It had always happened like this....
Her first "premonition" had been when she was eight years old, living in Quebec. Waking up, she felt as if she were suffocating; everything was dark and murky, and smelled of wet rot. She was drowning! Mud filled her lungs.
The next day, when her ten-year-old brother Christian wanted to go swimming in a nearby quarry, Celeste was terrified and refused to go with him.
That afternoon, Christian himself had drowned. The dream-warning had not been for her own sake, but for her brother. She had not bothered to warn him. She had not interpreted the dream correctly.
The next time occurred years later when she was in college. A friend of hers, Peter, had come to visit from upstate. He had stayed late. The weather turned drizzly and foggy, then cold, making for treacherous driving. The night before, Celeste had dreamed of cold, of loss of control, of breaking glass.
When Peter turned to leave, she suddenly realized that the dream must have been warning her about him. Uncertain, she tried to get him to stay, but he begged off. She couldn't think of any good reasion to give him.
Peter died in a car accident that night.
She was sure she could have saved him; but this clashed with the rational part of her mind. After all, she had a science background, believed in cause and effect, not ESP and pseudo-science. But were the drowning and the car accident dreams just a coincidence? Somehow she couldn't believe that.
And what about the Grissom?
Many lives on Earth, the Moon, and the Collins now depended on whether she could understand those nightmares again. And with Bernard Chu's call, she knew exactly what the nightmares had been preparing her for. Unfortunately, they suggested no solutions.
"We can't let those alien automata reach Earth," Pritchard said. "Even if it means ... neutralizing the Collins. You see what the things are doing to the Farside crater. What if something like that showed up in the middle of New York city? The three people who first discovered it are all dead. How long is it going to be before the nanomachines take apart Trace and anyone else who's contaminated?"
Celeste didn't tell him about Parvu's suspicions in Antarctica. It could already be too late.
She drew in a breath. "I agree, though it'll be hard on us. We're going to take a lot of flack -- but we can get through it." She raised her eyebrows and met his gaze. "It may soon be time to bring your involvement out into the open. We need a strong general, not just a compassionate space agency director."
Pritchard pushed out of bed. Both big dogs jumped to him. Yeager reached up and pawed the general's chest; Pritchard distractedly eased him down to the floor and patted his head.
Celeste knew what had to be done. She said it out loud, to get it into the open. "We're going to have to quarantine the Collins station, and the whole Moon -- as a first step."
Pritchard nodded as he looked for his uniform and picked up the shirt he had carelessly draped over her chair the night before. His mouth was a grim line. "No one there is ever going to be able to come home again."
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CHAPTER 16
COLLINS TRANSFER STATION, L-1
Strapped to the chair in the Collins observation chamber, Bernard Chu tried to control his breathing. Visible through the thick window on his left, the Earth occupied a good part of the starry sky. Opposite that, the Moon hung stark and unchanging, as if mocking him for having gone back to live in space.
He had thought himself safe at L-1.
Directly in front of him the image of Celeste McConnell seemed frozen in the flatscreen. Celeste had not been able to offer him any convenient answers, though at least she was transmitting video now. He wanted to look into her eyes as she told him the bad news.
"Bernard -- we all knew there would be risks," she said. "That's why we sent only one researcher to Sim-Mars and kept the rest back here on Earth. I didn't want to take the chance that somebody would get exposed."
Chu tried to mask his frown. "Well, somebody did. And now we all are."
Celeste's face stared back at him, as she waited to receive the rest of his words. The two-second light delay made the conversation maddening. Every time Chu interrupted to ask her a question, the image would continue to speak, only to stop abruptly and glare foolishly back at him.
"Actually, Bernard, we don't know what would happen if the infestation reached Earth. The nanomachines should have reacted in your bodies by now, taken you all apart."
"Don't you think every one of us is just sitting here waiting for that to happen?" He couldn't keep from being angry at Celeste, though he knew it wasn't fair -- she had saved him from the Grissom disaster years before, and he had always counted on her to give some kind of forewarning before another tragedy could strike. This time she had let him down.
The last time anyone had worried about an extraterrestrial virus was during the first Apollo Moon landings, and even then the precautions they took were a joke. Chu thought of how they had allowed the astronauts to be exposed to the atmosphere before locking them up in quarantine! He knew they had to do it correctly this time, and it was his responsibility not to let the nano-infestation spread further. He had a good guess what would occur if those machines got loose on Earth.
" -- and Erika Trace must have been infected at least a full day before any of you. Yet, you say she has shown no signs of any adverse reaction."
Celeste plowed through the conversation, unmindful of Chu's interruption. When she stopped, the delay allowed him too much time to think, to feel sorry for himself.
"It's only a matter of time before somebody gets disassembled. We're all watching each other to see who's the first to turn into a blob of ...
whatever."
Celeste came back gently. "Bernard, I'll give you all the help I can from here, but I'm not sure what to do."
"I'm sure as hell not going to sit here and wait! What's happened to you, Celeste? You never resigned yourself to waiting for the end before! What would have happened if you'd done that on the Grissom? Where did this bureaucratic mindset of yours come from?"
Celeste's unchanging face finally sagged. She kept staring, her face grim. Chu watched her for ten heartbeats before he realized that she wasn't going to speak again, that she was waiting for him to suggest something better.
"These alien nanotech machines -- " He jabbed at his chest. " -- could take us apart in a few seconds if they wanted to. At least let us do something useful, dammit. What else have we got to lose?"
"Specifics, Bernard. What do you want to do?"
Chu settled down and got a grip on his emotions. He felt like a man dying of lung cancer who was about to volunteer to smoke two packs a day.
"The entire moonbase is infected too, thanks to Typhoid Mary. Dvorak has confirmed that. So, it doesn't matter if we come into contact with them. I propose that we abandon the Collins and go down to Columbus. We can load up in the LTV and head for the Moon before anything happens."
"Convince me. What advantage is there?"
Chu shrugged. "They've got more resources down there. You just hauled the biostatistics equipment up here when you transferred my command. I'm a biochemist -- maybe I can do some work on this, too."
"What do you propose doing differently?" Celeste's questions seemed to be pro forma, as if she wanted to see if his answers matched her own ideas.
"First off, I'd start taking care of things Dvorak should have done a long time ago. This is the perfect time to send a scouting party out to Daedalus crater, explore the artifact. Since everyone is infected, why should we be afraid of the nanomachines now?"
"You'll be disassembled if you do that." Her voice sounded cold.
"We should have been disassembled hours ago! Something has happened, a mutation maybe, and we need to take advantage of it! Our death sentence is already signed."
Celeste pondered this for some moments, but Chu could not tell what she was thinking, could not read her body language. Her voice came as a near whisper transmitted across cislunar s
pace. "What about the rest of the Collins crew? Do they agree? Are all fourteen of them willing to go along with this?"
Chu thought of the two astronomers and one tech locked up and sedated in the loading pod bay, how they had broken down and started raving when told of their infection.
He also thought of Bryan Zimmerman, who still did not know of their situation, though he too was infected. Chu had decided that, with so much riding on the pilot shuttling everyone down to the surface, it was best not to tell him yet.
Chu whispered, "Yes, everyone agrees -- we need to expedite leaving the Collins."
Celeste glanced down at her watch. "We can't postpone the Rising Sun
longer than seven hours before they have to abort and return to Earth orbit.
Can you leave your station before then?"
"Of course." Chu felt confident in that much. He had checked already in the LTV specs; if everyone took only minimal items with them, the lunar transfer vehicle was rated to carry the full complement down to the lunar surface, though Bryan Zed might have a tough time piloting the heavy craft.
And Chu wanted to bring as much of his biostatistics equipment as he could.
"Very well, now listen to me carefully." Celeste's voice became hard.
"Once everyone has departed, we will remotely initiate the station shutdown sequence."
Chu frowned. Shutdown sequence? "That doesn't sound familar. I was supposed to have been fully briefed before I took over command up here -- "
Celeste waved a hand. "General Simon Pritchard is working with me to oversee a new instruction uplink to your onboard computers. We're writing the code as we speak."
"But what does it do? What's going to happen to my station?"
"Once we get you to the Moon, the uplink instructions will sterilize the Collins. No one -- including that Japanese tug or any hotshot salvage artists -- can be allowed access to the L-1 staging area anymore. Any contact could bring the infestation down to Earth. Do you agree?"
Bernard found a lump growing in his throat, but he couldn't swallow it away. "So what exactly is going to happen?"
"The instructions will cause your power plant's shielding to open; the reactor will then run up to maximum. This will irradiate the entire waystation and kill any of the nanotech machines that remain." She paused. "We hope."
Chu pushed back against the chair netting, then nodded to himself as the words sank in. That would make the L-1 station unusable for years due to primary and induced radioactivity, not to mention all the damage it would do to sensitive diagnostic equipment. Without the L-1 rendezvous station, returning to Earth would be more difficult -- if Earth ever decided to lift the quarantine.
A thought raced through his mind: Did Celeste already know that we'd vacate the station ... or did she plan to shut it down with us still onboard?
He forced a frightened smile. Maybe the station would be an orbiting monument to their sacrifice, just like the proposed Grissom memorial that kept troubling Celeste all these years. At last the Collins would live up to its namesake, keeping vigil alone in orbit while everything else happened on the Moon.
If any of them survived the nanotech infestation.
That was their first big problem.
Bryan Zimmerman kept his thoughts to himself as the last of the Collins crew loaded the Lunar Transfer Vehicle. Seventeen people in a space for ten,
he thought, not including all the equipment Chu had stuffed into the cargo bay. Nobody would give him any details about this "emergency temporary evacuation," but they had kept him on the Collins for a full day and a half after delivering Erika Trace. He was already running behind schedule.
The LTV was overdesigned as it was -- the specs allowed for a 50%
increase in passenger weight, and he had carried twice that amount in supplies without breaking into a sweat.
But supplies weren't on the verge of panic, as were at least half the passengers here. He never understood why others couldn't keep their cool. He always did.
As Zimmerman punched up the outside aft view from the lunar shuttle, he saw the Collins grow smaller in the viewscreen. Evacuating the waystation for the Moon without even leaving a skeleton crew behind seemed really crazy --
but orders were orders. He had seen Director McConnell's authentication himself.
Zimmerman didn't question too many things. Management types operated with a different logic sequence than anyone else. He had seen perfectly normal people promoted to positions of authority and instantly become either phenomenally stupid or incredibly callous administrators. Luckily, he had no aspirations to become a manager himself.
The astronaut program was the perfect job in the perfect place for him
-- he had complete control of his own vessel, and for the most part people left him alone. It gave him time to think, to lose himself in the sea of stars. Gloria understood.
He stole a glance at Erika Trace as she settled in behind him. She looked really frightened now, withdrawn, not as pretty as she had appeared during the first trip to the Moon. But the weightlessness still caused her breasts to swell out more than they should have. Before he punched the orbital-transfer rockets, he sighed.
Erika watched the Collins recede as they moved away from her stepping-stone to home. Nobody was ever going to go back. Not until they found a sure-fire cure to the nanocritter infestation.
We're probably all going to die soon, she thought. Yet most of the people were taking it so coolly ... until it struck her that this was just exactly what the astronauts had been selected for in the first place, why the initial and follow-on screening had been so rigorous. She was the only one who had been rushed through a condensed version of the training.
Bryan Zimmerman seemed particularly calm about the evacuation -- but then, he never got excited about anything. The pilot ran over his checklist, unconcerned. Cool customer or cold fish? She couldn't decide which comparison fit him the best.
Erika looked up. All the passengers kept to themselves, their heads down, or just looking toward the viewscreen, watching the Collins drop away behind them as the pock-marked surface of the Moon rose up on the other side.
She lifted her own hand. Opening and closing her fist, she studied her fingers. She felt no different, but inside she knew she was swarming with nanomachines. How soon -- when will they disassemble me? Why haven't I died already? The thought of an alien invasion inside her body made her feel violated.
A human voice, transmitted from Earth, came over the radio. "We have you five hundred kilometers away, Zed."
A synthesized voice broke in. "Collins reactor doors are opening."
Erika frowned, looked at the videoscreen.
Moments passed, and again the synthesized voice spoke. "The station has been flooded for ninety seconds. Approaching critical temperature."
A pause, then. "Detonation sequence initiated."
"Detonation!" Bernard Chu burst out, sitting up against his acceleration restraints. "What detonation? How?"
Zimmerman's face held an expression of surprise, but he merely grunted his reply. "Please confirm last transmission. Detonation sequence?"
"Confirmed."
"I never agreed to this!" Chu cried.
Erika sat blinking in surprise, unable to believe any of this was happening. The other Collins refugees began to jabber among themselves.
"Please specify detonation -- " the pilot started to say, but the waystation suddenly grew bright on screen, overwhelming the stereochip's brightness monitor. The superheated reactor breached its containment and ignited all the fuel tanks. Rainbow colors danced on the viewscreen in silence in the nonnuclear explosion.
An instant later Erika saw nothing but the black blanket of space filled with stars and twinkling bits of molten debris. Millions of superheated pieces of metal flew radially out from L-1, all that remained of the Collins.
Erika prayed that the radiation burst from the nuclear reactor had killed all the nanocritters left on board -- and not hurled t
hem through space toward other targets.
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PART IV
"The gray goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: we cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers."
-- K. Eric Drexler
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CHAPTER 17
ANTARCTICA -- NANOTECHNOLOGY ISOLATION LABORATORY
The cliche of having the rug pulled out from under your feet applied to Jordan Parvu in the Nanotech Isolation Lab. He had been in a near panic since learning of Erika's contamination and the destruction of the Collins. How could this have happened?
He felt so helpless, stuck at the bottom of the world, cut out of the loop completely. Shouldn't he be there, working side by side with his assistant to find a solution to the automata invasion in their bloodstreams?
He briefly thought about taking the Emergency Overland Vehicle, driving to McMurdo Sound, just to get out of here ... but what would that accomplish? He had tested his own blood, sick with fear that he, too, might be contaminated by the supposedly dormant automata he had sifted out of the Antarctic snow.
And if he was infected himself, then so might everyone on the planet.
But the blood under the high-resolution analyzer showed no contamination at all, no alien machines invading his cells. Whatever had caused them to spread through Erika and everyone else at the moonbase had kept them inert here.
He tried to call Erika, just to see her face and to give her a long-distance shoulder to cry on. The static-gray holoscreen in front of him blinked, with a maddeningly calm "STILL TRYING..." message flashing at the bottom. Finally, it informed him "ALL LINKS IN USE. PLEASE TRY AGAIN LATER."
He muttered expletives in four different languages. No doubt everyone who had any relatives at all on the moonbase, or on the Collins, would be trying to get through. He imagined families dipping into savings accounts just to pay for the transmissions. He wondered if Erika's own family would bother to call -- certainly not her father or brother, but possibly her mother would make the attempt.
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