frustrations of the day by leisurely scanning the view of the National Mall from his driver’s window, painted golden by the rays of the setting sun. He particularly enjoyed the view of the Lincoln Memorial at this time of day as he caught fleeting glimpses of it between the trees. He rolled slowly across 23rd Street, gazing south toward the familiar façade, seeing the Doric columns in his mind’s eye.

  As he was accelerating up the entry ramp onto the Roosevelt Bridge and drawing toward the curve, he eased his foot back on the gas pedal. Instead, the car continued to pick up speed toward a clumped pack of vehicles ahead.

  Thinking the linkage was sticking, he gave the pedal a sharp kick to free it, but that only raised the engine revs another thousand rpm. The pedal went down, but did not return.

  He stepped hard on the brake and the momentum threw him forward against his seat belt as his foot went straight to the floor. The brakes were gone. A surge of adrenalin shot through his body, and his throat clenched tight.

  There was a gap in the left lane. Without thinking, he wheeled over into it, then back right, and left again, dodging the line of moving vehicles, ignoring the blare of horns.

  A delivery truck suddenly appeared from behind on his left, merging from the Rock Creek Parkway onramp. He cut the truck off, evoking a squeal of protesting tires. He dodged far right again, up beside the curved guardrail, but there was no reprieve. An old beige Chevy close behind a moving van blocked his lane. There was nowhere else to go.

  At the last possible second, a gap opened up, and he took it with a wrench of the wheel. Had he clipped the Chevy? He thought so, but there was no time to dwell on it.

  He pulled right again to avoid a black Mercedes, but the guardrail was ending in a clump of overhanging trees, replaced by the two lanes of the onramp from Interstate 66.

  Frantically, he tried to downshift. The engine howled in protest, and then he was forced to shift up again to get ahead of oncoming traffic. With relief, he spotted a gap across both lanes that allowed him to quickly cut over to the outside guardrail again. Something in his brain said that it was the slowest lane—the safest place to be. Still, he was gaining on the line of traffic ahead much too quickly.

  Did he dare to shut off the engine? Or even throw it into Park? The transmission would be ruined, but that didn’t matter. Would it stop him? Or would it make him lose control, maybe cause someone to hit him from the rear before they could react? He didn’t know, but he was out of options. He switched off the ignition.

  Nothing happened.

  He was out over the river now, nearly into the back of a white Buick with at least three cars ahead of it. There was room beside him, in the middle lane. He took it, pissing off the driver of a green Lexus that suddenly appeared in his rearview mirror, blasting its horn as it wove around him on the left. He pulled over on its tail, up next to the center barrier, but it wasn’t where he wanted to be.

  A trace of a plan had formed in his mind. There was a short gap up ahead in the lane next to him, and possibly another forming to the right of that. He wheeled hard over, waited for a couple of seconds . . . .

  The outside lane wasn’t opening up. It wasn’t opening up. A brown SUV had gunned its way forward. It wouldn’t be out of the way before his runaway Impala would hit the low-slung red sports car ahead, climbing up onto it and its defenseless driver.

  In desperation, he downshifted again. He could only pray it would slow him just enough to provide extra seconds . . . allow the brown vehicle to get out of the way. The sound of the howling engine clawed at his spine. He couldn’t see past the bulky SUV in the outside lane. If there was another car behind it, he was out of luck. In front of him, the rear bumper of the sports car began to vanish behind his hood . . . .

  He threw the wheel over, somehow missing the tail of the SUV, and forcing a minivan not far behind to slam on its brakes. In a reflex action he hit his own brake pedal again. No response, and his back end nearly fishtailed, but he was next to the outside guardrail again—hopefully in a slower stream of traffic.

  Ignoring the protests of the engine, he tried to shift down into first gear. It wouldn’t go. Probably there was some kind of guard that prevented it above a certain engine speed. That left only one choice.

  Gritting his teeth, he moved the car onto the narrow paved s
houlder ribbon, gripped the wheel harder, and steered into the guardrail.

  Sparks flew, accompanied by a monstrous noise, and he had sudden visions of plunging through the rail and the wall, far down into the Potomac River.

  He’d hit the rail too hard. The car bounced off, and with a surge of panic he felt the back end start to stray to the left. Damned front-wheel-drive. Too goddamned hard to correct a skid.

  He clutched the wheel fiercely, and fought to get the Impala under control. Thankfully, the impact hadn’t triggered the side air bags.

  By now the car’s computer would probably be calling his roadside assistance company—signaling a problem, getting a satellite fix on his location, even alerting the White House. The swaying stopped. His heart pounded. Did he have the guts to try it again? Risk spinning sideways across three lanes of speeding traffic?

  No choice. There was another delivery truck just ahead and he was closing fast. He gulped a breath and slid the car over, but eased it more gently across the last few inches. The hellish grinding began again, and a seam tried to knock him away. He kept the wheel turned hard. It was working . . . he was sure it was working.

  He nearly lost his grip on the wheel as the car jolted over a piece of orphaned rubber tread from a truck tire. The shock steeled his determination, and he pushed the car harder against the shredder-like panels of the railing. Through the chaos of noise and sparks he dimly registered other cars veering around him. They were no longer part of his world—his world was the car and the guardrail; the guardrail and the car.

  The sedan began to buck as the engine fought for life. Finally, endless seconds later, it gave up the battle, coughed, and died. The assault on his ears faded. He gulped for air. With only a quick glance back, he threw open the door and staggered around the car to the railing, nearly retching into the river below. It wasn’t the first time he had faced death, but the aftereffects of adrenaline left him trembling and weak.