The Primus Labyrinth

by Scott Overton

  “Like a sudden fright?”

  “Yes, I suppose. A sudden fear for his life might produce a result like that. In fact, I’m not sure what else could.”

  “That still doesn’t explain anything. What could frighten him so badly in there? He knows he’s not physically involved. His life cannot actually be in danger.”

  Bridges raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps that distinction isn’t so easy to remember in there.”

  The director leaned forward. “I have a feeling we’ll only learn the cause when he decides to tell us. In the meantime, is he lucid. . . aware of what’s happening around him?”

  “He’s not catatonic. Anything he knows about what shocked him so badly, he’s keeping to himself.”

  # # #

  Hunter lay in his bed, his eyes rigidly open but not focused on anything. All of his focus was inward.

  Flashes from the past weeks burst randomly in his mind. He couldn’t stop them, couldn’t control them in any way. A grotesque slide show run amok, it had a dreamlike quality that suggested the subconscious rather than the conscious mind—his brain trying to make sense of what he’d experienced.

  Incongruously interwoven through the macabre montage was the image of a hummingbird. Sometimes darting like an arrow from fragment to fragment, sometimes sewing the scraps together with golden filigree wire, sometimes frozen in flight as if pulled by pungent nectars in opposing directions.

  That one was easy to interpret: it was his mind’s attempt to express time dilation within the world of Primus. From one perspective it was an accelerated movie, like time-lapse photography; from another it was more like a slow-motion performance with each frame distinct.

  He couldn’t bring order to the other images, but he began to sense certain themes—bombs amid a chaos of bloodstream clutter, abrupt swings of emotion, Primus off-course yet finding its way, and the sudden sharp fragments of unfamiliar memories.

  A conclusion solidified in his mind.

  He had been watched not by his companions or their machines, and not by any stranger or mole. He had been watched by the patient herself. Her body had been aware of him all the time.

  He couldn’t know whether or not her conscious mind was involved. That seemed unlikely. Would she have allowed such a bizarre. . . infestation of her body? Wouldn’t she have confronted Kierkegaard and the others?

  The confusing memories he had somehow tapped into must be hers. The emotions, too. He had unwittingly penetrated not only her body, but her mind; and that realization shocked him deeply. He felt dirty. A voyeur.

  The shame of it was made even worse because a bond had formed between them. There was no denying it. He truly cared for her. When he thought ahead to missions, he didn’t just picture arteries and organs and parades of cells, but a living, breathing woman. His heart hurt to know of her pain.

  How much did she know? Was she aware only of Primus making its way through her bloodstream or did she sense his presence, too, as his mind foraged through her hidden places—the most invasive violation of all.

  Surely she would have refused to continue, or at least demanded to know this interloper, prying into the secret corners of her psyche.

  So she must not know, not consciously. It must be only her unconscious mind tracking her microscopic defender and its improbable puppeteer. Perhaps even aiding them. Did that signify approval?

  The answer to that question went to the core of his own pain, and the personal rules of conduct forged from it. With a scarred psyche of his own, how could he willingly breach the mental sanctuary of another without her permission?

  That was the key.

  He had no means to contact her conscious brain. He would have to take her assistance as implied consent.

  Wearily he rolled to the side of the bed and sat up.

  He would go on. He had to. And he would do it with her help.

  42

  “It’s a phenomenal achievement.” Kierkegaard was sincere in his praise.

  “If it works,” Gage replied.

  Tyson looked pleased and slightly pink.

  Hunter returned his eyes to the diagram on the projection screen. The shape of Primus was totally familiar, yet he’d forgotten about the special radar pods at either end of the craft. They hadn’t been active. Now they would be.

  “How confident can you be that the sensors won’t read radar reflections off objects outside her body?” Tamiko wanted to know.

  “The timing of the responses is key,” Tyson answered. We believe we’ve finally got enough computer power available that we’ll be able to distinguish the nanosecond differences between a signal bounced off a leg bone and, say, the metal rail of her bed.”

  “Nanosecond?” Hunter smiled.

  Tyson nodded. “Yes. Possibly even yactosecond, to get any meaningful results while navigating within an organ, for instance.”

  “Yactosecond.” The pilot shook his head. “If it was anybody but you, Skylar, I’d swear you were pulling my leg. How will this help me? Will the radar identify the silicon of the bomb casings?”

  “That’s the goal, but there’s no guarantee of that right away. We think we’ve isolated the radar signature of the silicon but there are other elements that might give us false readings.” The scientist’s smile had faded.

  “It’s not perfect yet, but what do you want?” Gage bristled. “This is cutting edge stuff. Way ahead of anybody else in the field.”

  “Of course it is,” Kierkegaard agreed. “And it would be wonderful to be able to pause and celebrate such an achievement. But now that we have the tool to do the job, there is a task that has become an even higher priority than locating the bombs themselves. Locating where they’re coming from.” He looked into their faces. “There must be some kind of device that is still releasing bombs into her bloodstream. We must find it, and we must find it soon.”

  There was no consensus about where to search. Bridges, Mallory, and Tamiko believed any device that released bombs would most likely be some kind of a shunt inserted into a blood vessel of a hand or foot, allowing the blood to flow through a bomb-lined tube. The extremities of the body would allow easy implantation without the risk that a failure would create a fatal blockage or hemorrhage. The others argued that a placement near the skin would make such a device too easy to find, and that it might even be revealed by accident.

  Kierkegaard ordered Primus into the lower abdomen. Hunter agreed with the decision, though he couldn’t say why.

  They tried out the new radar right away, to confirm that the spleen was clear of bombs.

  “You’ll notice interference with the visual display,” Tyson told Hunter. “We’ve designed the receptors to cut out for the instant the radio pulse is sent, to protect them from overload. We’ll send pulses manually. By tomorrow, I think I’ll be able to give you control over the pulses, but it will take longer to integrate the readout into your visual display. For now, we’ll have to steer you using text messages in your heads-up display and a tone in your ears—a hot or cold signal, if you will, to tell if the bow of Primus is aimed at the target.

  “As you know, most radar dishes rotate, but we couldn’t arrange that. So the only way our radar can paint three dimensions is with the infinitesimal difference between the time a return signal is picked up at the bow and at the stern.”

  Tyson reminded Hunter of a father letting one of his kids take the family car out for the first time.

  On the first attempt, Hunter’s visual display went completely white, fading quickly back into a view of the surroundings; but as he concentrated his mind and opened his thoughts, the pulses became less and less intrusive.

  The radar showed a spleen clear of bombs. As Primus made its way back into the main bloodstream, several test pulses produced distant returns from what appeared to be silicon, but there was still a lot of refining to do. The radius of the radar envelope was unstable. Tyson tried more pulses every few minutes and relayed terse messages
to Hunter at first, then elected to remain silent unless a signal return appeared very close to the ship.

  Never comfortable that he travelled within an unsuspecting woman’s body, the route along the interior iliac artery to the uterine artery bothered him even more. He tried to compare himself to a doctor performing a medical procedure, but that didn’t wash. He felt more like a doctor who abused a patient while she was sleeping.

  He was startled out of his reverie by a text from Tyson. “IUD,” the message said. Intra-uterine Device? Why would Hunter want to know about that? Oh. Of course—it could help orient him with the surrounding organs. A very large blood vessel branched off downward and to the left. Most likely the uterine artery. He took it.

  He heard the locator tone of the radar begin. A message from Tamiko confirmed that it was the IUD they were painting for him. No bomb signatures were anywhere close—there were no vital organs in that part of the body. Yet Kierkegaard believed it was a likely site for a bomb launcher. He hadn’t given his reasons.

  The artery was swarming with blood cells, including a much higher-than-usual concentration of white cells in all their variants. Antibodies seemed to increase by the minute, too. If the trend continued, he was going to have a bitch of a time navigating through them all without making contact. Contact was risky.

  As he dodged and pirouetted, still navigating the twisting tunnels effortlessly, he understood that he was not alone. The other presence was with him. He knew the best place to turn away from the main branch of the uterine artery into the smaller channels without giving it any thought, and as he came upon each bend and fork, it was as if he’d been expecting them. Then, as he’d climbed close to the lining of the blood vessel and watched the pattern of cells racing past overhead, he had a vivid flash of memory: a long traffic tunnel in a major city, with two lanes of traffic in each direction and caged fluorescent lights in the concrete above.

  It was one of her memories, not his, and it was followed by others: a whirlwind of leaves stirred by an autumn wind, a school of darting trout seen through the shiny surface of a stream, even bursting blooms of fireworks in a summer sky. Clearly some part of her mind was seeing what he was seeing, and making associations.

  The fireworks coalesced into a burning intensity.

  WHO ARE YOU?

  This time he didn’t run away—he’d tried to prepare himself. He wanted to give her an answer—for her to come to know him, but he had no idea what answer to give. His own name would mean nothing to her. Instead, he tried to picture the lab with its hospital-style layout and people wearing smocks. He hoped she would accept him as someone on the medical staff treating her. It seemed to work. At least the strong sense of curiosity was tempered by relief and. . . was that trust?

  Again, he felt shame.

  What if she learned that he wasn’t a doctor? Could he hope to continue such a masquerade while communicating on the level of mind-to-mind? Surely what mattered was that he was trying to help her. To save her.

  There was a huge white blood cell directly ahead. He prepared to maneuver around it.

  Suddenly his mind filled with a vision of a shining silver globe covered with triangular dimples. EPCOT at Walt Disney World. . . the GeoSphere of Spaceship Earth. It gleamed so brightly that he couldn’t clear the image from his mind. He couldn’t see anything else. He couldn’t see!

  “Get it out of my mind,” he pleaded.

  But it was already too late.

  Primus plowed headlong into the white cell, careened off and was hammered from behind.

  43

  The blinding vision of the GeoSphere vanished, but Hunter’s restored sight was little use as Primus was battered and spun, carried by the colliding particles of cellular life into a maelstrom of swirling obstacles. Something scraped ominously overhead, dragging the full length of the craft’s superstructure.

  He was in a swarm of blood material and he had to get clear. Miraculously, the ship still responded to his wishes nearly at the speed of thought. There had to be an opening somewhere. There. A gap just ahead and below. But another grey oblong was spinning in from the right. He dived and rolled, slamming the throttle to full, racing between giant planetoids and hurtling meteors. He nearly made it. At the last instant a pseudopod seemed to reach out from the globe on his left, and he couldn’t avoid it. The impact sent Primus tumbling.

  He snapped the nose up and around, pointing for the longest stretch of empty space he could see, then risked a glance backward. His rear view was nearly full of objects, and within seconds he could tell that some were separating from the pack and coming toward him. Chasing him! Why?

  A flickering movement caught his eye: something filmy and thin, flapping along the ship’s upper surface. He’d seen that before.

  The lipid shield.

  It was torn, almost completely exposing the sensor array, Primus’ most recognizable feature—a dead giveaway that she didn’t belong.

  A text message lit his view, a single word.

  “RUN!”

  His pursuers were gaining. Their abilities within their home environment were almost magical. He spotted a group of half a dozen large blood cells above and ahead, and darted between them, hoping to throw off some of the hounds. The greatest danger to the ship was the giant killer white cells, and any interference from other obstacles would be to his advantage.

  The nearest of the T-cells was forced to detour and others piled up behind it. He knew that wouldn’t last long, but it would help as long as the cells ahead of him weren’t alerted to his presence.

  Even as he had that thought, a dark cylindrical shape raced past. An antibody? Some other messenger? He didn’t know, but he had no doubt that the arterial throughway was about to become a very inhospitable place.

  The ship shuddered, and slewed to the side as two oblong attackers rammed her, like missiles homing in on their prey. He dodged and swerved haphazardly, but they were quick and maneuverable. How did they move faster than the flow of blood? Some kind of attraction at the molecular level?

  He darted Primus into a small side tunnel. His attackers followed, but the way was much narrower, and the T-cells wouldn’t make it through side-by-side. The drawback was that he had much less room for evasive maneuvers, and any alerted white cells in his path would be very hard to avoid.

  He felt the pulse of the radar. Then his heads up display lit again: “HEAD FOR THE IUD.”

  The tone resumed in his headset, and he was amazed to discover he was almost exactly on track. Maybe it was no accident. The IUD would be a reference point for the team to find the ship and extract it. Could the patient’s unconscious mind have come to the same conclusion? He couldn’t rule it out. He had to trust his rescuers, outside and in.

  At least half a dozen objects crowded him now, keeping pace seemingly without effort, trying to slow the ship. A pale white behemoth had been steadily gaining from behind, filling the tunnel completely, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

  “IUD AHEAD. THROUGH ARTERY WALL.”

  His mind had already focused on the thin cellular wall ahead—a sharp bend in the capillary—somehow knowing that beyond it lay safety. Escape.

  He wasn’t going to reach it. The antibodies had formed a virtual wall at the bow of the ship, creating massive drag, defeating the straining engine. If he couldn’t free the craft of their grip within the next few seconds, he would never free her at all.

  A desperate idea burst into his mind, a childhood memory from a Disney movie. As he sent the vulnerable sensor array sliding rearward toward its stowed position for ramming, he extended the manipulator arms and clasped them together into a sharp point. Then he twisted the forked tip of the torch into contact with the other arm and hit the ignition switch.

  The sudden electrical charge through the hull made the attacking cells writhe and break contact. Primus catapulted ahead, drilling straight into the cellular wall at top speed. The membrane peeled pack in
puckered folds as the submersible charged through it, across the wash of cellular fluid, ruptured a second cell, and a third and a fourth, and finally stopped, embedded halfway in a last thick layer of protein with nothing on the other side.

  He was through. The white cells could not follow.

  His body began to shake as chemicals flooded his own veins. He was safe. Primus was safe. Her lipid shield would need repairs, but all was not lost. He breathed deeply, savoring the moment.

  The IUD should be near. Would he be able to see it? He looked around.

  It wasn’t to his right. He looked left, and then swept his view upward.

  There. Far enough away for him to take in its outline, and vast enough to dwarf him utterly.

  No. Wait. The view was poor, with almost no light, but he could tell the shape was wrong. This thing was round: a nearly perfect ball, and it gave off a dull gleam in the dark. Just like the bombs, except much, much larger.

  The bomb launcher.

  # # #

  “She must have been having an affair.”

  “Nonsense! You don’t know that.” Bridges responded hotly to the suggestion from Hunter. The whole team was in the meeting room.

  “Well it can’t have been her husband,” the pilot persisted, unreasonably disturbed by the placement of the launcher. “And it was someone she’s been with in the past few days.”

  Kierkegaard gave him a piercing look. “I don’t believe you know what you’re talking about Mr. Hunter, so perhaps it’s better if you don’t speculate.”

  “Besides,” Bridges argued, “that launching device could have been implanted a long time ago, perhaps by a doctor. It seems likely to me that it’s the source of all of the bombs.”

  “That should be easy to figure out.” Tamiko said. “You ran a full series of x-rays and MRI’s when she first arrived. Check them again and compare them to the scans done when she got back yesterday. If the launcher was there all along, we should be able to spot it, now that we know what to look for.”