The Primus Labyrinth

by Scott Overton

  With regular kicks of their fins, the predators continued into the gloom.

  61

  There were tears in Hunter’s eyes as he saw the clot begin to break apart. The matted clump broke into small knots of cells that quickly dispersed in the growing current, and relief swept through him like a wave. He could only pray that the rest of his team had been as successful.

  Now what? Leave Primus in the liver until needed? No, better to be circulating in the open bloodstream. That might save precious time if he had to reach another target in a hurry. He steered into the current, chasing the flotsam from his recent victory. Just as he reached the main channel of the central hepatic vein he sensed the pulsing red light of the alert indicator in Primus. The ship would be safe for a while. He disconnected.

  “What is it?” he gasped, as he pulled the headgear off.

  Tamiko pointed to her monitors. “From these readings it looks as if more bombs have detonated.” She stabbed the screen and he looked over her shoulder. “Her lungs… at least one there. A kidney. I’d say her spleen, too. Of course the damage is well established before we see the difference in her blood chemistry, so there could be many more.” Her face was pale, and Hunter could see fear in her eyes for the first time.

  “What do we do?” he asked. “Primus is out of plasmin. Without a reload it’s only useful against one of the bombs themselves. The torch is no match for something the size of a blood clot.”

  “Could Primus do any good by ramming a clot?”

  Hunter shook his head. “It’d be like a fly hitting an elephant, and the elasticity of the cellular material would probably absorb most of the force.”

  “You’d better get back to Primus,” Gage said as he walked into the room. “Find some backwater to hole up in. Bridges and Vitale haven’t inserted the Greenfield filter yet. They’re just about to go in now.”

  “What! What took them so long?”

  “They haven’t been dawdling, I promise you. It takes time to prep a patient for that kind of procedure. You’ve had time dilation on your side.”

  “But….” Suddenly pain stabbed through Hunter’s head, leaving a haze of surprise in its wake. It was like the impression of a sound, echoing through his mind. A cry…

  A cry for help.

  He collapsed into the chair and flung his head forward onto his knees, wrapping his arms around it to block out distractions.

  It was a terrified mental scream from Emma. Because of the surgery? The pain of the emplacement? No, that made no sense. The doctors would have used anesthetic. How was she communicating at all?

  COME TO ME. COME TO ME QUICKLY!

  His mind filled with an image: a dark, amorphous shape… massive, relentless. It rippled slowly as it passed through a dark fluid.

  Oh God. A blood clot—a huge one, traveling through a major vein.

  Traveling toward the heart.

  They would never get the filter placed in time.

  He snapped his head up. “The heart. They’ve got to stop her heart!”

  “Are you insane?” Tamiko stared in shock. “Do you want to kill her? She’s already shot full of anti-clotting chemicals and surgical anesthetic, and her body is critically weakened. Half of her vital systems are beginning to pack it in…”

  “What are you talking about, Mr. Hunter?” Kierkegaard had just entered the room, his face full of thunder. “Why in God’s name should they stop her heart? Quickly, man.”

  Hunter felt a flood of relief that the one who could make the life or death decision stood before him.

  “It’s a blood clot, sir. A huge one, headed for her heart. There’s no way Bridges and Vitale can get the filter in place in time. This is the only way. Stop her heart. Stop the flow of blood so Primus can catch up to the clot before it gets through and into her lungs.”

  “And what then? What can the Primus do without a load of plasmin?”

  “I… I can’t be sure, but there must be something. We’ve got to try. I’m certain this is a major clot—a killer clot, if it gets to her lungs.”

  “How can you know…,” Gage tried to interrupt.

  “Do it!” Kierkegaard barked. “Don’t argue, just do it.” He stepped to the main console and his fingers flew over the keyboard, entering the code that would make the previously forbidden video connection directly to the clinic. Instantly they could see the operating bed and the gowned and masked medical team hovering over the patient. Her face was obscured by the breathing mask.

  The project leader turned his head. “Don’t just stand there, Hunter. Get back to Primus! And you’d better be right.” He knew that his next order could cause the death of the daughter of the president of the United States. If he didn’t act, his failure to do so could be equally fatal.

  “Bridges, Vitale…,” he snapped. “Forget the Greenfield filter.” He took a deep breath.

  “Stop her heart.”

  62

  Kellogg gratefully pulled the dry-suit hood from his head and laid it on a patch of matted reeds. He piled the whole suit together in careful order, ready for his return. A screen of reeds hid them from the actual shore a few feet away. His team would rely on GPS and a very weak radio beacon to find the spot again in a few hours.

  The dive gear was covered in mud and bits of weed from the last ten minutes of half-floating half-crawling through shallow water to get into the protective reed bed close to shore. This tiny baylet didn’t appear to be guarded in any way. Clearly, the sensing equipment closer to the mouth of the creek was considered to be adequate.

  His regulation fatigues were wrinkled from the scuba suit, but it was unlikely that anyone would notice that in time. He replaced his night vision headgear and looked around. Each member of the team was carefully checking over his own gear, ensuring that none of the waterproof coverings had leaked. He barely heard a sound. These men were good at their work—the best. He felt his confidence rise again.

  With a softly whistled note he caught the attention of Rakov and Jackson. They quickly took helmets from the bag that Wahlberg had towed, and stealthily began to step through the reeds, ten feet apart. Two more soft whistles signaled ‘all clear’, and the team began to move out.

  # # #

  Hunter had three minutes.

  The medical team hadn’t been able to cool her body temperature or slow her metabolism in any other way—there hadn’t been time. Longer than three minutes and Emma’s brain cells would begin to die.

  How could that possibly be enough?

  He felt a wash of turbulence lift Primus and spin her off kilter, as the huge river that was the bloodstream slowly came to a stop. The pressure wave rippled forward, and bounced back and forth off the walls. He could see it by the way it tossed and shook blood cells around him.

  Now it would be harder going. The submersible was already at full throttle, and it was the only thing moving. Instead of gradually overtaking obstacles, he now had to dodge them like a skier daring a heavily treed slope. The blood cells themselves were giants—detouring around them stole precious time, and they often hid others.

  Even as he focused on the controls, a part of his brain was still in disbelief.

  Emma had reached him with her mind, and her mind alone. Somehow she had known her danger, and her panicked need had provided the impetus to break through to him. The implications were staggering.

  However that link worked, he needed it now. He needed it badly.

  No sooner had he framed that thought, than an image of the clot appeared in his mind. Dark and menacing, it floated within some large space. There was a suggestion of a vast latticed structure in the background, but he couldn’t quite make it out. At least the killer was held motionless. Part of him had endowed the monstrosity with a will of its own, and a means to propel itself. It had no such powers, but where was it? Primus had traversed most of the inferior vena cava. Could he have missed it? Passed it by without realizing?

  No. This
clot made even mammoth white blood cells look tiny. They were only the building blocks of its bloated body. Kierkegaard was right. What could he possibly hope to do against such a giant?

  He had to come up with a plan soon. He must be nearing the heart.

  Suddenly he remembered the latticed structure that he had only ever seen in flashes before, as Primus was tossed through the maelstrom. It was the inner webbing of the heart itself. The bomb was already there.

  The chambers of the heart were enormous. How could he hope to find anything in such a vast space? Radar wouldn’t be able to distinguish the clot from the surrounding tissues.

  How much time was left? What did three minutes of outside time become when stretched across the nano-world? Damn! He had to find out.

  He tore off the VR headgear. “Time.” he snapped at the startled faces of Tamiko and Kierkegaard.

  “Two minutes, seventeen seconds remaining,” she called out, and he had the helmet back on before the last words were out of her mouth.

  Space around the submersible had already increased tenfold. He must be in the right atrium of the heart, the first of the gigantic pump’s four chambers. On every previous venture there, he’d had no choice but to go with the pull of the current. Now, for the first time, he had to decide for himself where to look for the entrance to the next chamber: the right ventricle. On the Primus’ scale a wrong guess would send him blundering across the equivalent of one of the Great Lakes.

  He forced himself to relax and tune into his senses. Then he spun the ship to starboard, pointed the bow downward, and prayed.

  With no points of reference, the journey was an endless time suspended in watery limbo and unfeeling darkness. His body shivered with the memory of another such wasteland. Then, suddenly, shapes materialized from the gloom and he gave an involuntary cry. He eased back on the throttle, his surprise turning to despair.

  The way was blocked.

  His navigation had been on the money, the tricuspid valve was exactly where he’d hoped it would be. But the heart had been stopped at just the wrong moment and the mammoth gate was closed.

  63

  Hunter felt a howl of rage well up in his chest, but he had no time to waste on it. The tricuspid valve of the heart was closed. Was there another way? A back way? It would require penetrating the cells of the cardiac lining and finding a path through the tiny vessels that supplied the heart tissues with blood. Maybe with Tamiko’s help and an hour or two on the nano scale….

  Hang on.

  Scale. Maybe it was only a question of scale!

  He rammed the throttle forward and raced toward the giant valve. Sure enough, it was much farther away and much bigger than his mind had been willing to accept. He aimed the ship at the exact center, where the massive folds of tissue pressed against each other. The valve flaps themselves were huge. They could never seal tightly enough to keep out something as small as Primus.

  As the bases of the three vast cusps faded into the distance on either side, he saw what he needed: a roughly triangular crack where the flaps failed to meet perfectly. It would be enough. Seconds later, he broke through into the enormous chamber that was the right ventricle.

  He’d desperately hoped the blood clot would be waiting for him on the other side, but it wasn’t. There was nothing but a vast cosmos of blood cells, floating like planets in a night sky against a background of chordae anchoring the valve cusps, and dimly-seen papillary muscles farther beyond.

  Where to now?

  The ventricle was perhaps twice as large as the atrium, like a colossal vase with two branching openings at the top. The far opening was capped by a half-moon shaped valve leading to the pulmonary arteries and ultimately the lungs. In relative terms, that exit wasn’t too far away; but if the clot lurked somewhere in the main chamber of the ventricle, he would run out of time long before he could search it all. In desperation he sent a pulse of the radar; but, as he feared, the return was inconclusive. The clot’s tissues didn’t provide solid reflection.

  In desperation he focused his mind.

  Emma… you’ll have to guide me. I don’t know the way. Guide me!

  Her heart was stopped. Even before that she might have been in deep anaesthetized sleep. Could any part of her mind be left to respond?

  A sense of calm swept over him, and his scattered thoughts congealed. He became Primus—accepted its powerful machinery as his own body, its strange and wonderful devices as his own hands and fingers. The hybrid creation knew the way to go. The sub sprang forward in a deep curve, a concave course that would take it to the pulmonic valve. There lay its destiny, its ultimate battle.

  Now all he needed was a miracle.

  It was a David and Goliath scenario of daunting proportion. Primus, out of ammunition, versus an opponent larger than itself by orders of magnitude. Some of the world’s finest minds were at his disposal, only an arm’s reach away, but he couldn’t consult them. He would lose the sole advantage he had left: the time dilation effect of this nano-world, that stretched a scant three minutes into the slimmest chance for victory.

  He couldn’t ram through the immense bulk of the clot. He had no plasmin left to attack the bonds that held the mountain of debris together. Was there something else that could produce a similar effect? He desperately tried to remember his high school chemistry.

  Heat?

  No, the torch could never produce enough to affect such a huge mass, and most of its energy would dissipate through the surrounding fluid.

  The cells and other material that made up the monstrous thrombus were held together by powerful chemical attractions at the molecular scale, ions created from displaced electrons….

  He gasped at a sudden idea.

  Would it work?

  He returned his mind to the control of the ship, and looked ahead.

  There it was. An indistinct dark mass of latent death.

  He slid the sensor array behind Primus’ fuselage as the mottled behemoth drew closer with agonizing slowness. Then he could distinguish individual blood cells and other detritus of the bloodstream that had been gathered along the way.

  Even if his plan was to work, its range of effect was a complete unknown. The clot dwarfed him, and nowhere could he see any sign of vulnerability. He had no choice but to aim for the densest part. Dead center.

  In the last few moments the monster seemed to charge to meet him. Then he was into it—plowing among the clumped cells with all of Primus’ power. The drive lasted only seconds before the ship came to a lurching halt, lodged deep within a mass the size of Coney Island. Primus could never escape the way it had come. The plan had to work.

  He thumbed the stud that extended the torch tip on the right manipulator arm, and bent the arm at its elbow.

  The trick had worked once before. When Primus had been swarmed by defender cells just before discovering the bomb launcher, an electrical charge through the hull had disrupted the cells’ grip, long enough for the craft to get away. This time, a single electrical discharge would not be enough. He had to disrupt the very molecular bonds that held the giant mass together, ionic bonds formed of atoms whose natural shell of electrons had been destabilized. So, he would send out waves of free electrons, depleting Primus’ entire power supply in one sudden burst.

  He triggered the spark.

  A blinding flare of blue light rippled through the surrounding cell matter. He switched the ship to recharge. The electrical system had been built with a governor to ensure that what passed for a capacitor in the nanotube could handle the inflow of current. Hunter bent his every thought to that circuit—he was Primus and Primus was him. The governor circuit was a part of him and he could feel it, he could control it, he could disable it.

  A violet wave like heat washed over him, and the submersible hummed with energy.

  Switch again. Discharge. And again. Recharge.

  Discharge.

  Recharge.

  Five times. Ten
times. He could sense the capacitor beginning to warp under the strain.

  Discharge.

  Recharge.

  Within a quickly spreading radius electrons were being ripped from their orbits, then sprayed haphazardly to strike and deflect and rebound in extravagant disarray. Molecules were forcibly transformed into ions that suddenly repelled their neighbors.

  Twenty times. Thirty times. Primus could not take much more.

  And then suddenly he could see it happen. He could see it!

  Tangled blobs of protoplasm raggedly lit by an aurora of rippling colors began to tear away, chemical bonds ravaged beyond repair.

  Primus came free, and Hunter reacted swiftly, putting the submarine into a flat spin, pushing the fluid into waves to force the rabble of broken blood cells farther and farther apart. The ship spun with the fury of a fiery pinwheel, hurling its energy at the scattering mob. Gaps grew larger—he could see the clot dissolving into a loose cloud of colossal debris—and he knew that he had won.

  He snapped out of the spin, exulting in the might of his tiny craft.

  The disruptive electrical field still clung to it, batting obstacles aside. He made a quick run up and down the debris field, just to make sure the clot wouldn't re-form.

  It was as he returned to the upper end of the shattered thrombus that the final large clump of cells broke apart. What they revealed tore the breath from his lungs.

  Floating in the dark fluid… round, dully-sheened, menacing….

  A bomb. The largest one of all.

  64

  The project compound wasn’t surrounded by a large zone of clear ground. That would have been much better for security reasons, but would also have given away the high-security nature of the building to everyone else on the base. As a compromise, a few small stands of scrubby trees had been left, creating a narrow zone of ingress where the line of sight from other guard stations was partially obstructed. Kellogg’s team planned to exploit that weakness.