73
“This is as good a time as any to bring this up,” Kel called from his end of the table. “When it became apparent that the slime had flowed into the Underwater Bay, I figured maybe I ought to take a look at where it’s been coating the pilings.”
Michaela, face in her hands as she sat at the head table, looked at him through her spread fingers. Was there any good news? Anything that might give them a ray of hope? “And?”
The others shifted uncomfortably, expressions running from panicked to a sick-to-the-stomach countenance on Iso’s face. Had to be hard knowing that her husband was in the last stages of being digested down in the UB.
God, when did I get so numb that I can’t even share the horror?
The cafeteria might have been a morgue rather than a meeting room. Everywhere Michaela looked was a reminder of just how depressing their situation was.
Kel pulled up his pad, called up an image. He turned the screen so the rest of the team could see. “This what the piling should look like. Each of the supports is a duraplast pillar thirty centimeters in diameter, and it’s sunk five meters into the bedrock. What you are seeing is a view of the piling before the slime.”
Kel tapped the screen. “This is an image I took this afternoon. Notice any difference?”
Like a maestro, Kel tapped the screen, alternating the images back and forth.
Michaela gaped. “That can’t be the same piling!”
“Yeah? Well, surprise, it is.”
“How is this possible?” Michaela spoke for them all. “That’s half the diameter, including however thick the slime is that’s coating it.”
“Let me help you with the math, Director.” Kel looked around the table, a weary inevitableness in the set of his ruddy features. “As close as I can figure, about two thirds of the duraplast has been eaten away.”
“Eaten away how?” Casey demanded, her fist clenched on the table before her. “That’s goddamned duraplast! Not sialon, maybe, but it’s still tough stuff!”
Kel pointed to the forlorn UUV where it rested on its cradle at the side of the room. “Remember the jellyfish that almost ate the UUV? I’ve got a theory about that after talking to Vik.” He glanced at the microbiologist for assurance. “Donovanian life, like that tube the kids cut up in Vik’s lab, has polymer structures that serve the same purpose bones do for life on Earth. Am I right?”
“You are. I haven’t had the time to look into the histology, but polymer is just carbon chemistry.” Vik glanced around. “I was telling Kel that I thought that Donovanian life had figured out a way to digest the polymer that makes up the internal structure of prey species. Or at least denature it to the point it will pass through the digestive net that serves advanced life-forms here for a stomach and intestines.”
“So, the slime is either eating or denaturing our support pilings?” Michaela put the pieces together. “What the hell, people? Why didn’t we see this coming?”
“Because we were looking the wrong way!” Kevina cried. “We were so fixated on BMTs, scimitars, lobster monsters, and flying terror, we sure as hell didn’t care about a little algae!”
“It’s not algae,” Vik reminded. “That’s the kind of thinking that got us in trouble in the first place.” She paused. “And there’s something else. I caught Sheena standing in front of the tube hatch, her head cocked and her eyes vacant. I asked what she was doing. When she came to, she said, ‘Don’t you hear it?’ When I asked, ‘Hear what?’ she said, ‘It’s the Song. It’s trying to tell me something.’”
“What does that mean?” Michaela wondered. “What Song?”
Vik rubbed a nervous hand over her face. “Call me paranoid, but anything happening with the children bears investigation. I used one of the high-sensitivity microphones. It’s too faint for human hearing, but the entire Underwater Bay is, I guess you’d call it, singing. It’s like a sounding chamber for low- and ultra-high-frequency sound. I got readings from thirty hertz up to almost one hundred and eighty kilohertz. Nor is it random, but patterned. Tonal. Who knows? But whatever it is, Sheena said she could hear it.”
“That’s impossible.” Kel muttered.
“Is it?” Michaela asked. “TriNA changes human bodies. But it’s easy enough to give Sheena a hearing test.”
Kevina straightened. “Felix keeps talking about what he calls the Voice. Do you think that’s it? He’s hearing the slime? Thinks whatever this sound is, it’s giving him orders?”
“How can slime give orders?” Kel crossed his arms, expression strained.
Vik slammed a fist into the table. “Damn it, don’t you see? Our own semantics may have killed us. Algae? This life-form that we’re calling slime is an intelligent organism like nothing we’ve ever conceptualized. It shares information through transferRNA, proteins, and entire strands of recombinant TriNA. It’s made up of single prokaryotic cells that can assemble themselves at will into an organism that thinks, moves, plans, and inhabits our bodies. It’s infected us. The mode of transmission is by physical contact. Through the skin. As long as it has light, it can survive.”
“Can we kill it?” Yosh wondered.
Michaela felt like she was falling, like nothing was left. “What’s to keep it from just disintegrating into single cells and floating away again? No, I suspect we’d have to kill every single cell, and do it all at once.”
“Good luck!” Vik closed her eyes, paused to catch her breath, and said, “Do you begin to get it? This organism is everywhere, and we don’t know what it wants. Let alone why it’s doing what it’s doing.”
“Like with the kids,” Mikoru barely whispered. “This stuff has taken my little boy from me. Maybe it’s taken Felix and is about to do the same with Sheena.”
“To do what?” Yosh demanded. “What does it want with Toni? Why infect him?”
“Or any of the children?” Michaela answered. And then it hit her. Like a big chunk of the puzzle falling into place. “Oh, dear God!”
“What?” Kel demanded.
“Felix!” Michaela cried. “What he calls the Voice. When he said that he wasn’t there when Bill was killed.”
“I don’t understand.” Kevina leaned forward, expression tight. “We found traces of Bill’s blood on Felix’s clothes, on his hands.”
Yosh broke in. “You’re saying the organism did this? Took over Felix’s brain and murdered Bill? Turned the boy into an assassin? Why Bill, for God’s sake?”
“Test run,” Casey said bitterly. “See if the kid could really be turned into a weapon.”
“Why a kid?” Casey asked. “Why not one of us?”
“Maybe adults aren’t plastic enough? Or we’re too hardwired?” Vik wondered.
Michaela felt a headache beginning to spin up from behind her right eye. Shit, she hadn’t had a migraine since her university days. Or could it be the slime building some tumor in her brain? Was that it? Now that the creature was found out, it was going to kill her? Turn her into some sort of vegetable? Digest her body from the inside out in contrast to the way it had engulfed Tobi and Bryan?
Dear God, can it do that? Accrete and slowly digest me?
“People, wait. Think,” Kel pleaded. “One thing at a time. Let’s lay this out. Okay, as of now, the Underwater Bay belongs to the creature. Consider it gone for good. The pilings are two-thirds eaten through, so even though they were over-engineered, our structural integrity is compromised, and the stuff is still dissolving the duraplast. Final word: The Pod will eventually fail. Meanwhile, we’re all infected. The algae—”
“Don’t call it that!” Vik snapped. “It’s a fucking intelligent organism, and we’d better start respecting it for what it is.”
“Right,” Kel agreed. “The organism has infected us all. It may be using . . . Scratch that. It is using the children for its own purposes. It’s put Toni into a coma and may have taken control
of Felix to kill Bill. We know that all the kids, even the infants, are sick with sore throats. We also know that being infected, we may not be allowed in PA or Corporate Mine. Lastly, we’re being picked off one by one. Now, what are we going to do?”
Michaela stared around at her people. “They put the Unreconciled on an outlying research station. I know there are other abandoned bases out in the bush. We could ask for one. That’s an option.”
Yosh wore a miserable expression. “Isn’t that exchanging bad for worse? We’re still talking about Donovan. You heard the stories the Supervisor told when she was here. Three quarters of the cannibals who landed at Tyson are dead. Killed by Donovan’s monsters. What makes us any safer on the mainland than out here?”
Casey added, “If the Pod collapses into the sea, as long as the upper tube hatch is closed, it’s designed to float. And, while the supporting posts are duraplast, the Pod shell is sialon, that’s a ceramic.” She glanced at Kel. “Any sign the slime . . . er, organism eats sialon?”
“No. So far I can see no sign of corrosion or damage to the Pod’s sialon shell. But we still have duraplast around the doors, hatches, and windows to be concerned about. Maybe we can figure out some way to protect them.”
“And what does being adrift on open water get us?” Mikoru asked. “It puts us that much farther from any help from the Supervisor or PA. We’re at the mercy of the winds, currents, and tides, and eventually we’re going to wash up on some shore that might be a lot more hostile than what we have here.”
“Assuming we can survive the organism,” Vik noted. “Or defeat it somehow. Face it, people, we may not live long enough to make any of this even worth the debate. If Tobi and Bryan are any indication of its intentions, I’m not sure but that taking one of the seatrucks and hauling butt for shore wouldn’t be the smartest route.”
“What about the infection inside us?” Michaela asked. “Do we ever get rid of it? I mean, what if these cells start accreting inside us, creating an intelligence that lives in our muscles and brains?” She couldn’t say Takes us over like it did Felix?
Could she stand that? To be a spectator while some alien intelligence used her body like a robot? Was there a more terrifying version of hell?
I won’t let it happen. I promise!
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Vik said woodenly. “Last I talked to Raya Turnienko, she wasn’t very positive. Told me that Donovanian TriNA exists in most of the population on the planet. Some, like Talina Perez, show signs of the infection; in others the TriNA is just present in their blood. But that’s just single molecules. Not cells that can accrete into an organism. As far as our situation is concerned, we’re off the map.”
“It’s doing something to my little boy,” Mikoru told them. “He has wounds at the base of his neck. Swelling. His skin is turning green. Anna has no clue what it means, and she said that Dr. Turnienko has never seen the like.” A pause. “I want my little boy back.”
Michaela massaged her brow. The headache was going to be a killer. “We all want the kids back. My bottom line—as Kel tells it—is that the supports under the Pod are going to fold. When that happens—assuming the drop into the sea doesn’t compromise the Pod’s integrity—we’re going to just float away to whatever fate the organism has in store. Right?”
Kel nodded. “We could use cable, anchor the Pod to the reef, but the first big storm that comes along would probably tear us free. In the end, the result will be the same.”
“Then I say we shoot for the mainland. See what the Supervisor has in the way of abandoned stations that we could inhabit.”
“Die there as easily as we could here?” Casey asked caustically.
“Dead is dead,” Yosh muttered. “As I understand it, we’re talking no chance if we stick with the Pod, but a slim chance if we try the mainland. I vote slim chance.”
“I second that,” Kevina said. “I say that we pack up the seatrucks and abandon ship.”
A nagging thought penetrated Michaela’s growing headache. “Something to consider, people. To date we haven’t lost a single child. Why is the organism keeping them alive?”
Vik—in that listless tone of voice—said, “I’d guess that it is planning something.”
74
Danger! The quetzal in Dek’s blood sent that jolt of adrenaline squirting into his arteries and veins. His heart rate increased, air charging his lungs. Around him, the dim forest floor pulsed with the chime, the sound of it filling the warm morning with a symphonic harmony. Invertebrates buzzed as a column of them swarmed past a blooming tooth flower. The vibrant colors attracted the little creatures, many of which landed, only to be trapped and ingested when the colorful bloom snapped shut, the teeth interlocking to preclude any escape by the surprised prey.
Dek calmed himself, stalking quietly forward over the root mat with his rifle at the ready. He could just detect the faint odor, a sort of balsamic scent mixing with the tang of vinegar. He had the ornate Holland & Holland set for a muzzle velocity of seven hundred meters per second with a one-hundred-eighty grain bullet.
“This thing will kill you,” Rocket’s voice seemed to sound from above.
“Die,” Demon chided. “Stupid human.” The knowledge that it was good riddance and fitting settled in Dek’s mind like a misty net.
“Quetzals don’t know everything,” Dek whispered under his breath, trying to balance quetzal knowledge with his own. Damn it, he had to try this. See if he could integrate the two. He’d been working on this for two days now. Seesawing back and forth, battling to come to terms, to find that measure of control and fine balance.
He had Talina’s image to rely on, memory of how she’d reassembled the Mayan pot. It helped, but that was Talina’s solution. He could only use it as a sort of model, not a step-by-step guide. Maya mythology and tradition weren’t in his worldview. Knowing that it was possible to integrate—if not how—was enough. He had to deal with this in a Taglioni fashion. That meant risk, cunning, and profiting from success.
“So you see,” he told Demon, “we can die just as surely as drowning. I die, you die. Your TriNA never makes it back to your lineage. It dead-ends here.”
“Go back to Talina,” Rocket pleaded.
“Can’t,” Dek muttered under his breath. “Understand, we’re doing this. We’re going to kill this thing. Together. Demon, you, me, we’re all intelligent. So I’m gambling that Demon—hate humans as he does—is going to work with us when it comes that final moment.”
“Insane! Die.”
“Sorry. I’m calling your bluff.”
“Why?”
“It’s a Taglioni thing. I won’t live being half of what I could be. It’s all or nothing.”
“You die, you lose Talina.”
“And quetzals are supposed to be so smart? Come on. Share a little of that TriNA back and forth and think this through. It’s my body, but all of our existences. Being my body, I get the final vote on how I’m going to live in it. What the rules are under which I will continue to live in it. So, Demon, the choice is yours. We can all survive together, or not at all.”
Silence.
“Guess we find out how intelligent you really are.” Dek carefully inspected the thick bundle of roots ahead of him. The twisted knot of them, many as big around as oil drums, was bounded on either side by monstrous boles of forest chabacho that rose majestically up into the soaring canopy, the trunks five or six meters in diameter. From the way the root mat squirmed, it indicated that something had passed this way not too long ago. Given the faint balsamic vinegar odor that remained, Dek figured he knew what it was.
Well, not exactly. He just had quetzal memory, nothing with a name. Just a hazy image of a creature. Long. With sleek sides and three sword-like pinchers. Something quetzals feared. Something that, like the treetop terror outside of Tyson, had rid this area around Two Falls Gap of quetzals.
Other than it was dangerous—and scared Demon and Rocket half to death—Dek only knew it came from the river. That this was the extent of its range.
What better way to take control of his body and mind than to bet it all on one roll of the dice? Either he’d win, or they’d all lose. Simple as that.
With a bound, Dek leapt onto the lowest of the thick roots, using his Holland & Holland for balance he scrambled his way up. Unlike outside Tyson, he had good wind now. His muscles, pushed during the months he’d been on the ground, were back. Not to mention that quetzal TriNA was working its transformation, improving the efficiency of each muscle fiber.
At the top of the slowly contorting pile, Dek peered over into the confusion of interlaced roots beyond. He could see the track of the thing, straight across the root mat.
“Let’s go get it.”
Demon tried to turn his limbs into lead. That weird feeling he used to get in dreams when he needed to run, only to find his legs grown impossibly heavy and slow to move. Where each step became a slow-motion struggle.
“Not a chance,” Dek growled, jaw clenched. “A little help here, Rocket?”
He made the commitment, leaped off the root, trusting he’d have control when he thumped onto the next root down. He did. Demon wasn’t as stupid as he’d let on. Spilling into the roots would have been just as lethal as being eaten by whatever lay at the end of the trail.
Victory. At least, a small one.
Dek smiled.
“Still no guarantee that we’ll live through this.” Rocket sounded unsure.
“Welcome to Donovan,” Dek chided.
Rocket responded with that chittering that served for quetzal laughter.
Nothing from Demon. Dek imagined that all through his brain and blood, Demon’s TriNA was separating, recombining, and spitting molecules back and forth.
Good, let the evil little son of a bitch think it through. It wasn’t just Dek’s resolve that he was betting on. Demon had been living inside Talina. It had experienced Talina’s victory over one quetzal after another—ever since she’d killed the one that had infected her in that canyon in the Blood Mountains. Then there was the one she’d killed by dropping a front-end loader’s bucket on its neck. And the one from Whitey’s lineage she’d shot in PA. Not to mention that Demon had to have been affected by the TriNA from all those other lineages. The stuff learned from other molecules, right?
Adrift Page 43