by Warren Fahy
Otto shook his head and continued. “OK, the cloaca appears to extend through a hole in the bony ring and discharge waste through the anus in the middle of the ventral side of the body. Upon cutting open the cloaca, it appears to contain solid white waste, which we will collect momentarily for analysis.”
“It must crap in mid-leap when the tail is extended back, or else things would get pretty messy.” Andy grinned.
“Maybe it uses the muscular contraction of leaping to expel the waste,” Quentin said. “Projectile crap.”
“Looks like uric acid crystals.” Otto probed the material with his scalpel. “Bird poop.”
“You mean bird pee,” Quentin said.
“Yuck,” Andy said.
“Hey, guys! We got our first RNA results,” one of the technicians called out.
All turned to the technician. He pointed to a series of peaks in what looked like an EKG readout on a monitor over the molecular toasters.
“Oh shit,” Steve muttered as he scanned the graph. “Uh, sorry, folks. Looks like we’ll have to run it again. False alarm.”
“Why?” Otto asked.
“These results don’t make any sense.”
“There must be some sort of contamination in the system,” the lead technician confirmed.
“Why don’t they make sense?” Nell wanted to know.
Steve shrugged apologetically. “Because it’s showing three ri-bosomal RNA peaks.”
“What makes you think it’s contaminated?” Andy asked the technician.
“Nothing on Earth has three ribosomal peaks, my friend.”
“Except for crustaceans,” Andy said.
“Whoa—really?”
Andy rolled his eyes. He looked at Nell. “I guess you gene jocks do need a few folks who still know their animals.”
“I’ll be damned. I didn’t know that.” Steve looked back at the graph. “Guess we’re reading crustaceans, then, guys.”
“Bravo, Andy.” Nell winked at Andy, and he smiled.
“Looks like we’re back to arthropods, Otto,” Quentin said.
Otto shook his head, resigned now. “Unless it is from Mars.”
Quentin shrugged. “Hell, maybe crustaceans are from Mars, with three ribosomal peaks and all.”
Andy said, “Cut the other direction again, Otto.”
“All right. Continuing the incision down the abdomen from the original point of entry now—what seems like more lobes of the hepatopancreas, with multiple blind-ending tubules—”
“Wow, this thing is set up to digest massive amounts of food very rapidly,” Quentin said.
“This sure looks like a crustacean gut.”
“Yes, Andy,” Otto said, “it does. Continuing toward the hind quarters. Uh—OK…”
There was a spasm in the animal’s lower belly as Otto drew the scalpel near the rear pelvic ring.
“Back out, Otto,” Nell whispered.
Small legs tore at the edges of Otto’s incision.
“Something it ate didn’t agree with it,” Quentin said.
“No,” Nell breathed. “It’s a mommy!”
“Yeah, and she’s live-bearing,” Andy warned.
“Back out now,” Nell said again, her voice suddenly urgent.
Otto pulled his hands back as a mouse-sized miniature crawled out and snipped a chunk of its mother’s flesh with its foreclaws. It fed the bite into its serrated grin. Then it shook its head and shivered off blue blood.
“Don’t reach for it, Otto,” Nell warned in a whisper. “Just pull out of the gloves.”
Another baby thrashed its way out of the womb, crawling out of Otto’s incision.
“Those things are fully active,” Quentin said.
“Yeah, and we just gave them a cesarean birth!”
“They’re protecting the corpse, Otto,” Nell said.
“Don’t stick your hand too close,” Quentin said.
“Pull out, Otto!” Nell said again.
“I’m just trying to scare them so we can see how they move—”
“Back off, man,” Andy said.
Otto laughed in excitement. “They’re using their back four legs to locomote and raising their arms like a praying mantis! See?”
“They’re fast,” Quentin said.
Otto grinned at Quentin. “Ever hear of a live-bearing arthropod, Quentin?”
“Actually, some do have marsupial pouches in which they brood their young,” Andy said.
“They won’t scare off—they’re just getting more aggressive,” Nell said. “Pull out!”
“There.” Otto pointed as one of the juveniles reared back on its under-curled tail.
A gunshot sound made them all jump back as the juvenile struck Otto’s hand in a blur.
“Jesus God damn it!” Otto screamed.
He yanked his hands out of the gloves.
“My God-damned-motherfucking thumb!”
“Close the glove hatches, Quentin.” Nell moved fast as the others froze.
“That little shit split my fucking thumb! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuuuuck!”
“OK, narration ended,” Andy said.
Quentin gaped at Otto’s hand in shock, so Nell reached forward and sealed the glove hatches, banging the button with the side of her fist.
“They’re eating their mom,” Andy muttered, leaning forward over the trough.
“Quentin!” Nell snapped, giving him a hard shake of the shoulder. “Radio Section Three! Call the Enterprise. Tell them we have a medical emergency and need a transport immediately! We won’t be able to tell from the blood agar cultures if these things carry hemolytic bacteria for another six hours, at least. So ask them if they have gentamicin, vancomycin, and ceftriaxone. I think we need to treat this as if it were MRSA, until we know for sure what bacteria are in these creatures. GO!”
“Oh my God!” Andy shouted at the sight of Otto’s thumb—it looked like it had been clipped down the middle by a pair of bolt cutters.
“Andy, give me your tie,” Nell said.
“What?”
Nell flipped up Andy’s collar, removed his leather tie with her left hand, and looped it over Otto’s hand. She slid it up his arm and cinched it tight above his elbow. “Quentin, what did they say?”
“They’re sending some guys down here and calling Enterprise for a transport!”
“Good work. OK, Otto, let’s sit down, honey.”
Otto’s eyes glazed over. He slumped on a bench, muttering a string of obscenities. Bright red blood pooled on the white floor between his splattered sneakers.
“Andy, get some towels,” Nell said. “And the first aid kit. Quentin, sterilize the trough.”
Quentin balked. “Why should we sterilize the trough?”
Nell swung around and yelled at him, “DO IT!”
“All right, all right.” He pushed a button.
The chamber flooded with a yellow-green cloud of gas.
4:35 P.M.
As the Trident bobbed at anchor in the cove, surrounded by the echoing sounds of waves from the sheer rock walls, Cynthea paced the aft deck like a caged animal.
She could not take being this close to the story of the century without being able to document it. If she didn’t do something about it soon, she would go mad.
The others weren’t exactly overjoyed about being quarantined, or imprisoned, on the Trident, either.
The Navy was kind enough to bring them supplies, including current magazines and DVDs, but they were strictly prohibited from going ashore.
Approximately two hours after the last episode of SeaLife had aired, the U.S. government had officially ordered them not to move from, land on, or transmit any communication from Henders Island.
Her show was officially and irrevocably canceled. Cynthea seethed at their assumption of authority, which out here had no basis other than the big guns they used to back it up. She had to hand it to the Navy, though. They had certainly outdone any network executive in the power-play department.
Zero stretched out on a deck lounge, soaking up some rays on his long, lean runner’s body, his eyelids closed.
Cynthea stalked around him as she spoke, wondering occasionally if he was even listening to her.
“You have GOT to get on that island, Zero! An hour of footage is worth more than enough to retire on for both of us. Are you listening to me, asshole?”
Zero popped an eye open at her. “Yup.”
“Well?”
“No way am I going back there,” Zero said. He closed his eye.
“I can get on that island.” Dante, the ship’s assistant cook, had been loitering on the outskirts of their conversation.
Born in Palo Alto, California, Dante had learned to climb in the High Sierras, conquering El Capitan solo at the age of nineteen. On one team climb, when he was sixteen, he had been struck twice by lightning while sleeping suspended 1,200 feet up between a cliff and the granite pinnacle of Lost Arrow in a rainstorm. The wet lines he was suspended on had partially grounded the lightning strike, but he had still spent three weeks in a hospital bed before he could walk again.
Dante pointed at the crevasse. “I could climb right up that crack, where no one could ever see me.”
Zero opened and closed one eye. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, kid.”
“I saw the footage! What attacked you came from below, on the ground. I could climb right up the cliff inside that crack, all the way to the top.”
Zero sat up. “That’s an eight-hundred-foot ascent. Are you nuts, kid?”
“What do you say?” Dante said to Cynthea. “Want me to do it?”
Zero glared at the producer and the light flickered and went out in her eyes. “No. No, that sounds too dangerous.” She gritted her teeth and glared back at Zero. “But there must be some way. Zero, come on, baby! If you figure out a safer way, I guarantee I’ll make you the happiest man on Earth. The deal I could make for us…”
Zero leaned back and closed his eyes again. “I’m listening.”
“I can take a camera with me,” Dante said.
Cynthea turned toward him, grinning. “That’s—”
“Cynthea,” Zero growled.
“—too darn dangerous, Dante. Thanks for offering, though, sweetheart! You’re my hero today!”
Cynthea turned to stare longingly at the giant cracked wall of the island surrounding them in the cove. “God damn it! What am I going to do?” She glanced at Zero, who was apparently sleeping again. “Shit! And Nell wouldn’t even take my camcorder with her, that freaking little scientist snob!”
Zero chuckled.
“So what’s it going to take, Zero? Come on! Get me some footage of this island!”
“I’m still listening.” Zero flopped over to lie on his stomach as Dante stalked off, steaming.
Cynthea glared again at the crack in the island. For millions of years, the battered wall of Henders Island had defeated tsunamis, ice floes, and all passersby. Defeating her would not be so easy.
8:33 P.M.
A chopper carried Otto to the Enterprise, where medics set, stitched, and splinted his thumb. He was heavily sedated, dosed with antibiotics and anti-viral drugs, and put under twenty-four-hour observation in a quarantined sick bay, much to his despair.
The first specimens and tissue samples from Henders Island had arrived with him, carefully packed and sent along on the same Sea Dragon helicopter. They were then taken to the Philippine Sea for CAT scans, X-rays, biochemical profiles, and gene sequencing. From these results, the ship-based science teams could start making—or attempting to make—physiological and taxonomic identifications of the island’s species.
Since no live specimens were to be allowed off the island, Nell supervised the preservation of dead specimens and the isolation and study of live ones as teams worked throughout the first day and night. Keeping everyone moving without becoming careless turned out to be a doubly exhausting duty, but now that the investigation had finally begun, Nell drove herself well past twenty hours without sleep.
Night was falling when she took her first breather. She broke away to look through the long window at the darkening slopes outside the lab.
As her mind drifted, the hillside seemed to writhe and glisten in the moonlight.
She rubbed her tired eyes and looked closer.
Tendrils arched up out of the ground in radial clusters, like ferns. The ends of the tendrils fanned out into pads, visibly growing and stretching. Wisps of steam rose wherever the frondlike branches pressed down on the field.
“It’s like they’re grazing.”
Nell jumped, startled, and turned to see Andy at her shoulder.
“Sorry,” he told her. “Quentin thinks those things eat the stuff that grows on the slopes.”
“Only at night? And the bugs graze the fields by day…” Nell smiled and rubbed her forehead, marveling at the depth of the mysteries on this island.
“It changes color at night, Nell. Quentin shined a flashlight on it and it’s purple now! After a few minutes under the light it started to turn yellow and then green again.”
“It must be some kind of lichen.” She shook her head. “We’ve got a lot to learn.”
“Check this out!” The technician boosted the feed from the outboard microphones, which had finally been hooked up to the inboard speaker system.
Wails arched like a quintet of alto-saxophones over the jungle’s hum, echoing over the giant amphitheater of the island. The eerie sounds were remarkably like whale calls punctuated with rhythmic inflections and trilling scales of vowels as they reverberated and intertwined.
Andy whistled in amazement and laughed. “Thanks for letting me come along, Nell!”
“No thanks required, Andy. We need you.”
Andy beamed. “I don’t think anyone’s said that to me, like, ever, other than my aunt.”
Impulsively, Nell kissed his cheek, causing him to blush in surprise. “You’re harder on yourself than anyone, Andrew Beasley. You shouldn’t be.”
“I wish you were my girlfriend, Nell,” Andy blurted.
Now it was Nell who was blushing. “Thanks, sweetie.” She tousled his hair. “But I’m nobody’s girlfriend.” She looked at him with a grateful but decisive nod. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be. Formally pairing off is such a strange tradition anyway. I don’t really understand it, to tell the truth.”
“You deserve a great guy, Nell. Though I’m not sure he deserves you.”
She laughed.
“Hey, man! You wouldn’t believe these things!” Quentin shouted from the other end of the lab. He was pointing to a trap full of flying insects. “They glow in the dark!”
“Look outside!” someone yelled.
As night deepened, swarms of green sparks had appeared in the profound darkness. Swirling along the edge of the jungle, they linked together in spiraling chains that resembled nucleotides twisting over the fields.
“Maybe they’re mating,” Quentin said. “Copulating in flight like dragonflies.”
“They look like those strings of Christmas lights at Tavern on the Green.”
“Macro-DNA,” Nell whispered.
She sighed, laughing. She had been up for twenty-six hours troubleshooting the lab’s first day of operations, and she hadn’t slept much for a week. “I’m going to catch a few hours in Section Two.”
“I think you better,” Andy told her. “But they said it’s not quite powered up yet.”
“Right—but it’s quiet.” She nodded wearily, moving toward the hatch. Her whole body suddenly felt heavy with fatigue.
“They said the ROVs will be working tomorrow. Then we can finally get a look inside that jungle.”
“Yep. That’ll make Otto happy, when he gets back,” she said over her shoulder. “Make sure the latest specimens, data zips, and dissection logs are packed and ready for transport to Enterprise for the morning pickup. That’s at five. I’m planning to be unconscious. Please walk past me quietly, OK?”
&nbs
p; “Right.” Andy nodded. “Good night, Nell.”
“Right.” She saluted him, and opened the sealed hatch to the vestibule that led to Section Two. She entered and swung the hatch behind her, hearing the reassuring suction of the seal.
She yawned as she walked up the flight of aluminum stairs inside the plastic tube between sections. The green LEDs of microbe sensors glittered like a field of emerald stars on the wall of the tube. No breach, Nell thought.
She unsealed the far hatch and stepped into the deserted Section Two.
For the past three days the scientists had occasionally grabbed a nook in this section to catch some sleep as NASA technicians set up the rest of the lab.
She had heard there were bunk beds in the newly arrived Section Three, but it was swarming with technicians now. They were no doubt busy getting the electrical and computer systems up and running.
The air in Section Two smelled of new plastic, packing materials, and the ozone of electronics. Junk littered the floor: coils of cable and hastily opened boxes, torn plastic bags, broken Styrofoam molds, cable twists, box openers, and other detritus awaiting disposal. Right now any flat surface beckoned, so she climbed atop one of the long specimen chambers, similar to the trough in Section One, which was the only surface free of lab junk.
Lying on her back, using a plastic bag stuffed with packing peanuts for a pillow and a big plastic bag for a sleeping bag, Nell gazed at the starry sky through the window curving overhead. A few fireflylike bugs streaked by like meteors. For a fleeting moment she thought she saw a face looking down at her with multicolored eyes before sleep carried her away insistently.
SEPTEMBER 4
Midnight
Thatcher Redmond found the button on his armrest and pinged the stewardess.
He smiled craggily when the young Asian woman appeared. “May I have a few bags of peanuts? Not the warm nuts, but the bags?” he asked her.
“Surely. Let me get some for you, sir.”
Although she was pretty, Thatcher turned away in irritation. This whole last-minute trip to Phoenix had filled him with a grating sense of panic. And now, with his mission accomplished, just when he thought he could finally put it all behind him, they had been sitting on the tarmac for six unbearable hours as some Keystone Kops series of fuckups kept them stranded at the airport. He didn’t like the idea of being recognized. And guessing at the reason for the delay was toying with his sanity.