Fragment

by Warren Fahy

  The other scientists in earshot zinged some dirty looks at Pound.

  “I’m afraid that we’re having a few technical difficulties in Section One, Mr. Pound,” Nell told him. “Why don’t you have a look at this instead…”

  The visor of NASA technician Jedediah Briggs’s helmet was already fogged up as he entered the vestibule connecting Section Two to Section One.

  12:02 P.M.

  As he descended the aluminum stairway to inspect the damage to Section One, he heard shrieking whistles around him. A rhythmic pounding reverberated through the lab below. He peered out of his hazy visor at the sensors studding the plastic tube.

  About the size of smoke detectors, the sensors lining the vestibule sniffed out any microbial life that might breach the outer lining. They monitored the hermetically sealed space between the outer and inner layers using LAL extracted from the blood of horseshoe crabs, which had been injected into each unit.

  A small glass tube in the sensors was supposed to turn yellow in the presence of microbes. NASA had already used similar devices to ensure that interplanetary probes were microbe-free during construction.

  As Briggs crept down the aluminum stairway toward the hatch of Section One he noticed that all the green LEDs on the sensors had turned red—and the test tubules had turned bright yellow.

  Thankful for the blue cleansuit he had been cursing a moment before, Briggs reached the bottom of the stairs and peered through the hatch window into Section One.

  Halos of sunlight streamed into the lab from ring-shaped clusters of holes punched through its roof.

  The shafts of light illuminated the creatures crawling, flitting, skittering, and leaping throughout the lab.

  The center between one of the rings of holes in the roof fell out and larger animals immediately poured through.

  The swarms of creatures gathering below seemed to notice him peering through the window at them and they all moved with unnatural speed straight toward him, creating a cyclone of paper and flying debris.

  A rain of wasps and drill-worms splattered like bugs on a windshield as Briggs jerked back from the window. A sudden, piercing alarm sounded.

  He turned and ran up the aluminum stairway.

  All around him the lining of the vestibule was twinkling now with purple LEDs. He remembered as he ran that the inner layer was laced with fiber optics that detected structural damage to the vestibule. The whole tube turned purple-red as the inner lining was breached around him.

  Briggs cursed the baggy cleansuit as he vaulted up the creaking aluminum stairs.

  12:03 P.M.

  “Technical difficulties?” Pound snapped. “NASA spent 180 million dollars on this lab, Dr. Cato. I thought it was designed for this!”

  “Designed for this?” Nell stifled a laugh, looking at Dr. Cato ruefully.

  “Some adaptations have been made,” Dr. Cato answered patiently. “Even while the lab was being shipped, and ever since it got here. It’s quite miraculous what they’ve been able to do. But StatLab was primarily designed as a modular mobile lab that could be dropped into remote disease hot-zones, Mr. Pound. It wasn’t designed to be under siege by anything larger than a virus.”

  Nell guided Pound along with a firm hand on his waist.

  “We should be getting word shortly on the status of Section One. In the meantime, let’s take a look at some things that we’ve already found, OK?”

  12:04 P.M.

  The afterburners of an F-14 Tomcat roared as it was catapulted from the deck of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

  When the bone-rattling tumult had passed, a Navy officer resumed shouting at Zero over a revving V-22 Sea Osprey, which stood behind her on the gray plane of the flight deck.

  “You’re the only one who’s been in there and survived,” the officer yelled.

  Zero looked around at the busy men and women on top of the gigantic aircraft carrier. “What makes you think I would go back in there?” he shouted back.

  “Cynthea said you wanted to get off the Trident,” she yelled. “You’ll be quarantined on the island until this is over. The President needs a cameraman there—if you want it, the job is yours!”

  Zero looked around wryly in the direction of the Trident. “I’ll be damned,” he muttered. He pointed at a monster RV. “In that thing?”

  Sitting on the deck with a thick cable attached to its roof was the most macho off-road vehicle Zero had ever seen. Aside from the word “NASA” stenciled in red on its side, impressive by itself, the rover had two monster knobby tires in front and halftracks behind. It had four bubble windows like those on a deep-sea sub, three in front and another at the rear. Protruding from the front of the vehicle was a wedge-shaped grille like the cowcatcher on a 19th-century locomotive. Two heavy robotic arms were folded to either side of the front bubble, like the arms of a praying mantis.

  “The XATV-9,” the Navy officer shouted over the Osprey’s engines, pointing behind her. “NASA’s experimental Mars rover! Shipped in by special order of the President himself. You couldn’t be safer in your mother’s arms, sir! What do you say?”

  The lensman in Zero answered. “OK,” he shouted, cursing himself at the same time.

  “You need to get in now, sir!”

  Two flight deck crewmen rushed Zero forward. They sealed the airtight hatch behind him as he climbed into a sunken shotgun seat before the three bubble windows. A control panel out of Buck Rogers glittered between Zero and the driver, who was a clean-cut man in a navy blue jumpsuit. He gave Zero a confident thumbs-up and then pointed at a nice Steadicam on a folding robotic arm mounted to the roof above the shotgun seat.

  “Strap yourself in quick,” the driver advised. “You ain’t never had a ride like this.”

  Zero clicked the seat harness and grabbed the handles of the Steadicam, which swung down weightlessly from the ceiling. He put the wide viewfinder to his left eye just as the Osprey yanked them off the deck.

  “Woo-Hoooo!” the driver yelled.

  They swung out over the ocean. Zero gulped as he aimed the camera out the window.

  12:05 P.M.

  Nell led the presidential envoy past workstations where scientists monitored remote cameras.

  One screen showed disk-ants rolling down trails; another glimpsed nasty-looking creatures seemingly attacking the camera.

  Each monitor Pound looked at seemed to go dead on cue. The scientists observing them groaned as if they had come to expect it.

  Pound turned to Dr. Cato. “I really must insis—”

  “You may want to video this,” Nell said, patting Pound’s arm. “For the President.”

  Persuaded by Nell’s persistence, Pound awkwardly placed a glossy white plastic headband camera over his head and extended the arm of its viewfinder, wondering where his promised cameraman was. He centered the third-eye-like lens on his forehead, then tapped the side, illuminating a green operating light under the viewfinder’s miniature screen.

  Three large, vicious-looking yellow-and-black insects shot through a clear tube into the viewing theater.

  “Japanese giant hornets,” Dr. Cato said, appreciatively.

  “A hunting pack of thirty can slaughter an entire hive of thirty thousand honeybees in less than five hours,” Nell said.

  “Their larvae feed them an energy-boosting amino acid that enables them to fly twenty-five miles per hour for sixty miles,” Dr. Cato added.

  “Whoa,” Pound said.

  “Watch closely, Mr. Pound.” Dr. Cato pointed at the chamber to make sure the envoy didn’t miss it. “A single Japanese giant hornet can kill forty bees a minute. They chop them to pieces with their mandibles. Scouts spray a pheromone to mark their prey. Then they attack as a pack.”

  “Their stingers pump venom so powerful it dissolves human flesh,” Nell said. “They kill about forty people a year in Japan.”

  “We’ve been upping the stakes lately.” Dr. Cato chuckled.

  “Christ! I’ve never even heard of them.” Pound’s e
yes were glued to the specimen chamber.

  Nell glanced at Dr. Cato. “OK, Steve, let in the Henders wasps.”

  High-speed cameras whirred as their motors revved up and locked on two five-inch-long Henders “wasps” that emerged from a tube and hovered vertically on five transparent wings.

  Their dragonfly-like abdomens swung forward as they tackled the Japanese hornets in midair.

  With their ten double-jointed jackknifelike legs, the Henders wasps ruthlessly sliced the hornets into pieces that fell to the ground still moving.

  As the ring of eyes on their “heads” kept watch, the wasps landed on five legs. They dipped their tails to devour the sliced bits with five-jawed maws.

  “Yuck,” the Presidential envoy said. “They eat with their butts?”

  “They have two brains, Mr. Pound,” Dr. Cato said grimly.

  “Like many of the creatures we’ve studied here,” Nell said.

  Pound looked confused.

  “Is this how every experiment has gone so far, Nell?” Dr. Cato asked quietly.

  Henders Wasp

  Pentapterus tomobranchiophorus

  (and Japanese Giant Hornets, Vespa mandarinia)

  (after Wirth et al, Annals of the La Jolla Natural History Museum, vol. 47: 1-112)

  Nell nodded, sharing a worried look with him.

  Pound fiddled with a knob on his headcam.

  “Henders species,” Nell continued, “have not only matched every common species we’ve tested, Mr. Pound—they’ve completely annihilated them.”

  The envoy shrugged. “Sounds like we’re talking about a bunch of bugs. Why can’t we just spray a little DDT and be done with it?”

  “We’re talking about a lot more than bugs, Mr. Pound,” Nell sighed.

  “There are creatures here bigger than tigers, according to Nell,” Dr. Cato said.

  “Spigers, I call them, Mr. Pound,” she said. “Eight-legged creatures at least three times the size of tigers.”

  “Ham,” Pound said, feeling lightheaded. “Call me Ham, please. Why can’t we see some of those? Spigers? That’s what I really need to see!”

  12:05 P.M.

  The Trident’s sequestered crew played checkers and sat around the decks, utterly bored. Nineteen days of looking at a beach they could not set foot on was mixing an explosive cocktail of anger, fear, and insanity.

  At night, they could see the spy satellites watching them, slowly crossing each other’s paths in a precise and perpetual changing of the guard overhead, like the guards at Buckingham Palace.

  Cynthea, Captain Sol, and First Mate Warburton stood on the prow of the Trident. They watched the roaring Osprey pass over the inlet in which they were anchored.

  “There he goes,” Warburton exclaimed. “Lucky bastard!” Captain Sol shook his head. “I don’t envy him.” Cynthea peered through her opera glasses at the helicopter carrying the rover until it had disappeared behind the island’s cliff. “Come on, Zero!” she urged, squeezing a crimson-nailed fist. “If you come through for me, you are my lord and master for all eternity, baby!”

  Captain Sol and Warburton exchanged wide-eyed looks.

  12:06 P.M.

  “Watch this, Mr. Pound,” insisted Dr. Cato.

  “Otto is going to send in one of our last remote-operated vehicles,” Nell explained.

  Dr. Cato tapped Otto’s shoulder and startled him as he sat at one of the workstations in Section Four. “Where are we going now, young man?”

  Otto pulled up his VR goggles and grinned up at Pound. The biologist’s left thumb was encased in an aluminum splint. It had not stopped him from operating the ROVs he’d helped design.

  He was feeling no pain, thanks to the kick-ass Novocain pads the Navy doctor had given him for his thumb. “Welcome to the jungle, guys.” Otto put the VR goggles back on. “We’re about to penetrate the outer edge with a small robotic vehicle and take a little peek inside. This usually only lasts a few seconds, so don’t blink!”

  “All right.” Pound glanced reprovingly at Cato and Nell. “Now we’re getting somewhere!”

  “We’ve already deployed about eighty ROVs,” Nell said, patiently. “We only have about a dozen left. We’ve made it pretty far across the fields, all the way to the rim of the island. But we’re using all the rest now to try to get into the jungle, where most of the action seems to be.”

  The ROV was the coolest Christmas present a seven-year-old kid could ever imagine finding under the tree. Several outboard cameras captured images as it emerged from a rack under Section One. The remote-controlled vehicle turned left on the slope toward the jungle.

  With the soft zither of servomotors the robotic vehicle rolled over purple patches of Henders “clover” and left brown tracks behind it in a rearview cam that showed in the bottom half of the screen.

  Otto steered it toward the edge of the jungle and slowed down.

  “Hang on,” he said, and throttled the ROV into an opening between the trees. On the monitor above, the ROVs camera weaved swiftly around the trunks of trees that looked like palms crossed with cactus. Some were covered with reptilian scales, thorns, what might have been eyes—even snapping mouths.

  Slaloming around the tree trunks, the ROV came to a tunnellike corridor lined by dense trees whose trunks were curved like ribs or giant tusks and whose interlacing canopies of mistletoelike clover were pierced by sunbeams. The ROV raced under the dangling clusters, chains, and spirals of colored berries on translucent tendrils that rose and fell like jellyfish tentacles along the corridor.

  A streaming horde of insects and animals buzzed and roared past the speeding ROV, rushing toward it in the lower screen from the rear-cam. Otto zigzagged down the curving tunnel as a rush of creatures seemed to miss it at every turn. He hung a right turn at breakneck speed as the corridor forked. They could make out nothing but a whirl of blurring shapes hurtling around the ROV as it raced down the jungle tunnel.

  Something large darted out from the side.

  The rover’s camera dove into the dirt. A bird feather was all they could identify, pressed against the lens.

  “Yee-haw!” Otto pulled off his VR goggles. “We see lots of bird feathers,” he explained to Pound, who stared at the screen with a blank expression.

  “I want you to give me some of your best ROV footage inside the jungle, Dr. Cato, to show to the President,” he said.

  “Well, that was it, right there!” Otto announced triumphantly.

  “That’s as far as you’ve gotten?” Pound asked.

  “That’s the record, man!” Otto gave Nell a low-five. “You can see why those bastards have eyes in the back of their heads, Nell! We rigged a rearview cam that I could see in the bottom half of the goggles that time. There is no way I’d have gotten that far without it. But man, that is a LOT of stuff to process—they need two brains!”

  Dr. Cato pointed at another monitor, noticing Pound’s eyes glazing. “Look at this remote we were able to set up next to a disk-ant trail, Mr. Pound. This one’s lasted three days. Right, Otto?”

  “Ri—”

  The camera went dead.

  “—ght.” Otto looked at Pound and shrugged.

  “I still don’t understand why we can’t just go down to Section One and take a look inside the jungle there!” Pound complained. “What’s the point of having all this million-dollar equipment if we can’t even use it when we need to?”

  12:06 P.M.

  Briggs slammed Section Two’s lower hatch behind him. It sealed with a squeaking hiss as he sagged against it to catch his breath.

  He ripped off his helmet, and the bulbous blue cleansuit deflated. He straightened up as he addressed the eleven jumpy scientists in Section Two, who were staring at him, bug-eyed, from their workstations. “Duct tape is not an option!” the NASA technician announced. “Listen up!” Briggs barked as he extricated himself from the cumbersome suit. “Section One is now officially off limits!”

  He kicked off the last leg of the cleansuit and
surveyed the scientists with an almost contemptuous air. “And drill-worms fly. Yeah, just for everyone’s information, OK? And those damn worms are getting through the inner lining of the vestibule down there.”

  Briggs casually rapped his knuckles on the hatch window behind him. Everyone flinched as drill-worms viciously attacked the other side.

  The animals’ trio of spiked, folding legs resembled glossy black landing gear on a 1950s sci-fi rocket ship. Their sucked-lozenge heads had three ring-shaped eyes and a flexible neck. They hovered and twisted with precision in midair, using black wings that popped like flower petals from a three-paneled bud under their necks.

  They bent their yellow drill-bit abdomens to the window. Their grappling-hooked forefeet scrabbled over its slippery surface.

  Briggs looked over his shoulder and jumped as he saw the alien creatures so close at hand.

  “OK.” He turned back to the other scientists. “Drill-worms have now penetrated the vestibule! But that’s not what breached Section One’s hull. Something else did that. Hello, is there a doctor in the house? Because we lowly NASA technicians are a little out of our league here, OK? I can’t guarantee our safety if you can’t tell me what’s going on!”

  “Hey, we’re just here to collect data,” said Andy, sarcastically.

  Andy wore a bright tie-dyed T-shirt streaked red, yellow, and green. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a year. “All those prima donnas on the Enterprise are supposed to figure it out for us. Or so we’ve been told.”

  “In so many words,” Quentin grunted. “There’s a couple up in Section Four right now getting a tour, if you want to complain, Briggs.” He aimed a finger at a plasma screen showing a rooftop view. “Hey, check it out: Henders lichen is spreading over us right now.”