by RS McCoy
When she pulled it up, she was shocked to see so much green. Dasia and Osip had been hard at work figuring out connections, adding in new hosts as they were confirmed.
They must be working well together.
Mable added in Dr. Aida Perkins, Planetary Systems researcher at the LRF. Mentee to Dr. Parr. Of course, once entered, her circle slid into place near one of the first. Dr. Jackson Parr had been the most recently confirmed bug death when she arrived at CPI.
She was also connected to Dr. Fobbs in LRF Robotics, the recently vacated position now held by Mable’s esteemed husband.
“Theo, come here,” she said without turning around.
He trudged over and stood behind her. “What?” he asked, all the energy gone from his voice.
“Remember how Calvin said he’d already done three extractions on Aida?”
“How could I forget?”
Mable could almost hear his teeth clench. “Yeah, sorry…”
“What does that have to do with this?” Theo ignored her apology.
“She wasn’t on it. And look, when I added her in, look where she ended up. Right here in the middle. She’s been the one they were after the whole time.”
Mable looked up to see Theo taking in the chart, evaluating the connections, scanning through the hundreds of victims.
“But why?” he finally asked.
“Her planet. It has to be. There are bugs on it. It was never about anth or art or any of it. It was always about 196. Here’s a shuttle pilot that blew up his shuttle. This one is the robotics tech that sent the probes to do her research. This one, Dr. Grant Lilliwood, he led his field in advances in interstellar propulsion vehicles.” Even as she said it, the pieces fell into place.
Theo shook his head. “Some of these still don’t fit. Why those pharmaceutical researchers you extracted? Or this one, that geneticist your brother did? The one who did brain research. There’s no connection between them and the planet.”
“Okay, I didn’t say it was a perfect theory, but this one has something the others don’t.” Mable prepared to play her ace.
“What’s that?”
“Evidence. Her planet. There are bugs on her planet. There’s no denying it. They’re connected. We don’t know all the details yet, but there’s no way around it.”
Theo exhaled deep and slow, taking his time to think, as she knew he would need, especially today.
Then came the buzz of incoming ecomm.
Theo darted forward and tapped it before Mable had even registered it had arrived.
TO: DR. THEODORE KAUFMAN, LRF
FROM: DR. CALVIN HILL, LRF
MSG: AWAKE.
Mable clasped her hands over her mouth. Never in a million years would she have thought she could have successfully performed a Slight extraction, much less under those conditions.
Warm hands appeared on either side of her face as Theo kissed the top of her head. “Thank you,” he said as he landed another half dozen kisses before she finally wriggled away from him.
“I did it!” she squealed, unable to keep back her excitement. Mable jumped from the chair and tackled Theo to the bed. “She’s awake!”
Theo laughed, the good, heavy laugh of an easy heart. “And if you ever do that to me again, so help me—”
“You’ll do what?” Mable called his bluff as she leaned down and kissed him, no sissy kisses on the cheek or head, but a real one.
“I don’t know. I’ll find something. I’ll take away your coffee privileges.” With hands on her hips, he pulled her close. “Can we go see her now?”
“How about in the morning?” Mable laughed.
“You got it.”
SILAS
CPI-AQ-01
SEPTEMBER 14, 2232
After back-to-back comms from his teams on the LRF, Silas gave up on sleep. What was the point? Some other catastrophe would occur as soon as he fell asleep again.
So Silas trudged his way to his office and poured the first of many cups of coffee. He didn’t even bother to change from his loose-fitting sleep pants. His hand rubbed across his bare torso, so much softer than it had been twenty years before.
The lights of his office sprang to life when they sensed his motion in the room. His insects seemed to flutter to life, but it was only a trick of the eye.
Silas dropped his tablet beside his coffee and pulled up Maggie’s files. A planet profile. Her extraction debrief. A flow chart of bug hosts.
He started with the extraction debrief. It was a simple, two paragraph write up of the Slight extraction. With Dr. Perkins awake, Maggie joined the small group of people capable of successful Slight extractions. Now there were two of them.
Silas sipped his coffee as he read her glossed over details, her watered down version. Maggie’s report was clinical and to the point. “Agent MW made a five-inch incision behind the host vertebra,” she wrote. There was nothing about the blood, nothing about the feel of muscle under the blade.
Like Silas, Maggie would never forget the details. And like him, she would likely never reveal the horrors of that experience.
He moved on to the planet profile, unsure of what he was looking for. As Maggie had said, four native species were highlighted, the four bugs. They hovered in three-dimensional scans like he’d never seen, alive and moving where he had only seen those that were dead and preserved.
Silas looked up at his office walls—at the boxes of butterflies pinned in place, their colorful wings spread wide. The bugs were nothing like that.
The projected Gleam shimmered like a cerulean penny, its legs pumping beneath it as it scurried over something in its environment, its wide, circular body hovering above. Had he not known better, Silas would have thought it an interesting new species, a beautiful creature. Scholars would beat each other senseless for permission to study it.
But Silas did know better. Only CPI knew the capabilities of these creatures. How they operated was a complete mystery, one that was slowly coming to light.
They were close. He could smell it; the hairs on his arms tingled with the closeness of it.
Now they had a planet. A source, a homeworld, a clue.
More than they’d ever had before.
A victory, a small one, but they were so rare these days, Silas couldn’t help but feel the thrill of it. Instead of comm-ing to tell him of another bug-induced casualty, Maggie had commed to tell him she figured out a huge piece of their fucked-up puzzle.
Now they just had to put it all together.
Once satisfied the bugs were authentic, identical to those his agents extracted from hosts all over the world, Silas moved on to the flow chart.
It was a chaotic, jumbled thing. Circles and lines criss-crossed and overlapped with seemingly no reason. The chart filled his screen to the edges, and when he swiped, he found it went on in every direction.
One name in particular caught his eye: Dr. Grant Lilliwood. The pride of Ramona’s life, so unfairly stolen. A gift to his industry who died with a major accomplishment on his horizon.
Silas, the fourth son of struggling Craftsmen parents, and Grant, the only child of the great Dr. Ramona Lilliwood, should never have had cause to be childhood friends. Nonetheless, Silas had more memories of dinners at the Lilliwood home than his own.
When Grant died, Ramona found the bug. A capable anatomist in her own right, she performed a physical autopsy on her own son, determined to learn his cause of death when so many others had failed. She sought approval to open CPI and named Silas her second hand, sponsoring him through school to get the doctorate he needed to garner some measure of Scholar confidence.
Ramona didn’t know he had Masry on his side as well.
The degree made it all the more legitimate in the files.
Grant’s death had sparked the entire facility, Silas’s life’s work. Through the death of his oldest friend, Silas had found purpose.
It was Grant’s circle he tapped first. When he did, the connecting lines grew brighter, small de
scriptions appearing over each one.
DR. VIRGIL RATHBONE – LEAD PROPULSIONS ENGINEER (CIPE)
DR. AMELIA ST. CLOUD – MENTOR
DR. VALENCIA PRAIRIE – POTENTIAL GENETIC MATCH (VIA SCHOLAR COMMITTEE)
At sight of the last name, Silas remembered her. Grant had shown him a handful of candidates and asked for his advice, of which Silas had offered none. He knew nothing about Scholars back then, understood little of their strange practices.
Silas hadn’t realized it was her. She was Valencia Delacourt back then. He had never put it together.
Until now.
Under the lines, he saw a pair of letters: MW, TK, DD, JG, or OM. Initials, he realized.
His hand sent the ecomms within thirty seconds. Four minutes later, Dasia, Jane, and Osip stood in the doorway of his office, all groggy and squinting against the light.
“How much have you had to drink, Dr. A?” Osip asked, running a hand through his messy hair.
“None. You three worked on this?” He motioned to the chart above his desk.
They nodded.
“How did you get this information?”
Osip looked over at Dasia. “Uh, we used the Scholar database to find working relationships.”
“Why didn’t you use the Scholar research reports? Didn’t Nick show you how we do it?”
“Uh, I mean, he told us to use them, but we didn’t know what to look for. This made more sense to us.” Silas was unsurprised to hear Nick had been less than thorough.
Then, Silas asked the question he really wanted to know the answer to. “Why did you add this one, Dr. Prairie?” Again, he motioned to the chart.
“It says right there. She was one of his potential matches. We found her information in the Scholar databases. Took us a while to find her, actually.” Osip straightened his vest.
“Yes, but why her? Why not the other matches as well?”
Osip looked back at Dasia before he said, “She was the only one who got infected.”
Silas looked back at the chart with new appreciation. Three professionals who knew or worked with Grant had been infected. And, according to the connecting lines, each of those had other affiliations with bug hosts.
“Mable was right. It’s intentional. Someone is behind this, coordinating the attacks,” Silas began. Then, he told them about the planet, about the bugs, and Kaufman’s sister. All of it.
None moved as he spoke. They simply listened, taking it all in.
“Who knew Theo had a sister?” Osip said at the end, like that was the only piece he’d picked up.
“She’s had a total of four extractions. There has to be a reason she’s been targeted. It seems the planet is the obvious choice.” It was Jane who put it together first.
“Okay, so what do we do now?” Dasia asked. Her blonde hair stood in a messy pile at the back of her head. Her hands were hidden in the sleeves of a too-big sleep shirt.
“Reconfigure this chart with the matrix. Use the planet as context, and tell me how they relate. Maybe, just maybe, we can figure out how they select their hosts.”
THEO
LRF CORRIDOR
SEPTEMBER 14, 2232
Mable had to remind him to slow his steps three or four times as they walked to the Planetary Systems department. As far as Aida or anyone else was concerned, nothing happened, nothing was wrong. There was no reason to be worried.
But Theo needed to see her for himself.
The entire LRF seemed to know something was amiss. Scholars moved faster than he’d ever seen, some even ran. Several collided in the corridor like cars in a physics simulation.
It only made Theo pull Mable along all the faster. Minutes later, they arrived to find the wing vacant. “She’s not here,” Theo called from the doorway of Aida’s dark office.
“Calvin’s gone, too.”
At the end of the hall, the conference room was dark.
“You think they’re back at the apartment?” Theo tried to think of where else they might be. Aida could have gone to FIC, but that didn’t explain Calvin’s absence. Where were they?
Mable directed him toward the office of a Scholar Theo had never met.
“Dr. Niemeyer?” Mable stood in the doorway and waited. Several times she prompted him, but he never moved.
“You think—?” Theo asked.
“Yeah,” Mable replied. To Theo’s shock, she lifted him off the desk by his hair. His face sagged and turned purple where the blood had already begun to settle. The tablet left its image across his cheek. “Find me a flashlight,” she said without looking up.
Theo could see where she was going with it. He searched through Niemeyer’s office, then Aida’s across the hall, but didn’t find a flashlight until he came across Calvin’s extraction kit in the bottom drawer of his desk.
“Sorry,” Theo said as he returned to Niemeyer’s office and handed it over. “I should have looked in Calvin’s desk first.”
Mable ignored him. She clicked on the flashlight and shone it into the mouth she’d already worked open. “He’s got an Echo.”
“Still? Wouldn’t it have dissolved by now?” At the lab, it had taken only a second or two to oxidize.
“Yeah. Maybe since it’s still in his body? We need to find Calvin.”
Theo pulled the tablet from where he’d left it in the chair and pulled up the ecomm application. Before he could send anything to Calvin, Theo saw an ecomm he never would have believed.
“Mable, look.” In a stroke, he set the ecomm to hover in holographic projection where they both could read it.
TO: LRF STAFF-ALL
FROM: DR. MICHAEL FILMORE, LRF DIRECTOR
MSG: REPORT ANY CASUALTIES TO THE OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR IMMEDIATELY. FORM A LINE. ALL CASES WILL BE HANDLED AS SWIFTLY AS POSSIBLE.
“Holy shit,” Mable said to herself. “How many people have to die before they send an ecomm like this?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “A lot.”
MICHAEL
LRF-AQ
SEPTEMBER 14, 2232
The chaos of his once-private office hit Michael like a slap to the face. Dozens of frenzied Scholars filled the room and more waited outside the door. One talked over the other, and each thought theirs was the most important case.
In his head, he counted upwards of forty dead, though the number continued to climb.
A fantastic day for Abigail to quit.
“I was talking to him about the water-resistant grain splices and he just slumped forward. He died while I was talking to him!” screamed Dr. Ulrich from Astrobotany.
“He was my mentor! What am I going to do?” cried the new Dr. Holtz.
“She was the best in the field. Without her, we’ll have to start over! All her data is gone!” yelled another before covering her face and running out.
Michael put up his hands as a physical barrier between himself and the growing crowd. They’d never seen anything like it, he knew. In their highly-ordered little worlds, a sudden death was about as catastrophic as anything they could imagine.
He tried to ease them as much as he could. “Yes, I understand. I will take down everyone’s information. There will be a formal inquiry. I’m still working on contacting Dr. Masry.”
As he spoke, he wrote a series of desperate ecomms.
MSG: CRISIS.
MSG: NEED YOU.
MSG: COME TO MY OFFICE.
MSG: FORTY DEAD.
MSG: PLEASE ABIGAIL.
As each new ecomm went unanswered, Michael felt his hope slipping further away. She was gone. He’d lost her, for reasons he didn’t understand.
At the back of the screaming crowd, Michael heard a voice above the others, loud and commanding.
“Get out! Go back to your offices. Each department, send one ecomm. Go back to your offices!” The more he shouted, the more Scholars turned to listen, though some only argued more.
Michael peered through the group, trying to see who the speaker was.
“We c
ame to speak with the director,” Dr. Lehmon insisted.
Finally, in a gap between heads, Michael saw Dr. Hill, his cool, collected calm spreading over the room. “Director Filmore requires a status update from each department within the hour.”
A few looked to Michael. He nodded and confirmed, “I need a head count by 1700.”
Michael had no idea why Dr. Hill wanted to see him, but he was nonetheless grateful for a break from the crowd. Each person in his office represented at least one death. There were dozens.
And he had thought eight was bad.
“Director, what do you know about the bugs?” Dr. Hill asked.
Michael narrowed his eyes. “You’re one of the operatives.” Dr. Arrenstein had mentioned there were several of his proxies aboard the LRF but refused to release their names. Now Michael knew one.
“Technically, I’m an agent, but yes, I’m with CPI.”
Michael fumed, huffing hot breath. “Your bugs just killed forty Scholars.”
“We don’t have confirmation of that, but yes, it’s likely that they did.” Dr. Hill made the admission with nothing but calm.
“Why? What triggered them?” As he asked, Michael’s tablet buzzed with incoming ecomms, already divulging the extensive damage to his staff.
“We don’t know, but I need to check the rest of the personnel. Figure out a reason to get them in line, but I have to test them.”
“How? Why haven’t you tested them before?” If Calvin knew how to keep people safe from bugs and simply hadn’t done it, Michael was going to be very disappointed.
“I have to administer anesthetic and search their brains. It’s a highly invasive process. We only perform extractions on known targets. There’s never been a reason for a general sweep.” Dr. Hill slumped into one of the two formal office chairs Michael kept for appearances. “I’ve extracted twenty-nine in the last year,” he admitted.
A ding sounded from Michael’s tablet. Someone requested access to his office. Michael tapped the icon and saw the vid feed from the other side of the door.