by M. R. Carey
Tuning out the voices, Greaves prepares the tissue collected by the biopsy needle for examination. He uses the ATLUM, a machine perfected at Harvard’s Centre for Brain Science in the years immediately preceding the Breakdown. It’s a microtome, a lathe for slicing neural tissue into ultra-fine sections of a single cell’s thickness. The ATLUM mounts the sections onto a continuous ribbon of tape rather than onto conventional slides. It therefore allows the user—at least, the user with a scanning electron microscope ready to hand—to build up a three-dimensional view of brain structures and to follow them down through successive strata of tissue. Greaves finds the operation of the ATLUM utterly enthralling. It peels tissue samples the way you might peel an apple with your pocket knife, then rebuilds them into an apple again.
When he mounts and examines his sample, though, he is confused.
The children have already demonstrated that they are not at all like other hungries. Their behavioural repertoire is vast, perhaps as large as that of regular humans, so he expects to see little or no fungal penetration of the brain tissue. Instead he finds himself staring at a dense mat of fungal mycelia. The brain is one vast spider web of threads, woven about and through the regular neurons all the way from the outer cortex to the thalamus and transverse fissure. By volume, this brain is half human and half fungus.
But where is the damage? The human cerebral matter ought to have been hollowed out, devoured by the fungal invader. There ought to be a 55–80 per cent reduction in actual brain mass and a visible degeneration of whatever tissue still remains. A crust of microglial cells overlaying the damaged cortical areas. Myelin sheaths stripped away leaving bare neurons firing fitfully and futilely into synaptic gaps that have become mud wallows of necrotic juices. None of that is present. If this brain has been invaded, it is mounting a robust defence.
Or is this a moment rather than a state? Just a brief equilibrium before the cerebral tissue surrenders and the fungus carries the day? But in that case, how has the brain held out for so long, surrounded and besieged? There is some factor at work that he has never seen before, and the implications are immense. Almost dizzying.
Greaves raises his head from the eyepiece and looks around furtively. He feels for a moment as though the beating of his heart, the tremor in his breathing must have been noticed, but Rina isn’t looking at him at all. She is focused on her own work, her preoccupied calm contrasting with his own sudden burst of excitement and near-panic.
He goes back in. This time he abandons the microscope for a while, draws off another tissue sample and begins a series of tests for the presence of the major neurotransmitters—the chemicals that turn the brain from a lump of inert flesh into the world’s biggest communications hub. There are well over a hundred of these chemical couriers, but Greaves limits himself for the moment to a sample of about thirty: the ones that show up quickly in the presence of off-the-shelf reagents.
Half of the chemical transmitters are present in the same strengths and proportions as a normal human brain. The rest aren’t there at all.
Which is impossible.
He knows how Cordyceps is meant to work—how it works in every hungry studied so far. Seconds after primary infection, it floods the human host’s bloodstream where it proliferates with breathtaking speed. Carried through the blood-brain barrier, it lodges in the brain stem and launches a pre-emptive strike, deactivating normal neural functioning by destructive super-stimulation of the nerve cells. It burns the brain out.
Then it grows downwards again, into and through the spine, extending its mycelial system along the host body’s major afferent nerve trunks. With the brain out of the conversation, apart from a few powerful, instinctive behaviours controlled through the pons and medulla, the fungus is free to hijack the peripheral nervous system and use it to take direct control of the host’s motor functions.
So in a heavily infected brain, native neurotransmitter activity should be minimal to non-existent. There may still be a consciousness in there—the experts at Beacon have argued it back and forth without reaching a conclusion—but either way it doesn’t matter. The strings have been cut.
This brain is different. Structurally it’s intact and chemically it’s halfway functional: but what good is half a brain? You can’t drive a car if it has a carburettor but no spark plug, cylinders but no pistons. It’s not as though half a brain could run half the body’s systems. Your limbs can’t be made to move without dopamine or acetylcholine. You can’t have a proper sleep cycle without adenosine, or hunger and satiety reflexes without noradrenaline. So the fungus must still be running the show, surely, however healthy the brain tissue looks in cross-section.
But Greaves has seen how these children behave. Aside from the hunger, they remind him of real people.
Turn the question on its head. If this child, when he was alive, had a partial immunity to some of the hungry pathogen’s effects, then what was the mechanism? There is nothing unusual in the cellular structures Greaves is seeing, except that they are still pristine, still viable, when they should be bombed-out shells.
He ponders. Form follows function, but it also dictates function. There is a reason why the hungries are called that, after all. Obviously the hunger reflex is the first thing that Cordyceps hijacks. More than anything else it needs its hosts to eat, carrying the infection with every bite. He saw the little girl go after that pigeon, and he saw her tribe feeding on dog-flesh in the streets of Invercrae. The children have that instinct, that drive, just as strongly as the regular hungries have it, however different they may be in other ways.
So what is happening here? Is this just a refinement of the pathogen’s normal onset and progression, or is it something completely new?
He needs to look at spinal tissue to see what Cordyceps is doing down there. But he can’t take a fresh biopsy with Rina in the lab, working right beside him.
Reluctantly, he dismounts his slides and samples and stows them in his personal area where they won’t be touched. Rina hasn’t looked up once in all this time. What she is doing shouldn’t be that absorbing, though. It’s a fairly basic mechanical procedure. She is neutralising sulphuric acid with magnesium carbonate, which is a quick and easy way to produce …
Oh.
Dr. Khan looks up at last and meets his stare. The guarded blankness of it confirms his guess.
Greaves has had to learn people the hard way, but chemistry is easy. He knows magnesium sulphate very well indeed: its molecular profile, its chemical properties and its bio-regulatory effect. Dr. Khan almost certainly intends to take it as a tocolytic, to suppress contractions in her birth canal. The baby is coming, or at least announcing its intentions.
“What?” she asks, not realising that her cover is blown.
Greaves has no idea what an adequate response might be from the point of view of emotion and its abstruse architecture. But again, he is confident about the chemistry.
“Nifedipine, Rina,” he tells her. “Nifedipine would be better, if you want to delay the birth. We’ve got some in the med cabinet, for hypertensive trauma.”
Rina looks stunned. She puts down the retort she’s been holding all this time, leans away from it a little as though she wants to disavow all knowledge. After a moment she laughs, and shakes her head. “Amazing, Holmes,” she says.
“What? Who is Holmes? Why is he amazing?”
“Never mind. Don’t say a word to anyone, Stephen. I don’t want to slow us down or make this stupid situation any worse than it is. Don’t say anything. Please?”
Greaves nods. He may not be able to lie, but he is a hundred per cent sure that nobody is going to ask him this particular question. And if anyone asks the more general question “Is something wrong with Dr. Khan?” he can probably keep from giving away the secret by saying she is taking medicine commonly prescribed for stress. So he is confident that he can keep his word.
He wishes he could defuse his discovery of her intentions by confiding in her about his own immense projec
t. But this is not the time.
Soon. When he has findings rather than suppositions. When he has more to show her than a dead child.
A dead child, he strongly suspects, will only add to her troubles right now.
27
Dr. Fournier is still trying to coax a response out of the radio but he has long since resigned himself to failure. He’s only doing it now because he can think of nothing else to do that’s of any value. So when the voice of Brigadier Fry’s adjutant, Mullings, oozes weakly out of the radio in a viscous froth of static, he starts so violently that he cracks his right elbow on the engine cowling.
“Beacon. Please identify.”
“Get the brigadier,” the doctor snarls, doubled up around his injured arm. “It’s Fournier. Field report. Urgency one.”
“She’s conferring with her chiefs of staff, Dr. Fournier. You’ll have to—”
Another voice murmurs in the background. Fournier can’t hear the words, but Mullings’ robust “Yes, Brigadier!” is loud enough to make him clap his hand over the radio’s speaker and whisper a curse.
“Go ahead then,” Fry says. “Report, Dr. Fournier.”
He tries to:
“You—we—There hasn’t been a transmission through the main cockpit radio in two weeks, Brigadier. We didn’t know what was happening—”
“I’m well aware of that, Doctor. I asked you to report on your own status, if you please.”
“We had an incident. We lost a man—Private Lutes.” He tells her about Invercrae, in somewhat unnecessary detail, steering away from the substantive point for as long as he can. But finally he says it. “We’re heading home.”
“Are you now?” the brigadier asks mildly, after a momentary pause. “And whose decision was that?”
“All of us. It was … it was the group decision. We had hard evidence of junker activity, after all. It—it seemed—”
“You had a man down. That in itself isn’t evidence of anything. Frankly, I’d say the fact that Rosie herself was not attacked argues against any junker presence.”
So here they are. And of course Fournier is being required to bow his head and bear the blame. How very convenient a scapegoat is, especially in a situation where success is almost impossible. This time he fights back. “I made a judgement call based on the facts available to me. I also took into account the morale of the team, and the frictions—very considerable frictions!—between Colonel Carlisle and Lieutenant McQueen.”
Fry sweeps these arguments away. “What matters now,” she says, “is to manage the situation. The timing is very unwelcome. We’re in the middle of significant structural upheaval here, which is why there has been a hiatus in our communications to you. The colonel’s return at this point could be highly disruptive.”
Fournier is ready to dig in his heels and argue his case, but now he feels a stirring of unease. Structural upheaval! He imagines the bleak landscape lying under those anodyne words and he is unable to keep from lifting the blanket.
“When you say upheaval,” he ventures, “do you mean …?” He tries to think of a neutral way to phrase the question, discovers that there isn’t one. “Has the Muster taken charge of the Main Table?”
Fry’s tone is surgically precise. “The Main Table has voluntarily ceded executive authority to the Muster. A peaceful handover of power. We are not talking about a regime change, Doctor, but a logical reallocation of existing roles and priorities. Unfortunately, some extremist elements have refused to see it that way. They’re taking this opportunity to press their own private resentments, and we’re having to come down very hard on that.”
“Is there an emergency?” Fournier asks anxiously. He means besides what she has just described, of course. Was there some reason to do this apart from the end-in-itself of taking power?
“There was a need,” the brigadier says, “for firm and focused management of a volatile situation.”
Fournier has no further questions. He has just heard a military coup being defined in words that make it sound like a school detention. He doesn’t want to hear any more, in case it’s worse than what he is already imagining.
All his fight and all his grievances are gone out of him, suddenly. He thinks of asking “What do you want me to do?” but even in his head that sounds feeble and vacillating. He can’t let those words out into the world. He edits them into slightly better shape. “So what are your orders?”
“First of all, and most urgently, disable the main cockpit radio at your earliest opportunity. We’ve been maintaining radio silence, obviously, but we want to guard against anyone else managing to contact Rosie.”
“Anyone else?” Fournier hazards.
The brigadier doesn’t seem to hear. “You can render the cockpit radio inoperable,” she tells him, “by opening the fascia up with an Allen key and removing the smaller of the two circuit boards inset at the rear of the main motherboard. It will unclip very easily. Do this quickly, Doctor. The longer you delay, the greater the risk. If the colonel is apprised of events here at Beacon, he may wish to intervene. That’s unacceptable.”
“Very well. I—I think I can do that. Is there anything else?”
“Yes, of course there is. I need you to stay out in the field until further notice. We don’t want Carlisle here and we don’t want Rosie. Not yet. When the situation stabilises, we’ll bring you in. Until then, find a way to stop or slow down.”
Dr. Fournier feels that this is a very easy thing to say and a difficult thing to deliver. He is about to ask, with a carefully modulated amount of sarcasm, how the brigadier thinks he’s going to stop a tank. But at that moment there is a lurch so abrupt that it slams his chair and his shoulder right up against the bulkhead.
Rosie has stopped.
28
“I—I’m really sorry, sir!” Private Sixsmith stammers. “I didn’t see it until we were right on top of it. The leaves—”
She shrugs helplessly, then puts her hands back on the wheel—gripping it as if to draw some strength from it. “The leaves hid it,” she says again. “I didn’t think there was anything there. I’m sorry.” She isn’t finished with apologising but Carlisle shuts her down as gently as he can. They have to respond to what has just happened: everything else can wait. “It’s fine, Private,” he says quietly. “You reacted quickly and appropriately.”
He opens the ALL channel on the comms rig, speaking to the crew quarters, lab, mid-section and turret. From the crew quarters comes a chorus of raised voices. Sealey keeps asking what just happened and Penny is crying, “Did we hit something? What did we hit?”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” the colonel broadcasts. “Everybody stay where you are, and please don’t block the channel. Phillips, go to infra-red again. Scan for hostiles.”
“Sir,” Phillips says, and then there is silence for most of a minute. A provisional silence, anyway, with only breathless whispers from the crew quarters—and from the lab, very distinct, Stephen Greaves’ voice saying with rising panic, “Rina’s hurt! Somebody. Everybody. Rina’s hurt!”
“Dr. Akimwe,” Carlisle says, “please go to Dr. Khan. Mr. Greaves, help is coming. Please stay off the channel.” That done, he waits in silence. He approves of the fact that Private Phillips is taking his time. This is not a situation where an off-the-cuff answer will do.
“Nothing out there, sir,” Phillips says at last. “Nothing warm, anyway.”
Which doesn’t rule out hungries. But hungries didn’t make the thing they’ve just rolled over. It was a barricade stretched across the full width of the road. Mainly branches and twigs, but the grinding squeals from Rosie’s underbelly suggest that there were some rocks in the mix, too.
Whatever it was, it’s now under them. The jolt was from the treads rolling over the rocks and stones before Sixsmith could bring Rosie to a halt.
“Any damage?” Carlisle asks the driver now.
Sixsmith consults the diagnostic board, shakes her head. “Nothing in the red, sir. W
e’re good. Should I get out and verify?”
“Not here,” Carlisle says. “Move us on a mile or so. We’ll take a look when we’re well clear.”
Sixsmith rolls Rosie forward an inch at a time, alert for any suspect vibration, any hint of trouble. She waits until she can see the barricade in the rear-views before she hits the throttle.
In the event, they drive almost four miles before Carlisle calls a halt. He waits until the forest on both sides thins out and they’re in relatively open country. Even then, he makes Phillips do another 360 with the infra-red goggles.
In the crew quarters, he assembles the escort and assigns details. Sixsmith will stay at the wheel; Foss will man the turret guns. He himself will go outside with McQueen and Phillips to inspect the damage, if any. The colonel was expecting to have to field anxious questions from the science team, but they have migrated en masse into the lab.
While McQueen and Phillips kit up, the colonel goes astern to check on Dr. Khan’s status. She fell down when Rosie stopped. She is still on the ground, ashen pale, not speaking or trying to move. Her lab coat and shirt are thrown open and Akimwe holds a stethoscope to her bare abdomen. The remaining members of the science team stand around, extraneous and unhappy. Stephen Greaves is rigid with misery and fear. His head is bowed and both of his fists are pressed hard against his forehead. Almost imperceptibly, his upper body rocks backwards and forwards. John Sealey kneels beside Khan, both embracing her and holding her head up off the cold steel of the deck. His cover, the colonel assumes, is now blown even for the slowest of uptake. As if on cue, Dr. Fournier enters from the engine room, blinking in the harsh light from the neon strips.