“So what you’re telling me is that the harvesters are reproducing even faster than we thought?” Naomi shook her head in disbelief. “How is that possible?”
“I’ll show you. I should’ve caught this earlier, but this is the first time I’ve seen this on video, and I just about peed my pants. I never would have believed it, otherwise.”
She pressed a key and a video began to play on her monitor, full-screen. The camera view was from above a major intersection. The street in the scene was littered with human bodies and adult harvesters feeding.
“God,” Naomi whispered, putting a hand over her mouth.
“This was in upper Manhattan two days ago,” Renee told her, “right after one of the defensive lines collapsed. Now watch what happens.”
The creatures continued to feast for a few moments. Then, in unison, they looked at something off-screen to the right and dashed away in the opposite direction.
“What…”
“Shh!” Renee pointed. “Watch!”
The view showed nothing but the corpses for a moment, then something heaved into the frame from the right.
An enormous larvae the size of a garbage truck oozed along the street, absorbing the corpses as it went.
“My God,” Naomi said, “that’s huge! It’s a dozen times larger than the ones I saw in Los Angeles.”
“Don’t blink,” Renee whispered. “This happens so damn fast…”
Just as it reached the center of the camera’s view, the giant larva disintegrated, shattered. In the blink of an eye it went from one gigantic blob of malleable tissue into thousands, each of which was no larger than Naomi’s fist, that cascaded to the street like raindrops.
Renee played that part back again, then turned to Naomi. “We assumed that these big ones just crapped out all the stuff they didn’t need and made a single harvester, because we never had reason or evidence to assume they did otherwise. Some people have speculated that they might form huge adults, but that hasn’t panned out. But this,” she hooked a thumb at the screen, “is what’s really happening. How the hell can they do that? You’d think all the little ones would just stick together again.”
“I don’t know,” Naomi whispered as the larvae separated and began to make their own separate ways from the epicenter of the original mass. “Once the larva reaches that threshold, a gene sequence must kick in to make it fission into smaller ones. We’ve seen that separate larvae don’t tend to merge together, and also that a single larvae can be forced apart into multiple viable organisms, although I can’t understand why they don’t just reform. This is…incredible.”
“Well, now we know why we’re seeing so many more adults than we thought there should be. I don’t think I can even model their propagation now.”
Naomi swallowed. “I’d better go brief Carl and Howard.”
***
“Oh, my God.” Carl’s whisper fell into the silence of the conference room as he and Howard watched the video Renee had shown to Naomi. While he had always been fairly pale, having avoided the outdoors as much as possible beyond what was necessary to do his job, he now looked like he was chiseled from white marble.
“This is the first clear evidence we’ve seen,” Naomi told him, “but now that she knows what to look for, Renee’s found other videos and even some eyewitness accounts of this happening. No one believed them at first because we couldn’t corroborate the handful of statements we had and it was simply too fantastic. But we believe them now.”
“You know,” Howard added, tearing his eyes from the screen to look at Naomi, “I’m really starting to hate it when you call us in here.”
“What can we do about these things?” Carl asked.
“Nothing more than we’re doing already,” Naomi said. “They have the same strengths and vulnerabilities as any other larva, they’re just a lot bigger and fragment into hundreds or thousands of smaller ones.” She nodded to Renee, who hit a button to advance to a slide that showed the most recent graph of harvester reproduction versus human casualties. “The main thing is that it tosses these projections out the window.” Using a laser pointer to trace the line that represented harvester population, she said, “Making a very rough estimate of the casualties we’ve inflicted, this line should be tapering off, or even declining slightly. This is a global projection, and you can see here the huge hit the Russians inflicted with their nuclear strikes. But all the field reporting, even taken with a grain of salt, indicates that the harvesters are continuing to gain ground against us, especially in rural areas. Entire towns are just disappearing.”
“Why?” Carl rubbed his eyes. “Aren’t they still concentrating in the cities?”
“Oh, they’re still in the cities,” Howard interjected, “but think of how much food is in the countryside. And imagine these things loose in the Siberian forests. Or our forests, for that matter.”
“But wait a minute,” Carl said. “Why aren’t all the larvae getting huge? There’s no shortage of food for them out there. Hell, each of them could eat a house and there’d still be plenty more.”
“It could be another trait that does not appear in all of them, just like full sentience.”
Everyone turned to look at Kiran, who had up to now been sitting quietly along the wall behind Renee. Having had some food and rest, he looked more like the tough commando Jack had said he was. He was dressed in an American combat uniform and wore the rank of captain, and someone had sewn a cloth tape over his left breast pocket that said INDIAN ARMY, with CHIDAMBARAM in tightly squeezed letters over his right. “I’ve heard you talk of the first generation of harvesters almost as if they were gods. But they are not. As different as they are from us, they are creatures of flesh and blood; their only divinity is what we choose to see in them.” Gesturing to the screen, he went on, “I think the first generation harvesters, which you say could not reproduce and probably lived among us for centuries, could not possibly have intended what is happening now. You say that if we do not stop them, the only form of life on this planet beyond simple microbes will be harvesters, with the larvae feeding on the adults and the adults spawning more larvae, forever. Is this the work of highly intelligent, sentient beings that wanted to see their species thrive?” He shook his head. “I think not. You have put their genius in genetics upon a high pedestal, but they were fallible. Tell me they would have intentionally created such monstrosities as what we just saw. Tell me they intended to create a handful of sentient children whose fate was to be eaten by their non-sentient siblings or their mindless offspring. Tell me these things are what the first generation planned for this world, and I will not believe you.”
“It’s important to remember that they don’t think like us,” Naomi said quietly. “That especially applies to the first generation. While I don’t like to assign them human traits, in their own way they looked upon themselves as gods, immortal and infallible. We were little more than puppets in their eyes, to be manipulated to their own advantage. It would be easy, maybe even comforting, to think they made mistakes when they engineered this new generation, or perhaps that the results were skewed by the law of unintended consequences.” She shook her head slowly. “But I don’t believe that’s the case. I worked with one of them, and it knew exactly what it was doing. What they unleashed on the world is what they intended. The only difference is that we’re only facing the product of a single bag of the contaminated corn that was distributed to a handful of places. Had all the bags gone out as they’d planned, we’d already be extinct.”
“That may all be true,” Carl said, “but anything that doesn’t help us kill them is irrelevant.”
“So I take it that we have even less time now than we’d hoped?” Howard asked.
Naomi glanced at the screen. “Yes. We just don’t know by how much.” Turning to Carl, she said, “There’s only one way forward now. You don’t like it, and neither do I, but…”
“Forget it,” Carl said, cutting her off. “I’ve had both ass cheeks chewe
d off by the vice president, and the president left the rest of me black and blue over even the suggestion that we work with the harvesters. If I bring it up again, they’re going to fire me, and with good reason. The president’s the boss, and he’s made it clear that he’s not going to deal with them. Period.” He leaned forward. “We’ve got hundreds of the best minds in the world working on this, using the best equipment science has to offer. We can beat this thing. We have to.”
Howard was carefully examining his finger nails. Naomi knew that he’d gone to bat over this more than once, but Carl had finally drawn the line.
“Listen,” Carl said, “once Jack gets Melissa back here, you should be able to make faster progress on figuring out how to make the harvesters’ skeletons turn to mush, right?”
“It won’t matter,” Naomi told him, “unless we can figure out how to get through the second set of cellular locks and devise the right changes to the DNA code we insert into the viral delivery system.”
“Oh, Naomi,” Howard said with just the right touch of sarcasm, “it’s only eight hundred billion base pairs in a species that has so little differentiation they may as well be identical twins.” He looked up at Carl. “We’ll have that knocked out in time for cocktails.”
Carl gave him a pained look. “Don’t make me out to be the bad guy. I…”
His secure cell phone rang. With a frown, he took it from his coat pocket and answered it. The room fell into a hush. Only one person called on that particular phone.
“Yes, Mr. President,” Carl answered. Staring up at the ceiling, he bit his lip as he listened to whatever the country’s Commander in Chief had to say. “Yes, sir. I understand completely.” Slowly putting away the phone, he looked around the room, his gaze finally falling on Naomi. “Chicago…the safe zone is being overrun.”
Naomi clenched her fists as she stared at him. “Jack?”
Carl shook his head. “I don’t know, but I’ll find out.” He swallowed. “Once they’ve evacuated everyone they can out of the safe zone and the rescue ships are away, the president’s going to give the order to nuke the Chicago metro area. Everything from Skokie south to Whiting is going to burn.”
“He should have done that to Los Angeles days ago,” Howard said. “Not to mention Manhattan.”
“B-2 bombers just launched from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to take care of L.A. He didn’t say anything about Manhattan or any other cities that are under attack.”
“So what changed his mind?” Naomi said. “How many times have we heard that he wasn’t going to drop nuclear weapons on American soil?”
“He’s been holding out in hopes we could come up with something. But we haven’t left him with any other choice. His words, not mine.” Blowing out a breath, Carl got to his feet and left the conference room, slamming the door behind him.
Renee gave Naomi a squeeze on the shoulder before following him out. “I’m sure Jack will be okay,” she whispered.
Naomi could only nod. Her body felt heavy, her muscles unresponsive, as if she’d been paralyzed.
“So,” Howard said, breaking the silence, “when are you leaving?”
Naomi looked at him and blinked. “What?”
He tilted his head and stared at her with an are you really that dense expression. “I said, when are you leaving? We don’t have any time to waste.”
She swallowed. “You want me to fly to Iran. Is that what you’re saying?”
Howard shook his head. “I’m just a glorified administrator whose billions of dollars in assets and stock holdings are now worth about as much as the monkey droppings in the lab. You’re the genius geneticist the harvesters want to parlay with.”
“But Carl just said that…”
“Carl said what he was required to say. Don’t think for a minute that he agrees with it. He’s a creature of duty, Naomi. You know that as well as anyone. But the president won’t have any of this alliance idea, and Carl’s pushed it to the point where he’s sure he’ll be canned if he opens his mouth about it again. He’s not afraid of losing his job. He’s afraid of failure.”
We both share that particular fear, Naomi thought. “You’re saying I should go and not tell him?”
“I didn’t say that at all.” He grinned.
Naomi threw up her hands in frustration. “So how do I get out without Carl knowing? None of us can leave the compound without his authorization.”
Howard shook his head. “Don’t worry, I’ve already taken care of that.” Turning to Kiran, he said, “I want you to go with her to command her protective detail, if that’s all right with you.”
“I would be honored, sir.”
Nodding, Howard turned back to Naomi. “Ferris and three former EDS security goons are waiting for you at the helipad.” Al Ferris was a former Combat Search and Rescue pilot, hired by Howard to be his personal pilot after the Earth Defense Society, which had employed Ferris to fly covert missions, had been disbanded. “Just get what you need and go to the main exit. Swipe your badges through the security terminals and you’ll be cleared outside. Ferris will get you where you need to go.”
Naomi and Kiran got up and made for the door. Then Naomi stopped and turned around to face Howard. “How did you know that this…opportunity…would come up now?”
“I didn’t become a billionaire by chance,” he said. “Now get going.”
***
After making sure that Naomi and Kiran were able to depart without any trouble, Howard returned to his office. He was tired, but buoyed up by the knowledge that he had helped put another piece into play in the great and deadly game that was playing out across the globe. A part of him felt guilty for what he had done, but in the end he had been nothing more than a facilitator. Naomi had wanted to explore the harvesters’ offer from the beginning, and he was convinced it was the right move, perhaps the only move that was left to them. She would have come to the same conclusion herself in time and figured out a way to make it happen. But time was something they simply didn’t have, so he’d helped her along.
When he opened the door, he found Carl standing at the window. They had adjoining offices, the only ones left where the windows hadn’t been covered with metal sheeting, with a door between them. But this was the first time Carl had come into Howard’s office and waited for him like this.
Howard waited for the verbal firestorm.
Instead of chewing him out, Carl said, “Is she on her way?”
Howard stopped, stared at Carl for a moment, then closed the door. “Yes,” he said, deciding not to joust over the matter. If Carl wanted his head for what he’d done, he was welcome to it.
Carl stood there a moment longer, staring out across the military encampment that sprawled across the flat Nebraska landscape toward the distant security fence. “Godspeed, Naomi,” he whispered.
ALEXANDER
Alexander ran for his life. Panting with exertion, adrenaline pushing his body beyond its normal limits, he surged ahead of the crowd of screaming humans. He had clawed and bitten several that got in his way, bringing some of them to the ground like prey. One had stepped on the end of his tail, but the pain was only a fleeting memory now.
Behind the humans, he could sense the onrushing tide of them. His attack reflex had been suppressed by the simple instinct to survive. Every unexpected sound, every sudden movement, every strange scent could be a mortal threat. So far, his size, speed, and stamina had saved him, but he was nearly exhausted. He had never run so far or so fast in his life.
With a glance off to the right and behind him, he caught sight of his human, running in company with the others in its company, the two large males and small female. He longed for the human’s company, for where the human was, there was food and attention. There was safety, save for the times they had been forced to confront them. He was struck with an impulse to turn toward his two-legged companion, but his survival instinct held sway. He fled.
Nimbly dodging around and sometimes leaping over the ston
es that were set in orderly rows in the grass, he ran into the freshening breeze that carried the scent of many more humans, along with the smell of water. His human had sometimes taken him to such places to gather fish, where Alexander had indulged himself in snaring some of the smaller ones in his paws while his human wrested larger ones from the water with a pole.
The way ahead was blocked by a great wall, extending to the left and right as far as he could see, without any visible doors. It was much too high for him to leap over, nor were there any openings through which he might squeeze.
But there were trees, some of which had limbs that extended over the wall to whatever lay beyond. Alexander had only once climbed a tree, when his human had left the door ajar and Alexander had been taken with the notion to explore beyond his den. He had chased a chittering squirrel across the yard and up a tall tree. His human had been much more careful about closing the door after that.
Without missing his stride, his heart pounding in his rib cage, he coiled his body and leaped up the tree’s trunk. Using his claws, he scrabbled upward to the first branch that jutted out over the wall. With his tail twitching and thrashing back and forth to help him balance, he made his way out across the branch, then dropped the short distance to the wide top of the wall.
Behind him, the humans came on quickly. Many of them bellowed in fear when they realized their escape was blocked by the wall. So many hit it at once that the wall shook. Those humans who were strong or tall enough began to clamber up to the top, with some climbing over the backs of others.
Behind the crowd that was jamming up against the wall below him, he saw the dark things at work, killing and feeding.
Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) Page 13