by Scott Sigler
“Roger that, Chief,” Tom said. “Diver turning left.”
The image on the screen slewed left again.
“Look down,” Clarence said.
The diver did. The image of a black shoe appeared.
“Just a shoe,” Tom said. “It’s stuck in some kind of brown stuff, looks like sediment has leaked in through a crack somewhere.”
Clarence remembered when Murray had come to his house, remembered the picture drawn by Candice Walker.
“Move closer,” Clarence said. “Pan up a little bit.”
“Diver moving closer,” Tom said. “I don’t… wait, I think there’s a foot in that shoe, and the leg is buried in the… oh my God. Are you guys seeing this?”
“Uh… roger that,” the dive master said. “Stand by.”
Clarence leaned closer to the monitor. Wedged between a pair of equipment racks was a body. Unlike the sitting-down-and-napping body in the torpedo room, however, this one was encased in something, something attached to the hull, the deck, even crusted up over the equipment racks. Tom’s light played off of a brown, bumpy surface that covered the unknown sailor’s torso and half of his face while leaving the mouth and nose unobstructed. The right eye stared, wide and forever frozen open. A left hand stuck out from the brown mass, fingers curled in a talon of death, just a bit of blue shirtsleeve still visible. Clarence saw a second left hand — there were two people in there. At least. Just as in the drawing made by Candice Walker.
“Diver One to Topside, what the hell is this?”
Tom’s voice sounded ragged, like he was becoming overwhelmed.
“Ignore it, Diver One,” the dive master said. “Proceed to your objective. Tom, stay cool.”
Clarence could barely blink, barely breathe. Tom again turned right, toward the room’s main storage locker. It looked like a horizontal, flat-topped freezer, the kind usually kept in a basement, only this one was military gray instead of the white. Inside, Clarence knew, was the soda-can-sized object the Los Angeles crew had collected days earlier.
Tom moved slowly toward it.
On the locker, a tiny keypad glowed green — it had its own power supply, which was obviously still functioning.
“Topside to Diver One, great work, we’re almost home. Prepare to enter access codes.” The dive master read off the sixteen-digit code. Tom read it back. Clarence saw Tom extend his suit’s pincer hand. The pincer ended with a stiff rubber stud, small enough to press the keypad digits.
The last button drew a beep from the crate, audible over the speakers. The keypad’s glow shifted from green to orange.
The crate’s lid slowly rose on a rear hinge, pushed up by steel pistons on either end. The diver’s lights shone on a small, black, cylindrical container. It wasn’t much bigger than a travel mug.
Hidden inside of that, a piece of an alien spacecraft.
“Topside, Diver One, I see the objective.”
“Visual confirmed, Diver One. Retrieve the objective and then exit the vessel.”
The hard blue spheres — inside of which were Tom’s hands — reached into the crate, toward the objective. The black pincers opened wide, ready to grab the black tube, then paused.
“Diver One to Topside, I know I was briefed that this is safe, but… well, are you sure?”
“Diver One, retrieve the object,” the dive master said. “It’s safe, Tom, just don’t pretend you’re making a James Bond martini, okay?”
Tom actually laughed, a sound thinned by the electronics but still full of a grateful relief.
“Yeah, shaken not stirred, you got it.”
The diver’s pincers closed on the container, rubber grips locking down on the curved, black surface. He lifted it free of the storage locker.
“Topside, Diver One — objective acquired.”
Something black darted across the screen, a split-second flash that made Clarence think of snakes, worms, eels.
The image on the screen shifted, blurred, the diver turning as fast as he could.
“What the fuck was that?” Tom’s voiced peaked his microphone, making his words crackle with static.
“Diver One, calm down,” the dive master said, his tone cool and collected — of course it was, he wasn’t the one in a dark tomb nine hundred feet below the surface, surrounded by dead bodies.
Clarence’s hands clenched into involuntary fists. He wanted to reach down and somehow grab Tom, drag the diver to safety.
The image skewed as Tom turned, looking for the source of that unknown movement. His lights lit up the same empty shelves and slightly bobbing boxes, the same motionless dead men covered in crusty brown.
“Topside, Diver One — I think I saw something moving in here, maybe a fish. Moving to exit the… it’s on my suit! Goddamit, there’s not supposed to be—”
The screen turned to white noise.
“Diver One, status?”
No answer.
Clarence closed his eyes, tried to stay calm. So close… what had happened?
He heard the dive master’s disembodied voice in the control room’s speakers. “Diver One, status? Talk to me, Tom.”
There was no response.
“Diver Two, we’ve lost contact with Diver One,” the dive master said, his voice still supremely composed, infuriatingly so. “Proceed inside immediately to Diver One’s location. Move forward with caution — it’s possible Diver One tripped a booby trap.”
“Topside, Diver Two, entering the sub.”
The dive master continued to calmly issue orders, sending the remaining UUVs to the Los Angeles and getting rescue divers into the water.
The image on Clarence’s screens shifted from static to the entrance hole and then the torpedo room, the view of Diver Two’s camera nearly an exact replay of what Diver One had seen just minutes earlier.
Suddenly, the image shook violently, filled with bubbles and bits of falling metal. The diver slewed right, making the view tilt.
“Topside! Large explosion in the nose cone! Wreck is unstable!”
“Diver Two, exit immediately. Repeat, exit immediately.”
Clarence heard the diver scream, saw a flash of something coming down from above. The image slewed the other way, the horizontal now vertical and the vertical horizontal as the diver fell to her side. He heard a crunching sound, painfully loud in the speakers.
“Diver Two, get out of there,” the dive master said, his voice at last carrying a shred of urgency, a hint of emotion. “Exit immediately.”
“Topside… I’m stuck… oh my God, my visor is cracked, water is coming in, get me help, get someone down here—”
Another crunch far louder than the first, then, no sound at all.
The sideways view didn’t waver. The diver had been crushed, but her helmet camera remained on, continued to send signals up the umbilical to the Brashear far above.
Clarence sagged back in his chair. He felt cold, distant, as if it were all happening somewhere else. Two divers dead. Both ADSs destroyed.
And, worst of all, the artifact was still down there.
DAY FOUR
FOREIGN POWERS
Murray hated the Situation Room, but at least that felt comfortable, felt familiar. The president’s private sitting room didn’t feel familiar at all. He’d been here twice before, both times to deliver bad news to former presidents; the kind of news that couldn’t wait until morning.
The room could have been in any house, really, any house of someone with money and status. Murray and Admiral Porter sat on a comfortable couch. Murray knew he looked wrinkled, disheveled — he’d been napping on a cot when the news had come in. His staff had brought him fresh clothes, but he’d done little more than throw them on. Porter, of course, looked neat and pressed, not a wrinkle on his uniform.
The sitting room was right next to the president’s bedroom. Blackmon seemed sleepy, which was no surprise — she’d been woken up only fifteen minutes earlier.
“An explosion,” she said. “What was the cause, Admir
al?”
“Unknown at this time,” Porter said. “Possibly sabotage, a booby trap left by the infected crew of the Los Angeles.”
Blackmon’s tired eyes turned to Murray. “Is that what you think?”
“It’s a possibility, Madam President,” Murray said. “Once the LA’s engines blew, the infected crew could assume that sooner or later divers would come down to retrieve the artifact. Booby traps fit the mentality of the infected, to some degree, although the infected would be most interested in spreading the disease. The explosion was definitely internal, however, which does make crew sabotage the most-likely cause.”
He stood — slowly, his aching hips and a stabbing pain in his back keeping him from doing it otherwise — and handed the president a photo taken by one of the Blackfish UUVs. The front end of the Los Angeles had blown open like some cartoon cigar.
Blackmon studied it. “Admiral, would that destroy the artifact?”
“Possibly,” Porter said. “The last report from the diver said he had removed it from the main, hardened storage locker. If that is accurate, it’s doubtful the smaller container holding the artifact itself could have withstood such an explosion.”
Blackmon set the picture in her lap. “When will we know for sure?”
“Another ADS is en route,” Porter said. “It will be at least twelve hours before we can get a person down there. The UUVs have scanned the area, but found no sign of the container. Considering the damage, that’s not surprising.”
She looked at the photo again. “Could it have been survivors? The Los Angeles also had one of those deep-sea suits, did it not? That, or someone in an air pocket? Or could the disease modify human biology enough for people to survive down there?”
Porter shook his head. “Not likely. At that depth, the pressure is twenty-eight times that of sea level — nitrogen narcosis would quickly kill anyone not locked into a sealed area or wearing an ADS. Those suits have at most forty-eight hours of life support, and the Los Angeles sank four days ago. Any normal human being in that crew is definitely dead.”
Porter looked at Murray to answer the final part of the question.
“The disease can change physiology, but not to that extent,” Murray said. “Pressure is still pressure, Madam President.”
She nodded. “All right. Now for the obvious question — could this have been a deliberate attack by foreign agents, allowing them to seize the artifact?”
Murray had known that question was coming. Truth be told, he wanted to hear the answer himself.
Porter thought carefully before responding.
“It’s absolutely a possibility, although less likely than the booby trap. Recon flights are out around the clock. Coast Guard ships have been called in to patrol the five-mile perimeter around the task force. It is highly doubtful any sub could swim undetected beneath that perimeter, and nothing on the surface could get past it unseen. The Pinckney reported no sonar sightings, nothing was detected by the UUVs and ROVS, and neither of the deceased divers reported anything unusual until they entered the nose cone.”
Murray wasn’t a naval expert, but Porter seemed confident in the measures taken.
Blackmon eased back in her chair. “So, sabotage,” she said. “That’s the most likely answer. But if something did get through our lines…”
She didn’t finish the thought. She didn’t need to.
“Every agency is on alert,” Porter said. “Homeland, TSA, everyone. Not that this changes anything — they’ve been on alert since the Los Angeles went down.”
Murray had his doubts. Anyone talented enough, resourceful enough, to snatch an artifact from nine hundred feet down — right out from under the nose of the U.S. Navy — would have no problem getting past airport security, or just putting the thing on a truck and sending it to Mexico.
At any point on any path of transport, infection could occur.
“Well,” Blackmon said, “for once, I find myself rooting for sabotage.”
Murray couldn’t agree more.
WELCOME ABOARD
Ten clear cells. Four empty. Six occupied.
Three new subjects. Margaret tried to think about them in those terms, as subjects. But unless Tim’s cellulase-secreting yeast acted like some kind of miracle cure, those men were death-row inmates.
She stood in the airlock that led from the lab space to the containment area. She looked through the door’s window, stared at the men in the cells. Clarence stood on her right, Tim on her left. They quietly waited for her to think things through.
Thirty hours since she and Clarence had landed on the Carl Brashear. Barely more than a day, and things were already collapsing.
The men in the clear cells weren’t alone — two positives had been found on the Pinckney, the infected men discovered because they opened fire on their shipmates, killing three and wounding two. Unlike the Brashear, however, the Pinckney had no containment facility: Captain Tubberville had ordered the immediate execution of the infected men and the incineration of their bodies.
Obviously, Petrovsky and Walker hadn’t been the only ones to come up from the Los Angeles. Others, or at least pieces of others, had floated to the surface, contagious flesh mingling with swimming survivors of the Forrest Sherman and the Stratton. Or could it have been something else? Maybe a gas-filled puffball corpse breaking the surface and then opening up to spill spores across the task force?
The cause almost didn’t matter: what mattered was that the task force had become infected. This was going to end in a giant fireball. The only real question was, would anyone get out alive?
“The killer, Orin Nagy, the test missed him,” Margaret said. “I didn’t think false-negatives were possible.”
“They’re not,” Tim said. “He must have found a way to skip his test, or use someone else’s blood.”
Margaret turned to Clarence. “Yasaka has strict procedures in place. How could someone dodge a test?”
“I don’t know the specifics,” he said, “but there’s hundreds of extra men on this ship. It’s very confused up top, no matter how disciplined Yasaka’s crew is. If someone smart tried hard enough, they could probably duck a test. Maybe even two.”
That didn’t make the cellulose test worthless, exactly, but not far from it.
“Maybe more are ducking it,” Margaret said. “There’s got to be another way to look at the task force’s population as a whole, try to get an idea of just how fucked we are.”
Tim raised a gloved hand. “I can get Yasaka to give me access to onboard medical records. I’ll set up a biosurveillance algorithm. Maybe there’s common symptoms reported early, before the infection reaches the stage where it’s detectable and then contagious. If there’s a spike in a certain symptom — say, headaches — we might get an idea of how many people are infected but not yet testable.”
Biosurveillance… she hadn’t thought of that. Maybe Tim’s background in bioinformatics could make a difference.
“Do it,” Margaret said. “But make sure your yeast cultures are the first priority. What’s the status of those?”
“Modified yeast is growing like wildfire,” Tim said. “Population-wise, we’re succeeding, but it remains to be seen if it has any impact.”
Tim didn’t sound jovial anymore. The light had faded from his eyes. He, too, was good at math, and math said he was standing in what would wind up being his tomb.
“We need to split your cultures,” Margaret said. “As soon as we’re finished here, give half to Clarence so he can ship it to Black Manitou.”
Tim didn’t answer right away. Margaret knew he could read between the lines, knew she was confirming his fears that they were all doomed.
“Sure,” he said. “I guess that makes sense.”
Clarence cleared his throat. “I assume sooner is better than later?”
“Yesterday was already a week too late,” Margaret said. “Get ahold of Murray, make it happen. Right now, Tim’s cultures are the most valuable thing on the p
lanet.”
“Will do,” Clarence said. “What about those new crawlers you injected into Edmund? The hydras. Do we need to get those to Black Manitou as well?”
Margaret looked into the containment area again, toward the cell that held Edmund.
“We’ll find out soon,” she said. “I’m going to take samples from him right now, see if the hydras replicated.”
Aside from Tim’s yeast, the hydras were the only other real hope. The yeast would live in the intestine, secreting cellulase into the bloodstream, cellulase that would, hopefully, melt any infection. But Tim’s yeast wouldn’t survive in there indefinitely: normal gut flora would outcompete it, the very nature of the gut itself would kill it, and so on. To maintain effectiveness as an inoculant, people would have to ingest regular doses of the stuff.
Hydras, on the other hand, reproduced on their own. Like the crawlers, they hijacked stem cells, made those stem cells produce more hydras. As far as Margaret could tell, hydras would provide permanent immunity from the infection — no booster doses needed.
But with that possibly permanent immunity came a larger problem: Margaret still had no idea what else the hydras might do. Using them might very well be trading the devil she knew for the one that she didn’t.
“Okay,” she said, “let’s get in there.”
She opened the airlock door and stepped into the containment area. Four hospital-gown-clad captives looked at her.
Clark was still sedated and strapped to his bunk. Triangles were beginning to show; pale blue shapes beneath his white skin.
Edmund, of course, wasn’t ever getting up again.
Cantrell stared out, eyes only for her. She’d done nothing to the man, but he couldn’t hide his hate for her. She didn’t know why and didn’t have time to worry about it.
Margaret looked at the three new men.
Men? Of course they were men, although two of them looked like boys. Especially the one who cried silently, tears wetting his young cheeks.
He was in the cell next to Edmund. How old was this boy? Nineteen? Maybe twenty, tops? Had Margaret made different choices in her life, he was young enough to be her son, just like Candice Walker was young enough to have been her daughter.
