No camera feed could explain exactly what it was.
A hundred yards farther up the tunnel, the team paused, uncertain. This only lasted an instant. In her typical fashion, Nidhi Vedala was already waving them onward with impatience.
“On we go,” she ordered, setting off down the tunnel. “Respirators tight. Eyes open. Prep your sample kit, Peng.”
Taking small, steady steps, Vedala advanced until she had reached the maelstrom of flickering lights and humming drones. She aimed her headlamp down, tracking the bright beam along ridges of ruined flesh. Looking beyond the body, she noticed that the wall didn’t reflect back—it was missing.
“There’s an opening,” she reported. “Rubble on the floor. Pitting on the walls. Probably caused by a kinetic energy release.”
Odhiambo spoke up from just over her shoulder, cracking a fresh chemical light stick that bathed the walls and his face in electric-green shadows.
“Oh yes,” he said, “certainly an explosion. And look at the surface features. See the striations? These fine grooves? Unique to this area of the anomaly. Almost crystalline, like quartz. Or perhaps like ice that has melted and been refrozen.”
“What caused it?” asked Vedala.
“Probably a shock wave passing through the structure.”
Vedala produced a slim digital camera from her hip-mounted kit bag. Stepping carefully around the body, she snapped a series of pictures. Once finished, she nudged the mass of flesh with the toe of her boot. The body swayed, shivering like gelatin, but didn’t roll over.
“Careful, Nidhi,” said Stone, unable to help himself. “We don’t know what the hell that is.”
Vedala pocketed the camera and kneeled. She curled her gloved fingertips under the corpse’s cheek. Pulling firmly but gently, she twisted the head to the side to reveal the hidden face.
Only then did Stone realize he was holding his breath. He let it out.
“It’s a man,” said Vedala. “Seriously infected. Look at the nostrils.”
Gray-green ash caked the nose and mouth. The cheeks were blemished with a patch of metallic hexagons. The chest and neck were fused with the floor, pulling grotesquely at the skin of his face.
“Get a sample, Peng,” Vedala ordered, releasing the head and letting it sink back to the floor. “Let’s compare it to what we’ve seen already.”
“He is not indigenous,” said Odhiambo, helping Vedala stand. “This person is a Caucasian male, or was. And you can see now he is wearing something . . . perhaps a lab coat or a uniform. The fabric is melted into his skin.”
“There’s part of a badge,” added Stone, pointing with his light. “No name, just a number.”
. . . k B . . . kstein #23402582
Vedala produced her camera and snapped a photo of the badge. She aimed her headlamp into the dark space beyond the corpse.
“He must have crawled out of this room,” she said, stepping over the sprawled body.
“Slow down, Nidhi,” called Stone. “I’m sending in the drones. We don’t have any idea what’s waiting for us in there.”
Stone scrambled after Vedala, with Odhiambo close behind him. They were preceded by a whirring swarm of drones. Peng stayed behind, scraping a sample vial over the pale flesh of the corpse. After a long final gaze at the motionless body, Peng Wu rose and joined the rest of the team.
None of them noticed the boy, crouched and watching from the shadows.
“WHOA,” SAID VEDALA. “This is big.”
Her voice echoed back across an open expanse.
The canary swarm spread out into the emptiness to explore. The team remained by the doorway, crowded around Stone and his monitor. Nobody spoke as a series of hideous images flickered over the screen. Occasionally, Stone would flip over to the laser rangefinders to see the room topography. And to provide a bit of relief.
This was the site of a massacre.
The narrow passageway had opened into a vast space with an impressively high ceiling. The floor was littered with debris: shards of metal, broken rock, and more human bodies. Barely visible, three knobby cylindrical machines rose in a line. Red glowing emergency lights shone at their bases, and a faint humming was audible. A fourth cylinder was scorched black and leaning at a precarious angle, its casing shattered.
“What are those?” asked Stone. “They look like fermenting vats from a brewery.”
“Not beer. Turbines,” said Odhiambo. “As I expected, those are hydroelectric generators. The water flows under the dam and turns them, making electricity. The nearest one seems to be the source of our explosion.”
Soaring around the turbine heads, a few canaries approached two tall beige cabinets located against the wall. Their metal surfaces were studded with dials and controls.
“The control panel,” said Odhiambo. “Simple controls for simple turbines. These are small, the same kind of micro hydroelectric plants I have seen employed all across what is called the third world. From Afghanistan to Ethiopia. With twenty thousand dollars, a village of a hundred homes can have lights, refrigeration, water purification. And television, of course.”
Odhiambo added the last example with a rueful smile.
“Let’s get over there,” said Vedala. “Carefully.”
Moving together, the team approached a broad metal desk parked beside the panels. A body was slumped over it. A piece of debris had torn through the corpse, leaving the desk and cabinets beyond coated in a rusty spray of dried blood.
“Interesting,” said Vedala. “This body isn’t compromised. Looks like a simple puncture wound followed by bleeding out.”
“Check the feet,” said Peng.
The worker’s boots had clearly fused together and then sunk ankle-deep into the anomaly surface.
“It’s as if the room turned to quicksand,” said Peng, twisting to look around. Vedala put a hand on her arm.
“We need to count the bodies,” said Vedala. “See if we can identify who was here and where they came from.”
For the next few minutes, the team cataloged half a dozen bodies scattered around the room. Most had melded into the surfaces where they stood or fell, with their clothing and equipment absorbed into the skin. All of it was flinted with hexagonal scabs—like frost growing over a windowpane.
The worst were the everyday items that formed part of this deformed human landscape: pens growing from a woman’s forehead; two bodies partially absorbed into each other; swaths of fabric and human hair melted into mundane office furniture.
The room had become a graveyard of wreckage and twisted bodies, much of it unidentifiable.
All of this carnage emanated from the fourth turbine. A mound of crusted black ash surrounded a scarred metal casing that had been blown off. The detonation had vaporized a deep crater in the floor, and the path of superheated debris could be seen in a starburst pattern of streaks and gouges.
Over the hum of the remaining turbines, the team could hear the far-off roar of water under their feet.
Odhiambo began to hypothesize out loud, as was his habit. He spoke while holding a chemlight in one hand, walking and inspecting. As he gesticulated, the greenish light seemed to dance around him like swamp fire.
“Something went wrong with the dam turbine. It exploded. The detonation itself was surely lethal. But the shock wave also provided a burst of energy to the AS-3 substance this anomaly is constructed of. Triggered, it began to self-replicate using the available fuel on hand. Both inorganic material . . . and organic.”
Peng stood frozen in the middle of the room, staring blankly at the drones. The only indication she was disturbed was in the way her front teeth were digging into her lower lip. Spread out, the other scientists were not paying close attention to Peng or to each other.
Vedala added to Odhiambo’s hypothesis, her voice echoing through the empty space.
“So AS-3 is capable of pure energy conversion. Not surprising. Both known strains can self-replicate, given energy. If that nuclear fail-safe had gone of
f in the original Wildfire facility, it would have spawned enough Andromeda to end the world. We’re seeing a smaller version of that here.”
“On the bright side, at least it was temporary,” added Odhiambo. “If the reaction had continued, these bodies would have been swallowed up. Instead, they are only halfway . . . eaten. It appears our unfortunate crawling man had at least a minute or two to try and escape.”
Odhiambo looked back toward the room entrance.
“The tunnel leading outside,” added Odhiambo, “acted as a natural chimney, concentrating and spewing this smoke into the jungle. It infected the Machado, as well as any animals in the vicinity. For them, it was a slower death.”
“I think we’re missing the bigger picture,” said Stone. “If there are people in here, it means this isn’t some extraterrestrial fluke. It’s a building. And it was built by a human being, for a purpose.”
The room fell silent.
“Stone is right. Do we all understand what this means?” asked Vedala.
As a lifelong professor, she was accustomed to employing rhetorical questions. “Someone has figured out how to use the Andromeda Strain,” she continued, not waiting for an answer. “They’ve reverse engineered the microparticle to create this structure. And whatever this place is designed for, it needed at least a few highly skilled workers to operate it.”
“Yes,” said Odhiambo. “Most of this structure must have grown through the mitosis event we saw. But some pieces were too complicated for that. For example”—he waved his chemlight at the damaged curl of metal casing—“A turbine.”
“It’s amazing,” Vedala mused. “This entire structure probably began as a single mote of reverse-engineered Andromeda material, encoded with growth instructions and the ability to make fuel for self-replication from anything nearby. The turbines and equipment are small enough to airdrop straight into the jungle. And all of it was installed by a skeleton crew who could have been lowered in on a single helicopter.”
Leaning closer, Stone examined the burned husk. He kept his respirator tight over his nose and mouth. The explosion had vaporized a hip-deep chunk out of the floor. Inside it lay the blasted remains of the turbine—a scorched cylindrical frame the size of a refrigerator, still partially intact. From under it, he heard the rush of water.
Stone stood up and scanned the walls for cables and wires.
“One problem,” he said. “The electricity generated by these turbines is useless if it can’t be transported. And this electrical transmission equipment is small-scale. That makes sense, if all the equipment had to be airdropped in. But without larger transformers, the hydropower will attenuate before it can get anywhere.”
“Unless it doesn’t have to go very far,” added Odhiambo, waving his chemlight at the spot in the crater where a bundle of frayed and burned cables emerged from the exposed innards of the destroyed turbine. The thick braid disappeared straight into the black rock of the floor.
Across the room, Peng was holding a long sheet of paper in one hand. A banner, torn and burned. Her face was blank.
“What have you got, Peng?” asked Vedala.
Peng held up the piece of limp paper.
GLÜCKWUNSCH ZU EINER GUT—
“It’s in German,” she said, her voice dull with fear. “‘Congratulations on a job well done.’ . . . They were only construction workers. And they were celebrating.”*
Odhiambo turned to Stone, a worried look on his face.
“That means this station is complete. So where is the power going?”
“I don’t know,” said Stone. “The canary map ends here in this room. This structure is as simple as anything I’ve ever seen. Just a big mass, a tunnel cut straight through to this turbine room, and that’s it. There aren’t even doors.”
“Building doors in a growing structure would be futile,” said Odhiambo. “There is very little here that is not an organic part of the whole. But it isn’t here for no reason. The power goes somewhere. Here, my friend, lend me your compass.”
Stone complied.
The rangy older man stepped over to one of the turbines. Holding the instrument near the floor, he began sweeping it back and forth. His eyes stayed on the compass needle.
As it fluttered, he stopped.
Taking careful steps around the room, Odhiambo used the relationship between current and magnetism to find a hidden line of electrical current. By watching the direction of the swinging compass needle, he determined the flow of current and followed a live wire across the room.
“The electricity goes this way,” he said. “That canary survey puts us at nearly a kilometer deep. Well below the waterline. You said the transformer can push power only a short distance. Well, if we continue in this direction we will find ourselves . . .”
“Directly under the lake,” said Stone. “It makes no sense.”
Unfazed, Odhiambo methodically followed the line. It ended at a blank wall. He paused, frowning.
“I do not understand,” said Odhiambo, standing under brightly lit canary drones. “The electricity flows this way. There should be some kind of duct or maintenance hallway, at least.”
Stone rechecked his neck monitor. With a swipe of his thumb, he turned off the canary cameras and reactivated the laser rangefinders. The room filled with an invisible sweep of precisely measured beams of near-infrared light, projected from spinning mirrors in the hearts of the drones.
The monitor began to display the wall and floor surfaces in exquisite detail. Among the patterns and shapes, Stone saw the man-shaped outline of Harold Odhiambo. And under the feet of Odhiambo’s silhouette, he saw the familiar lines of a hexagon.
“Harold, look down at your feet.”
The silhouette on the screen looked down.
“I see nothing . . . wait, an imprint. But those are everywhere.”
Stone lowered the monitor to his chest, where it dimmed itself. He was already walking toward Odhiambo. He had identified two barely noticeable grooves, visible only at submillimeter-level precision. Luckily, he recognized them for what they were.
Hinges.
Fight or Flight
I TOLD YOU,” SAID ODHIAMBO, SMILING. “THE ELECTRICAL conduits must lead somewhere. Otherwise the dam serves no purpose.”
Leaning on his digging trowel, Odhiambo was able to unlatch the hatchway. He levered it open, and the hexagonal lid rose to reveal a dark hole. Inside, Odhiambo saw the glinting bones of a metal utility ladder leading down. The six-sided shaft cut straight into the substrate and disappeared into black depths.
“I thought you’d be more upset,” said Stone, leaning over the shaft with a canary resting on his palm. “Now that we know this isn’t an alien structure, after all.”
“Oh,” said Odhiambo. “We most certainly do not know that. In fact, I am more convinced than ever that this structure is alien in origin. Human involvement or not.”
Stone looked at Odhiambo to see if he was joking. It appeared he was not. Shrugging, Stone removed his hand from under the glowing drone. It hovered in place for an instant, then began to slowly lower into the pit. The rest of the canaries continued to survey the control room.
“I guess we’ll find out,” said Stone.
The squawking of a loudspeaker startled everyone, but most of all Peng Wu. She let out a surprised shriek and clapped a hand over her respirator in embarrassment. Over the course of the exploration she had grown increasingly tense, to the point that now a facial tic had appeared under her left eye. Years of emotional mastery seemed to be fracturing under the strain of this mission and its secrets.
Embedded in the beige face of a bloodstained control panel, a small square speaker was sounding a transmission alert at full volume.
“Attention,” announced a tinny voice. “I don’t know if you can hear me but by my estimates, you should have reached the control room by now. If so, good work, Nidhi.”
The team looked at each other in disbelief.
“That’s Sophie Kline, i
sn’t it?” asked Stone.
Vedala could only nod.
“What happened here was an accident. Nobody was supposed to get hurt.”
Riddled with waves of static, the astronaut’s words echoed through the room. Stone and Odhiambo left their rucksacks and equipment at the open mouth of the hatch. They joined Vedala, who was standing near the desk.
Peng Wu began to pace back and forth.
“No,” Peng said. “No, no, no. This is not good. She’s working with them.”
Her attention split, Vedala cocked her head at Peng. Them?
Kline continued her monologue over the speaker. “I can’t explain to you what I have accomplished. And you could never understand my reasons. But I want you to know . . . this is for the good of all humankind.”
Peng looked around in dismay.
“We have to leave here,” she said. “She’s not on our side. She’s dangerous.”
Turning to go, Peng collided with a small figure who had been hiding behind a dark, thrumming turbine. Tupa was knocked to the ground. The adult-sized T-shirt he wore billowed around him, ghostlike. Instantly on the attack, Peng began to raise her boot for a vicious stomp but the boy scrambled away, his borrowed machete clattering to the ground. Back on his feet, he stood exposed in the light of several canaries, chest heaving.
“Tupa!” shouted Stone, recognizing the boy’s lanky silhouette.
As Peng stood staring, Stone rushed over and swept the boy up in his arms.
“Are you okay? What are you doing here?”
“Hi Jahmays,” said the boy, grinning.
“I said we have to go,” said Peng, her voice rising. “Now. All of us.”
The former soldier seemed to already understand the dire implications of Kline’s speech. Her resolve only grew as Kline’s slightly slurred words continued to wash over them like rain, the echoes of each syllable chasing each other.
“I warned you to stay away. I warned you all. Remember that.”
The Andromeda Evolution Page 17