Adrift

by W. Michael Gear

  “Something’s really wrong here,” she whispered.

  From down below, Talina heard a different melody, familiar, the notes rising and falling. Her heart skipped, and she recognized the tune: “London Bridge.” A kid’s nursery rhyme. A chill played down her back.

  Ahead of her, Kalico called, “This is the Supervisor. Hello? Little boy, who are you? Where is everyone?”

  In answer, a child’s voice sang,

  “Now the pod is fallen down, broken down.

  “Namby Pamby is a clown . . .”

  Kalico, started down the steps, even faster. Talina put a hand out, grabbing Kalico’s shoulder, stopping her a couple of steps short of the bottom. Leaning close she whispered, “Something’s really not right. I’m smelling blood and a rotting corpse.”

  “Off to prison you must go, you must go, you must go.

  “Now death courts the lady gray,

  “My fair lady.”

  Talina wondered, What kind of sick song is that?

  It happened so fast. One instant the landing was empty, the next a naked little green boy with a large rifle leaped into sight. Talina wrenched Kalico aside and down, desperate to get a clear shot.

  Little as he was, the kid still held the rifle remarkably steady, the black muzzle pointed up the stairway. Right on Talina’s center. She saw it as if in slow motion.

  The kid’s questing finger was searching for the trigger as he sang,

  “Now the lady’s falling down . . .”

  Talina threw herself sideways in one last panicked . . .

  The kid’s entire body spasmed, jerked, the rifle spitting fire and ear-splitting pain. Muzzle blast patted Talina’s face. But she didn’t feel the impact of a bullet. How could the kid have missed?

  The way Talina saw it, the kid—expression stunned—folded up under the rifle’s recoil and slammed to the floor as if he’d been hammered. Or had he? Talina would have sworn there were two shots, sounding an instant apart. Looking closer, to her amazement, she could see the hole blown in the kid’s right side, bits of lung, blood, and ribs blasted through the delicate green skin.

  Ears ringing, Talina staggered forward. Stepped over where Kalico was crouched, trembling, her hands over her ears, to stumble out into the hallway.

  Her own ears wouldn’t stop ringing. She shook her head. Damn it!

  The kid was on his side, mouth working; swellings on the side of his throat seemed to convulse, blood pumping from slits above each collar bone. What was that all about? His eyes were indeed oversized, large, dark, and staring in disbelief. When he coughed, blood shot out of both sides of the bullet wound in his chest and began to bubble up past his lips.

  The heavy rifle had fallen across his way-too-muscular thigh; instinctively, Talina kicked it away.

  From training, she pivoted, taking in the corpses. Kevina Schwantz, bloody and limp with a split skull. Two more green children, naked. Girls this time, all with bullet holes blasted through their bodies. A blood stain smeared the floor where the door gaped open to the stairs down to the lower level. Catching movement from the corner of her eye, Talina whirled, rifle at her shoulder.

  Her sights settled on a woman in the middle of the hallway. Middle-aged, white, with short hair. She approached, a rifle held at half-ready. Talina vaguely remembered her: Vik Lawrence.

  “Drop it!” Talina cried, wishing her damn ears would stop squealing.

  Vik Lawrence said something inaudible through Talina’s tortured hearing.

  Tal started forward, combat-ready. And yes, she damned well could drop Dr. Lawrence before the woman could raise and trigger the rifle.

  “Put it down! Now! That’s an order!” Tal barked, and the panicked woman, swallowing hard, seemed to finally comprehend. Carefully, she set the rifle on the sialon floor.

  Lawrence spread her arms wide in surrender. Saying something.

  “I can’t hear,” Talina shouted, pointing at her ear. “Muzzle blast.”

  Lawrence cupped her hands, shouted back. “We have to get out of here. Now! Before the slime kills us all!”

  Glancing back, she saw Dek and Kalico, warily inspecting the bodies in the hall.

  “No argument from me. This place is creep-freaked,” Talina agreed.

  94

  Kalico’s hearing was coming back, the insane ringing beginning to fade. She sat, curled in a seat in the cabin, staring at the darkness behind her window as Dek’s airplane spirited them east, driven by a tailwind. The Gulf was down there, dark, menacing in a way it had never been.

  They had enough charge to make it back to the beach charger. They’d have to spend the night there, recharge, and fly back to PA in the morning. But they were off the Pod with its dead and creeping algae.

  Donovan was a dangerous world. Didn’t matter if it was in the Number Three or out at the Maritime Unit.

  Kalico glanced across at Vik Lawrence. In the dim glow of the cabin lights, the microbiologist and geneticist had a shocked look on her face, her eyes distant with nightmare and disbelief.

  Vik had shot the little green boy at the last minute. The bullet blowing through his chest had spoiled his aim. Caused his shot to blast a divot out of the sialon beside Kalico’s head. Saved all of their lives.

  Kalico tried not to think about how close she’d come to dying. Or the kid’s corpse, rolled tightly in a tarp and stored back in the cargo hold along with Dr. Lawrence’s crate, notes, and specimens. The little shit might have been ready to blow them away, but he’d end up surrendering a goldmine of biological information on what Vik called “the slime.”

  That is, assuming the good doctor wasn’t a psychological basket case.

  God knew, she had a right to be. Kalico would live with the memory of the dead where they lay mangled on the floor. Two little girls, their green bodies torn by bullets. Kevina Schwantz, her forehead split with an ax. Kalico had gagged at Anna Gabarron’s putrefying corpse in the smashed Pod clinic. And then there was that single glance she’d cast down the stairway to level one. She’d been fascinated and repulsed by the slime, humped up, twisting around on the stairs, and engulfing Michaela Hailwood’s corpse down on the level one landing. There had been no sign of the little girl called Breez. Maybe she’d been completely devoured.

  Vik had been shaking, verging on throwing up, as she told how Felix had split his mother’s head, how Breez had somehow torn Michaela’s trachea from her throat, how it had all spiraled out of control. She’d broken down before she could tell the whole tale, but that would come. Later, when and if the woman could pull herself together.

  How the hell could this have happened? Vik Lawrence was the only survivor? A bunch of kids and algae had destroyed the Maritime Unit?

  “We weren’t prepared,” Vik said just loudly enough to be heard over the cabin noise. Her tears had stopped. Her eyes were puffy, gaze fixed on something an eternity away.

  “No one was.” Kalico gave a faint shake of the head. “And did you see? When we lifted off? The moment we were clear of the landing pad, those floating cone things went drifting in. Dropped their tentacles into the algae.”

  Lawrence nodded. “I saw. The water was roiling. And just out from the Pod, the seaskimmers were coming in.” A pause. “Seeing that, something Felix said suddenly made sense. The slime wanted the Pod for protection. A place where it could accumulate, and nothing could eat it. From now on, inside the Pod, it will be protected.” She shook her head. “Can you believe it’s afraid? That those floating cones eat it?”

  “Glad something does.”

  Lawrence gave her that half-dead look. “Welcome to Donovan.”

  95

  After the bright morning light, Dek had to blink as he stepped into the hospital hallway. Another of the light panels had burned out. Obviously one that Raya didn’t have a replacement for. Either that or Sheyela Smith had
n’t had time to cobble together a jury-rig fit for a different kind of light. He was still getting used to the way his eyes didn’t adapt, but simply shifted to the infrared range.

  “Better, yes?” That was the Rocket voice.

  “We’ll see,” Dek told the quetzal. “Nothing comes free.”

  He passed the old nurse’s office, then Dya’s, both dark since the former occupants were dead. That was the thing about Donovan. Like his visit today. People didn’t always come to Donovan to find themselves or leave. Many came to die.

  He strode down the long hallway, found Raya Turnienko’s office with a note on the door that stated: IN THE LAB.

  Dek made his way down past the patients’ rooms and found the lab door open. There, bent over the autopsy table, Raya, Vik Lawrence, and Shanteel Jones were crowded around Felix’s body.

  Dek knocked lightly at the door, and as they turned, said, “Raya? You wanted to see me?”

  The tall Siberian looked up, her face distorted by a magnifying lens and mask. She wore a smock, gloves, and held wicked-looking stainless-steel dissecting tools in her gloved hands. So did the others. All were wearing biohazard suits beneath their aprons.

  “I did. Thanks, Dek. Could you give me a minute?”

  “Sure.” Dek stepped into the room, stared down at the body on the table. Granted, he’d been the one to wrap the boy’s body in a tarp and carry it up to the airplane. It still upset him. More so now that it was cut open in a classic Y incision.

  “Hard to believe that’s Felix,” he said softly.

  “It’s not,” Vik told him, shooting him a wounded look from her masked face. “Not any more than that was my Sheena laying on the floor beside him.” The words sounded so brittle, as if Vik were on the point of shattering.

  “What are we looking at here?” Dek asked.

  “A whole new biology,” Jones told him. “Even by Donovan’s standards, or what we thought was Donovan’s standards, this is a step beyond what we imagined was possible.”

  Dek stepped closer, stared down at the boy. “Why is his skin green? What are those things on his neck? And he looks like a weightlifter, not like the skinny little Felix I knew in Ashanti.”

  Raya turned her attention back to the body. “The closest I can come to describing it is that he’s like two organisms existing side-by-side in the same body. This is a quantum leap beyond simple TriNA molecules. We’re seeing prokaryotic cells forming organs alongside the human cells. Augmenting, remodeling. And it isn’t random like an infection, but directed morphological change to preadapt the body to an aquatic environment. The scary thing is, not only did it modify and integrate with the boy’s immune system to do this, but it had a plan. It knew exactly what it was doing, and how to do it.”

  “Why just the kids?”

  Vik shot him another look. “Oh, I’m infected, too, Dek. We all were. Doesn’t matter that my infection is dormant. I’m still in quarantine. Will be for as long as it takes to figure out if I’m contagious. Our first guess is that the slime chose the kids because they were still growing. For whatever reason, it either decided, or figured out, that the adults weren’t suited for remodeling and hybridizing.”

  “Why green?”

  Iji told him, “It would have allowed the boy to photosynthesize, not enough to support the body entirely, but it would certainly cut the amount of food he’d need to survive. Remarkably efficient, if you ask me. And looking at the skin cells, they’re like a lattice of human and prokaryote cells. Every bit as flexible and resistant to tear as human integument.”

  “Stay back,” Raya warned as Dek tried to get a better look. “The human cells are dead, as are the internal organs, but the prokaryote cells in the skin are still alive. As long as they can photosynthesize and don’t desiccate, they remain viable. We think the slime is spread by contact. Especially through sweat glands in the palms.”

  Which, of course, was why Vik was restricted to her hazard suit and lived in a quarantined section of the hospital.

  “You got it. I’m staying back. Got enough trouble with all these quetzals in me.”

  Into her mask, Raya mumbled, “And I thought that was bizarre? Compared to what we’re seeing here? Quetzals are a cakewalk.”

  Dek lifted his hands, imploring. “But I still don’t get it. Felix tried to kill us. He split Kevina’s head with an ax. His mother, for God’s sake. I knew that boy. Watched him grow up. Him, Sheena, Felicity, and the rest. How the hell could something turn those precious children into murderers?”

  Raya shot him a sidelong look. “You’re the one with quetzals in his head, and you’re asking that question? How close did you come to losing yourself?”

  Dek heard the chittering of quetzal laughter.

  “We’ll get a better idea when we get to the brain,” Vik told him. “Listen, Dek, we’re just at the start of this. We’ve got years of research on Felix’s body. Let alone understanding what kind of life the slime is. Slime? Even the name’s wrong. Disparate cells that can assemble themselves into an organism at will? That collect, transmit, and analyze data? That can, in a matter of days, adapt an entire immune system and alien organic chemistry to its needs? From single cells, it took over and destroyed the Pod, turned the children into its agents, and used them against us. Are you getting an idea of the sophistication? The intelligence it takes to do something like this?”

  Shanteel gestured with a scalpel. “And some of the children are still missing out there.”

  Vik’s shoulders worked, as if she was fighting off a shiver. “The little ones, they were remodeling at an advanced rate. God knows what the slime is turning them into. You ask me? The slime was willing to sacrifice the older children. Maybe, like the adults, they couldn’t be modified as successfully as the younger children and infants. The changes in Toni, Vetch, Kayle, and the rest? Well . . . call it chilling.”

  “And Tomaya?”

  “Still out there, Dek.” Vik stared at him through her transparent mask. “This is a guess, but my take is that after the organism first infected Felix and the rest of the children, it saw an opportunity. For the first time in its evolution, the introduction of the Pod into its environment provided protection from predation by cones, seaskimmers, and who knows what else. Better yet, it realized what an opportunity human physiology offered. We are remarkable animals, capable of manipulating and modifying the physical world in a way the organism can’t. All it had to do was take the Pod and adapt the human body to function in the organism’s aquatic environment. Our arrival gave it the opportunity to completely change its existence. We gave it the ability to modify its environment.”

  Dek rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah, well, lot of good it will do the slime. Kalico and Shig left this morning with the A-7s. They’re going to recover the Pod. The plan is to blow the tube and what’s left of the pilings while the shuttles support the Pod by cables. Then they’re going to fly it to a rocky outcrop about an hour east of here. Kalico wants to salvage the equipment. The microscopes and such. If she can decontaminate the Pod, she’s figuring it might be turned into a remote base on one of the other continents.”

  “Good luck with that,” Iji muttered, studying the gill channels that ran down the boy’s neck. “How did the slime know to grow these gills here? Why lateral to the root of the tongue and down the side of the throat? Why didn’t it choose the shoulders, or anywhere else on the body? It’s like it instinctively knew?”

  Raya was fingering her scalpel, staring down at the corpse. “It took humans a couple of million years to develop the skills and technology to create life-forms. The slime did it within weeks. How do you assemble that kind of brainpower from a bunch of floating cells? This is an intelligence orders of magnitude beyond anything we’ve ever encountered.”

  Dek rubbed his chin, considering. “We’re going to have to completely rethink how we’re going to go back to Donovan’s oceans.
Even if we go back.”

  “What about the children still in the Pod?” Vik’s eyes had a thousand-yard stare. “What the hell are they going to be? What does the slime intend to do with them?”

  96

  Of all the bad moods Kalico had ever descended to, this was about the worst. Never—not even in those days when she’d been alone after Turalon’s departure—had she felt this dispirited, defeated, and most of all, frustrated. Nothing in her life was working. The collapse of the Number Three, the mine shutdown, and idling of her smelter had her people at a standstill. The Maritime Unit was gone, a total loss. Nothing she could salvage.

  And Dek belonged to Donovan now.

  She walked down from the ramp on her A-7, smelling the stench of hot exhaust as she stepped onto Port Authority’s heat-glazed landing field. Shuttle exhaust had seared the clay to the point that landing no longer blew dust out in great clouds to settle over the shipping containers stacked seven-high on the field margins. She jammed her hat onto her head in response to Capella’s burning afternoon blaze.

  As she hit dirt, Pamlico Jones was already heading her way with his skid-steer to unload the thick coils of cable that were supposed to be carrying what was left of the Pod back for salvage.

  Shit on a shoe, she wanted to kill something. Stamp her feet. Scream her rage and frustration at the universe. And all she had to look forward to was Shig Mosadek, waiting patiently at the man-gate. He’d been aboard the PA shuttle, had left as soon as it was apparent that there was nothing but disaster out at the Maritime Unit site.

  Kalico knotted a scarred fist, wished she could strangle the universe with it.

  The memory would stick with her, how the Pod looked, resting below the reef’s transparent surface, maybe twenty meters down, at the edge of the drop-off to deepwater. A big, white, elongated oval splotched by patches of blue-green algae. What Vik Lawrence called “the organism.” Above it, those weird glowing cones had floated, tentacles dangling, and around them, seaskimmers, their sails flashing in a riot of colors, had circled. So, too, had a flock of four-winged, polka-dot fliers.