The Pouakai

by Sperry, David;

“But it does see some?”

  “Yes.”

  “That should be of some help. If we see a few, we know there are probably more around, and if we don’t see any, it should be clear.”

  “We hope so. We’re counting on the satellite to give us an idea of whether we can proceed all the way to Palmyra. If the Pouakai are too thick to approach, we’ll have to try somewhere else.”

  The ship rolled over a big swell, and we held on to the table until we were level again.

  Steve, one of the two graduate assistants with us, grabbed a stack of binders as they threatened to slide off the table. With a bushy red beard and baggy T-shirt, he fit my image of a typical college student. He put the stack back on the table and grinned.

  “Gotta love the ride!” he said.

  “Not really,” I countered.

  The other assistant was Mina, a quiet, mousy little Korean woman. She sat next to Alan, typing away on her laptop. I hadn’t heard her utter a single word since we’d boarded. I don’t know what prompted these two kids to come along on the voyage, but it must have been some powerful need, considering the dangers involved. Maybe it was just that youthful feeling of invincibility.

  “Come on everyone,” Colin said. “It’s lunch time.”

  “What’s on the menu?” Steve asked.

  “Fish stew.”

  Something lurched in my stomach. “I think I’ll pass. I’ll be outside.”

  2

  By dinner-time the pills had taken full effect, and I felt human again. I nibbled on some grilled chicken and rice, before joining the rest of the team in the conference room, one deck up. Colin sat at the table, talking to someone on the satellite phone, the other three either on their laptops or writing in notebooks. I sank onto a couch along the outside wall. The constant rumble of the engines faded to background noise as I closed my eyes. A spectacular sunset streamed orange through the windows, a glow I could see even through my closed eyelids. The seas had calmed as we moved farther south, chugging steadily toward the equator. As I lay back in the comfortable couch, I thought about Jennifer, and a veil of sorrow draped over me again. I was out of my element here; I wasn’t a Captain in charge, I wasn’t a pilot any more, I wasn’t a scientist. Hell, I didn’t even know what I was supposed to do here. Why had I agreed to do this?

  “Boonie? You still with us?”

  Colin had finished his call, and roused me out of my stupor. The pills had taken away the seasickness, but left a side effect of drowsiness.

  “Yep. Present,” I said, pulling myself upright.

  “Feeling better?”

  “I’ll live.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Alan said, looking up from his laptop. “Like I said, everyone gets it.”

  I sat next to Colin at the table. “Okay, I’m here. I don’t know why, but I’m here.”

  “Because I asked you to come along,” he said with a grin.

  “Yeah, I’ll be a big help writing your papers.”

  “Boonie, you’re here because we need you. You have as much experience with the Pouakai as Alan and I do. You’re used to dealing with unusual situations, and know how to lead if necessary. Anna and I felt it would be a lot better for you if came with us instead of moping around Honolulu.”

  “Jennifer died!” I said sharply. “I think I have a right to be upset.”

  Colin put his hands up.

  “Sorry, sorry. I know it’s been horrible on you. We just thought it would be healthier if you were involved in something, anything, rather than sitting at home.”

  I hated losing control so easily. “Sorry. I shouldn’t snap like that.”

  “No problem, buddy. So here’s what’s going on.” He pointed to a screen on the wall with an electronic navigation chart. A blinking red dot showed south of Hawaii, less than a quarter of the way to Palmyra. “We’re here,” he said, pointing at the dot. “We’ll cruise through the night then stop for the day.”

  “Stop?”

  “The sub has their radar going full time looking for Pouakai. They haven’t seen any yet, but we’re close enough to their territory that being underway during the daytime would be foolish. Out here in the fringe areas of their habitat, there haven’t been any reports of Pouakai attacking ships this size while underway at night. The same goes for standing still during the day, so we’re going to use that to our advantage. We cruise at night, and float in the daytime.”

  “How long to get to Palmyra then?”

  “About seven or eight days. Normally it would take about four days if we cruised straight through.”

  I thought for a moment.

  “Why can’t the tankers and freighters use this method?”

  Colin shrugged. “They did try it, but the size of the craft must be a factor. Ships our size aren’t attacked if they not underway. Anything bigger is swarmed though, even if it’s just floating. It only works out here in the fringe anyway. Down in the heart of the Pouakai territory, just south of the equator, everything gets attacked.”

  “Do we know why?”

  Alan laughed.

  “If we did, we’d be a lot further on our way to understanding these things,” Colin’s chubby co-worker said. “If you have a theory, we’d love to hear it.”

  I shook my head. “No theories from me. I’m the action hero, remember?”

  All four of them laughed.

  “Come on,” Colin said. “Let’s go outside. These guys have everything under control, and I need some fresh air.”

  We walked downstairs, and out onto the aft deck. The trap sat lashed to the deck underneath the hydraulic crane. I leaned against the railing at the back of the deck, and watched the water slip around the two bulbous, submerged hulls. A small flock of sea birds followed us, and I wondered what they were doing so far from land. The ship ran smoothly across the ocean, and somehow everything seemed calm. Colin crossed his arms on top of the railing, and peered over the side at the passing ocean.

  “I don’t know why you think I should be here.” I said.

  Colin sighed. “I know you, Boonie, I know your moods. Hell, after rooming with you for two years in college, I could tell exactly what you’d done the night before by what you ate for breakfast.”

  I raised an eyebrow at him.

  “Cold cereal after a normal night studying,” he continued. “Spam and eggs after a late evening baseball practice, and pancakes with Portuguese sausage if you’d gotten lucky with your girlfriend.”

  “Come on, I wasn’t that predictable, was I?”

  Colin shrugged, and looked at the ocean. “You need this trip, Boonie. I think without it, you might end up broken.”

  He paused a moment, then looked at me. “I need you here, Boonie. You’re my good luck charm. You’re the one that finally talked me into asking Anna out. You got me safely down onto Nanumea, where we learned far more than we ever would have in Cairns. You got me safely back home to Anna. For all of that, I’ll be forever thankful.”

  That was about as close to an emotional outpouring as I’d ever heard from Colin. We both stared at the ocean and the hypnotically smooth wake trailing behind the ship. One of the birds following in our wake screeched at us, passed overhead, and backed off again.

  “Okay,” I said. “Tell me everything.”

  “About what?”

  “The Pouakai. Tell me what you’ve found with the one you captured. Tell me what you guys are thinking. Tell me what other scientists are thinking. Tell me what we’re going to do if we capture a bunch of these things on Palmyra, and how we can use that info to eliminate them.”

  A grin slid across Colin’s face.

  “They don’t have cells,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “Their tissue isn’t made up of cells like ours is. Its structure is actually fairly simple, relative to ours. There are different compounds in there, and there are structures analogous to muscle, nerve fiber, and a flexible supporting framework that resembles ceramic fibers, but no individual cells. We haven’t fo
und anything in there that might work as genetic material.”

  “So how do they have babies, like the ones I saw on Nanumea?”

  A bigger smile appeared on Colin’s face.

  “We did all sorts of scans on the one we caught in Honolulu before it died. And, by the way, it took nearly sixty hours of pitch black before it kicked the bucket.”

  I gave a low whistle.

  “Almost any amount of light, even equivalent to moonlight, was enough to keep it alive, if not moving.”

  “So much for Captain Baker’s idea of a sunshade,” I said.

  Colin nodded. “Regarding the baby Pouakai however, we found something even stranger. The scans we did included everything we could think of; CT, MRI, PET, nucleotide tracers, and sonogram. As soon as it died we were able to capture it with a scanning electron microscope too. We imaged this thing down to the fraction of a micron. What we found was that it was born pregnant.”

  “Really? Like a hermaphrodite?”

  “No, hermaphrodites will get themselves pregnant. These things are already born that way, with their offspring already inside them. Let me ask you this; when we were on Nanumea, how many Pouakai babies did you see being born at once?”

  “Depends. Anywhere from two to five. Is that important?”

  “It might be, because the scans we did showed that our captured Pouakai had three offspring in the sacs on its back. The scans were detailed enough that we could get a clear image of the unborn Pouakai, and what we found was that each of them had two tiny sacs on their back, and at the highest resolution, we saw that each of those sacs had very tiny Pouakai with one sac each.”

  “One less baby with each generation?”

  Colin nodded.

  “Maybe they grow additional offspring as they get bigger?” I said.

  “Maybe, but the problem with that idea is that the three unborn Pouakai on the back of our captive seemed to have all of their body structures in place, only smaller in comparison to an adult’s. The same applied to the two grandchildren Pouakai on the backs of each of the unborn children. When we looked over our data from Nanumea and from these tests, we couldn’t find anything suggesting that the Pouakai develop additional organs, structures, or features after they’re born. They do grow in size, but all the parts are there on the day they’re born.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “If they have one less offspring each generation, they’d die out. That sounds like a pretty ineffective strategy for survival.”

  Colin nodded. “You’re right. It would be stupid, if the idea was to perpetuate the species.” His eyes were bright as he talked about their discoveries.

  “Another problem is that, according to what the Nanumeans said, a typical Pouakai takes about three months to go from newborn to having it babies. Then it dies. We weren’t on Nanumea long enough to see this through, but I don’t doubt what they were saying.”

  “How could they tell the lifespan of an individual?” I asked. “They couldn’t follow a single Pouakai for three straight months.”

  “Not normally, but occasionally one would come by with some identifiable mark, like a scar or an oddly shaped spike. They were observant enough to be able to track them that way.”

  I looked up at the emerging stars, and did some mental math.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “If each generation lasts only three months, then even if you start with a Pouakai giving birth to five babies, and they all give birth to four, and so on, there’s only six generations before they die out.”

  Colin nodded in agreement.

  “At three months per generation that’s just a year and a half,” I continued.

  More nodding.

  “So how do we still have Pouakai three years after they were first seen?” I asked.

  “That is the trillion dollar question,” he responded. “Nobody, anywhere, has reported seeing a Pouakai give birth to more than five babies, and that has only been here in the central Pacific basin. The reports from elsewhere are scattered, and some are suspect, but from the trustworthy data, the most they’ve seen in the Indian Ocean is four, the Mediterranean is three, and the Atlantic is two. So the farther you get from where we first found them, the fewer babies they have.”

  “Something had to give birth to those Pouakai that had five babies.”

  “Give birth, or make them, somehow.”

  “Make them?”

  “It’s a theory. Or there could be a giant hive queen, like in Aliens, squeezing these things out at a prodigious rate.”

  I looked at him, and raised an eyebrow. He tried keeping a serious face, then burst out laughing.

  “Sorry bud. I had to do that,” he said through the laughter.

  “What if it really happens that way?” I asked, still shivering at the thought of that memorable movie image.

  “Then we call in the Marines, or the SEALs, in our case, and do away with her.”

  I took a couple of deep breaths, and tried to rid my mind of thoughts of the Alien queen. I also wondered again why Scott, my friend in fourth grade, decided it would be a good movie to watch with me one evening when his parents were out. The nightmares took a long time to subside after that experience. Apparently it had been a mistake to tell Colin about that night years later too.

  “So we really don’t know what we’re looking for, specifically,” he said. “They must be coming from somewhere. What we’re trying to do is understand them, their life cycle, and anything else to help find a weak spot. By coming down here, into their territory, maybe we can find that source: queen, nest, or whatever it is that they come from.”

  “Anything else you guys have come up with?” I asked, trying to move the subject away from alien queens.

  “Well, there have been some changes to the Pouakai over time, too.”

  “Like what?”

  “When they were first seen, in Vanuatu, three and a half years ago, they weren’t as strong, or vicious. They did attack loud objects, but didn’t seem able to keep their strength up for as long. A few months later however, they got bigger, and stronger too. That’s when we really started having problems with them.”

  “Why didn’t you scientists go check them out before they became dangerous?” I asked.

  “Because we didn’t believe the stories at first. Do you know how many elaborate hoaxes and false reports the scientific community sees every day? Even with all the technology we take for granted today, Vanuatu is a poor and technology-limited country. By the time video of the Pouakai came out, it was too late. They were already beginning to sink ships and down airplanes.”

  “Oh.”

  The ocean below had darkened from deep blue to nearly black, with only the white of our wake visible beyond the stern. We remained quiet for several minutes, as brilliant stars twinkled in the sky. The ship ran with all lights off, glowing displays shielded and curtains over the windows of occupied rooms. Somewhere nearby, the Ohio kept pace with us, watching the skies for Pouakai. For all I could see though, we were alone in a black hole, in the middle of the ocean.

  “I just don’t get it,” I finally said. “I mean, I remember my basic biology. I thought there had to be a reason for certain kinds of evolution. Like the moth that changed colors when smoke from the industrial revolution turned the bark of trees from white to black.”

  Colin nodded.

  “So what is the reason for the Pouakai’s existence?” I continued. “What is its purpose in life? I thought the most basic reason for existence was to perpetuate the species. If the Pouakai die out after a few generations, what is its purpose? If it doesn’t have DNA or cells, how did it come to exist in the first place?”

  “I’m proud of you, Boonie,” Colin said quietly. “You’re beginning to think like a scientist. That’s why we’re down here; to answer those questions.”

  Those were answers I very much wanted to have.

  3

  A week later we dropped anchor a few hundred yards offshore from Palmyra. Smaller
than Nanumea, the sandy atoll had a central lagoon dotted with tiny islets and a rim of coconut palms. The whole thing, including fringing reefs, was about six miles long, and two miles wide. Just like Nanumea, nothing stood taller than the palm trees.

  The engines stopped twenty minutes before sunrise, followed by the anchor chain rattling down to the sandy bottom. A pink glow filled the sky, reflecting off the small puffy clouds overhead. The wind had died down, and the waves were mercifully small.

  After a radio conference with Captain Baker on the Ohio, the Captain of the Kilo Moana decided to go ahead and move the trap into the lagoon right away.

  I watched from the railing as the crew used the big crane to lower the container, with its attached raft, into the water between the hulls.

  “Easy, easy,” the Captain shouted from the deck above. “Just let it edge into the water.”

  Colin, Alan, their assistants Steve and Mina, and I watched the sailors work. Off to the west a short black line lay on the horizon; the Ohio. They were staying in deeper water in case the Pouakai forced them to make a quick dive. Two rubber inflatables from the sub, like the ones that had brought us from Nanumea, were waiting nearby, ready to maneuver the trap into the lagoon.

  “Anything on the radar?” Colin asked into a handheld radio.

  “Nothing at all,” replied a voice from the Ohio. “All clear to at least fifty miles.”

  Colin looked up at the Captain, giving him a thumbs-up.

  The trap bobbed in the small waves a minute later. Once the Navy workers had nudged their inflatables up to the bulky raft, the crane pulled its cable away.

  “Let’s get going,” Colin said.

  We dropped our duffle bags over the side, into another small inflatable, and climbed a rope ladder down the side of the Kilo Moana. We wouldn’t be coming back. From here on, we were at the mercy of Captain Baker, the Ohio, and the Pouakai.

  The university was understandably reluctant to leave their expensive and unarmed research ship in the Pouakai’s territory any longer than necessary. It would head back to Hawaii, with another sub escorting it, as soon as they had unloaded the trap.