Parvu opened and closed his mouth, gaping. He felt a cold deeper than the Antarctic storm running through his veins. What had he done? "Kent," he said. "Kent!" But he had no idea what he should say.Inside the quarantine chamber, Kent was not listening anyway. His screams had continued to rise in pitch until his own eyes rolled backward, white.
He stretched out his hands in front of him. He screamed and stared at his fingers. They visibly elongated, stretching out like pencils.
As Parvu watched, the skin sloughed off Kent's fingerbones like melting grease, red and pink and yellow crayons oozing down into his cupped hands.
"Oh ... God ...." Kent gurgled, then he toppled backward. His knees seemed to turn to jelly as he fell onto the floor, convulsing.
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PART VI
"To destroy is still the strongest instinct of our nature."
-- Max Beerbohm
"He is dangerous who has nothing to lose."
-- Goethe
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CHAPTER 27
MOONBASE COLUMBUS
Take any action necessary to ensure the survival of your crew.
McConnell's words rang in Bernard Chu's ears. He hadn't spent all that time in astronaut training and periodic refresher courses learning how to roll over and die. He knew how to find options, to determine what he could do and how he could fight back. Now it was for real.
The ordeal on the Grissom eleven years ago had taught him that he might not always get a second chance. Celeste wasn't giving him any second chances.
She had dumped it all back in his lap. Okay then, she had no right to complain if she didn't agree with his tactics from now on. He was going to make her pay attention. He had to convince Celeste to let them all come home.
Rubbing his jaw, Chu wandered into the commissary, which was kept open to accommodate the different working hours of the crew. Since days and nights on the Moon were two weeks long, Earthbound work schedules meant little.
Tables and chairs fashioned of scrap metal from the original cargo landers made up the decor. Only a third of the fifty-meter-long cylinder was used for eating; the galley and food storage areas were hidden behind a sectional curtain of plastic blankets. Some crewmembers had scrawled sarcastic but generally good-natured graffiti over the walls; others had pinned pictures of home to the plastic blanket.
Lon Newellen and Bryan Zimmerman were the only two people in the commissary. When Chu entered, Newellen held up what appeared to be a slice of pizza. "Come on in, Dr. Chu. Care for a piece?"
Chu glanced at the food in disbelief. "Is that what it looks like?"
Their diets had always been rigidly controlled by the Agency. "Whatever happened to all that high-protein, low-fat stuff the dieticians require you to eat?"
"Here." Newellen pushed a plate holding the last slice of pizza. "Take a bite."
Chu pulled a chair across from the two men, trying to decide if he wanted to be sociable or be annoyed. His eyes lit up as he tasted the slice.
"This is good. Very good. What in the world did you do?"
Newellen slapped Zimmerman on the back. The pilot grinned weakly, then returned to his flat expression. "Zimmerbuddy, here, is our secret weapon."
Newellen's bulging frame and Zimmerman's straight-backed posture made them look like Laurel and Hardy. "Oregano, basil, bay leaf. You know -- spices.
Just like Marco effing Polo! Zimmerbuddy brought it with him. All that stuff the Agency said would be bad for our metabolism."
"Personal items," Bryan Zimmerman said. "I am allowed five kilograms on each flight."
"Ever since they decided we were going to be part of the life-sciences database, Zimmerbuddy has been stashing this stuff away and bringing it with him," Newellen said. "You'd be amazed at the trades you can make with the Japanese."
Chu ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, tasting the pizza again. First the years on Columbus, then months up on the Collins -- it had been a long time since he had tasted food that wasn't overly bland and healthful.
Chu said, "This has been going on underneath my nose the whole time?"
He should have known that some type of smuggling would occur, but cold-fish Bryan Zed as the perpetrator? The thought of these supposed straight arrows circumventing the Agency's stormtrooper dietary plans nearly made Chu laugh.
The overriding purpose of the long-range life sciences experiments was to control the entire colony's diet, to ensure with a strict accounting of intake and caloric expenditure that real differences in the human metabolism might finally be understood. Not only would the results have benefited the upcoming Mars mission, but it would have helped the medical community as a whole. Now all the data had to be questioned.
Zimmerman shrugged. "Life's got to go on."
Newellen scrunched up his face. "Now that the Agency has put us on permanent hold, why should we keep suffering for their stupid nutritional experiments? Maybe one reason we were infected by those nanocritters was because of our bland diet. A little bit of cayenne pepper might be the perfect antidote."
Bryan Zed smiled innocently. "Personally, I like the idea of thumbing my nose at the Agency, for stranding us here."
Chu narrowed his eyes. That insipid letter Celeste had placed in the robot supply shuttle had made him feel betrayed, written off by the one person he always thought he could count on. Chu couldn't depend on her to come to the rescue any more; he had to try something of his own before they all died, before that alien construction was completed and triggered itself.
And Chu decided he wouldn't mind throwing a wrench in Celeste's works right now, either.
He suddenly stood, knocking his chair backwards to the module floor.
Newellen and Zimmerman blinked at him in astonishment. Chu gathered his thoughts before he turned to them. "What can we salvage from the dead supply shuttle to get to Farside? Can we patch the fuel tanks long enough to get it that far?"
Newellen looked puzzled. "The shuttle's engines are fueled with a LOX-hydrogen mixture, same as Zed's. The hoppers used on the moonbase are methane based. We can crack methane on the surface, but there's no way we can make LOX-hydrogen."
Chu shook his head. "That's not what I mean. Perhaps between the two shuttles and a hopper, we can deliver a ... bomb to Daedalus."
Zimmerman raised his eyebrows, then shrugged his shoulders. "If my shuttle can't go anywhere, then let's cannibalize it so we can do something about that construction before it gets finished."
Sim-Mars
"He wants to do what?"
Jason gently pushed Erika back into her chair. "You've got to understand where he's coming from before raising a stink."
"I understand. He's come back from the Collins and has taken over your job -- "
"He's much better suited for command than I am." Jason sounded too defensive.
"He's taken over your job and now he feels like he's got to prove something."
Jason ran a hand through his dark curly hair. He could hear her South Carolina accent much more clearly when she was upset. "Erika, it's a good option. There's no reason not to try it. At least we'll go down swinging."
"But what's it going to accomplish? Even you haven't been able to figure out what the construction is supposed to be." Her eyes narrowed. "You don't believe this dormancy theory that Taylor is pushing, do you? That the nanocannibals are still hiding in our muscle tissue and waiting to surge back once they receive some signal?"
Jason held up his hands. "All I know is that Chu thinks he can use one of the hoppers to drop a bomb on that structure. We might be able to wipe them out. Or at least wreck that thing they're building. Have you seen the flyover images? It's not changing much -- so the aliens must be nearly finished, and we still don't know what the hell they're building. This just might get rid of them."
"How?" She flipped her blond hair behind one ear. "My God, Jase, there are billions upon billions of nanocritters at Daedalus! What happens if that bomb just scatters them across the surfac
e?"
Jason shook his head. Somehow it didn't bother him when Erika called him "Jase." Not like Margaret at all. "I don't know."
She stood. "Well, we've got to do something then. To protect ourselves in case Chu's plan doesn't work!"
The hopper sat a good five kilometers from the landing pad; if anything went wrong and the hopper or the shuttle hulk blew up on the pad, nothing else could be damaged. Only one other hopper remained at the moonbase.
Bernard Chu watched as the modified refueler filled the shuttle's salvaged hydrogen tank, now mounted inside the hopper. It had been a tight fit, but by removing all of the fixtures intended for human use, Cyndi Salito had managed to force the shuttle's cryogenic H2 tank inside the hopper. Bryan Zed had watched grim faced -- as usual -- as they dismantled his shuttle for the scheme.
Salito's voice came over Chu's headset. "We've got a steady flow rate now. I don't want to increase it more than this. I just don't have any experience with this stuff."
"Neither does anybody else," said Chu. Which is why we're lucky as hell being able to tap informational resources back on Earth, he thought.
He had contacted Celeste, pulled as many strings of guilt as he could manage, and got her to promise him several things. It had taken only a matter of hours to dig up the appropriate explosives experts who could explain how a minor change in the regeneration equipment would produce a supply of nitrogen and oxygen; chemical stores had provided glycerol as well as concentrated nitric and sulfuric acids. As an unappreciated joke, Celeste had even transmitted an online copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook.
Cyndi Salito had set to work adding the glycerol to the acids, drawing off the top layer of the mixture and then washing it with water and sodium carbonate. When she had finished, Salito had managed to cook up several drums of old-fashioned nitroglycerin. They added that to containers of all the explosive rocket fuel they could scavenge from Bryan Zed's shuttle as well as the useless supply ship.
"We're going to blow the hell out of that sucker," Cyndi said over the suit-mike. "I sure hope it's a good idea."
As he watched, Chu wondered to himself why such a relatively simple idea had fallen to him. Why hadn't the people back on Earth thought of delivering an explosive out to Daedalus if they were so frightened of the nanotech construction?
No matter. The important thing was that they had the hopper available now, and with Salito's change to the refueler, the ton and a half of nitro was being pumped into Zimmerman's shuttle's tank along with about five thousand gallons of rocket fuel.
"We've got three quarters of the tank full now, Dr. Chu." He saw a spacesuited figure bounding his way from out of the fringes of his suit faceplate. Cyndi Salito. She said, "No topping off, though. I don't want the whole shebang blowing up in our face."
"And you still think it can take the liftoff okay?"
She probably would have shrugged if the bulky constant-volume spacesuit would have allowed her that much freedom of movement. "I still insist we get the hell out of Dodge when this thing launches. Liftoffs are a bit bumpy, you know -- even with quaint little methane engines. This safety distance of five kilometers is for the birds once the hopper gets off the ground -- if it explodes then, the blast could send pieces everywhere."
Cyndi looked up from the bank of diagnostics in the control center. Her station was set away from the main holotank and depended on solid-state readouts rather than holograms projected into the central tank. The room was darkened, packed with most of the moonbase crew. "Ready when you are, Dr.
Chu," she said.
Newellen glanced around the crew. "Hey, has anyone notified Jason at Sim-Mars?"
Chu scowled, not wanting to think about the former commander hiding in the isolation lab, as if there wasn't more important work to be done here.
"We've got him hooked up through the secondary relay," Salito said. "He should be getting the feed along with us."
"Let's do it, then," said Chu. "No use waiting for Earth to okay it.
We're the ones on the line, here, and this is our show."
Working the virtual joysticks with his massive hands, Newellen paused.
"Uh, you don't want a countdown or anything like that, do you?"
Bryan Zimmerman hovered beside him, watching the sequence of events; Cyndi Salito stood close to him, looking as if she were going to explode.
"Come on! The longer you let that nitro wait, the more likely something could go wrong!"
"Okay, okay. Don't be so touchy."
Chu motioned with his head. "You heard her."
Newellen jabbed at the virtual controls. An instant later, the image of the hopper in the holotank shuddered. Dust flew up, obscuring the lower part of the view. The holotank seemed to vibrate. Suddenly, the hopper shot up and out of view.
"She's off, and no explosion," said Salito. She leaned into the projected diagnostics. Green lights from the controls reflected off her face.
"Looks like we've got a good trajectory, and she's holding together. Good job on those patchup welds."
"Does this mean it'll make it?" asked Newellen.
Salito straightened. "We'll know in half an hour. Max gee loading was at takeoff. Since the nitro survived that, there's no reason to worry. None at all."
"I'm going to start worrying as soon as it prangs into the artifact!"
Newellen said. "Then we'll see what the aliens decide to do. What if they get pissed?"
"Three ... two ... one," Salito said. "And, now!"
The control room became dead quiet. Every diagnostic on Salito's panel showed no activity. Chu wet his lips before speaking. "Did it work?"
"Give us another minute for the S wave to get here, boss," Newellen said. "We'll be able to tell from the seismic shock if it was merely an impact or if the nitro detonated. Thud or thunder."
He twisted his large frame in the chair and read off the seismographs that fluttered beneath their glass-enclosed cage. "I've got two stations reporting now and it looks good, as far as magnitude goes. Big boom. Once the S wave gets here I'll have a fix on the exact location."
Chu merely nodded. It would have been so much easier if the satellite at L-2 had monitoring capability, rather than just the bare instrumentation necessary for a relay station.
"Got it, got it, got it!" Newellen announced. He stood and scanned the seismograph. "A direct hit, smack in the middle of the artifact! And it made a big kaboom."
Salito folded her arms and looked smug. "That much nitro should have taken out more than the entire structure! There's probably a crater within the crater."
Chu spoke rapidly, snapping his fingers. "Launch the javelin probe. I want a look at it now. As soon as it gets a chance to cool down, we need to validate via IR that we've stopped all nanotech activity."
As he stepped back, Chu watched the team swing into action. Even though no confirmation had yet come through, the morale of the entire base had lifted. At least now they had something to look forward to. They had struck a blow. They had done something instead of sitting around and playing victim.
Chu prayed that he hadn't made things worse. What if the alien nanocritters decided to strike back?
The control room had only a skeleton crew when Newellen approached Bernard Chu with a handful of further results. "Take a look."
Newellen used a chubby finger to set up a playback cube, calling his own files. As the image appeared, Chu felt a sudden sense of vertigo. "Walk me through this, if you please."
Newellen set the playback to slow motion and pushed a finger into the holotank. "The javelin is coming down off its ballistic trajectory, here, and has rotated so the ground is 'down.'" The view swung around, moving from a backdrop of stars to the mottled black-on-gray of lunar regolith. Everything looked eerie in the infrared spectrum; most of the nightside surface was cold, showing no heat being emanated. "Any second now it will pass directly over the artifact."
Chu watched, half expecting to see no change in the mysterious structure, half wanting to see
it leveled to the crater floor. As the javelin approached, he sucked in a breath.
Portions of the Daedalus complex were down, disconnected. But the superstrong diamond-woven fibers comprising the structure seemed unharmed. The perfectly symmetric hole from which the artifact had sprung now showed irregular features as part of the surface had collapsed, revealing an extensive network of unexpected catacombs beneath the crater floor.
But the main image that stayed with Bernard Chu was that the area glowed a brilliant white in the IR, brighter than it had ever been before --
showing that nanotech activity had increased over an order of magnitude since the explosion.
"That's not just residual heat from the blast is it?" Chu asked, already suspecting the answer.
"No way! That stuff permeates everything. They're swarming all over the place like ants after a rainstorm."
Chu watched the transmissions as the javelin went over, then impacted the regolith, cutting off the image. He whispered, "We didn't do a thing, did we? All we did was to make them start over. And spread them out farther."
"Yeah," said Newellen, "we sure stirred them up good." He waited a beat. "Now they seem to be in even more of a hurry."
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CHAPTER 28
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Compared to this, a war would have been a piece of cake, Major General Pritchard thought.
Lips drawn tight, Pritchard looked out the office window toward the Air and Space Museum. At times like these, Pritchard envied his military classmates, still on active duty at the Pentagon some three miles away. The Pentagon types only had to worry about smashing the hell out of whomever the President told them to -- a fast, clean job. And no President had given such orders for years.
Pritchard, on the other hand, had to deal with a threat that was anything but certain. Nothing about the alien construction was certain. Was it even a threat at all?
An old flat-television played quietly in his office. Pritchard watched the Cable NewsNet from the corner of his eye, though he concentrated mainly on the Smithsonian complex across the street. The National Air and Space Museum contained relics of other times mankind had found ways to solve insurmountable problems. Maybe someday there would also be a model of the Daedalus structure on exhibit. If the human race survived.
Assemblers of Infinity Page 24