Pandemic i-3

by Scott Sigler

  Tim entered the briefing room. Margaret was sitting in one of the room’s ten theater-style chairs. Clarence stood off a bit to the side. He’d lost the suit coat, thank God. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt. A T-shirt that was too tight, in Tim’s opinion. Well, maybe Margaret was tired of all those muscles. Fuck but that Clarence dude was put together, though.

  Margaret saw Tim enter, raised her glass of wine. “Doctor Feely. I found the liquor cabinet and helped myself. You don’t mind?”

  He gave her his best seductive smile. “Don’t mind at all.”

  Clarence saw the smile. He scowled.

  Tim dialed the smile back a few notches, from leering to slightly-more-than-friendly.

  Margaret gestured to the room, clearly hoping to change the subject. “This theater is really something.”

  Tim could imagine how the room took newbies by surprise. In addition to cushy seats that faced a ten-foot screen, there was a fridge full of beer, plenty of snacks, and a liquor cabinet packed with the best liquid treats a boy could buy.

  “Don’t forget there was a full staff here for years,” he said. “Uncle Sam wanted his pet scientists to be happy.”

  Clarence let out a snort. “Yeah. And the people who actually do the work of running the ship? What do they think of your little private theater?”

  Tim waggled his pointer finger side to side. “Please to no-no-no,” he said. “The entire science module is off-limits to the rank and file. I doubt people who hot-bunk would appreciate we brainiacs living in the lap of luxury.”

  “Right,” Clarence said. “That doesn’t bother you at all?”

  Tim walked past Clarence to the liquor cabinet. The half-empty bottle of Adderall was right on top. Correction, half-full: Tim was an optimist, after all. He opened the cabinet and pulled out the bottle of Oban 2000.

  “Clarence,” Tim said as he poured a glass, “it’s not my fault other people didn’t get a doctorate.”

  “No, I suppose it’s not,” Clarence said. “Just like it’s not your fault that you get to live in freedom.”

  This guy had to have an American flag tattooed somewhere on his body.

  Margaret waved a hand. “Boys, don’t rain on my parade with your political differences, okay? If Tim’s yeast culture takes off, we may very well have this thing beat. I’m in the mood to enjoy my break, because soon we have to get back to work.”

  Tim nodded. “I agree. Tomorrow’s going to be a big day.”

  Margaret shook her head. “I’m talking about tonight, Doctor Feely. As soon as we watch the diver enter the Los Angeles, we’ll get back at it.”

  Tim had a moment to hope she was joking. The look in her eyes said she wasn’t.

  “Ah,” he said. “I see.”

  Good thing he had enough stimulants to go around. Better living through chemistry.

  He sat in the chair next to Margaret, feeling Clarence’s stare on the back of his neck as he did. Tim sipped his Oban.

  The image on the big screen showed a cone of dimly lit water, featureless save for an occasional bit of flotsam that glowed like a tiny star in the diver’s light, then gone as the camera passed it by. Numbers played out at the bottom of the screen, showing the descending depth: eight hundred feet and counting. Another hundred feet or so, and that light would play off the wreck of the Los Angeles.

  Up until the shit hit the fan, Tim had spent most of his time in this very room, watching downloaded movies and TV shows, playing video games, just generally dicking around and wasting taxpayer money. What else had there been to do? Sure, he’d worked on his yeast, trying to engineer a genome that would successfully produce a little-understood cellulase. Trying, and failing; he’d had no crawlers, no samples, nothing to go on but a mass spec analysis that clearly wasn’t 100 percent accurate. He’d collected a six-figure paycheck, come up with bullshit to put on his weekly reports and generally kicked back and lived the good life of a government employee flying under the radar.

  Now, however, he had something he could use: an actual cellulase, and plenty of it. On the one hand, it made him furious to see how close he’d been to getting it right. On the other, if the new line of Saccharomyces feely succeeded, his work could make the human race immune to a disease that made the black plague look like postnasal drip.

  Tim raised his glass toward Margaret. She frowned, but begrudgingly reached out her wineglass and clinked in a quiet toast.

  Like him, she had showered. Her black hair hung heavy and damp, but she looked fantastic. When she’d arrived, she’d been drowning in a bizarre notion of self-pity. Well, no more — her eyes blazed with intelligence, with life, and a persistent smile hovered at the corners of her mouth. She looked good even inside a BSL-4 suit; outside of one, she looked fantastic.

  Tim could see more than a few lost weekends with that one. As long as Captain Yasaka didn’t find out, of course. It was always a good rule of thumb not to incur the jealousy of a woman with keys to the weapons locker.

  “I should make popcorn,” Tim said. “You guys want popcorn?”

  Neither Margaret nor Clarence responded. Their attention stayed fixed on the screen.

  The number at the bottom of the screen ticked up to 850.

  “The diver will be there soon,” Tim said. “We’ll get a look at this debacle.”

  “It’s not the diver,” Clarence said. “This is from a camera mounted on the nose of a Blackfish 12, the navy’s high-end UUV. The ’Fish is going down ahead of the diver to get a fresh rad reading.”

  Tim drained his glass. He thought about asking Clarence to fetch him a refill, but he wasn’t really in the mood to get his ass kicked. He started to stand.

  Margaret put a hand on his arm. “Doctor Feely, you’re not getting another drink, are you?”

  Tim stopped halfway out of his chair. “Uh, the thought had crossed my mind.”

  She shook her head. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t. We go back into the lab in a little bit.”

  Tim sighed, sat down and watched the screen. The Blackfish’s lights played against a far-off, ghostly image. Finally, the submarine.

  His hand tightened on his empty glass. The submarine… Walker, immune…

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “We think Walker was immune, right?”

  Margaret nodded.

  “So then why did she sabotage the sub’s engines? Why did she cripple it if she wasn’t a psycho?”

  “The answer is simple,” Clarence said. “Maybe not for someone with a doctorate, but simple enough for a veteran.”

  Tim turned to look at Clarence, saw the man’s self-confident smirk.

  “Do tell, Agent Otto,” Tim said. “Edify me with your worldly wisdom.”

  “The disease wants to spread, it always wants to spread,” Clarence said. “If the captain was one of the Converted, he’d head for the nearest major port so he could spread his infected crew among a dense population.”

  Margaret’s eyebrows rose. “Chicago. They were heading for Chicago. Candice stopped them.”

  Clarence nodded. “Lieutenant Walker knew her duty. She knew what she had to do to protect the country.”

  Tim huffed. Clarence was right, obviously, which Tim found annoying.

  Patriotism could drive people to sacrifice themselves. That, too, was damn annoying, because it flew in the face of survival of the fittest. Stupid people could be convinced to die for the greater good. The greater good was always someone who would live on because of — and long after — that sacrifice. Soldiers die, generals retire.

  On the screen, the wrongly angled sail of the Los Angeles loomed into view. Lights played off more flotsam. Tim knew a lot of that detritus was composed of sailor bits, bodies either torn apart by the torpedo strike or picked at by scavengers.

  The number 688 glowed a bright white.

  The PA system clicked on: a too-loud, mechanical voice that broke the moment’s magic.

  “Doctor Feely, line one for Captain Yasaka. Doctor Feely, line one for Capta
in Yasaka.”

  Tim glanced at the wet-haired Margaret Montoya, felt like he’d been caught at something — did Yasaka know he was ogling his fellow scientist? He stood and strode to a phone mounted on the wall. He lifted the handset, as always marveling a little at the archaic cord that ran from it to the wall unit.

  He pushed the number “1.”

  “This is Doctor Feely.”

  “This is the captain.” Yasaka’s voice. Not the voice that on some nights said take me, or on extraspecial nights said please, Daddy. This was her command voice.

  “Captain, how can I be of service?”

  “Are you with Doctor Montoya?”

  “I am.”

  “A petty officer just killed two of my crew,” the captain said. “He tested positive, as did two other men who were bunking near him. We have a total of three positives.”

  Tim’s body went ice cold.

  “Three… positives?”

  “So far,” Yasaka said. “Security will deliver these men to cells in your lab. I suspect they won’t be the last.”

  DIVER DOWN

  Clarence sat in the lab’s control room module, looking down at Tim and Margaret who were working away in their big-helmeted suits.

  They’d rushed out of the extravagant theater, desperate to get back to work. Clarence had watched them both pop some pills — apparently, now wasn’t the time to let fatigue get the better of them.

  As for himself, he’d suited up and overseen delivery of the new prisoners: Orin Nagy, the killer, as well as Conroy Austin and Lionel Chappas, both of whom had tested positive. Cantrell now had company.

  The deck crane had lowered the men down to the Brashear’s big side airlock, accompanied by six biosafety-suited guards. Clarence had watched everyone go through the bleach-wash decon process, watched the infected men be placed in clear cells, watched the guards reenter the airlock for their final decon.

  The side airlock was the only safe way to bring the infected into the holding area, but it was also needed for the submersion tests on Clark’s and Cantrell’s suits. The first test, the pressurized fall test, hadn’t detected any leaks; if the suits had holes, those holes were microscopic. Margaret didn’t seem that concerned about it, but Clarence would still push Captain Yasaka to do the submersion test. With Yasaka’s crew redoubling efforts to find any infected, the best Clarence could hope for was to see the test run tomorrow night, or, at the very latest, the following morning.

  The mood had changed, to say the least. In the extravagant briefing room, he’d sensed Margaret’s subdued elation — she thought they had the infection beat. Not today, of course, but so soon that a few more weeks would make no difference. Now, however, the infection had spread to the general crew. Three positives would quickly multiply. Yasaka’s best efforts couldn’t stop the spread, not with so many people packed on the Brashear and nowhere to send them. The captain could only hope to slow the contagion, give Margaret and Tim time to come up with a solution.

  And if they didn’t find that solution? This would end with an F-27 Eagle dropping a firebomb on the entire task force. Carl Brashear would join the Forrest Sherman, the Stratton and the Los Angeles at the bottom of Lake Michigan. Would Clarence and Margaret still be aboard if that happened? Maybe. If Murray Longworth wasn’t sure that he and Margaret were clean, he’d torch them without a second thought.

  Clarence couldn’t do anything to help Tim and Margaret. What he could do was pay attention to the diver entering the wreck of the Los Angeles.

  On the counter in front of him, Clarence had diagrams of the Los Angeles’s layout. He watched the diver’s progress on the console’s small screens. It was quite different from the deep-water dives he’d seen on the Discovery Channel: no rust, no colorful clusters of barnacles and anemones, no schools of bright fish. The LA had sunk only three days earlier — just a broken, gray hull sitting on a lifeless lake bottom.

  The control room’s speakers carried the chatter between the diver and the Brashear’s crew.

  “Diver One, status? How you doing, Tom?”

  “Diver is okay,” came back the answer. “Goddamn cold down here, feeling it in my joints right through the suit. Request permission to start cutting.”

  “Permission granted, Diver One.”

  Seconds later, the screen blared brightly. Clarence looked away.

  The diver’s awkward high-pressure diving suit made him look like a cross between a morbidly obese man and a heavily armored beetle. Five round, blue segments made up each arm, connected together by oscillating rings that allowed limited movement. There weren’t even hands, just blue spheres tipped by black pincers.

  The legs were similar to the arms, all connecting to a white, hard-shelled torso, as did the bulbous helmet. A boxy red backpack housed the oxygen supply and CO2 scrubber, which could give the diver up to forty-eight hours of life support. An ADS rig was one of the few things that could make a space suit look dainty by comparison.

  The suit was far too bulky to fit through any of the Los Angeles’s external hatches. Cutting directly into the nose cone might put the alien artifact at risk. The diver would use an underwater torch to cut through the hull of the torpedo room, then move through that wider space into the nose cone.

  The bright light faded from the screen.

  “Diver One, cut complete. Removing hull.”

  Clarence saw a large, oval piece of metal drop away from the submarine’s curved hull and thump into the lake bottom, kicking up a slow-motion cloud of flotsam.

  “Diver One, proceed into the torpedo room.”

  “Roger that, Topside. Moving into the torpedo room.”

  Clarence inched closer to the screen.

  Almost immediately, the diver’s light revealed three uniformed corpses that hung motionless in the water. Rigor held arms away from bodies, as if the dead were waiting to give someone a hug. There was at least some animal life at this depth — even though no fish were visible, the ripped flesh of hands and faces betrayed their presence.

  “Topside,” the diver said, “you seeing this?” His voice sounded tinny. Clarence could hear the man’s breathing increase.

  “Roger that, Diver One,” the dive master said. “Nobody said it was going to be pretty. You’re almost there. Just get the job done.”

  “Roger,” the diver said. “Moving in.”

  Clarence could imagine the diver’s stress. Nine hundred feet below the surface — a depth that would kill him without the suit — he was surrounded by corpses while violence and uncertainty swept across the ship above him. The diver, Tom, he had to have giant balls of steel.

  Technically, Clarence was the current representative of the scientific team. If needed, he had an override button he could hit and speak directly to the diver. If any major issues popped up, Clarence could route the diver-cam view to Margaret’s heads-up display, let her decide what needed to be done.

  The dive master’s voice sounded loud and clear in the speakers. “Diver One, move forward through the torpedo room to the nose-cone airlock.”

  “Roger that, Topside.”

  “Diver Two,” the dive master said, “position yourself at the entrance point and maintain safety of Diver One’s umbilical.”

  “Diver Two, confirmed,” came a third voice, the voice of a woman.

  Of course they were using a safety diver. Oddly, that made Clarence nervous — the Brashear only had two ADS 2000 rigs. If something went very wrong on this dive, there was no way to get another person down to the wreck without flying in additional suits. Even on a rush order, that might take a day or more.

  “Topside, Diver Two,” the woman said. “Feeding Diver One’s umbilical.”

  The ADS onboard air meant the divers didn’t need air tubes. What they did need, however, was a communication cable a thousand feet long — if Tom cut his on some jagged piece of wreckage, the Brashear would lose his visual and audio signals.

  On the screen, Clarence saw racks of long, gray torpedoes. A body
sat there, ass on the deck, back against one of the racks, chin hanging to chest as if the man was only taking a catnap.

  “Topside, Diver One,” the diver said. “I have reached the nose-cone airlock. It’s open.”

  Clarence looked at the sub’s schematics. The nose cone had a small external airlock, for loading material from the outside directly into the negatively pressurized minilab, and it also had an internal airlock, allowing the science crew to enter the lab from the ship proper.

  “We see it, Diver One,” the dive master said. “Proceed.”

  The images on the screen blurred: the diver turning, slowly pulling in the slack on his umbilical cord. He turned again, then stepped through the airlock door into the small area beyond.

  The room looked tilted, of course, about a thirty-degree slant down and to the right. Every wall had racks. Most of the racks were empty — they had been meant to hold small, airtight cases, cases that now bobbed against the ceiling. The cases held various scientific equipment: microscopes, voltage meters, hardness-testing kits and a dozen other devices that might help in identifying alien material.

  “Topside, no bodies here, room is empty,” the diver said. “Moving toward the objective.”

  He turned to the right, his light moving past the empty racks.

  Clarence saw something. He slapped at his “override” button.

  “Wait! Look left again!”

  The dive master’s voice came back angry and impatient. “Who’s on this goddamn channel?”

  “This is Agent Clarence Otto. Sorry. Listen, Tom… I mean, Diver One… can you turn to the left again?”

  The dive master spoke again. “Diver One, stand by! Agent Otto, this is dangerous work. We finish the recovery first. Diver, stay with the mission par—”

  A no-bullshit female voice cut in. “This is Captain Yasaka. Facilitate any and all requests of Agent Otto, as long as those requests do not compromise diver safety.”

  Clarence waited through a short but uncomfortable pause.

  “Aye-aye, Captain,” the dive master said. “Diver One, do as Agent Otto asked.”