Infinity Drake 3

by John McNally

  Dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu.

  Finn grabbed one. Squeezed. It was like a slimy sponge. His wonder ceased with the metallic CLUNK of the first airlock opening.

  Three bright yellow divers emerged, Tyros, and got straight to work, each releasing a bundle of ten or so Splice cables from the racks. More airlocks opened and more Tyros swam out to do the same. Each had a scoot on a short tether attached to their ankles. When they were ready, they clipped their feet into their scoot and propelled themselves out of the hold into the bloodstream, into the artery itself. They leant into the force of the flow and the scoots came to life and held them steady, angled like ski jumpers in flight, trailing thick cable tails, happy to ignore the soft pummelling they were getting from the oncoming cells.

  Straight away, Finn got a familiar urge.

  I want a go …

  Dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu.

  He clipped his feet into the scoot he’d grabbed, and attached a bundle of cables to his belt.

  The airlock opened again and the last of the yellow Tyro crew emerged, this time with five green figures: the three medics, plus Amazon and Pan. The medics huddled and tested their scoots while Pan corralled the crew using a laser pointer. Amazon attached a line to her belt from a set of reels marked UMBILICAL COMMS TETHERS, laying a guideline from the Vitalis to their destination.

  Out in the stream, one of the yellow Tyro crew struggled to control the scoot, like Bambi finding his feet, flipping a full 360 degrees.

  Carla! thought Finn. Should he do something to help her? But before he could move, she’d read the power dynamics of both blood flow and scoot, righted herself, and was holding her own among the Tyros. A natural. Delta would be proud, thought Finn.

  As the three green medics eased out of the hold to join them, there was some more instability and a rush to assist Sir James, who seemed in danger of careering off downstream.

  During the confusion, Finn floated out to join the Tyro crew.

  Dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu, dhu-dhu.

  As soon as the stream hit him, he angled the scoot. Immediately, it whooshed and responded, threatening to whisk out from under him, until he threw his shoulders forward to balance the forces and gain some stability. At first, he was washed too far back, but he angled his feet to increase the thrust and edge forwards, steadying himself as best he could at the back of the pack of yellow Tyro crew members, acutely aware each would happily kill him.

  Immediately beyond the lights of the Vitalis was utter, gaping darkness, and out of this darkness rushed the red cells, like fat confetti, the artery walls full of forbidding dark potholes where smaller blood vessels branched off.

  Leopold touched Pan and gave him an order. He waved forward two of the crew with his pointer and they led the way, switching on arc lights that illuminated the mouth of the target blood vessel. Another wave of Pan’s laser and they were ordered to follow him as he went in first. The medics came immediately after, then the Tyro crew members, all in a line, trailing their cable tails.

  One of you is Carla, Finn thought, but he couldn’t risk approaching her now. Instead, he entered at the back of the line, following the narrow snaking path ahead. Behind him, Amazon closed in, bringing up the rear with another arc light, trailing the tether line back to the Vitalis.

  Down the blood vessel they went, in single file, carried by the flow, all the while the walls around them closing in till they were like surfers riding a tube, curling round the slick arterial skin as they twisted and turned. The bright arc light was making the membrane translucent, so Finn could see the press of other vessels, black and sinewy, in the flesh beyond. Down and down, Finn having to focus against panic as the ugly tunnel tightened still further. Then, suddenly – light and space. Relief.

  The tunnel had opened into a much larger space, an interface chamber with a ghost-grey membrane of some kind, a great thick curtain that attracted the blood cells. As if in a frenzy of worship, the cells pressed themselves against it and changed in colour and form, their redness dulling in a moment as oxygen passed out of them before they fell away to drain out of the veins, dark and spent.

  Finn saw the medics holding each other’s wrists, discussing something. Then he saw the laser scalpel brought forward by Pan, bigger than a rifle. One of the medics, the old surgeon, Sir James, braced it against his shoulder.

  Everyone backed away as Sir James took aim and pulled the trigger.

  FZZZZTZTZFZTZZTZZTZTTTTTTT! An intense beam of light appeared at the tip of the device and boiled the liquid plasma it shot through, sending out blooms of bubbles. But the surgeon kept the electric-blue blade steady, and ran it down a section of the membrane, cleaving it along the grain of tight grey cells. Then he stopped and let the bubbles and debris drift off in the flow. Gently, reverently, he parted the curtain at the gap and slipped through into the unknown.

  Leopold followed, then Nico, then Pan. One by one, trailing equipment and cables, the Tyros followed suit. Finn felt the grey membrane pressing tight against him, but he pushed on through to emerge into yet another world.

  A crystal-clear ocean trench. The spinal canal. They were deep within Kaparis now, near the injury that so defined him. Beneath them, about twenty metres or so away at their scale, lay the great grey-black snake of the spinal cord, suspended in the clear spinal fluid by ligaments that ran like anchor lines to the walls around them. Following the line of green and yellow figures that scooted ahead of him in the arc light, Finn looked along the vast snake to the wound itself.

  A great cluster of gnarled flesh and bone seemed to have burst through into the perfect ocean and then set like lava down one half of the canal, and while clear spinal fluid passed easily around it, the great snake itself was cut clean through, its two severed sections ten or so metres apart, both sides held firmly in place by the web of ligaments, or else fused to the landslide of scar tissue.

  With barely a pause, the medics led the party down into the gap. The two circular sides of the crevasse, the ends of the severed spinal cord, were huge, the size of cricket pitches, and the cut ends of the nerve fibres that ran through it swirled in different patterns of grey and white, like letters running through a stick of rock. Each grey nerve fibre was barely the thickness of a thumb and there must have been thousands on thousands of them facing each other across this abyss, unable to connect.

  This is it, Finn thought. Journey’s end.

  Suspended just a few metres ahead of him, stunned in the silent chamber, one of the crew members had stopped.

  Carla.

  He wasn’t going to get a better opportunity.

  Here goes nothing, he thought.

  He eased himself forward on the scoot, reached out … and touched her.

  “Whatever you do, do not freak out!” he said.

  She spun round and her eyes grew so wide they almost burst.

  “What …?” He heard a gasp like a choke, then she grabbed hold of him, almost convulsed in shock.

  “WHAATTT …?”

  “I said DON’T!” hissed Finn, looking around nervously at the others, but no one seemed to have noticed.

  Carla’s body buzzed with the shock of it, the impossibility, the joy too. In the depths of her despair, in the deepest pit, he had found her. And he was …

  He was bigger than her! It was like she had never seen him before, had never met him, yet she knew him absolutely – not a face on a screen, not a voice at her ear, but whole and real. She wanted to burst into tears of absurd joy.

  “I found you …” she said.

  “No, I found you! I followed you and crashed the party,” said Finn, grinning at her. She had a hold of his arm like she would never let go.

  Amazon spotted them and angrily waved them forward with her pointer.

  They started towards the other Tyro crew.

  “One of the medics, the woman …” said Carla.

  “I know,” said Finn. “She’s not one of them. We’ve got to get to her, sabotage the mission, t
hen get out of here.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know yet – just copy what the others do and we’ll try and get close to her.”

  Finn! It was really him. She couldn’t believe it. Don’t smile, she reminded herself, just in time.

  As they rejoined the main group, Dr Leopold lifted a cable off the back of one of the Tyros and unfurled it. He took the Splice cup at one end of the cable and clipped it on to a severed nerve fibre at the dead centre of a dark carpet swirl of endings on one face of the cord, then he scooted across the chasm to the corresponding swirl on the opposite side.

  He looked at Sir James, then at Nico. Then with a mad laugh inaudible across the abyss, he drove the end of the connector into the corresponding nerve fibre.

  LEDs along the length of the cable leapt into life …

  FEBRUARY 21 23:52 (GMT+3). Great Cavern, Monastery of Mount St Demetrius of Thessaloniki

  “ARRRGH!” Kaparis cried out, in shock and … pain.

  The surgeons wondered for a moment if he had suffered a heart attack.

  He might as well have. His soul shook. Every hair on his head stood on end.

  It was as if part of his left leg had been hit with a hammer. And he felt it … felt the pain subside to a warmth, an abstract mysterious joy. Life.

  HSSSSSSSSSS …

  Heywood saw his terrible face contort in ecstasy beneath the mask.

  “I am REBORN!” Kaparis raved. “My left leg!”

  The Big Swiss Cheese yanked the sheet up. There was the left calf muscle, tight as steel.

  “Command it!” the surgeon insisted.

  “Move!” went Kaparis’s brain, and an electrochemical command shot down his spinal cord – all the way.

  The muscle twitched.

  It was the surgeon’s turn to scream.

  “IT’S WORKING!”

  Santiago dangled above the henge, silent, mesmerised like Hudson.

  They had seen the submarine disappear, consumed by the hot area. They had seen technicians move in with a massive microscope with robot arms that had picked something up from the centre of the particle accelerators.

  Did it contain the submarine? Did it contain Finn and Carla?

  “Closer!” Hudson had urged, and Santiago had flashed the instruction up the shaft to lower them just a few feet more.

  All eyes were on screens, the technicians and Siguri in awe.

  The robot microscope was wheeled into a temporary tented structure composed of sheets of thick translucent plastic; at its heart, a figure lay prostrate on an operating table.

  “Diablo!” gasped Santiago.

  “Bloody hell,” agreed Hudson.

  Hudson didn’t know what was going on. He could guess, but they had to know, and they had to tell Al.

  “Just a little closer,” he whispered to Santiago.

  TWENTY-TWO

  FEBRUARY 22 00:08 (GMT+3). Body of D.A.P. Kaparis

  Deep in the vast intraspinal crevasse, the reconnected nerve fibre sparkled.

  Dr Leopold scooted a loop-the-loop, while Sir James shook his head in wonder.

  Nico couldn’t believe it. To operate at this scale … The possibilities cascaded through her mind. The potential was huge. She saw cables running through bodies ill with multiple sclerosis, she saw children with spinal injuries walking again – running even! Never having to see a doctor again!

  And then she thought of her own children running. And she remembered where they were. Where she was. And who she was inside.

  The flick of a supervising laser, wielded by one of the senior Tyros, called her to action.

  The Splice cable bundles were being offloaded by the Tyro crew and collected in a tethered bale. Half the Tyros were unfurling cables ready to start work, the other half were heading back to the Vitalis to fetch more, scooting along the tether line that Amazon had laid and which led all the way back to the ship.

  Dr Nico Sharma felt a hand touch her arm. It was Leopold, his eyes shining.

  “Now do you understand why I brought you here?” He opened his arms as if to offer her the strange new world. “Isn’t this the most stupendous thing you’ve ever experienced?”

  But Nico didn’t know what to think or what to say.

  “Where do you want them to start?” asked Leopold. He handed her a laser pointer and gestured towards the Tyros. “They are yours to instruct.”

  Nico looked at the vast surface of the spinal cord, at the cross-section of nerve endings she’d studied all her working life and knew so well. There were relatively few cables compared to the thousands of nerve fibres, but, as long as the key connections were in the right place, the brain could fill in the gaps. The logical thing to do was to distribute the cables evenly by structure and function, following the patterns on the faces of the severed cord.

  She selected a pattern she knew controlled the motor function of the arms and put her hand on the first crew member.

  “Start on this swirl here –” and she indicated the precise spot with her laser – “and run your cable to that swirl over there,” she said, indicating the swirl on the opposite side of the crevasse.

  The swirls looked exactly the same … almost.

  The Tyro did her bidding and connected the first Splice cup as directed, as Nico scooted along the line of Tyro crew, issuing the same order.

  Leopold watched her, and slowly the scales fell from his eyes.

  At the end of the line, the last Tyro shocked her by speaking back. “Dr Sharma, please don’t freak – we’re not Tyros – we’re on your side.”

  Nico felt alarm. What was this? Had she been found out? She looked into the Tyro’s eyes. They were bright, desperate. Another Tyro, the clumsy girl, touched the first, so that all three of them were linked somehow. Instinctively, she knew these two weren’t like the others.

  “Make it look like you’re giving us instructions,” said the boy.

  She took the Splice cup Finn held and pretended to show them something as he machine-gunned information.

  “My name is Infinity Drake. This is Carla Salazar. We got caught up in this a while ago. We’re in as much trouble as you are.”

  “More,” said Carla.

  “We have to stop this,” Finn continued, while out of the corner of her eye Nico saw a pair of green shapes swimming towards them. “We’ve got to figure a way out of here and we somehow have to booby-trap the body, and I figured that as you’re a doctor you’ll know what to do, see? Dr Sharma?”

  She glanced up as the pair of green figures closed in.

  “I understand,” she said quickly. “I’ve already started, but now it’s too late.”

  “Too late?” Finn began, as Nico pushed away, breaking contact with them just as Amazon seized her and Pan swooped in to cut the short tether running from her ankle to her scoot. Then he took the distress flare and knife from her utility belt.

  “What are you doing?” Nico said.

  Finn and Carla backed off, trying to read the situation.

  Leopold arrived, gestured at the cables Nico had ordered to be attached, then touched her arm. “I fought so hard to get you on this mission,” he said. “Both of us know this is sabotage.”

  Nico tried to play dumb. “I don’t know what you’re talking about …”

  “You’re connecting the nucleus proprius to the dorsal nucleus,” he said.

  Nico protested. “No, this is the nucleus proprius.”

  “It’s really not that difficult to study a spinal cross-section,” replied Leopold, flatly.

  “If you think you could do my job, why drag me into this in the first place?”

  “Because you’re special, Nico. But not that special.” He gripped her arm, hard. “This would have cost all of us our lives, our families’ lives. Not to mention the damage to the patient. As a doctor, you took an oath to do no harm …”

  “Don’t talk to me about right and wrong!” said Nico. “Can’t you see you are in the pay of a madman?”

  “Yo
u think the man who gave us all this should suffer?” Leopold paused to contemplate his own question a moment. “I wanted you to be part of it. To see it. Ever since we met at the institute in Zurich … I’ve loved you.”

  Nico shook her head. “No. We’re friends, you’re not in love. You don’t know what love is. Don’t tell me you’ve thrown your life away for that,” she said.

  “Maybe I have …” said Leopold, hurt. “I’ve waited so long for you to see the real me. I’ve given you everything, even this. And if you can’t see how extraordinary this is, how extraordinary Dr Kaparis is, then that makes you very ordinary indeed. So thank you, Nico, thank you for setting my heart free.”

  Leopold suppressed tears of self-pity, then ordered Amazon to take her back to the Vitalis and lock her up. Then he turned away and started to disconnect the Splice cables that had been misplanted on the nerve endings, like the arrows through his heart.

  Amazon regarded Nico through eyes narrowed to gimlets of hate. Pan scooted up behind her. They exchanged a few words.

  Finn and Carla watched from the cable bale. They saw Amazon grab Nico and scoot with her back up the guide line.

  “We’ve got to follow,” said Finn.

  There were enough Tyro crew members coming and going for Carla and Finn to drift up after them without being noticed. But what were they actually going to do?

  They rose out of the crevasse into the great body of spinal fluid in the canal above. Carla was already thinking ahead. “If we can get back to the Vitalis with her, we could try and rescue her and take the ship.”

  “And do what?”

  “I don’t know!” she said for both of them.

  Ahead, Amazon was forcing Nico back through the cleft in the canal lining, back into the bloodstream, a plume of red cells escaping to pollute the fluid as it opened.

  Finn and Carla waited a few moments, then parted the cleft and wriggled back into the bloodstream themselves.

  There were no arc lights at this point and the atmosphere back in the red blizzard was menacing. They could only see by the lights on their helmets. Beyond them, the lights of Amazon and her prisoner were disappearing back the way they’d come earlier, through the intervertebral gap.