Pandemic i-3

by Scott Sigler

  A laptop let out a beep. Bo Pan sat up straighter. Steve put the chips aside, brushed his orange-dust-covered fingertips against his shirt, then pulled the laptop closer.

  A tweet.

  @TheMadPlatypus: Dizzy in the hizzy.

  Steve sagged in his seat, felt the anxiety flood away in a crashing waterfall of relief.

  “It’s the Platypus,” he said. “It’s signaling.”

  He watched a string of tweets come pouring in. Seemingly normal language — mostly about “hot bitches” and “keg stands” — told him the story.

  Bo Pan leaned in. “Is it working?”

  Steve smiled. “Hell yeah, it is.” The Platypus had found the location. Steve read the tweets, trying to figure out what had taken so long. There it was:

  @TheMadPlatypus: Mean muggin’ AT-ATs all over the damn place. Fuck the Empire.

  Navy ROVs.

  Holy shit, it was really happening.

  @TheMadPlatypus: Stick in the mud is big like a pickle.

  It wasn’t just the ROVs… the Platypus had found a big object on the bottom. Too big.

  “Something is off,” he said. “When the alien object came down, there was enough observed data to calculate its size as roughly equivalent to a small refrigerator, like the kind I had in my dorm. But the Platypus found something exponentially larger.”

  Bo Pan nodded slowly. His eyes seemed electric.

  “Do you have pictures?”

  Steve huffed. “Does a bear shit in the woods?”

  The old man’s forehead wrinkled with confusion. “What are you talking about?”

  “Yes, I have pictures.”

  “Show me,” Bo Pan said. “And prepare yourself. There is some other information I have not told you.”

  Steve sighed. The old man was being cryptic. Whatever.

  That feeling of failure faded away. Steve had done it — he felt strong once again, ready for the next step.

  The Platypus couldn’t send straight video. That was too much bandwidth; even if his encryption held, the size of that signal and the location it came from could alert the navy ships to the Platypus’s presence. Instead, his machine took low-bandwidth snapshots — one frame every twenty seconds — and routed each one through a different secure server.

  “Here we are,” Steve said, and called them up on the screen.

  The first picture showed something green, blurry. That meant it was a pale color, brightly reflecting the low-light camera’s illumination.

  “Can’t make that out,” Steve said. “Lemme get the next one.”

  He called the image up, and froze: the face and torso of a corpse.

  A sailor. A navy sailor.

  Puffy face. Black sockets where the eyes had once been, eyes probably eaten by fish that had also picked at the skin, tearing holes and leaving strands of flesh dangling weightless in the water. Body bloated, so swollen it had burst the zipper at the belly and neck, leaving only a bit near the collar still fastened. Pale skin glowed an obscene white-green.

  “Bo Pan, what is this?”

  “More pictures. Let me see.”

  The next image showed a long shape. Gray, perhaps? The one after that, yes, gray, large, maybe ten feet tall or even taller, rising up at an angle. Definitely artificial.

  When Steve saw the next picture, he felt his heart drop into his stomach. He realized, finally, just how dangerous this game was.

  The gray image rose up at an angle. Flat, with slightly curved sides. At the top, a white, three-digit number glowed a bright green.

  The number: 688.

  “A submarine sail,” Steve said. “Is that… is that a nuclear sub?”

  Bo Pan leaned in closer, so close Steve could smell his unwashed odor. The old man seemed… gleeful.

  “The Los Angeles,” Bo Pan said. “There was a battle. It sank.”

  Steve hadn’t asked questions, hadn’t tried to understand the situation; when Bo Pan said the word location, Steve had jumped. How naive. How stupid.

  The next picture came up. The Platypus was moving closer to the sub. Another corpse. Some kind of bulbous, sausage-shaped metal construct behind the sail, bent and torn, a man-size round door still sealed but the construct itself ripped open. And there, stuck on that jagged metal, a leg — just a leg, no body. Inside the ruined construct, Steve saw an inner hatch sitting open.

  This was almost a thousand feet below the surface. Could there be survivors?

  “A battle,” Steve said, his voice a husky whisper. “Between who?”

  “The Americans. They shot at each other.”

  Steve couldn’t think. Why hadn’t he asked more questions?

  The final picture showed blackness: the Platypus moving over the submarine to the other side. Then, a wider shot of the sunken ship; from this angle, it looked bent, like a loaf of French bread kinked in the middle. A huge gash marred the hull, metal shards bent violently inward.

  Bo Pan pointed to the gash.

  “There,” he said. “Can your machine go inside?”

  Steve stared. What had happened? Why had the navy destroyed its own vessel? If the navy would slaughter everyone on the Los Angeles, it wouldn’t think twice about sinking the Mary Ellen Moffett. He started to shake. He was in danger. This little excursion might get him killed.

  “Steve,” Bo Pan said sharply. “Can it go in inside?”

  Steve tried to clear his thoughts, tried to focus. He examined the tear in the hull.

  “No, that’s probably not a good spot,” he said. “The metal is too torn up, too jagged. The Platypus could get hooked on a shard, get stuck.”

  “Then go back to the picture of the dry deck shelter.”

  Steve started to ask what that was, but then he knew — the sausage-shaped construct behind the sail. He called up that image.

  “There,” Bo Pan said. “Could it go in there?”

  A hole large enough for two men to walk through… the open inner hatch… far enough away from the torpedo damage that the corridors would be flooded, but mostly intact…

  But if the Platypus went in and got stuck, and the navy captured it, could any of the advanced tech lead back to Steve? What would happen to him if it did?

  “We need to leave this alone,” he said. “The data shows there are American ROVs in the area.”

  He felt an iron-hard hand grip his shoulder. Steve’s body scrunched up from the sudden pain.

  Bo Pan bent close. When he spoke, Steve felt the old man’s breath on his neck.

  “I said, can it go inside.”

  “Yes, sure,” Steve said in a rush. “But it’s like a maze in there. Without a deck plan, the Platypus might get stuck. We’d never get her back.”

  Bo Pan stood straight, lifted up his bulky Detroit Lions sweatshirt to reach into his jeans pocket — when he did that, Steve saw the handle of a small revolver.

  A gun?

  Bo Pan had a gun?

  Steve realized he was staring, turned quickly to lock his eyes on the laptop screen.

  “Steve, what is wrong? You seem startled.”

  The tone in Bo Pan’s voice made it clear: I know you saw the gun, and now you know who is really in charge, yes?

  “I’m fine, Bo Pan. Fine.”

  “Good.”

  The old man offered Steve a folded piece of paper.

  Steve took it, started unfolding it. Even as he did, he wondered if this might be the end of him. Once he looked at it, would he know too much?

  He found himself looking at a detailed deck plan of the USS Los Angeles. Under the title were the words Modified: Operation Wolf Head.

  Bo Pan flicked the paper. “This cost your country a great deal of money.” He pointed to the sub’s nose. “There. The Tomahawk missile tubes were removed and a lab was installed.” He slid his finger to a small box with an X drawn on it. “And that is their containment unit. Tell your machine to look there, and bring us whatever is inside.”

  Steve turned in his chair, stared at the older man. B
o Pan still looked like some rich white man’s gardener, yet here he was with classified information that had to go way beyond top secret.

  “The alien artifact,” Steve said, “that’s what’s inside the containment unit?”

  “Hopefully,” Bo Pan said.

  “This is a bad idea. The submarine was hit by a torpedo. Even if the alien artifact is inside, it could be broken into a hundred pieces, and each piece might have that contagious disease that turns people into killers. We should just go. The navy will be angry if they find us looking in there, and—”

  The slap rocked Steve’s head back. He stared, wide-eyed, hand cupping his now-stinging cheek. He hadn’t even seen Bo Pan move.

  The old man stared down at him. “You are wasting time, Steve Stanton. Do you think you are the only intelligent person on the planet? The X on the paper represents a locker, a locker built to withstand a direct hit from almost any kind of weapon. Inside that locker is a piece of alien ship stored within an airtight container that has already been decontaminated. If the locker is not damaged, the container can be brought onto this ship with no danger to any of us.”

  The sting of the slap faded to mild heat. Steve gently rubbed at his cheek. It hurt. He’d made a mistake by following orders and not asking questions, but he wouldn’t be bullied into making an even bigger one.

  “No,” Steve said. “I’m done with this.” He turned to his laptop, fingers reaching for the keys. “I’m telling the Platypus to return to —”

  A cold pressure pushed against his temple. He felt a mechanical click that sent a slight vibration through his skull — Bo Pan had put the revolver against his head and cocked the trigger.

  Steve couldn’t move.

  “If the container makes it to shore, you make it to shore,” Bo Pan said. “Do you understand?”

  Just a pull of the trigger, one tiny motion, and his brains would splatter all over the cabin. Steve stayed oh-so-still, lest a shiver or a twitch make Bo Pan’s finger squeeze.

  “Yes, I understand.”

  The pressure against his temple went away, leaving the cool spot in its wake.

  “Good,” Bo Pan said. “And your other machine, the snake, it can destroy an American ROV?”

  The snake had been in the second crate. It hitched a ride on the Platypus the way a remora hitches a ride on a shark. It was made up of nine metal-shelled sections connected together by rubber seals. Each section had a battery-powered motor inside. The nine motors worked in synchronicity to create a waving motion: the three-foot-long robot could slither across land like a snake, or swim through water like an eel.

  Each metal-shelled section also held twenty grams of C-4. If the snake swam near a threatening object, it could detonate all nine charges at once.

  “Steve, I asked you a question. If it needs to, can the snake destroy an American ROV?”

  Steve’s body vibrated with fear.

  “Yes, of course,” he said. He wasn’t sure if it could or it couldn’t, but he wasn’t about to say that to an angry old man holding a gun. “If the snake can wrap around one of the navy’s ROVs, it can detonate and crush the thing like a tin can. But if you’re thinking of using it on the locker that holds the alien object, Bo Pan, I can’t guarantee it won’t destroy everything inside.”

  Bo Pan shrugged. “The Americans will try to retrieve the container. When they do, they will open the locker for us. That is when your machine will take it. I will tell you what I want it to do. I talk, you program, understand?”

  Steve turned to his computer, suddenly relieved to dive into his work, to give his brain something to think of other than Bo Pan’s gun.

  THE BARRIER

  Clarence sat in the observation module. He watched a monitor, trying to make sense of the video Tim and Margaret were so excited to share with him. It was time-lapse footage, two side-by-side bits of Charlie Petrovsky’s rotting flesh. Five hours compressed into fifteen seconds let Clarence immediately see a significant difference.

  He looked over the console, down into the Analysis Module where Tim and Margaret stared up at him, waiting.

  “Okay, I watched it,” Clarence said. “The one on the left is rotting faster than the one on the right. What’s it mean?”

  Tim turned to Margaret, half bowed, lowered his arm in a sweeping gesture: after you, madame. Margaret mocked a curtsy, which looked ridiculous in her bulky suit.

  To say their mood had changed was an understatement; they thought they were on to something big.

  “The sample on the left is the control,” Margaret said. “That’s Petrovsky’s tissue, getting hit hard by the black rot. The one on the right is also his tissue but was treated with a solution that contained Walker’s blood.”

  Clarence glanced at the footage again. “Walker’s blood stops the black rot?”

  This time Margaret turned to Tim, bowed, made the after you gesture. Tim kept form and mocked a curtsy of his own — a little better than Margaret’s, Clarence had to admit.

  “Not Walker’s blood, exactly, but a chemical that’s in it,” Tim said. “I found a compound in her blood that wasn’t present in Petrovsky. We then detected that same compound in the few living hydras we have left. Ergo, the hydras make it. The compound is a catalyst that alters the black-rot process — it turns off the part that makes human bodies undergo exponential apoptosis, but it doesn’t do anything to the chemical that makes the infected tissues and microorganisms undergo their own chain-reaction decomposition.”

  Clarence had to play back the words in his head to make sure he wasn’t oversimplifying what he’d heard. Could it be that straightforward?

  “So it’s a cure,” he said. “It kills the infection, but leaves our tissue alone?”

  Tim thought for a moment. “Sort of. It depends on how long the person has been exposed. See, the catalyst is a really big molecule. You know anything about the blood-brain barrier?”

  Clarence hesitated for a moment, wondering if Tim was trying to make him look stupid in front of Margaret, but both of them seemed far too excited to be playing any games.

  “No, not really.”

  “Think of it like a mesh,” Margaret said. “It’s a semipermeable membrane. That means things of a certain size can penetrate it, but things larger than that size cannot. It evolved to keep circulating blood separate from the extracellular fluid” — she paused, perhaps realizing she was going too far into detail — “to keep blood and other things separated from actual brain tissue. Blood can’t go through the barrier, but oxygen diffused from blood can. So if things are small enough, they can slide through the mesh. If they’re too big, they can’t. Follow me so far?”

  Clarence nodded.

  Tim held out his hands wide, like he was talking about the fish that got away.

  “The hydra catalyst is too large to penetrate the barrier,” he said. “So to answer your question, the catalyst first works as an inoculant — if it’s already in your system before you are exposed to the infection, any crawlers produced will die before they can reach your brain. It makes you immune. And if you’ve already been infected but the crawlers have not yet reached your brain, the catalyst can kill off those crawlers. Meaning, if you get infected right now and we get this catalyst in your system within twenty-four hours, it will probably cure you.”

  Clarence now understood their excitement. He was beginning to feel it himself.

  “So if you take it soon enough, it is a cure,” he said. “What happens after the twenty-four hours?”

  Tim shrugged. “The crawlers need about twenty-four hours to form, find your nervous system and reach your brain. If enough of them get in, they rework your brain into the cellulose-based structures we’ve seen. At that point, it’s too late.”

  Clarence looked at Margaret. “But you said Walker had hydras in her brain. Hydras can get in there?”

  Margaret nodded. “They can, following the same path the crawlers do. We don’t have much evidence to go on right now, but it seems possible t
he hydras travel to the brain instinctually, because they are so closely related to the crawlers. But there’s a difference — the hydras don’t seem to alter brain tissue. They’re just there.”

  As far as cures went, alien organisms in the brain didn’t seem all that encouraging.

  “Say the crawlers get to the brain first,” Clarence said. “They start changing everything around, and then the hydras get there. What happens then?”

  Margaret glanced at Tim.

  “The hydras probably keep secreting their catalyst,” he said. “Since they’re on the other side of the blood-brain barrier, and so are the crawlers, any crawlers exposed to the catalyst will die. Any cellulose-based structures probably dissolve.”

  “Which means what to the host?”

  “Death,” Tim said. “It means death.”

  For a few minutes, Clarence had dared to hope that it was all over, that if some poor soul was infected, he or she could be saved with a shot or a pill. Life didn’t work that way, it seemed. Still, at least now there was something to fight with.

  “Impressive work,” Clarence said. “So what happens next?”

  “Tim goes to work on genetically sequencing the hydras,” Margaret said. “He isolates the genetic code that makes the catalyst, inserts that bit of code into the genome of his yeast, and the yeast produces the catalyst.”

  That sounded impossible.

  “Feely, you can really do that?”

  Tim shrugged. “It’s how insulin is made for diabetics. The DNA that makes insulin is inserted into bacteria, the bacteria secrete the insulin, which is harvested and purified. When the bacteria reproduce, the subsequent generations have that same inserted DNA. Boom, you have a permanent, insulin-producing population.

  “The basic technology is decades old. I’ve spent the last two years inserting crawler coding into my fast-growing yeast, so at this point it’s just plug-and-play. The only question is if my yeast will survive the new coding. If so, we’ll have Saccharomyces feely producing the catalyst inside of a few hours.”